The house on Henry Street

by Lillian D. Wald

Ernest Crosby, Tolstoian and reformer, was the first president, and the original membership comprised distinguished men and women, courageous thinkers who fully met the requirements of the society, and others, like myself, who were to gain enlightenment regarding methods and theories for the direct improvement of industrial and social conditions.

Father Ducey, whose support of Father McGlynn[18] during his time of trial was then still referred to; Charles B. Spahr, and others no longer living were among the organizers. On the club’s weekly programmes can be read the names of men and women who were then and still are bearers of light for the community. Devoted members of the club testified to their indebtedness to the Knights of Labor as “a great educational force for social reform,” and a younger generation gained immeasurably from association with men and women who had given themselves unselfishly to the early labor movements in this country.

It was at the time of excessive sweatshop abuses, and from the windows of our tenement home we could look upon figures bent over the whirring foot-power machines. One room in particular almost unnerved us. Never did we go to bed so late or rise so early that we saw the machines at rest, and the unpleasant conditions where manufacturing was carried on in the overcrowded rooms of the families we nursed disquieted us more than the diseases we were trying to combat.

Our sympathies were ready for enlistment when working people whom we knew, and whose sobriety of habits and mind won confidence and esteem, discussed the possibility of improving conditions through organization. In another place I have told how the young girls first led us into the trades union movement, but now where the standard of the entire family was involved through the wage and working conditions of its chief wage-earner, it became to us a movement of greater significance.

We were accorded a doubtful distinction by acquaintances who had no point of contact with working people when we acknowledged friendship with “demagogues” and “walking delegates” (terms which they used interchangeably), and, inexperienced though we were, it was possible for us, in a small way, to help build a bridge of understanding.

Research was not then a popular expression of social interest. Discussions developed the need of a formal investigation into conditions, and a distinguished economist of Yale was asked to send someone academic and “without feeling for either side,” while we chose a labor leader, well informed from the workers’ point of view, to make the inquiry. The paraphernalia of cards, filing cabinets, et cetera, was provided, and a room set apart in the settlement, but the investigation ended before it was fairly begun with mutual scorn on the part of the two men.

Through the years that have followed the settlement has from time to time been the neutral ground where both sides might meet, or has furnished the “impartial third party” in industrial disputes.

One such conference lingers in my memory because of the open-mindedness shown by a man whose traditions and training were far removed from wage-earners’ problems. A friend and generously interested in all our undertakings, he questioned my judgment in espousing the workingmen’s side in a threatened strike, believing that a compromise on disputed hours and pay during that unprosperous time was better than interrupted employment. We believed that the “half loaf” might prove too costly. The wage was already below a living minimum, and the workers’ contention that at the beginning of the season the market could be made to meet a fair charge for labor seemed to us an entirely reasonable one. My friend agreed to bring representatives of the manufacturers and contractors if I would bring an equal number of workers to a conference in the Henry Street house, over which he would preside. No agreement was reached, but when the strike was finally declared this friend, whose wisdom and experience have placed him high in the councils of the nation, had come to see that the workers could not do otherwise, and throughout the strike he aided with money and sympathy.

Since those days cloaks are no longer made in New York tenement homes, and the once unhappy, sweated workers, united with other garment-makers, have been lifted into eminence because of the unusual character of their organization.