The
Nineteenth Ward was one of the poorest areas in Chicago.
This was one of the main reasons why Jane
Addams and Ellen Starr decided to
establish its Hull House Settlement
in this ward in 1889. This ensured that the area was one of the most
documented areas in the United States.
By 1896 there were 48,280 people living in the Nineteenth Ward. A
large number of the residents were recently arrived immigrants from
Europe and contained sizable communities from Germany,
Italy, Sweden,
England, Ireland,
France, Russia,
Norway, Austro-Hungary
and Finland. According to Ernest
Moore, who carried out a survey of the area in 1897: "The
largest foreign elements in the ward are the Irish, German, Italian,
and Bohemian, stated in the order of relative numerical strength.
Of those of foreign parentage, about one-half are American born."
Florence Kelley and Alzina
Stevens, who carried out a survey into child labour in 1896, discovered
that the ward contained a large number of factories employing young
immigrants. In "one caramel works in this ward, where there are
from one hundred and ten to two hundred little girls, four to twelve
boys, and seventy to one hundred adults, according to the season of
the year."
The ward was run by Johnny Powers, a member
of the Irish community. The investigative journalist, Ray
Stannard Baker, described Powers in an article that he wrote in
1898 as being "cool-headed, cunning and wholly unscrupulous".
Baker added: "He is the feudal lord who governs his retainers
with open-handed liberality or crushes them to poverty as it suits
his nearest purpose."
(1) Ernest
Moore, The Social Value of the Saloon (July, 1897)
The Nineteenth Ward of Chicago
according to the school census of 1896 has a population of 48,280.
It is a workingman's district, and the population is typical of unskilled
labor in general. The largest foreign elements in the ward are the
Irish, German, Italian, and Bohemian, stated in the order of relative
numerical strength. Of those of foreign parentage, about one-half
are American born. As to moral condition, neither the extremes of
vice nor of virtue are reached, while the general moral tone is rather
healthful.
(2)
Jane
Addams wrote an account of the Nineteenth
Ward of Chicago soon after arriving there in 1889.
The houses of the ward, for the most part wooden, were originally
built for one family and are now occupied by several. They are after
the type of the inconvenient frame cottages found in the poorer suburbs
twenty years ago. Many of them were built where they now stand; others
were brought thither on rollers, because their previous sites had
been taken by factories. The fewer brick tenement buildings which
are three or four stories high are comparatively new, and there are
few large tenements. The little wooden houses have a temporary aspect,
and for this reason, perhaps, the tenement-house legislation in Chicago
is totally inadequate. Rear tenements flourish; many houses have no
water supply save the faucet in the back yard, there are no fire escapes,
the garbage and ashes are placed in wooden boxes which are fastened
to the street pavements. One of the most discouraging features about
the present system of tenement houses is that many are owned by sordid
and ignorant immigrants. The theory that wealth brings responsibility,
that possession entails at length education and refinement, in these
cases fails utterly. The children of an Italian immigrant owner may
"shine" shoes in the street, and his wife may pick rags
from the street gutter, laboriously sorting them in a dingy court.
Wealth may do something for her self-complacency and feeling of consequence;
it certainly does nothing for her comfort or her children's improvement
nor for the cleanliness of anyone concerned.
Another thing that prevents better houses in Chicago is the tentative
attitude of the real estate men. Many unsavory conditions are allowed
to continue which would be regarded with horror if they were considered
permanent. Meanwhile, the wretched conditions persist until at least
two generations of children have been born and reared in them.
Hull-House once stood in the suburbs, but the city has steadily grown
up around it and its site now has corners on three or four foreign
colonies. Between Halsted Street and the river live about ten thousand
ItaliansNeapolitans, Sicilians, and Calabrians, with an occasional
Lombard or Venetian. To the south on Twelfth Street are many Germans,
and side streets are given over almost entirely to Polish and Russian
Jews. Still farther south, these Jewish colonies merge into a huge
Bohemian colony, so vast that Chicago ranks as the third Bohemian
city in the world. To the northwest are many Canadian-French, clannish
in spite of their long residence in America, and to the north are
Irish and first-generation Americans. On the streets directly west
and farther north are well-to-do English speaking families, many of
whom own their own houses and have lived in the neighborhood for years;
one man is still living in his old farmhouse.
The policy
of the public authorities of never taking an initiative, and always
waiting to be urged to do their duty, is obviously fatal in a neighborhood
where there is little initiative among the citizens. The idea underlying
our self- government breaks down in such a ward. The streets are inexpressibly
dirty, the number of schools inadequate, sanitary legislation unenforced,
the street lighting bad, the paving miserable and altogether lacking
in the alleys and smaller streets, and the stables foul beyond description.
Hundreds of houses are unconnected with the street sewer. The older
and richer inhabitants seem anxious to move away as rapidly as they
can afford it. They make room for newly arrived immigrants who are
densely ignorant of civic duties. This substitution of the older inhabitants
is accomplished industrially also, in the south and east quarters
of the ward. The Jews and Italians do the finishing for the great
clothing manufacturers, formerly done by Americans, Irish, and Germans,
who refused to submit to the extremely low prices to which the sweating
system has reduced their successors. As the design of the sweating
system is the elimination of rent from the manufacture of clothing,
the "outside work" is begun after the clothing leaves the
cutter. An unscrupulous contractor regards no basement as too dark,
no stable loft too foul, no rear shanty too provisional, no tenement
room too small for his workroom, as these conditions imply low rental.
Hence these shops abound in the worst of the foreign districts where
the sweater easily finds his cheap basement and his home finishers.
(3)
Ray
Stannard Baker,
Hull House and the Ward Boss, Outlook Magazine (26th March,
1898)
The Nineteenth Ward is fertile
soil for growing a ward boss. Its population consists of Italians,
Polish and Russian Jews, Irish of the poorest class, and the offscourings
of a dozen other nationalities. They live huddled together in ill-smelling
houses, and few of the older people, many of whom are day laborers,
have any understanding of American institutions, or even of the English
language. They are capable of being herded and driven by any one who
is strong enough to wield the rod.
Johnny Powers has been the undisputed political boss for many years.
Powers has been more than ordinarily successful as a ward boss. He
is cool-headed, cunning, and wholly unscrupulous, and yet he possesses
the effective gift known, for lack of a better name, as "good-fellowship"
or good-heartedness". Among his constituents he appears in his
kingly aspects of unlimited power and benevolence. He impresses them
with the primitive generosity which has turkeys to give away by thousands
at Christmas time, which elevates a faithful follower to a position
on the city pay-roll in a single day, or discharges him with equal
ease. He
is the feudal lord who governs his retainers with open-handed liberality
or crushes them to poverty as it suits his nearest purpose.
The
streets and alleys of the ward were notoriously filthy, and the contractors
habitually neglected them, not failing, however, to draw their regular
payments from the city treasury. At last it fell to the women of Hull
House to take the initiative. Miss Addams herself applied for the
position of garbage inspector, and, to the astonishment of Johnny
Powers and his retainers, received the appointment. Within two months
the Nineteenth Ward was one of the cleanest in the city.
(4)
Florence Kelley and Alzina Stevens,
Hull House Maps and Papers (1895)
The Nineteenth Ward of Chicago
is perhaps the best district in all Illinois for a detailed study
of child labour, both because it contains many factories in which
children are employed, and because it is the dwelling-place of wage-earning
children engaged in all lines of activity.
The largest number of children to be found in any one factory in Chicago
is in a caramel works in this ward, where there are from one hundred
and ten to two hundred little girls, four to twelve boys, and seventy
to one hundred adults, according to the season of the year. The building
is a six-story brick, well-lighted, with good plumbing and fair ventilation.
It has, however, no fire escape, and a single wooden stair leading
from floor to floor. In case of fire the inevitable fate of the children
working on the two upper floors is too horrible to contemplate.
Children in the Nineteenth
Ward of Chicago.
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