Freeland tribune. (Freeland, Pa.) 1888-1921, 1893-01-05
IN NEW YORK'S SLUMS
AMONG THE WRETCHED SLAVES OF
THE SWEATERS.


Has it ever struck you that there are
more bankruptcies, failures, losses by
6re and water and forced sales at sac
ritice in the clothing trade right here in
New York than in any other half dozen
lines of business you might name? Not
a day passes but one meets some staring
Fellow sign announcing that clothing
house has gone bankrupt, and that the
whole stock will be sold out for song
one-half or third or a quarter of its
former cost.
l used to feel sorry for those poor, un-
fortunate manufacturers, but l don't
now. l visited last week the quarters
where bankrupt clothing" was made,
and somehow l lost faith in the glib
clothing dealers veracity. There are sac
rifce and sorrow and bitter disappoint-
ment enough in the clothing trade, but
it isn't the Broadway assignee" or the
bourgeois mother picking from his
shelves the $1.47 and $2.69 children's
suits that feel these. Up in the dark,
foul rookeries which line Hester and Es-
sex and Suffolk streets and other tene-
ment thoroughfares toll the wretched
creatures who make cheap clothing possi-
BILE, and their sufferings are the ones
translated into the black letter appeals
and ruinous prices of the huge yellow
signboards.
Not always do we know who our real
benefactors are, and doubtless few mem
bers of the great middle class in New
York have ever stopped to think what
midnight and early morning toll, what
boarding of scanty wages to make ends
meet, what lunches of black bread over
sewing machines, what stretches of con-
inement for sixteen and eighteen hours
in foul air amid nasty surroundings has
put good clothing on their backs, with
plentiful margins of spending money
left for other expenditures. Forty thou
sand men, women and children over on
the east side make the wearing apparel
of all but the sweller classes of New
York.
People ask, What becomes of the sew
enty-three thousand and odd Russians
who land on our shores in single year
the record for 1891? One could an
swer that the true dumping ground of
the Russian immigrant is the crowded
district east of the Bowery, where third
of million human beings swarm in
square mile and the making of cloaks
and clothes constantly goes on. And
should you make tour of that region
| am sure you will convince yourself
that thousands upon thousands of Slavic
Jews have but exchanged the white
cZar's tyranny for economic servitude in
this land of political freedom.
Americans are anxious to know how
these isolated masses live. Glimpses of
light are shed now and again upon the
Jewish quarters when an organized re-
volt in the shape of a strike against the
clothiers' methods spreads on the east
side or some newspaper starts crusade
in behalf of the sweaters victims. 1t is
only by personally mixing with the toll
ers of Jewry and through the patient
collection of details regarding their hab-
its and manner of life that one gains
any clear idea Of the industrial machin-
cry of the east side.
One has not long to be on such an in
vestigation before he discovers that the
Jewish race is not the only one ground
to powder in the mill of the clothing in
dustry. The Italian "padrone" imports
his countrymen like cattle across the
sea to set them at work ON whining ma
chimes as well as the hand processes of
clothing manufacture at wages if such
a thing be possible, less than even the
shameful pittance doled out to the Rus
sian immigrant.
Whom the 'padrone" has not the
Hebrew contractor seizes by subletting
the finishing" of smaller garments to
dwellers in italian tenements, adding
further tone and contrast to an already
squalid condition of misery. And now
the Chinaman has been drawn in. You
will find little sweaters shop where
he slaves and spins up among the lofts
of Doyers street, an entering wedge for
a score of others to tame the elusive
spirit of the almond eyed oriental into
the unprotesting submissiveness Of the
Hebrew.
'Since the passage of the antisweater
law" said my guide, himself a Russian
/ SiOhhihhhCl ldpOi ledutI DIS we
started out one morning to explore Jew
town, ''since the passage of the anti
sweater law the large contractors have
been driven ont of the tenements, and
those cloakmakers who work in factories
are tolerably well off as to hours, santa
ton, etc, though the pay is miserable.
But you'll find scores and hundreds of
the smaller sweat shops existing all
over the east side in open defiance of law
"The operators often work from in
| the morning until . or 10 at night.
There is no air or stoppage for meals,
and little girls not yet in their teens
take hand at the benches with the
older ones. These shops are in out of
the way places, rear tenements or lofts
on the top floor of some six story build
ing, and they manage to evade the in
spectors. There nearly all the garments
requiring finishing are sent by con.
tractors directly to the houses of fami
lies, where husband, wife and children
toll ceaselessly under worse conditions
if anything than the sweaters"