Not only was peddling a part of the working life of the immigrant,
it was part of the intellectual life as well. On the evening of
Thursday, October 31, 1890,
the Russian Jewish
folk poet, Eliakum Zunser, recited his own works from the stage of
Dramatic Hall. Zunser, one of the most beloved Jews of that era,
arrived from Russia the previous year. Lullabies, sung to the
immigrants by their mothers in Russia, were not folk songs handed
down from generations past, but in many cases were the beloved
recent works of Zunser. Few immigrants knew until years later, after
they had already left their
Yiddishe Mama,
that songs, like
Di Blume
(the Flower), were
not ancient songs of their people, but fresh new melodies from the
heart of one man, Eliakum Zunser.
That evening Zunser appeared with a pianist, a violinist, and a bass
viola player. He chanted his own
poetry as he kept
time to the music with the beat of his foot. The musicians, playing
before a packed house, accompanied his readings of his own original
musical score. "One of his poems," reported the
Jewish
Exponent,
"is the Peddler, in which he
describes the position of the Russian-Jewish peddler living a
miserable existence, and advised that he leave basket and strap and
his miscellaneous array of things for the green fields and the pure
air, amid which he may labor in happiness with ploughshare and mower
and reaper."88
In addition to peddling, the immigrants entered factory life. In the
Centennial decade and earlier, work in cigar factories required a
great deal of training and a definite skill. Soon, however, modern
machinery (bunchers and rollers) allowed unskilled hands to do the
same work.
But by
any
measure it was the needle
trade that attracted the Jewish immigrant. Almost everyone was a
presser, baster, buttonhole maker, or sewing machine operator. Later
the immigrants also became cutters. They worked at home, in
sweatshops or in small factories located on Bank and Strawberry
5treets.89 The finest Jewish tailors were those who
formerly toiled for the Russian Army making uniforms for the
officers. Young girls were experienced with the needle before they
left the shtetl.
After arrival in the United States, almost everyone acquired a
katerinka
(jocular American Yiddish for a sewing machine). In 1892, when there
was fierce competition for jobs and work in the sweatshop involved
long hours, from seven in the morning till the evening meal, the
sweatshop system itself came under the scrutiny of a committee of
the United States House of Representatives. One of the witnesses who
testified before the committee was familiar with conditions
prevailing in Philadelphia:
Q.
WHAT DO YOU UNDERSTAND BY THE "SWEATING
SYSTEM"?
A. The sweating
system is a system under which
work
is given out to a
contractor by the manufacturer, and by the contractor sublet to a
workman who makes :heir work ...
Q. WHICH OF THESE CITIES NAMED
WOULD YOU CONSIDER FIRST IN THE EXTENT TO WHICH THE
BUSINESS IS CARRIED ON?
A. Philadelphia.
Q. TAKE PHILADELPHIA. WILL YOU KINDLY
GIVE A SUCCINCT DESCRIPTION AS IN YOUR OPINION PUTS MOST CLEARLY
BEFORE THE COMMITTEE THE CONDITION OF THINGS THERE?
A. Well, in
Philadelphia there are a large number of Italians, emigrants engaged
in this business, I mean as employees of the sweaters, and also a
large number of Russians, who are also employed.
Q.
IS THE BUSINESS ALMOST
EXCLUSIVELY IN THE HANDS OF THESE PARTICULAR CLASSES AT THAT PLACE?
A. Yes, Sir;
and you will find a contractor will go to one of the manufacturers,
and we will say
that he contracts for a garment at $2. The employees who make that
garment will, perhaps get $1.25, or possibly in some cases $1.50,
and the contractor himself gets the balance of it. The sanitary
conditions are such that I know a number of places on different
streets in Philadelphia where there will be working in a room, not
as large as this, certainly not any larger, 20 people. Some of you
who are familiar with Philadelphia know the old style of houses, and
possibly in a room 18 feet by 12 feet you will find 20 people
working under this system ...
Q.
AND WHAT WOULD CHARACTERIZE, AS YOU HAVE
SUGGESTED, ONE-HALF THE BUSINESS IN PHILADELPHIA. THAT IS A FAIR
BASIS TO PUT IT ON.
A. Well, the places are
decidedly unclean. These old houses have very poor plumbing
arrangements and the conditions with the sewers are miserable and
the houses are just as unclean and untidy as it is possible to be
for that class of people and they seem to like dirt about as well as
anyone I know of, and you will find them in these rooms, where they
will have their work benches and many of the employees when they lie
down to sleep will lie right down on the bench, and their closets,
to which the women and children have to retire if they wish to use a
closet, in many cases is directly connected with the same room or
in a hall where the well, the stench and conditions are horrible.?90
To understand the men's
clothing industry in Philadelphia, it is necessary to go back to
1835, the year that marks the beginning of ready-made clothes. Prior
to that time only slops for sailors (cheap clothing) and slaves'
clothes were ready made, but inside of twenty years ready-made men's
clothing replaced traditional home sewing. By 1857, manufacture of
men's clothing was divided into thirty-nine operations, some of
which could be learned easily in a few weeks. No language skills
were needed and children as young as seven years old could work long
hours.
At the beginning of east
European Jewish immigration into Philadelphia, the clothing industry
was centered in the Fifth and Sixth wards of the city, east of 7th
Street, between Vine and South Streets:
CLOTHING: This
industry in the Fifth ward is large, employing 516 persons in 17
establishments on men's clothing, and 71 persons in 10
establishments on women's clothing. But in the Sixth ward it is the
leading
industry, employing
17,450 persons in 127 establishments on all forms of men's
clothing, and 1,974 persons in 38 establishments on women's
clothing. This employment is not conducted wholly or even most
largely in the buildings occupied by the establishments, the work
being given out for men's clothing to persons and families who work
at their homes in various parts of the city, but chiefly in
Kensington and the northern wards.91
This was the state of
affairs in 1882, but it would soon change. As Jewish and Italian
immigrants poured into Philadelphia, the center of "home work" in
the needle trade shifted south from Kensington, to Lombard Street,
to Monroe Street, and farther south into the heart of South
Philadelphia. The sweating system included three parties: the
manufacturer, who gave out the cloth and contracted to have it made
into garments; the sweater, or small contractor who hired the
laborers; and the sweated, or the working tailors.
The manufacturer was
known as the wholesale clothier or the clothing house and their role
in the sweating system was the most clearly defined. The principal
and sometimes the only manual work done on the premises of the
manufacturer was the cutting of cloth. The leading clothiers hired
the best talent in their cutting rooms. When the east European Jews
came to Philadelphia, cutters were not Jewish. A typical wholesale
clothier had offices and salesrooms on the premises.
German Merchant
Tailors' Exchange (non-Jewish) and the Philadelphia Clothing
Exchange (Jewish), organized at a meeting at Mercantile Hall on
November 6, 1882.92 The latter was established to obtain
the recognition of Philadelphia as a center relating to the clothing
trade.93 When the immigrants first arrived, clothing
factories and sweatshops were located on Bank and Strawberry
Streets. Beginning in 1892, we also find Russian clothing houses on
these two streets. (Appendix B contains two listings:
(1)
the names of members of the Philadelphia
Clothing Exchange in 1886, located on two blocks of Market Street
and the block of N. 3rd. Street between Market and Arch Streets, and
(2) the names of Russian wholesale clothiers on Bank and Strawberry
Streets.
The second party to the
triumvirate was the contractor or sweater. The contractor agreed to
sew the cut material into a garment for a fixed price. The following
description is typical of a contractor's shop in the Jewish quarter
of Philadelphia:
We enter a sweatshop on Lombard, Bainbridge, Monroe or South Fourth
Street. It may be one of several floors in which similar work is
going on. The shop is that of the so called contractor - one who
contracts with the manufacturer to put his garments together after
they have been cut by the cutter. The pieces are taken in bundles
from the manufacturer's to the contractor's. Each contractor usually
undertakes the completion of one sort - pants, coats, vests, knee
pants, or children jackets.94
The contractor was the person who sweated the profits out of the
immigrant. The contractor or sweater was also known as the
"boss tailor" (translated into Yiddish as the
shnayder boss).
Tailors were
divided into two groups, the working tailors and the boss tailors.
Some contractors worked alongside their employees and sewed
the
garments; others did not. Most contractors, recent immigrants
themselves, were adventurers, risk takers with little or no capital,
running their operation any location where work could be done and a
profit quickly made.
The third party to the arrangement was the immigrant tailor. Always
under the thumb of the boss tailor, men, women, and children tailors
quickly sank into poverty.
Two fears haunted the immigrant: one was lack of
money and the other was consumption (tuberculosis). Having to work
with others suspected of already being infected with tuberculosis
was constantly on the mind of the immigrant. When it could be
arranged, sweatshops operated outdoors in the summer, to the rear of
the city houses of old Society Hill. New arrivals to Philadelphia
from the towns and small villages of rural Russia who had not been
exposed to tuberculosis could succumb quickly to the disease. At the
end of the immigrant period, Moses Freeman looked back to the early
years of east European Jewish migration into Philadelphia:
Tired from hunger and want, the helpless and
wretched tailor allowed himself to be enslaved in the sweatshop by
the boss tailor, sweating and toiling for sixteen hours a day at the
katerinka, or forged to the twenty pound iron
press. The tailors, the old time sewing machine operators, finishers
and pressers, they all superhumanly toiled and bled in dark, stuffy
and polluted tailor shops for slave wages. Instead of saving money
with which to help himself and free himself from
hard work in the
shop, the operator, presser or finisher, after a few years bleeding
in the sweatshop, saved up the workingman's gift, the White Plague,
the most terrible of terrors, the "con," as they called it here,
shortened in America from "consumption."95
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