USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Lawrence > Immigrant city: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921 > Part 7
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1. Massachusetts Board of Health, "Lawrence: An Inquiry Relative to the Conditions Which Attended an Unusually High Rate of Mortality in Lawrence in 1889, with Special Reference to Diphtheria," Annual Report, XXI (1889), Mass. Pub. Doc. 34, pp. 397, 399-412; The Evening Tribune, May 4, 10, 27, June 12, July 28-31, Aug. 5, 1890; Cyclone Relief Committee . . . Lawrence, Mass., ... , Report, April, 1891 (Lawrence, 1891); British-American Citizen, Dec. 7, 1889, Aug. 2, 1890, cited in R. T. Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790-1950 (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 200; United States Census Office, Eleventh Census of the United States: 1890, I (Washington, 1895), 670; Horace G. Wadlin, Census of ... Massachusetts: 1895, II (Boston, 1897), 607; United States Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States . . . 1900, II (Washington, 1902), 796-97; United States Census Bureau, Thirteenth Census
69
DECADES OF DESPAIR, 1890-1912
The first Italians came in 1891, when the owners of the street railway imported forty-two to break a strike. The immigrants spent the night on straw beds at the condemned "Bullfrog Tavern," where hundreds of curiosity seekers visited them the next morning. Not satisfied with watching their toilet, the crowds pressed so close as the work began that the Italians finally panicked and ran out of town. A dynamite explosion injured another gang of Italian workers in 1902 as they were building the electric railway in North Andover. Others from Boston dug a sewer in North Andover until the pay ran out. In these years Lawrence was a substation in the padrone system originating in Boston. The Italians who came to stay moved into the former Irish districts of lower Common Street and the "plains," where they had a Christopher Columbus Society in 1899 and other clubs by 1909. Around Columbus Day lower Common Street was particularly alive as the Italians enjoyed a weekend of band music and dancing under colored lanterns. The organizers of the celebrations were usually Jeremiah Campopiano, president of the Columbus Society, and Fabrizio Pitocchelli, treas- urer of the 1901 festival, both bankers, as well as Father Milanese, the priest at Saint Laurence's.2
Several nationalities fled to Lawrence from Russia. The Lithuanians dedicated a church in 1903 and six years later com- memorated the fortieth anniversary of the arrival of the first Lithuanian in America. Their principal spokesman was John Alosky, president of their Citizens' Club and organizer of the 1909 celebration. The Poles, who inhabited the "Italian and Polack district" of Garden and Union Streets, built a church in 1905 and had a young men's club a year later. A majority of them actually came from outside the Russian Empire, two-thirds from Galicia. The Jews were about evenly divided between those from Russian Poland and Lithuania and those from the other Baltic provinces and the shores of the Black Sea.3
of the United States . . . 1910: Abstract of the Census ... with Supplement for Massachusetts ... (Washington, 1913), p. 609. There were 6,700 Italians and 4,400 Russians in 1910.
2. The Evening Tribune, June 13, 1891, Aug. 3, 1900, Feb. 14, 1902; Sunday Sun, July 18, 1909, Aug. 28, 1910.
3. W. J. Lauck, "The Significance of the Situation at Lawrence: The Condition of the New England Woolen Mill Operative," The Survey, XXVII (1911-12), 1773; Sunday Sun, Feb. 5, 1905, Nov. 25, 1906; The Strike at Lawrence, Mass.
70
IMMIGRANT CITY
From the Turkish Empire came the Syrians. These immigrants, who settled on the "plains," were from around Mount Lebanon, particularly the cities of Damascus and Beirut. The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 aroused their interest in America and the Presbyterian minister W. E. Wolcott, who was the son of a Beirut missionary, attracted them to Lawrence. There they made rapid progress, within a few years establishing a newspaper, a school, and several churches, while producing leaders such as Joseph Saliba, principal of their school, Joseph M. Khoury, editor of Al-Wafa, and Gabriel Bistany, priest at the Syrian Catholic Church.4
The influx of the southeastern Europeans forced the construc- tion of more and more tenements that climbed higher and clustered closer together. At first they were only two stories high, but by 1895, 957 of the tenements were three stories or more, the great majority in the central wards where the immigrants lived. By 1910 even the four-story building was common with 268 in the center of Lawrence, a far greater number than in any other city of Massachusetts. In 1901 the Tribune observed: "Lawrence is growing steadily, but not so rapidly as the towering mushroom buildings grow on the back alleys." In an effort to end such con- struction, Councilman Kennedy deplored the "large number of great eight-tenement and sixteen-tenement blocks that had crowded into the little yards in the rear of the other buildings." Adjoining dwellings were even closer on the side than on the back. Some were so close that a woman in one would hang kitchen utensils on the outside wall of the next, so close that there was not even room enough for a garbage pail between houses, so close that agents
Hearings before the Committee on Rules of the House of Representatives . 1912, 62 Congress, 2 Session, House Doc. 671 (Washington, 1912), p. 291; The Evening Tribune, Mar. 14, 1904.
4. Chief of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Census of ... Massachusetts 1905, I (Boston, 1909), 109; Nagib Abdou, Dr. Abdou's Travels in America (Washington, 1907), pp. 68, 80; The Evening Tribune, Aug. 3, 1900, Nov. 7, 1901; Lauck, "Significance," p. 1773; Board of Trade of London, Cost of Living in Amer- ican Towns, 62 Congress, 1 Session, Senate Doc. 22 (Washington, 1911), p. 209; Boston Evening Transcript, Feb. 1, 1912; Al-Wafa, April 30, 1907; The Lawrence Sun, April 9, 1906; Sunday Sun, May 31, 1908, May 14, 1911. For Armenian statistics see The Evening Tribune, July 30, 1894, Oct. 27, 1900.
71
DECADES OF DESPAIR, 1890-1912
collected rents on the upper floors of two blocks at the same time by reaching across from one apartment to the one next door.5
Inside, the tenements were dreary and dark. The 1911 survey commented: "In the apartments of the front house, one or two rooms are well lighted from the street; the kitchen receives but little light; and the two rooms in the rear are almost as poorly lighted. ... The front rooms [and] ... the kitchens in the rear houses are almost entirely inadequately lighted." Many rooms had no outside light at all. In one of them, a bedroom used by five people, the survey discovered that an eight-month-old child had died of tuberculosis, a price that Lawrence paid for over- crowding its buildings.6
Another price was fire, which constantly threatened the lives of all, but particularly the two thousand who lived on the fourth floors of wooden buildings. Jammed close together with no fire escape and but one exit, the four-deckers trapped men like animals. In 1895 all but 453 of the city's 6,855 buildings were wooden, and fires once started raced rapidly through the most heavily populated areas. The habits of the dwellers also contributed to the danger. A child with an oil lamp in a dark cellar could easily set fire to the piles of rubbish that were always there; and school children at home alone who attempted to light stoves with matches and kerosene were also a menace. A tenement building with six apartments had six coal stoves, any one of which could destroy the structure.7
Men as well as buildings were packed closer and closer as Lawrence neared the strike of 1912. While the density of popula- tion rose only from seven to ten per acre between 1870 and 1890, it jumped all the way to twenty by 1910. The worst crowding was in the center of Lawrence, where one-third of the city's people lived on only one-thirteenth of the area or about 119 to the acre.
5. Wadlin, Census of ... Massachusetts: 1895, I (Boston, 1896), 662-64; Robert E. Todd and Frank B. Sanborn, The Report of the Lawrence Survey (Lawrence, 1912), pp. 37-38, 59-60, 87-89, 96, 105; Lawrence City Documents, 1897-1898, p. 19; The Evening Tribune, Feb. 5, June 20, 1901; Charles P. Neill, Report on Strike of Textile Workers in Lawrence, Mass. in 1912, 62 Congress, 2 Session, Senate Doc. 870 (Washington, 1912), pp. 147-51. Lawrence had many of the dumbbell-shaped dwellings that made Boston notorious.
6. Todd and Sanborn, Survey, p. 61.
7. Ibid., pp. 44, 105; Census of Mass., 1895, I, 662.
72
IMMIGRANT CITY
The land on which they huddled was a central district running from Essex Street north almost to the Spicket River and from Union Street west to the railroad tracks near Broadway.8 Into this "conflagration center" the immigrant moved when he first arrived: the Irishman and later the southeastern European to lower Com- mon Street, the Irishman and then the Syrian to Oak Street on the "plains," and the French Canadian to Valley Street. These three streets quickly became the most densely populated and poorest in the entire city. The 1911 survey studied five half blocks on these streets and found that each held from three hundred to six hundred people per acre. There were few blocks in the country more heavily populated. Even the thirty crowded blocks in Harlem in New York, visible from the train between 125th Street Station and the 110th Street tunnel, included only three with more than six hundred per acre. Almost all of the lots on the Lawrence blocks had more than 70 per cent of the land covered by buildings, leav- ing little for anything else. The two on lower Common Street, the heart of the Italian quarter in 1911, were the most congested three acres in the state except for a small part of Boston. And in Boston there was much less danger of fire because the houses were nearly all of brick.ยบ
All reports and studies of Lawrence underscored the threat of overpopulation. Health inspectors reported six Syrians sleeping in their clothes on two beds in a tiny room eight feet by ten on Oak Street and nineteen more in four rooms on Valley Street. The Sanitary Inspector in 1912 found only four rooms without a bed in 214 tenements.10 The Labor Commissioner's report on the
8. United States Census Office, Eleventh Census of the United States: 1890. Report on the Social Statistics of Cities . .. (Washington, 1895), pp. 53-57; United States Census Office, Ninth Census of the United States . . . 1870, I (Washington, 1872), 380; Thirteenth Census ... Supplement for Mass., p. 596; Todd and Sanborn, Survey, pp. 54, 87; The Evening Tribune, Feb. 5, 1901; Sunday Sun, June 24, 1906. See map, p. 25.
9. Todd and Sanborn, Survey, pp. 54-60. These half blocks were on one side of the street only and included all the land back to the alley. They averaged an acre and a half in size. Actual density of each half block per acre in 1911: Common Street south side east from Newbury, 603; Common Street south side west from Newbury, 462; Valley Street south side east from Franklin, 348; Valley Street south side west from Franklin, 342; Oak Street north side west from White, 303.
10. The Evening Tribune, Mar. 30, Aug. 10, 1900, July 9, 1903; Sunday Sun, Aug. 11, 1912.
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DECADES OF DESPAIR, 1890-1912
Lawrence strike of 1912 showed that most of the immigrant workers' households occupied four or five rooms with an average of 1.5 persons per room. In his study only three of the households with ten or more members had more than five rooms. No wonder Lawrence was near the top in number of persons per room and in every other category that related to overpopulation.11
Filth already present during the decades of promise became worse during the decades of despair. Swill and ashes were often in the halls in open buckets or on closet floors. Rats were all too common. When the Stanley Brewery burned, thousands overran the streets of western Lawrence and according to one poor fellow "attacked his house by dozens, came up through the cellar into the sink room, where they carried off everything edible-raw potatoes by the peck, apples, eggs, pies, bread .... " While almost every apartment in 1911 had a sink with running water and a water closet, only one out of twenty in the poorer areas had a bathtub and half of the water closets were dark, dirty, and wet. Landlords were responsible when paint, plaster, and whitewash were missing, when cellars were wet, when roofs leaked, and when water closets overflowed. But the landlords complained that dirty tenants destroyed plumbing and wasted water. Immigrants from rural parts of Europe were no less clean than others, but they needed time to learn how to care for a city tenement. The peasant method of throwing water on the floor and swabbing it with a broom was disastrous to the ceiling of the apartment below, and it was no longer possible to bury garbage or feed it to farm animals. References to "vermin," "filthy alleys," "voracious rats," and "evil smells" were common.12
11. Lawrence was in the top 10 per cent among American cities in persons per house in 1910. She ranked between fourth and sixth in the state in families per house in 1910, size of family in 1905, and persons per room in 1895. In 1910 there were 8.2 persons per house, 1.6 families per house; 5.0 persons per family in 1905. Thirteenth Census ... Supplement for Mass., p. 262; Census of Mass., 1905, I, 1x. In 1895 there were 0.8 persons per room and 5.8 rooms per family. Census of Mass., 1895, I, 761, 784. Neill, Report, pp. 156-60.
12. Mary Heaton Vorse, "The Trouble in Lawrence," Harper's Weekly, LVI (1912), 10; Alice W. O'Connor, "A Study of the Immigration Problem in Lawrence, Massachusetts," (unpublished social worker's thesis, Lawrence, Mass., 1914), p. 26; The Evening Tribune, Feb. 14, 1895, Mar. 30, Aug. 10, 1900, July 9, 1903; Todd and Sanborn, The Survey, pp. 65-67; Lawrence Journal, July 12, 1879; Le Progres, Aug. 26, 1904, May 10, 1906; Lawrence Board of Health, "Report, 1885," p. 7, Lawrence City Documents 1885-1886; Massachusetts Board of Health, Report, XXXIX (1907), 471; Sunday Sun, April 8, 1906.
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IMMIGRANT CITY
The trend toward better housing that had started after the Civil War had ended by 1890. But this was not the only way in which life in Lawrence became bleaker at the close of the century. Many immigrants had enjoyed hearty meals in Lawrence during the period of French-Canadian immigration-some in their own homes, others in the boarding houses. As the southeastern Europeans moved in, almost all found their way to the tenements and the boarding house became less typical. Within their dismal tenements the immigrants no longer ate the hearty food that some had enjoyed in the past. At the government strike hearings in 1912 the city missionary said that his office had to feed the children bread and karo corn syrup in school because many arrived without breakfast. The pride with which he depicted the meal of hard bread and karo led Congressman Foster to comment acidly: "As I understand the testimony here, there are two very desirable luxuries in the city of Lawrence, Mass., among the mill operatives, that is, molasses on their bread, and water." A Polish mender said the people lived on bread, syrup, molasses, and beans, and rarely had meat. A weaver testified that when he was earning only $3.00 a week, he lived on bread and water, and even at best never had meat more than two or three times a week. The workers were also, he said, "trying to fool . . . [their] stomachs" with a "kind of molasses" in place of butter.
Food was so expensive in 1912 that the city set up a store to provide it more cheaply for the poor. Though the Syrians liked lamb and mutton and the Poles sausage and smoked shoulder, they and the other immigrants ate little meat. As a substitute the Italians consumed macaroni, vegetables dressed in oil, and rye bread; the Poles had tinned fruits, bakery products, and rye bread; and the Syrians filled up on rice, vegetables, and fruit. Greens and berries, readily available in the countryside, supplemented the workers' diet. Milk was so expensive that the immigrants re- placed it with tea, coffee, or, in the case of the Italians, wine.13
13. Strike at Lawrence, pp. 32, 154-55, 244, 380-86. Another striker said he had meat once a week and otherwise nothing but black bread, coffee, and molasses at each meal. Once he was reduced to bread and water. Sunday Sun, Feb. 4, 1912; Lawrence City Documents 1911-1912, p. 651; Board of Trade of London, Cost of Living, pp. xxv, 217-18. Meat was so expensive it was not sold by the joint. Neill, Report, pp. 26, 165-78; O'Connor, "Study," pp. 30-32.
75
DECADES OF DESPAIR, 1890-1912
And so in the decades before the strike the immigrants found themselves crowded into dirty tenements where the hazard of fire put their lives in jeopardy. Poorly-fed and ill-clad they left their homes daily to work in the mills. Here they found an existence even worse than their home lives because the mills maimed and killed them in many ways. The case of one Polish girl with beauti- ful long hair was not unusual and received only cursory attention. Carelessly chatting with her fellow workers she allowed her flowing hair to get caught in her machine and seconds later lay writhing on the floor with part of her scalp torn off. After placing her scalp carefully in a paper bag, her friends carried her to a doctor, and happily or unhappily she survived. Other machines sucked in arms and legs; some even whole bodies. The Pacific Mill had 1,000 accidents in less than five years and even though most were considered slight, the steady succession of injuries was depressing to the immigrants, who suffered 788 of them. With an average of forty-three persons working above the ground floor for every stairway or fire escape, the Lawrence mills were next to the worst in the state in 1877. Four of the large plants employing workers above the second floor had only a single exit and that in- side. By 1912 conditions were even worse. The sight of terrified operatives nerving themselves for the breath-taking plunge to a net or the street below was not uncommon.14
The very nature of the textile industry caused less spectacular deaths. In the ring spinning and carding rooms, for example, dust, dried sputum, heat, moisture, poor air and light, and carbon monoxide produced unhealthful conditions. The humid, confined air of the weaving rooms was filled with fine particles of fiber that cut years from the weavers' lives. Elizabeth Shapleigh, who studied the city's vital records for the socialist New York Call in 1912, found that a third of the spinners died before they had worked
Oxtails, pig's plucks, and lamb's plucks were eaten. Butterine, leaf lard, and suet replaced butter. Condensed milk replaced fresh milk.
14. Strike at Lawrence, p. 170; The Evening Tribune, Sept. 23, 1897, Mar. 25, 1899; Charles Harrington, "Report on Sanitary Conditions of Factories, Work- shops, and Other Establishments," Massachusetts Board of Health, Report, XXXVIII (1906), 477-79; Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Eighth Annual Report . . . 1877, Mass. Pub. Doc. 31, pp. 239, 282. Actually Lawrence was the worst city in regard to number of fire escapes; the only city that had fewer was a small city employing only 769 workers. In Lawrence 8,421 worked above the ground floor and had only 195 exits.
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IMMIGRANT CITY
ten years and half of them before they were twenty-five years old. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other respiratory infections carried off large proportions of the weavers, dyers, and combers, as well as the spinners. While these diseases killed almost 70 per cent of the textile operatives, they killed only 4 per cent of farmers, who consequently lived to be sixty while the textile workers could not reach forty. The Massachusetts Board of Health found that the death rate from tuberculosis and pneumonia in Lawrence from 1886 to 1910 was higher than in almost all of the non-textile cities.15
The same board made a special report on Lawrence in 1890 because an epidemic of typhoid fever, diarrheal diseases, and diphtheria, as well as the mill diseases, were making the city a death hole. The death rate, dropping steadily in the 1870's and 1880's, shot back up to 27 per thousand in 1890, placing Lawrence first in Massachusetts and sixth in the nation. The board found that most of those who succumbed to diphtheria and croup lived in immigrant areas, the dense Irish and French-Canadian district between Essex and Lowell Streets being the worst. Here, where ill-fed, poorly- clad families huddled in three rooms in six-family tenements, half of those who contracted diphtheria died. Additional plagues struck the city in 1891 and 1892, and a concentrated attack of diarrheal diseases in 1900 led to another study of the beleaguered city. This time the board found that only in deaths from consumption, heart disease, and cancer did the immigrants suffer noticeably more than the natives.
Disease hit the new babies so hard that the percentage dying in the first two years, which had dropped between 1870 and 1890, went up again to 44 per cent of all deaths after 1900. And with it the mean age at death dropped back down from twenty to fifteen. The decades of promise had indeed given way to those of despair.16
15. Harrington, "Report," p. 472; Elizabeth Shapleigh, "Occupational Disease in the Textile Industry," The New York Call, Dec. 29, 1912, p. 13; H. W. Clark and Stephen Gage, "A Study of the Hygienic Condition of the Air in Textile Mills with Reference to the Influence of Artificial Humidification," Massachusetts Board of Health, Report, XLIV (1912), 659-92. The record of the other textile cities was similar.
16. For death statistics see Report ... relating to the Registry and Return of Births, Marriages, and Deaths ... , XLIX (1890), Mass. Pub. Doc. 1, p. 373. See also Table VI. For the five census years 1870-90 Lawrence had the fifth lowest excess of birth rate over death rate in the state. Ibid., XLIX (1890),
77
DECADES OF DESPAIR, 1890-1912
While the homes and the mills were full of dangers, so were the streets, where crime continued to prevail. But now the news- papers were blaming most outrages on the newcomers. While up to 1890 they had been filled with accounts of the Canadians' crimes, they now were concentrating on the misdeeds of the southeastern Europeans. One Italian was called a beggar, the two who fol- lowed were counterfeiters, and the Tribune connected another with an illegal liquor business. Police arrested an "Israelite" and a Syrian for peddling without licenses; Russian Poles "overindulged"; and a Syrian boy made the headlines by stealing $2.07. When seven Italians slashed an Irishman in 1894, the stories of fights and killings began. One Italian ran "amuck" in "Little Italy," while another threatened to stab a pretty girl whom he could not seduce. One Chinese chased two taunting boys with a long knife and a second routed four assailants with a brick. The press also twisted isolated events into mass movements such as a "Polander" riot and a Syrian-Portuguese "race war."17
215, 373, 375; Eleventh Census . . . 1890, Social Statistics of Cities, p. 55; United States Census Office, Eleventh Census of the United States . . . 1890, XVII, Part I (Washington, 1896), 554. The federal census called the 1890 death rate 29-1. Massachusetts Board of Health, "Lawrence," pp. 397, 399-412, tables 415f; The Evening Tribune, Mar. 15, 25, 31, June 11, 1892, May 4, 1893, Mar. 26, 1897; Lawrence American, Dec. 13, 1889; Anzeiger und Post, April 8, 1899. The statistics for the 1900 deaths are as follows:
DISEASES THAT KILLED PROPORTIONATELY MORE FOREIGN-BORN THAN NATIVE-BORN IN LAWRENCE 1900*
Native-Born
Foreign-Born
Consumption
55
69
Heart Disease
36
60
Urinary Diseases
26
27
Old Age
12
21
Cancer
10
24
* Foreign-born percentage of population was 46 per cent. United States Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States . . . 1900, III (Washington, 1902), 365. The statistics for babies' deaths came from Report of Births, Marriages, and Deaths, XXVI-XXVIII (1867-69); XXXVI-XXXVIII (1877-79); XLVI-XLVIII (1887-89); LVIII-LX (1899-1901); LXVI-LXVIII (1907-9). The percentage was 44 per cent before 1870; 35 per cent 1870-90; 44 per cent again 1907-9.
17. Lawrence Journal, June 28, 1879, Feb. 12, 1887; The Lawrence Sentinel, Mar. 13, 1875; The Evening Tribune, June 16, 1890, Sept. 1, 10, 1894, July 18, Aug. 16, 1896, June 3, 1899, Feb. 25, 1901, July 6, Sept. 17, 1903; Sunday Sun, Aug. 19, 1906. According to The Evening Tribune there was trouble in the "Hebrew Quarter," the Syrians "shed blood," and there was a "hot Syrian row." The Evening Tribune, June 26, 1901, Aug. 18, 1902.
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IMMIGRANT CITY
The crimes of the post-1890 immigrants were actually quite similar to those of the Irish, French Canadians, and others be- fore them. National animosity led to the more serious brawls. The Irish-French fights of the early period blended later into clashes involving Italians, Syrians, and other southeastern Euro- peans. As before, the newly-arrived immigrants tended to resist police authority. Examples were the early French and Irish at- tacks on policemen and the later attempt of two hundred Poles and Lithuanians to tear a prisoner away from the police. Most of the immigrants, particularly the Italians, Irish, French Canadi- ans, Poles, Lithuanians, Syrians, and Armenians had come over hating the government back home and were in the habit of re- sisting its wishes. It is remarkable that they obeyed an alien law force as well as they did. Tragically ironic was the number of deadly riots that accompanied weddings. At Lithuanian "drunken orgies" the members of the wedding parties used bottles, black jacks, stove covers, and stones on each other. There were also Irish, French, Polish, and Syrian wedding brawls. The major change came in weapons. With the Irish, conflict was a matter of fists or blunt objects, but the later immigrants turned to knives, guns, and even razors. When Patrick Mulvaney exchanged taunts with some Italians who were walking with a girl, a crowd gathered and shouted, "Here's yer dagoes, Kid, go get them," and with that one Italian slashed Mulvaney with a razor.18
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