Part 18

This tendency to economize even at the loss of home life, induced primarily by low wages, has a further cause in the ambition of the Slavs to own a home in a better locality, or to buy a bit of property in the old country to which they may some day return. Again and again in explaining why they took lodgers these excuses were given, "Saving to educate the children", "The father does not earn enough to support the family", "Taking boarders in order to start a bank account". Thrift, it would seem, is not a virtue to be recommended indiscriminately. Figures as to overcrowding are in themselves but a lifeless display; when you see them exemplified in individual homes they become terribly significant. I entered one morning a two-room tenement,--the kitchen, perhaps twelve by fifteen feet, was steaming with vapor from a big washtub on a chair in the middle of the room. Here the mother was trying to wash, and at the same time to keep the elder of her two babies from going into a tub full of boiling water standing on the floor. On one side of the room was a huge, puffy bed, one feather tick to sleep on and another for covering; near the window a sewing machine, in the corner an organ,--all these besides the inevitable cook stove whereon in the place of honor was cooking the evening's soup. Asleep upstairs in the second room were one boarder and the man of the house. The two other boarders were at work.

Can you picture the effect on the mother of such a home, the overwork for her, the brief possibility of rest when the babies come? Yet it is even more disastrous to the children. And, as appears in the accompanying chart, many of the families who take boarders are families with children.

WITH LODGERS WITHOUT LODGERS No CHILDREN FAMILIES FAMILIES 0 30 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 24 XXXXXXXXXXXX 1 30 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 46 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 2 25 XXXXXXXXXXXXX 26 XXXXXXXXXXXXX 3 10 XXXXX 22 XXXXXXXXXXX 4 7 XXXX 15 XXXXXXXX 5 0 7 XXXX

The situation brings serious results both to the health and the character of the children. The overworked mother has neither time nor patience for their care and training. As half of the families use the kitchen for sleeping, there is a close mingling of the lodgers with the family which endangers the children's morals. In only four instances were girls over fourteen found in the families taking lodgers, but even the younger children learn evil quickly from the free spoken men. One man in a position to know the situation intimately, spoke of the appalling familiarity with vice among the children in these families. A priest told me that he preached to the women against this way of saving money, but as long as wages are low and the good ambition to own a home or have a bank account can find no other way of fulfilling itself, it is difficult to persuade them to give it up.

The crowding and other ills have also serious physical consequences. The birth rate and the deaths of children under two, show that while among the Slavs in the second ward a child died for every three that were born, among the other population of Homestead one died for every six that were born. Against many of these deaths was the entry "malnutrition due to poor food and overcrowding." Sadder still is the case of those wailing babies who do survive and begin life with an under-vitalized system ready for both the disease and the dissipation that attend weak bodies and wills.

Outside of the crowded tenement rooms where are the many children to play? In investigating the conditions in one narrow court, I opened a door into a low shed where the entrails of a chicken lay on the floor. It was foul and dark and I turned away in disgust, but the bright little boy beside me piped up cheerily, "Oh that's our gypsy cave." A sorry region, surely, for a child's imagination to rove!

The congestion in Homestead must be considered not only from the standpoint of the family and the child, however, but of the single man. His problem is no small one. In the figures for the mill we find that 30.5 per cent of the total number of Slavs are unmarried. This large group, in the period before they send back for a wife or sweetheart, must find some sort of a home. While some are scattered in families and create the lodging problem we have been considering, others live in groups over which a "boarding boss" presides. In West Homestead, for example, in about twenty houses there were three hundred Bulgarians, among whom at the time of the depression there were only three women. These scattered houses hidden away on the outskirts of the town housed a group of happy, industrious men, all ambitious to hoard their money and return to the old country as men of property. They cared little how they lived so long as they lived cheaply. One of these homes consisted of two rooms one above the other, each perhaps twelve by twenty feet. In the kitchen I saw the wife of the boarding boss getting dinner, some sort of hot apple cake and a stew of the cheapest cuts of meat. Along one side of the room was an oilcloth covered table with a plank bench on each side, and above a long row of handleless white cups in a rack, and a shelf with tin knives and forks on it. Near the up-to-date range, the only real piece of furniture in the room, hung the "buckets" in which all mill men carry their noon or midnight meal. A crowd of men were lounging cheerfully about talking, smoking and enjoying life, making the most of the leisure enforced by the shutdown in the mill. In the room above, double iron bedsteads were set close together and on them comfortables were neatly laid. Here besides the "boarding boss" and his wife and two babies, lived twenty men. The boss, himself, was a stalwart Bulgarian who had come to this country several years ago, and by running this house besides working in the mill, had accumulated a good deal of money. The financial arrangements of such an establishment are simple. The boarding boss runs the house, and the men pay him three dollars a month for a place to sleep, for having their clothes washed, and their food cooked. In addition an account is kept of the food purchased, and the total is divided among the men at each pay day. The housewife purchases and cooks what special food each man chooses to order: beef, pork, lamb, each with a tag of some sort labeling the order, and all frying together. A separate statement is kept of these expenses for each boarder. Such an account for a group of men in a small Slavic household may prove of interest.

The family (which consisted of a man, his wife, his brother, and three children, eleven, eight, one, and four boarders), occupied a house of four rooms, one of them dark, for which they paid a rent of fourteen dollars. The man, though he had been in this country about twelve years, was still earning only $10.80 a week with which to meet the needs of his growing family. One-half the cost of the food was paid by the boarders including the brother, amounting for each man to about $1.06 a week. For the whole family, the expenditure was as follows: flour and bread, $2.03; vegetables, $1.06; fruit, $.56; milk, eggs, etc., $1.98; sugar, $.49; sundries, $.73; meat, $5.78; a total of $12.63. Besides this the boarders ordered "extras," and the following table for a month expresses the men's individual likings:

EXPENSES FOR THE MONTH.

_Pamhay._ _Baker._ _Drobry._ _Pilich._ _Timko._ Beef .87 1.20 .48 Pork 3.71 .92 2.14 3.04 2.30 Veal .90 Eggs .10 .05 Milk .21 1.90 Cheese .10 .19 .09 .05 Fuel .15 .25 .25 ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Total $3.96 $3.34 $3.04 $4.43 $2.88

This made the average total expenditure about $8.02 a month for each man. Adding $3 a month for room and washing, the total expense each is about $11. These men make from $9.90 to $12 a week. It is obvious therefore that a large margin remains for saving or indulgence, after clothes are provided. They are thus able if they will to send for wife and children, to fulfill their duties to aged parents, or to provide for their own future.

While this program is an economical one, it by no means furnishes to this great group of homeless foreigners a normal life. Though some expect to return and others to send for their families when they have made their fortunes, all for the time being are in a strange country with neither the pleasures nor restraints of home life.

To those who have no family at home or no desire to save, the temptation to spend money carelessly is great. Unfortunately the saloons get a large tribute. On pay Saturday, the household usually clubs together to buy a case of beer and drink it at home. These ordinarily jovial gatherings are sometimes interrupted by fights, and the police have to be called in. One officer, who had been on the force for nine years, said that while in general these men were a good-natured, easy-going crowd, and in all his experience he had never arrested a sober "Hunkie," when they were drunk there was trouble. The punishment usually inflicted for their disorderly conduct is of course, a small fine, which has little or no effect. It is indeed currently said that the bigger the fine the better they like it, as they feel that it indicates increased importance.

It is not surprising that excesses exist in a town which offers so little opportunity for wholesome recreation, and whose leaders have failed to realize any obligation toward the newcomers. The Carnegie Library represents the only considerable effort to reach them. The clubs are open to the Slavs. Aside from a class in English, however, they are not adapted to non-English speaking people. Even the Slavic books which the library bought for their benefit are seldom used. I found that a number of the influential Slavs in Homestead did not know that these books were in the library; therefore I judge that one reason why they are not used is a lack of proper advertising. That the building is on the hill away from their homes, that it has an imposing entrance which makes the working man hesitate to enter, and that certain forms must be gone through before books can be secured, or the club joined,--these things have doubtless acted as deterrent influences. However desirous the management of the library may be to reach them, the Slav's ignorance of our language and customs will keep many from ever getting inside. If a library is really to reach the foreign population, it must not wait for them to come to it; it must go to them. A simple reading room opening right into the courts where the people live, where they could drop in after the day's work, find newspapers and books in their own tongue, and where the Americanized Slav could reach his newly-come brethren, teaching them both English and citizenship, would become an important center of influence.

For though these people are in many respects aliens, they are not unwilling to accept American standards. The quickness, for example, with which the women adopt our dress, reveals an adaptability which might find expression in more important ways. That they are glad when they can afford it, to have really attractive homes, is shown by these pictures. They are the homes of two families from the same place in the old country, one a newcomer, the other one of the "oldest inhabitants" of the Slavic community.

In the first instance, as the man earns but $9.90 a week, rent must be kept low if other bills are to be paid and a little provision made for the future. It is hard enough in a one-room tenement, though the furniture includes only absolute necessities, to keep all one's crowded belongings in order. On wash day morning, when this picture was taken, there are extra complications. On the whole, therefore, the home will be seen to be as neat as circumstances permit. The bright pictures on the wall manifest a desire to make it attractive.

The other picture, a "front room" with its leather covered furniture, is in a five-roomed house which the family owns. The vivid-colored sacred pictures relieve the severity of the room; and they reveal a dominant note of Slavic life, for if happiness is to stay with the family, the priest must come yearly to "bless the home." The family who came many years ago, has by slow thrift accumulated the means to obtain this house. And though the mother, who is now a widow, still takes boarders, the family has in general the standards of Americans.

This instance I introduce because it is well to recognize that low standards are not necessarily permanent. When Slavs do buy their homes, the size and attractiveness of them indicates that the unsanitary surroundings and crowded quarters of early days were simply tolerated until the ambition could be attained. With a house on the outskirts of the town, a garden about it, and a glimpse of the larger out-of-doors, they begin to feel that the dreams of their emigration have come true.

Only the few however have fulfilled the dreams and it is back in the squalid courts that we find the typical problems of every industrial center that has felt the tide of immigration. The Homestead community has so far shown a general indifference to the problems which its industry creates. The mill demands strong, cheap labor, but concerns itself little whether that labor is provided with living conditions that will maintain its efficiency or secure the efficiency of the next generation. The housing situation is in the hands of men actuated only by a greed of profit. The community, on the other hand though realizing the situation, does not take its responsibility for the aliens in its midst with sufficient seriousness to attempt to limit the power of these landlords.

The Slavs themselves, moreover, are people used to the limitations of country life, and are ignorant of the evil effects of transferring the small rooms, the overcrowding, the insufficient sanitary provisions which are possible with all outdoors about them, to these crowded courts under the shadow of the mill. And, as we said, their ambition to save and buy property, here or in the old country, is a further incentive to overcrowding.

Summing up the results of the indifference of the community and the ignorance and ambition of the Slavs, we find a high infant death rate, an acquaintance with vice among little children, intolerable sanitary conditions, a low standard of living, a failure of the community to assimilate the new race.

As we waited in one of the little railroad stations of Homestead, a Slovak came in and sat down beside a woman with a two year old child. He made shy advances to the baby, coaxing her in a voice of heartbreaking loneliness. She would not come to him, and finally her mother took her away. As they went, the Slovak turned sadly to the rest of the company, taking us all into his confidence, and said simply, "Me wife, me babe, Hungar." But were his family in America, it would mean death for one baby in three; it would mean hard work in a little, dirty, unsanitary house for the mother; it would mean sickness and evil. With them in Hungary, it means for him isolation, and loneliness, and the abnormal life of the crowded lodging house.

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OF TYPHOID

THE FEVER'S ECONOMIC COST TO PITTSBURGH AND THE LONG FIGHT FOR PURE WATER

FRANK E. WING

ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR PITTSBURGH SURVEY; SUPERINTENDENT CHICAGO TUBERCULOSIS INSTITUTE

One convincing and startling feature of the Pittsburgh Civic Exhibit in November was a frieze of small silhouettes three inches apart stretching in line around both ends and one side of the large hall in Carnegie Institute in which the exhibit of the Pittsburgh Survey was installed. The frieze was over 250 feet in length, and the figures were distributed in correct proportion by age and sex. They represented six hundred and twenty-two persons in all, the death-toll from typhoid fever in Pittsburgh during the year 1907. Accompanying this frieze, placed prominently over the doors where everyone could read them, were duplicates of the following sign in large display letters:

* * * * *

IF THE DEATH RATE HAD BEEN 25 PER 100,000, still considerably greater than that in Albany, Ann Arbor, Ansonia, Atlantic City, Binghamton, Boston, Bridgeport, Brockton, Cambridge, Canton, Detroit, Fall River, Hartford, Jersey City, Lawrence, Lowell, Milwaukee, New York, Rochester, St. Paul, Springfield, Syracuse, Worcester, and a score of other cities having a fairly pure water supply, but _114_ of these persons would have died and the line would _be only 2/9 as long_.

_Who is Responsible for this Sacrifice?_

* * * * *

And next to this placard was another sign, showing in comparative columns the amount of typhoid fever in Pittsburgh during the four months that had elapsed since the opening of a great municipal filtration plant, compared with the amount for the same months of the previous year; for example ninety-six cases in October, 1908, as against 593 in October, 1907.

The typhoid problem in Pittsburgh in its larger cause has always been a water problem; in its consequences it has become one of the city's biggest social and economic problems; in its solution, it has been tied up with all the politics of a boss-ridden city. The story of filtration is the story of the navigation of an unwieldy craft through a tempestuous channel. Buffeted by cross winds of public opinion, its sails battered and torn by squalls of commercial opposition and abuse, guided now to the right and now to the left by frequently changing pilots, a plaything for the waves of councils, its booty coveted by buccaneers of each political faction, filtration and its freightage of health (or contracts) has been a prize over which the elements in the municipal life of Pittsburgh have battled hard and long. The docking of this craft in safety and security is one of Pittsburgh's greatest civic achievements; its protracted passage is her most enduring disgrace.

In handling the question of typhoid in Pittsburgh, we must then, deal with three distinct themes: water, economics, and politics.

I.--WATER. THE MENACE.

The publicly supplied drink of Pittsburgh has been river water and whatever that river water contained. Prior to the opening of the new filtration plant last summer, that part of the city known as "old Pittsburgh," comprising the first twenty-three[9] wards, received its water supply from cribs in the bed of the Allegheny River at Brilliant Station, about seven miles above the city. Water taken from these cribs (and since 1905 from an artificial channel of sheet piling along the shore) was pumped into reservoirs on Herron Hill and Highland Park, and then turned unfiltered into the water mains for distribution to the shops and residences throughout the city.

[9] Ward numbers in this article refer to the existing or old notations. A new ward system has just been adopted.

With the exception of two or three wards, which receive a company supply of filtered water, that part of the city known as the South Side, comprising wards twenty-four to thirty-six, and ward forty-three, formerly the Borough of Sheraden, receives its water from the Monongahela direct, and from the Ohio direct, just below the junction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny. The former city of Allegheny, the present North Side, was supplied directly from the Allegheny River from two sources; first from the Allegheny at a point near Montrose, about eleven miles up the river, and second from another point on the Allegheny near Sixteenth street. This latter source of supply was discontinued on March 5, 1908.

The Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers are turbid at all times, and after a rain or in the spring, so muddy that a platinum wire cannot be seen more than a quarter of an inch from the surface. In addition to this, investigations have shown that the rivers commonly carry in solution the soluble chemical products of the mills along their shores,--organic and inorganic, acid and alkali; oils, fats, and other carbon compounds; dead animals,--rats, cats and dogs; flesh-disintegrated and putrescent; as well as the offscourings of iron and steel mills, tanneries and slaughter houses, and similar industries. But this is not all. Seventy-five up-river towns,--with an estimated population of 350,000 inhabitants,--in the Allegheny or tributary valleys; and in the Monongahela a long string of towns, Swissvale, Homestead, Braddock, Rankin and McKeesport, all furnish their supply of common sewage as a further contamination of the already dirty water with its long list of disease-breeding bacteria.

These conditions have existed since Pittsburgh came into prominence as an industrial center. Typhoid has been endemic. The duration of this "plague" in Pittsburgh, unbelievable though its sufferance may appear in view of the facts already given, is a matter of history and record. For thirty-five years, up to the beginning of 1908, the city was in the grip of a scourge which has been in the words of the most recent treatise on typhoid[10], "one of the black records in the sanitary history of our country." Here and there clamorous, indignant voices were raised against it; but public sentiment had become so callous that it only spasmodically and halfheartedly demanded the carrying into operation of a tardy system of filtration. In the meantime, those who could not afford to buy distilled or spring water, continued to drink this filth.

[10] Whipple, Typhoid Fever, p. 158.

With what result? For the last twenty-five years, an average death rate of 102.3 per 100,000 population; since 1889 never below 107; for the last nine years an average of 130; and last year, the year of the completion of Pittsburgh's filtration plant, 131.5 deaths and 1,115 cases for every 100,000 inhabitants. A black record this, in the face of uncontrovertible evidence from other cities, both in this country and abroad, that the purification of the water supply should blot out at least seven-ninths of the typhoid fever. In contrast with Pittsburgh's high mortality, the average for other large American and European cities since 1898 may be seen from the following list:

Pittsburgh 130.0 Allegheny 104.4 Washington 59.0 Philadelphia 54.7 Baltimore 35.3 San Francisco 30.5 St. Louis 30.3 Chicago 27.3 Boston 24.5 New York 18.2 Paris 17.4 London 11.7 Vienna 5.2 Berlin 4.2