Remembrance of Things Past

I just finished How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, an expose of urban poverty in New York written in 1890, and it fits nicely between two ideas. The first is the over-romanticization of the industrial city and the second is the plight of the garment worker. For Riis, the suburbs can’t be built fast enough. He, with the same kind of logic pursued by the fathers of twentieth-century urban renewal that good buildings make for good neighborhoods, lays the squalid depravation of the immigrant slums of fin-de-siecle Manhattan squarely at the doorstep of their tenement housing. The overcrowding and lack of light and air are to him the source of a myriad of ills, soon remedied by introducing laws to reduce density (no buildings covering more than 85% of their lots) and include greenery. “Life on the street” is for him the absolutely last thing one wants, as his world is full of filth, gangs, needled beer, and the corrupting influence of living with too many others. What would he have thought of the twentieth-century?

The other thought that springs to mind is “has Naomi Klein read this?” [see Organized Labor below] His detailed description of the race-to-the bottom labor practices of the garment industry in the big apple reads alarmingly like the advocacy of today. From Bohemian cigar-rollers exploited by their lack of access to the larger market, to the sliver-thin margins of Jewish cottage sewing in the Lower East Side, the same pattern of wage destruction from a vulnerable population willing to work for starvation rates plays out like a script for the modern Far East. The only thing more tragic than the exploitation of an inefficiently captive labor market is the knowledge that the whole system wouldn’t have worked if these people hadn’t been led to the yoke by their fellow countrymen. One really has to respect the strategy of the Jewish thrift – they seem to have been the only ones to have figured how to climb out of the system over the long term.

My question is: what changed? Obviously wages eventually went up, and these people integrated into the economy. Just as much the cities got healthier and sturdier, and eventually almost withered away entirely. The process of how may hold the lessons to learn. Mass innovation of electricity (often overlooked in urban discussions) doubtless helped a great deal, along with the (much-maligned) automobile later in the story. Is public education the secret to the integration question, or is it the draconian immigration restrictions levied soon thereafter? How does the circumstance differ when it’s the industry that’s the immigrant and the laborer the native? One of the characteristics of the City Beautiful movement that followed Riis was the active private charity – could that be the missing lynchpin?

History only asks that we ask the right questions.