American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Uniformity resulted in part from the common practice of cutting up land into small, easily sellable lots usually about twenty-five feet wide by one hundred feet deep. These property lines ran through hill and dale, pasture and woodland, with little logic except the realtors’ interests. But the main cause of monotony in living areas was the almost universal adoption of the “balloon frame” in building residences. Early in the century most buildings had been constructed by skilled craftsmen using heavy beams and mortised and tenoned joints. The balloon frame used instead thin plates and studs, often the familiar “two-by-fours,” running the entire height of the building and held together only by spikes and nails. “A man and a boy can now attain the same results with ease, that twenty men could on an old-fashioned frame,” wrote an architectural expert in 1865. Soon the outlying city areas were dotted by thousands of balloon-frame skeletons soon to be clothed in whatever framing was handy and cheap.

  The mass production of houses was part and parcel of the industrialization of the city. Such production required masses of timber, often brought long distances and processed by increasingly large and efficient woodworking machinery. Even more, mass frame housing depended on the simple nail in cheap and plentiful supply. The iron and steel industry had to provide ample metals for machines that cut and headed nails by the million. Hand-wrought nails had cost twenty-five cents a pound; by mid-century machine-made nails were selling for three cents a pound. Chicago was the ideal place to bring together masses of land, timber, nails, and carpenters, and the balloon frames came to be associated with that city; but this cheap housing was responsible for the “taming of the West” all the way to San Francisco and Los Angeles.

  It was more profitable to erect houses than to provide for support services vitally needed in increasingly congested areas. Water was the vital need, for both comfort and sanitation. Toward the end of the century, the old sewerage arrangements were simply collapsing under pressure. In 1881 the mayor of Cleveland called the Cuyahoga River “an open sewer through the center of the city.” Most families depended on local wells to obtain water and private cesspools to get rid of it. “Foul-smelling” privies often stood nearby. By the late 1870s, Washington still had 56,000 private sewer vaults and cesspools, and Philadelphia 82,000. Would sewerage be better in the West, where more land seemed available and cities could start from scratch? To keep their waste from pouring into Lake Michigan, Chicagoans ingeniously reversed the flow of the Chicago River away from the lake and into the Illinois River, with the aid of six pumping stations. But the waste now fouled the water of downstream towns and still backed up into the city and into Lake Michigan during heavy rains.

  Some cities planned ahead. After completing its thirty-four-mile Croton aqueduct in 1842, New York found in three decades that it needed a second big Croton aqueduct, and not long after that, a huge new source of water in the Catskills. Los Angeles had to turn to Sierra mountain water 250 miles away. Often, however, it was not foresight that brought action but disaster. Just as Philadelphia had brilliantly experimented with ingenious water gathering and distribution methods after its yellow fever epidemic of 1793, Memphis built a new sewer system only after a similar plague in 1878. In this crisis, Memphis turned to George E. Waring, Jr., who argued that typhoid and other diseases could be traced to “the exhalations of decomposing matters in dungheaps, pigsties, privy vaults, cellars, cess-pools, drains, and sewers,” and launched a campaign against filth. By 1910, over 10 million city people drank filtered water, cutting the death rate, it was estimated, by at least a fifth in New Orleans and several big eastern cities.

  At least sewers were practical and useful, if expensive. What about green areas, recreation space? Few realtors trying to make a profit off land, few industrialists busy selling nails and construction machinery, had time to think much about parks, nor did workers intent on acquiring food, shelter, and clothing. Such green areas seemed the province of gentlemen-idealists like Frederick Law Olmsted, who helped conceive a magnificent plan for a central park in Manhattan, campaigned for its creation, and saw it completed in 1876 after twenty years’ effort, in a manner that preserved the easy, undulating shape of the original land and related the park to the city. Henry W. S. Cleveland, a scientific farmer and engineer, designed parks and cemeteries in both North and South. He urged city leaders to think ahead to future needs and to acquire land before real estate interests did; Minneapolis, for example, must predict what would be the “wants” of its people when they became a million strong. But visitors from abroad were distressed to see, in the working-class sections of big industrial cities, street after street, block after block, without the green space of park, playground, or even cemetery.

  The ultimate unit in the “rectangular street platting, the atom of mechanical design, was the individual rectangular plot into which each block was divided,” wrote Lewis Mumford. He noted that the width of the plot was rarely greater than twenty feet; often, as in sections of Baltimore, it might be only fifteen or twelve. “As long as row houses were two rooms deep, this platting was tolerable; but as soon as the need for more dwelling space grew, the natural line of expansion was not laterally, to embrace a second costly plot, but backward, to eat up the back-yard areas and to increase thereby the sunless interior space….

  “The desire to utilize every square foot of rentable space possessed the owner, even when he was building for his own use, and not for sheer pecuniary exploitation; and in its search for profits it often over-reached itself, for an overcrowded plan does not necessarily bring the maximum financial return. Cumbrous, uneconomic plans, with a maximum amount of wasteful corridor space and dark ill-ventilated rooms, characterized the two-family houses, the three deckers, the higher tenements. And the habit of letting the shape of the individual lot determine the plan and layout of the house dominated the imagination of the architect: he lost the ability to design freely in more comprehensive units, built for common living and not for individual division, individual ownership, individual sale….” This shotgun wedding of individualism and urbanization was a hallmark of the industrialization of the cities.

  The Life of the City

  Into the balloon frames of Chicago and St. Louis, the four-storied “three-deckers” of Boston and Lowell, the “dumbbell” shaped tenements of Manhattan and Detroit, the shanties on the outskirts of Omaha, and the boardinghouses of the western cities flowed the gigantic tide of migrants and immigrants, with their extraordinary diversity of backgrounds, religions, customs, needs, perceptions, and expectations. Whatever the architecture, the new environment was essentially the same for all—urban, congested, noisy, stinking, treeless. Yet the newcomers for a time at least transformed their immediate environment far more than they were transformed by it. Consciously or not, ethnic groups adopted strategies for coping with their environment, converting it into something familiar and manageable, for a time making it a means of alleviating physical insecurity and uncertainty, a buffer against collisions with the volatile, kaleidoscopic new world into which they had plunged.

  Walk west on East Houston Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side before the turn of the century and you can see how the Jewish newcomers are absorbing the shock of moving into a crowded and ugly urban environment. Look right, beyond Hamilton Fish Park—there, in an area of twenty or more blocks behind the docks and warehouses of the East River, live tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews. On your left, reaching down to Delancey Street, stretch a dozen blocks of Galician Jews. Turn left on Chrystie Street and you pass through an area of Romanian Jews on your right and Levantine and Romanian Jews on your left. Then take another left, off Chrystie onto Canal Street, and you enter the heart of the biggest Jewish district of all—Russian Jews from Poland, Lithuania, Byelorussia, the Ukraine. Don’t try to hurry; the sidewalks and the streets are packed. This is by far the most populated square mile in the city; in some acres here are packed more people than in the same square footage in Bombay.

  The East Side Jews have moo
red themselves to the two most enduring foundations of social stability—race and nationality. Most of them act far more like Jews with a common culture, however, than Hungarians or Russians or Romanians with separate national identities. Here on the edge of the Russian district are the Hebrew Technical School for Girls, the Home for the Aged, the Jewish Maternity Hospital, the Hebrew Sheltering House. The Forward Building on Yiddish Newspaper Row, the Isaac Elchanan Yeshiva, and the Educational Alliance flank Henry Street. A dozen congregations meet in tenements or storefronts that serve as synagogues. Over toward lower Broadway lie the temples of entertainment—the Grand Theater, the Yiddish Rialto, the Thalia Theater.

  The streets burst with life, action, clamor. People throng the narrow sidewalks, push through the streets with their carts, crowd onto fire escapes, call down from open windows. Even “the architecture seemed to sweat humanity at every window and door,” the British novelist Arnold Bennett observed. In the Pig Market on Hester Street, peddlers sell fish and fruit from pushcarts, milk from big cans, cheap clothes off racks, secondhand eyeglasses and knickknacks from trays hanging on straps from the peddler’s neck. Sharp-eyed housewives with large bags check pushcart goods and prices against those in the shops that occupy the ground floor of the tenements. Things are a bit grander over on Grand Street, with its department stores, restaurants, dancing halls (for proper dancing), and even a little park.

  Still, no matter how successful East Side Jews were in reestablishing old social forms and institutions in the new world of the city, few could escape psychological stress and disorganization. For some, the repeated shocks had been almost too much to bear—being left in charge of the home in Vilna or Kiev or wherever, while the breadwinner took the long journey to America; then the family’s own trip marked by fear, homesickness, illness, humiliations; the joyous reunion, followed often by shifts in the relationship of husband and wife, parents and children, parents and grandparents, as harsh new demands changed the roles of family members—especially mothers—and lowered immigrants’ sense of competence in their new situations, altered their esteem for others, sapped their self-esteem. And now again the breadwinner might seem to be deserting his family—for twelve hours a day, perhaps, as he labored in a factory, or for weeks at a time when he carried his peddler’s pack off into the wilds of Connecticut or western Pennsylvania.

  For some, religion was a strengthening and stabilizing force. But, in Irving Howe’s words, “pressures of the city, the shop, the slum, all made it terribly hard to stay with the old religious ethic. The styles and rituals of traditional Judaism had been premised on a time scheme far more leisurely, a life far less harried than urban America imposed. As for the new ethic of materialist individualism, what could this mean to a garment worker who spent sixty hours a week in a sweatshop, physically present in America yet barely touched by its language, its traditions, its privileges? … Except for those who clung to faith or grappled toward ideology, the early immigrants consisted of people who were stranded—stranded socially, morally, psychologically.” These especially were the ones who withdrew into their culture, their institutions, their families, themselves, as they tried to re-create the feeling of belonging they had once enjoyed in a town or village now distant.

  In many respects, the experiences of Italian immigrants paralleled those of Jews and other newcomers, especially those from southern and Eastern Europe. The heaviest waves of Italians came from western Sicily and from rural provinces south of Rome—Aguila, Reggio, Bari, and others—that were almost as separated from one another in geography, history, and even language as were some of the nations of Europe. They brought with them powerful loyalties to native town and village, high expectations aroused by the advertisements of steamship lines and by agents shilling for cheap foreign labor, and the rural folkways of the “Italian shtetl.”

  Like the Jews and others, their goal in America was mainly economic betterment, but some Italians too left to find greater freedom—especially religious liberty—or to evade military service, or to break away from political oligarchies. Like other immigrants, but perhaps to an even greater extent, Italian immigrants settled into the dingiest tenements and took the most menial jobs in the stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago, the mines and steel mills of Pennsylvania, the construction gangs of Schenectady and Utica, in the “Little Italies” of Kansas City and Cleveland, in “Dago Hill” near the clay pits and brickyards of St. Louis. Even more than many other immigrants, Italians were slow to conquer the urban American language, as they converted street into “streetu,” factory “fattoria,” shop “shoppa,” store “storu.”

  The most distinctive aspect of Italian immigration, however, was the manner in which the newcomers from southern Italy and Sicily coped with culture shock and economic need. This was to accept a leadership and authority system represented by the padrone. Italians arriving on the docks of American ports or in the terminals of great cities needed not sermons or patriotic speeches but help—help with officious immigration officials, help with the American language, help in finding jobs and housing. The padrone, or labor boss, was the man who met him when he arrived, took him and his family around to Little Italy, put him into some kind of flat, and knew where to find work. The padrone was essentially an agent for employers seeking low-paid labor, but in the process he often became an intermediary too; he “collected wages, wrote letters, acted as banker, supplied room and board, and handled dealings between workers and employers,” in Humbert Nelli’s description.

  Because padroni recruited Italian labor not only for city jobs but for all parts of the country, Chicago as a railroad center became a stronghold for these bosses. And bosses they were, with their power to offer jobs or to withhold them, to overcharge for food, rent, and railroad tickets to construction centers, to collect fees for jobs that they then failed to produce. A United States government report in 1897 showed that prices charged by the padroni were often far greater than “those charged in Chicago markets for similar articles of food at the same quality”—almost twice as much for bread, over 50 percent extra for macaroni, two-thirds extra for tomatoes, sausages, bacon, and lard.

  So Italian immigrants paid a steep price for help in acculturation at the hands of the labor bosses of Chicago. The price could be even steeper, for the padroni tied in with the criminal element that emigrated in large part from Sicily and would have a profound influence on Chicago’s—and the nation’s—urban life. But, above all, the padroni, performing their essential function of uniting labor and capital, testified to the desperate need of immigrants for help, understanding, communication, shelter, and jobs, in a nation that offered virtually no planned and comprehensive assistance or protection to the millions of newcomers flocking into its industrializing cities.

  Would factory work serve as the great homogenizer? If the newcomers were bringing their cultures and subcultures with them, if they were implanting their old ways, their costumes, their pushcarts, their languages, their churches, and their family and ethnic loyalties into the heart of the industrializing city, could they carry their diverse ways of life past the factory gate? Man in all his diversity, Adam Smith had said, “is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be transported.” But the factory had its own exactions, imperatives, disciplines.

  Factories had power. Factories, whether second-floor sweatshop or huge steel works, commanded that workers arrive and leave at set times—usually many hours apart—and work in prescribed conditions. The capitalist work ethic and capitalist efficiency barred loitering, absenteeism, malingering, visiting around the floor, perhaps even talking on the job. “Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist,” the Communist Manifesto had charged. “Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bour
geois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.” Marx and Engels had looked to the future. With the development of industry, “the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.”

  Yet immigrants and migrants found countless ways to thwart the discipline of the industrialists, the slavery of the machine. Used to their holidays in the “old country,” Poles would spend several days celebrating a wedding in a far-off mill town. Accustomed to more than eighty festivals a year, Greeks were not prepared to give up these happy occasions in the New World. The Irish celebrated some of their old patriotic and religious days, such as St. Patrick’s Day, and their new ones, like Independence Day. Nor could employers integrate holidays so that their plants would close only once, for all concerned; no one would dare synchronize Labor Day and Columbus Day. Even the nonreligious might follow the slower working-day tempo of their earlier peasant lives.