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The Jewish Quarter
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PEDDLERS AND SWEATSHOPS

 
     East European Jewish immigrants exhausted most of what little money they had on the long journey to America. Some ran out of funds at the dock in Hamburg or Rotterdam and by the time they reached Liverpool, they had to borrow money. It was not uncommon for immigrants to  arrive in Philadelphia with less than $25, all of it borrowed from fellow passengers during the voyage. Of those immigrants who planned to settle in the City of Brotherly Love, most sought refuge with a relative. The greener (greenhorn) was welcomed, and the American relatives eagerly listened to the latest gossip from the alte heym (the old country). Exhausted, the newly arrived immigrant was given a clean bed and the host-relative slept on the floor. In the morning the new arrival began to look for work. Peddling and cigar factories provided many among the Jews who came from Lithuania. The litvak (Lithuanian Jew) would spend his last $10: $5 on a peddler's box, $3 or $4 for goods, and $1 for a basket in which to put his goods. He would place the box on his back and answer the call: "Be on the march, you Lithuanian!"86 Lucien Moss, a leader of the established Jewish community in Philadelphia, visited a school of the Alliance Israelite Universelle in Port Richmond and the nearby surrounding dwellings of the recently arrived Russian immigrants, and in a letter to Sabato Morais, wrote, "Ask any of those children in number at the school, what does your father do, and the invariable answer is, he peddles."87

ITINERANT PEDDLERS, PENNSYLVANIA, 1886.
Courtesy of the Philadelphia Jewish Archives Center,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

     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
 

PHILADELPHIA 8 
 

 



 



 

 


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