The house on Henry Street

by Lillian D. Wald

The need of constructive social measures has long been indicated. The planting of roots in the new soil can best be accomplished through an intercourse with the immigrant in which the dignity of the individual and of the family is recognized. Heroic measures may be necessary to establish a satisfactory system of distribution, and these measures must be based on a philosophic understanding of democracy. Among them should be provision for giving instruction to the prospective immigrant in regard to those laws, customs, or prohibitions with which he is liable to come in contact, and also in regard to the industrial opportunities open to him. Then, with competent medical examination at the port of departure and humane consideration there and here, the tragedies now so frequent at the port of arrival might be diminished, or even eliminated altogether.

In turn, the private banker, the employment agent, the ticket broker, the lawyer, and the notary public have battened upon the helplessness of the immigrant. Our experience has convinced us that in the interest of the state itself the future citizens should be made to feel that protection and fair treatment are accorded by the state. The greater number of immigrants who come to us are adults for whose upbringing this country has been at no expense. It would seem only just to give them special protection during their first years in the country, to encourage confidence in our institutions, and to promote assimilation. From an academic point of view, it might be said that all institutions for the citizen are available to the immigrant, but the statement carries with it an implication of equal ability on the part of the latter to utilize these institutions, and this is not borne out by the experience of those familiar with actual conditions.

Such thoughts as these lay back of an invitation to Governor Hughes to dine and spend an evening at the settlement and there meet the colleagues who could speak with authority on these matters.

The Governor left us armed with maps and documentary evidence. A few months later the legislature authorized the creation of a commission to “make full inquiry, examination, and investigation into the condition, welfare, and industrial opportunities of aliens in the State of New York.” Among its nine members were two women, Frances Kellor and myself. Upon the recommendation of that commission the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration of the Department of Labor was created.[21] Miss Kellor, the first woman to be head of a state bureau, became its chief.

Pending the enactment of legislation, she and I, with a photographer and a sympathetic companion interested in questions of labor, motored over the state examining the construction camps of the barge canal (a state contract), the camps connected with the city’s great new aqueduct, and some of the canning establishments.

In the latter we found ample illustration of indifference on the part of private employers. In the camps surrounding the canneries were large numbers of idle children who should have been in school. The local authorities were, perhaps not unnaturally, indisposed to enforce the compulsory education law upon these children whose stay in the community was to be a transient one. In the public work the New York City contracts, with few exceptions, showed carefully thought-out and standardized conditions for the men; but examination of the state contracts showed that while elaborate provision had been made for the expert handling of every other detail connected with the work, even to the stabling of the mules, nowhere was any mention made of the men.

In a shack that held three tiers of bunks, occupied alternately by the day and night shifts, with a cook-stove in a little clearing in the middle, we found a homesick man, who chanced not to be on the works, reading a book. When we engaged in conversation with him he pointed contemptuously to the bunks and their dirty coverings, and said, “This America! I show you Rome,” and produced from under his bed a photograph of the Coliseum.

The commission exposed many forms of exploitation of the immigrant, and subsequent reports have corroborated its findings. Some safeguards have now been established, and the reports of the Bureau of Industries and Immigration in the first years of its existence bore interesting testimony to its practical and social value. The significance of the indifference of the state to its employees, as it appeared to the investigators, was given publicity at the time, and roused comment and discussion. I quote from it as follows: