Read Ebook: White Slaves; or the Oppression of the Worthy Poor by Banks Louis Albert

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I showed that the women who make shirts made only fifty cents a day, and yet the proprietor made on every shirt twenty-two cents profit on an investment of twenty-eight cents. I do not admit that competition is so stern that it is necessary for this shirt manufacturer to make seventy-eight per cent profit while the woman who works for him must beg assistance of the Provident Association, or see her children cry for bread.

Or, take the case of the poor girl, whose mother finishes pants for the postal uniforms at nine and one-half cents a pair, slaving eighteen hours for fifty-seven cents; and she, the daughter, toils all day long, in the midst of the physical and moral stench of a Jewish sweater's shop, for sixteen and two-thirds cents. But she is better off than the orphan girl that works beside her, whose condition some poet has described:--

"Left there, nobody's daughter, Child of disgrace and shame, Nobody ever taught her A mother's sweet saving name.

Nobody ever caring Whether she stood or fell, And men ensnaring With the arts and the gold of hell!

Stitching with ceaseless labor To earn her pitiful bread; Begging a crust of a neighbor, And getting a curse instead!

All through the long, hot summer, All through the cold, dark time, With fingers that numb and number Grow, white as the frost's white rime.

Nobody ever conceiving The throb of that warm, young life, Nobody ever believing The strain of that terrible strife!

Nobody kind words pouring In that orphan heart's sad ear; But all of us all ignoring, What lies at our door so near!"

There is nothing wholesome in the question whether it is better to pauperize people a little in the attic, or to pauperize them altogether in the almshouse. We ought not to pauperize them at all. A noble Christian woman, who has a young men's Bible class in the North End, and who by her womanly tact and Christian sympathy has gained the confidence of some of the most hopeless cases in that section, told me that one of these boys said to her, "When the Back Bay folks know that we are made of flesh and blood, they won't pauperize us any longer."

The eighth question returns in some of its aspects to the first: "The use of the term 'slave' implies a slave-owner and a slave-driver. In this series of the manufacturer, the sweater or middleman, and the working-woman with her children, which is the slave-owner, and which is the slave-driver? Under what authority does the slave-master force this woman to render her labor for all that it is worth?" Answering the last part of the question first, I have already shown that the woman does not get all that her work is worth. The manufacturer, who makes from seventy-eight to a hundred and fifty per cent profit, gets a far larger proportion of the profits than rightly belongs to him.

Under the sweating system, the sweater is, most emphatically, both the slave-master and slave-driver; and no Georgia overseer was ever more cruel than some of these sweater taskmasters in Boston to-day.

Even at the wretched wages they pay, they will not give any of their workers all the work they can do; they dole out the work to them, trying to make them think it is very scarce. If they ask for higher pay, they are met at once with a threat of discharge. Do you ask why they do not hunt for something better? What can a poor, half-broken-down mother, with three little babies, do hunting work? Who will pay the rent, furnish them food, and care for the children while she makes her search? There are thousands of laboring people, both men and women, in all our great cities, who are in the same condition that a majority of the Israelites were when Moses came to them, and told the marvellous story of his talk with Jehovah, and painted before their dim eyes the picture of the Canaan, and recounted to their dull ears the promise of their deliverance from bondage. Pathetic, indeed, is the record, "They hearkened not unto Moses for anguish of spirit and for cruel bondage." It is idle to talk, as so many newspapers as well as private individuals do, as though domestic service were the cure-all for these half-starving, under-paid women. A great majority of the women who are slaves to these sweaters, have families of little children depending on them, that are as dear to their hearts as are the children of more fortunate mothers to them. Dr. Barnardo, of London, who has had a most extensive experience among the poor, tells of a poor woman, with a husband lying disabled in the hospital, earning her living by charing and odd jobs, while she herself was receiving out-door hospital relief for physical debility. Driven at last to accept assistance from the relieving officer, she hastened home, placed the bread and meat on a table, and fell dead of exhaustion. Dr. Barnardo was sent for, and beside the dead body of the mother he was surprised, as well he might be, to find five well-fed, chubby children. The poor, slum mother had literally starved herself to death that her children might live! Truly, as Coleridge says, "A mother is the holiest thing alive;" and God never intended that the almshouse or the orphan asylum should be the only refuge held open for a mother who is able and willing to work to support her children.

In the ninth question our critic says: "If her work is worth more than she gets, can she not get it? A little inquiry into the condition of the clothing trade and some examination of the facts might disclose to you that the poor sewing-woman is poor because she sews poorly, and that there is always a scarcity of skilful and intelligent sewing-women, at full wages." The more thorough my examination into the facts of the case, the more I am convinced that the sweating system is demoralizing the entire clothing trade, as it will every trade it touches. Whether the woman sews poorly or not, she does not, in any class she may be placed, receive the wages to which she is entitled.

The conclusion of my critic's letter is, I think, as remarkable as anything in it. He says: "My final question is, how do you propose to help those who are incapable of helping themselves, without pauperizing them yet more than they are pauperized under their present conditions? What will you do when you have destroyed the house and done away with the sweater?" To this part of the concluding question I simply say, I will be a Christian, and pay honest wages for honest work. But the critic continues: "Are you justified, as a Christian minister, in creating prejudice and arousing malignant passion by the use of the term 'slave?' Can you defend or justify this term under the conditions as they are stated in the printed report of your sermon? I venture to put these questions to you because I think that the dangerous class in this community is to be found among persons who, without intelligence, create animosity and, by their method of preaching, tend to retard rather than to promote the progress of the poor and ignorant in this country." My answer to all that is, that, as a Christian minister, I am a follower of Him, who, standing in the midst of the self-satisfied and wealthy oppressors of His times, exclaimed, "Woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God." And who, standing in the audience of all the people, said unto His disciples, "Beware of the Scribes which devour widows' houses, and for a show make long prayers: the same shall receive greater damnation;" who, standing in the presence of the lawyers, cried aloud, "Woe unto you, also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers." I am a follower of Him who came "not to send peace on the earth, but a sword." All an infernal system of oppression, like the sweating system, asks, is to be let alone. To uncover its atrocities is like turning over a huge stone in the meadow in springtime, that has been a hiding-place for bugs and worms that nest away in the dark. As soon as the hot, searching sunlight finds them, they will wriggle and squirm in agony until they can crawl under cover again. So I do not wonder that, when the hideous cruelty of the tenement-house sweat-shop is brought to light, the sweater and all his friends wriggle and squirm in an agony of fright and shame. Neither am I alarmed that this critic, as a type of conservatism, regards me as a member of the most dangerous class in the community. It was ever thus. The old antislavery agitators were considered the most dangerous men in the republic, and I remember that a very distinguished minister once bitterly regretted the agitation on the evils of slavery, because he feared it would destroy the prospect for a revival of religion in the city where he lived.

If to be a Christian minister is to stand as a policeman to hold back the righteous indignation of the robbed and degraded laborer, or preach patience and contentment to empty stomachs,--empty that the sweater may grow rich and fat on the toil of orphans and widows,--then I spurn the title as beneath the dignity of my manhood; but if, as I take it, to be a Christian minister is to be like my Master, the brother of all men, rich or poor, standing forever as the unflinching enemy of oppression and injustice wherever found, as the friend and advocate of the defenceless and the weak, then I am proud of the title, and thank God for its unspeakable privilege.

THE PLAGUE OF THE SWEAT-SHOP.

"Can the heart be deformed, and contract incurable ugliness and infirmity under the pressure of disproportionate misfortune, like the spine beneath too low a vault?"

The Klamath Lake Indians in Oregon have a strange and weird fashion of mourning their dead. They dig a hole in the ground, and roof it over with willows, which they cover with dirt, forming a sort of underground cabin. In case of death in the family, the relatives go into this dug-out, which is called a "sweat-lodge," and heated rocks are brought in and heaped in the centre of the lodge, and water sprinkled over them, so as to fill the room with steam. In the midst of this steam-heated, poisonous air the family hover around their heap of rocks, and sweat for days at a time, in memory of their departed friends.

When the mourning days are over, they heap up into a cairn beside the sweat-lodge the stones that have been used, as a monument to their dead.

But that, after all, is only a brief torture which is soon over, and is constantly lightened by the hope of relief. The sweat-lodge of our modern civilization is a much more serious matter. The tortured victims who are suffering there, are not mourning for their dead friends, but for the living, and in the dark night of their sorrow there is no promise of a brighter dawn.

An English writer gives this definition of the sweating system: "One whereby the middleman tries to get the largest profit, with the least labor and outlay, out of the maximum labor of his workers." Another gives three definitions: "First, one who grinds the face of the poor; second, a man who contributes neither capital, skill, nor speculation, and yet gets a profit; third, a middleman." Still another describes it as a systematized payment of unfair wages. Away back in the days of Queen Anne the term "sweater" was given to a certain class of street ruffian. The sweaters went about in small bands, and, forming a circle around an inoffensive wayfarer, pricked him with their swords, and compelled him to dance till he perspired from the exertion. The sweater is still a ruffian, though the street is no longer the scene of action, but, in some attic or tenement-house bedroom, he gathers his victims from the poorest and most helpless of our population.

It is my purpose, first of all this morning, to show you something of the growth and development of the sweat-shop in England. It is reasonable for us to suppose that, if left to itself, it will produce the same general results in this country that it has there. Fortunately we have an abundance of data upon which to form our conclusions.

There are in the Boston Public Library five ponderous volumes containing the evidence taken before a commission, appointed by the English House of Lords, to examine into the sweating system of Great Britain.

I think it is well for American laboring-men to know that this evidence puts beyond question the fact that the sweating business, while it may begin with the clothing trade, by no means ends there. "The plague of the sweatshop" is not something of interest to the tailors and sewing-women only, but is of equal importance to workers of every class. Take the matchbox trade; before the sweating days, the people who worked at it received two and three-fourths pence a gross. Now the large contractors let and sub-let until it is only one and a half pence a gross, and a woman and a family of children have to work all the week to make four or five shillings.

The fur trade in Europe has been largely driven into Whitechapel sweaters' shops. They call the sweater in this business a "chamber master," and in these foul chambers, in the midst of "bad smells, great heat, no ventilation, and fetid refuse," men and women swelter and die, the men getting ten shillings, and the women about five shillings a week.

The cabinet and upholstery trade is not exempt. Sub-contracting here, as in clothing, is the first step in sweating. The evidence shows that sweating began in this business as early as 1855, but has rapidly increased under pauper immigration from Italy and Russia since 1880. Much of the work is crowded into garrets and cellars, where there are no sanitary arrangements. So universally is this so, that the sweater in this business is called a "garret master." Wages have been brought down, from forty to fifty shillings a week, to from eighteen to twenty shillings.

The boot and shoe trade has had the same history. Large numbers of foreigners are employed in this work. The workers are kept in ignorance of the language and under surveillance, so as to be taken advantage of. They are not instructed in the more skilled work, and, to use the words of one of the witnesses, "are too crushed to resist." They are compelled to work from eighteen to twenty hours a day. Wages in these sweat-shops are from ten to fifteen shillings a week.

In Sheffield, the great cutlery manufacturing city, the same system is prevailing, and a woman whose business was awl-blade grinding, a strong woman of forty-five years of age, testified that she could only make six and a half shillings per week.

Military harness and accoutrements are also made by the sweaters. Many workmen earn only three pence an hour, and complain that they cannot live on it. The nail trade is in the same condition. A man and wife working together make thirteen shillings a week. Women's earnings average from three shillings and a half to six shillings per week.

Large numbers of women are only able to earn three shillings a week at this business. Boys and girls are paid, in a sweater's chain-shop, one-half penny per hour.

A witness from Glasgow testified in regard to the clothing shops of that city: "It is a rule among the sweaters to give the men some money, a shilling, every night, to keep them alive till the next day. Some of the men at the end of the week are actually in debt instead of having anything coming to them. When in debt, they do not, as a rule, come back, but go to another sweater. The men never actually get any wages, but are in debt from one year's end till another. All independence is taken out of the men; they are always in the sweater's power."

A witness from Leeds says: "Wages are driven to a starvation level, and workmen at piece-work compelled to excessive hours. If the employers find a good workman, who is earning good wages by piece-work, they try to reduce prices. Time work is healthier, but no one would believe how the men are driven in shops where time-work exists."

Another gentleman, testifying about his investigations in Glasgow, tells of a place he visited, where a sweater had between forty and fifty women employed in an old boiler shed, a disused part of an engineer's shop; the women had to get to it by three wooden ladders, and had to go through a joiner's shop in order to enter the workroom. There was no sanitary accommodation for these women anywhere. It is a common practice for sweaters to take on learners, that is to say, to employ young girls for a certain time to learn the machine part of the work; but they get no wages for say five or six weeks or so, or two months, and after that time, if competent, they receive two or three shillings per week. But the sweater's trick, as soon as the busy season is over, is to discharge all these girls and take on a new batch.

As one would naturally expect, moral degradation keeps pace with the outrage upon the rights of the laborer. It is claimed that the Jewesses, who have always had the most unblemished character of any women in the world, are being ruined in the sweat-shops of London, where they are herded together with all classes of men in a way which renders morality and decency next to impossible. One witness bears this terrible testimony: "The sweating system, in which you have young girls working with men of all nationalities, and of all degrees of intelligence, conduces to their being later on, and they are mostly, to my certain knowledge, prostitutes. Most of the young English girls whom we can see in the Strand and Oxford Street are, or have been, tailoresses, and the conditions conduce to that effect."

So great and wide-spread is this question of the increase of immorality in England, under the reign of the sweat-shop, that a barrister-at-law, Mr. Wm. Thompson, has written a novel entitled, "The Sweater's Victim," which has for its burden the ruin of girls through the "plague of the sweat-shop."

The Journeymen Tailors' National Union, in its fifth annual report, describes in detail one of these New York sweat-shops, similar to those which the recent commission, appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts, found to be the manufactories of enormous quantities of clothing for Boston firms: "On the first floor, which was occupied by two families, was a contractor, or 'sweater,' who made overcoats. In the front room, 8x16 ft., eight full-grown men were at work, some on sewing-machines, a man pressing, and others finishing. They were hollow-cheeked and cadaverous. Trousers and undershirts were their only apparel. In the rear room, 9x14, were six other men, almost identical in appearance with those in the front. All were working as if for dear life.

"This place was simply indescribable in its filthiness. The only household furniture discernible , were a bedstead and a child's crib in one of the two dark, so-called bedrooms. Bedding and overcoats were piled up together. The floors were four inches deep with dirt and cotton battings and scraps of linings. The ceilings and woodwork looked as though they had not seen a brush since the house was built years ago. Water from the floor above had leaked through the ceiling, but it seemed to make no difference. One stove was used by the pressers and the cook. It did not appear that there was any regular meal hour. There was a table littered with dirty dishes, morsels of food, and scraps of coats. One man was seated, eating out of a dish with his fingers, without the aid of spoon, knife, or fork. As soon as he had finished, he merely wiped his hands on some cotton batting, and proceeded with his work. The poor creatures were haggard and apparently stupid." What wonder?

Dr. George C. Stiebling, of New York, who accompanied the recent Boston investigating committee, says, in an affidavit made after a careful investigation, that the New York sweatshops "in which clothing is manufactured, and which serve at the same time as dwelling-rooms for the bosses, their families, and boarders, are overcrowded, ill-ventilated, over-heated, full of dirt, filth, vermin and stench, and that, consequently, they are in a most unwholesome, health-destroying and disease-breeding condition." The doctor, speaking of one particular case, says: "On the fourth floor I found four very small rooms, occupied by five sewing-machines, twenty-four working hands, and the family of the boss consisting of himself, wife, and five living children. The mother reported to affiant that, within the last few years, six of her children had died of various diseases here in the same place." Relying upon these and other facts, which he relates, the Doctor declares it to be his deliberate conclusion, as a medical man, that "the dust, filth, and dirt, accumulated in the 'sweating dens' he has visited and examined, contain the germs of the prevailing infectious diseases, such as diphtheria, scarlatina, measles, erysipelas, and smallpox, and that the clothing manufactured in these shops is impregnated with such germs, and consequently may transmit and spread the aforesaid diseases to persons who handle and wear it."

These places referred to in this affidavit by Dr. Stiebling, who is a wealthy and respectable medical practitioner, are places where goods are made almost exclusively for Boston houses.

Another physician of standing and repute, Dr. Markierez, who made an investigation of the sweating district, in connection with a commission from the advisory board of the operative tailors of Boston, in August, 1889, states that the section of New York City in which the tenement-house system of clothing manufacture is carried on, is filthy and infested with vermin; and he further affirms that the sanitary condition of these tenement houses is so low that the death rate is frightful and almost beyond comprehension.

That the sweating system in New York degrades the men and women employed in the sweatshops, may be inferred from the fact that men and women to the number of twelve have been found sleeping together in one of these workrooms. The tenement-house factories are so crowded that no such thing as privacy or modesty, on the part of men or women, is possible; the usual water-closet is a wooden bucket upon every landing, which fills the air with its vile and death-breeding stench.

The New York sweaters, like some of their English prototypes, take advantage of the newly arrived foreigners who do not understand the language. Green hands, who have just arrived at Castle Garden, are pure gold for the contractors. Full-grown men among these will receive, probably, two dollars a week, but one case was discovered where a man was only paid eighty cents for his week's labor. A fourteen-year-old boy was found in a Jewish sweatshop, who, although he had been in the shop eight months, was still receiving only his board. If that is not slavery, what is it?

The State inspectors of factories and public buildings, in their report to Chief Wade of the Massachusetts district police, say that "the confidential clerk of perhaps the largest concern in town assured us that but a small part of their goods were made in New York, and that in shops; that all of their nice work was done in Boston; admitted the fact of tenement-house clothing, but thought the greater part of it was worn in New York, and wished that its manufacture could be prohibited by law. This gentleman, as well as some others questioned, believed that relatively there was as much tenement-house work done in Boston as in New York, and under nearly as unwholesome conditions."

"'Another bad thing is the "sample" game. A small lot of garments are brought in, which, we are told, must be made up very carefully. We are made to rip, and do work over, to suit the notions of the big firms, who want the garments to send out on the road. It takes twice as long to make such a coat, but we get no more for it. Of course the game is played on us when the coats are not really samples. If we accidentally scorch the cloth a little, in pressing, we have to pay for that.'"

An officer of the Operatives' Union puts the number of sweat-shops in Boston at one hundred and fifty, but this does not include the smaller tenement-house shops that are beginning to develop here very rapidly.

I have, myself, visited a number of these shops during the past few weeks. I will describe a few of them very briefly. Here is one in two rooms. There is no light except from the end of the room, which contains twenty-three people, men, women, and little girls. I am satisfied that some of the girls could not have been more than twelve or thirteen. One of the women had a little baby which, though almost entirely naked, was crying from the heat and poisonous air. The place did not look as if it had been swept for weeks. The clothing, both finished and unfinished, was piled up in every direction, and workers walked over it with their sweaty feet, for they wore only such clothing as was absolutely indispensable. The stench of the place was sickening in the extreme.

I went into another place, where there were eighteen men and twelve girls. As near as I could judge, the ages of the girls were from ten to fifteen. The men were nearly all smoking, and that, together with the heat from the fire necessary for the pressing, made an atmosphere that was almost intolerable, even for a few moments. I was not astonished that the girls looked pallid and sickly. There was only one filthy water-closet for men and women.

I was in a little tenement-house Jew shop where a man and four boys were making knee pants in a bedroom. The clothing was piled upon the bed, which was one of the filthiest assortments of tenement-house bedding that I have ever seen--and that is saying a great deal. The largest shop I visited was one in which there were seventy-nine people employed. They occupied four rooms. The rooms were quite large, but were filthy almost beyond description. The coal was piled up in huge heaps on the floor; ashes, both in barrels and heaps, were scattered about; clothing was flung over the floors everywhere; dirt and scraps of cloth literally made a carpet for these rooms. These seventy-nine people were about evenly divided between the sexes, and yet for all this herd of humanity there was only one water-closet, the door of which stood open, on the landing, and the poisonous stench filled all the rooms; the floor about it was damp and filthy. How any woman or girl could work in this shop, and retain her self-respect, I do not understand. I estimated that at least twenty boys and girls of this company were under fifteen; one little boy sitting on the floor hard at work was almost crying with a headache. The men were smoking cigarettes here, as in other places, and this added to the poisonous condition of the air. The majority of these people could not speak English. Taken altogether, they were a hopeless-looking lot. Many of them had a brutal, hunted look in their faces.

Remember, this is not Glasgow, or London, or New York, but in the heart of Boston, in the month of June, 1891. It is easy to say that these people are foreigners, and that they had poor wages where they came from; that they are probably as well off here as they were at home, and that they are too ignorant and brutal to suffer, as more refined and cultivated people would. Putting all other questions aside for a moment, let us remember that these people are setting up a standard of living in our midst, which, if permitted to become established, will dictate its cruel laws to all the laboring people in the community.

If this system is allowed to go on, there are people living in luxury, who are indifferently pooh-poohing this whole question, whose grandchildren will be starved to death in a sweat-shop.

No investment exacts such cruel usury as indifference to injustice. A wrong, uncared for in a North End tenement house will avenge itself, sooner or later, on Beacon Hill or Commonwealth Avenue.

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