Children Of The City Part 4

The children of the city would grow up to exert an influence on American culture far out of proportion to their numbers, their wealth, or their political and social power. Though there were among them children who would become United States senators (Jacob Javits), Supreme Court justices (William O. Douglas), heavyweight champions of the world (Jack Dempsey), corporate executives (David Sarnoff), philosophers (Morris Raphael Cohen), bestselling novelists (Meyer Levin), educators, critics, and journalists, in none of these fields would the former street children displace older, established elites. Only in the entertainment industries which grew up with the children would they achieve an influence that was both profound and predominant.

This book is filled with the names of vaudeville stars, comedians, and Broadway and Hollywood directors, producers, writers, and actors. As we argued earlier, the children who achieved fortune and fame in show business were in many respects representative of their generation.6 Though their individual talents and ambitions and their ultimate success would mark them off from their contemporaries, they grew up in the same tenements, played on the same streets, attended the same schools, had the same sorts of fights with their parents, and hawked papers, shined shoes, and peddled gum just like the others. We can, in examining their adult lives and work, locate-in microcosm-the influence of the streets on their generation. We can also trace that generation's contribution to the shaping of twentieth-century American culture. The entertainers were the vehicle through which the street children exerted their particular influence on American culture. Embedded in their songs, their comedy routines, and their movies were the lessons they had learned years before on the streets of the city.

Though the movies, as Gilbert Seldes has written, came from America, they were made here by immigrants and their children.7 The nickelodeon owners who moved to Hollywood to establish and then manage the first studios (Harry Cohn, William Fox, Samuel Goldwyn, Sam Katz, Louis B. Mayer, Spyros B. Skouras, Marcus Loew, and the Warner brothers) were children of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities who had played, worked, and grown up on the streets. In the decades between the wars, it was they who exerted the greatest influence on the shape of the image and the sound of the dialogue that reached the screen. Though the studio heads did not supervise every project from conception to script and screen, the men who worked under them were always alert to their probable reactions. The projects that were bought, shaped into scripts, produced, and distributed were those that appealed-or that the producers, directors, and screenwriters believed might appeal-to the moguls' tastes.8 The moguls were businessmen, who sought above all to maximize their profits by shaping their product to the market (and the market to their product). But they were also former street children who believed in the messages they projected on the screen. Edward G. Robinson, who on his arrival in Hollywood was amazed and a bit frightened by the personal attention and power the moguls focused on their films, saw at once that no matter what their habits, moralities, or life styles, the studio heads "imposed their childhood moralities on the screen."9 They considered the studios their personal property. Anything that might offend them was barred from production, but projects they approved of were supported from beginning to end. The Andy Hardy films received star treatment from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer because Louis B. was captivated by the project. With his interest, support, and sometimes interference (he once had a scene rewritten because he was convinced that Andy was not praying the way he should), the series ran to fourteen films. Had Mickey Rooney not grown up and gone off to war, fourteen more might have been produced.10 It was in the 1930s that the movies attained "the zenith of their popularity and influence," with the introduction of sound temporarily postponing the impact of the Depression on box office receipts.11 Though the Warner Brothers' The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, was the first film to talk (or rather sing), it was the gangster films that made the most of the new technology. In the early 1930s the studios turned out one after another, with Warner Brothers leading the way.12 The first of the 1930s' gangster films-and among the most successful commercially-was Little Caesar, bought by Jack Warner, a street kid from Youngstown, Ohio, produced by Hal Wallis, a street kid from Chicago, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, a former San Francisco newsie, and starred in by Edward G. Robinson from the Lower East Side. Each of these men had a special relationship to the film. In their autobiographies, Warner, Wallis, and LeRoy13 each claim to have initiated the project, and Robinson explains how he tried to convince producer Hal Wallis that the part of "Rico" was made for him. He, Robinson, and "Rico" (he could have added, Wallis, Warner, and LeRoy, as well) were ambitious men who fought to be "different, above, higher." They came from the "humblest, the most dispossessed" of backgrounds. They feared that their ambitions to rise in the world would eventually lead to self-destruction.14 The gangster films are films about the city. The gangster, as Robert Warshow has written, is "a man of the city, with the city's language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring...."15 The films present the street as a determinative influence in the lives of the adults who grew up on it. We are reminded again and again-sometimes, as in The Public Enemy, in the film's opening scenes-that the gangster is a former child of the streets. So too, we learn, is his counterpart, the "good" or reformed brother or friend: Rico's sidekick Joe Ma.s.sera (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) in Little Caesar, Baby-Face Martin's old playmate Dave Connell (Joel McCrea) in Dead End, Tom Powers' (James Cagney's) war hero brother in The Public Enemy. Gangsters and good guys have grown up with the same tough-skinned determination, strength of will, and ambition. They are urban frontiersmen who know what they want and possess the self-reliance, courage, and confidence to get it. What in the end distinguishes good guys from gangsters is luck (Dave, in the play from which the film Dead End was adapted, suggests that Baby-Face Martin was ruined not by the streets alone but by being sent to reform school for some minor prank16) and the gangsters' inability to set limits to their ambition. There are, for the gangsters, no indecent, immoral, or evil means to their ends. They will do whatever they must to reach the top.

The gangsters represent in exaggerated, almost mythologized form the children of the city. For one reason or another, neither home nor family, neither school nor church have tempered the streets' influence on them. They are loyal to family, friends, and the gang, but beyond that are committed to nothing but their own personal success. The street is their strength and their undoing. It has given them the skills, the drive, the cunning they require, but also the unbounded ambition that must lead to their ultimate self-destruction.

The gangster films enjoyed a brief ascendancy in Hollywood, but their gritty realism and unhappy endings were not as well suited to the Depression years as the charm, gaiety, and good times of the screwball comedies which succeeded them as the most popular film genre. There were many reasons why, as historian Robert Sklar has written, "Hollywood's contribution to American culture [in the 1930s] was essentially one of affirmation."17 The studio heads and their managers, producers, and directors did not want to reawaken the crusades against film that had kept them on the defensive through much of the industry's early years. They also understood as well as anyone that, in an era of economic depression and political anxiety, audiences wanted to be amused and rea.s.sured, not challenged by what they saw and heard on the screen.

Hollywood had no difficulty providing the audience with what it wanted. The former street children who reigned in the studios had grown up with a belief in America and its inst.i.tutions. They were only too pleased to project this faith onto the screen. The screwball comedies that they produced in such abundance in the late 1930s presented a wonderfully optimistic vision of the social world. Rich and poor were separated by circ.u.mstance and misunderstanding, no more, no less. In the blockbuster of screwb.a.l.l.s, It Happened One Night, written by Robert Riskin, a former New York street kid, and directed by Frank Capra, a former Los Angeles newsie, a poor working stiff and a rich girl meet, fall in love, and, in a succession of "screwball" acts prove to one another that they are more alike in personality than separated by cla.s.s. What counts in the screwb.a.l.l.s is s.p.u.n.k, confidence, and inner strength, not money or breeding. In Easy Living, a "Wall Streeter" takes delight in marrying his son to a "plain Jane working girl."18 In It Happened One Night, Claudette Colbert's grumpy millionaire father helps Clark Gable win his daughter's hand in marriage because he admires his character.

Frank Capra's films were not as blissfully oblivious to social problems as most of the comedies and musicals of the 1930s, but they shared with them the "common a.s.sumption that America is the last, best hope of mankind, the country where the fate of the common man is of the utmost importance."19 Even in his so-called "populist" films, where Capra describes a social and economic order despoiled by bankers, corrupt politicians, businessmen, and the misguided "ma.s.ses," the disorder is only temporary, never permanent. In the end, it is Mr. Deeds, John Doe, and Mr. Smith who set things right again. They, the common men, triumph-and with them, America and capitalism.

While the Marx Brothers films are perhaps the most wildly satiric and subversive of the 1930s' Hollywood productions, they resemble the others in their happy endings. The world, so artfully taken apart in the course of the film, is always put back together again in the end-with lovers united, sanitariums, circuses, and tenors rescued, and villains unmasked and humiliated. Cla.s.s differences are not always bridged by love, but neither do they loom large in the fates of their characters. The world of the rich and powerful exists to provide the brothers with a source of amus.e.m.e.nt and funds. Like the street children arriving downtown to sell their wares, the brothers appear as aliens visiting a social world they do not belong in: hotels, opera houses, country estates, ocean liners, and big stores. The comedy develops from the confrontation between the brothers and the established society they are thrown into. Harpo plays himself throughout: the cheerful cherub who converts his environment into a playground. But Chico and Groucho are presented, in different ways, as hustlers who must make their living from the rich. Chico is a street kid, hustling, peddling, hyping, wheeling and dealing. Groucho takes another approach. Like the street performers and newsies looking for a tip, he plays to his patron, Margaret Dumont, at once flattering, cajoling, and entertaining her. He is a rogue, a hustler, and will do nothing to hide it. This is his particular way of making a living, he declares through his actions and words, and it is no more or less corrupt than anyone else's. There is so much money around, why not take what you can, when you can?

From A Night at the Opera: "Dumont. Mr. Driftwood: three months ago you promised to put me into society. In all that time, you've done nothing but draw a very handsome salary.

Groucho. You think that's nothing, huh? How many men do you suppose are drawing a handsome salary nowadays? Why, you can count them on the fingers of one hand...."20 From The Coconuts: "Dumont. What in the world is the matter with you?

Groucho. Oh, I ... I'm not myself tonight. I don't know who I am. One false move and I'm yours. I love you. I love you anyhow.

Dumont. I don't think you'd love me if I were poor.

Groucho. I might, but I'd keep my mouth shut."21 The Marx Brothers recall the streets not simply in the content but in the style of their comedy. Like many other entertainers who grew up on the streets and served an apprenticeship in vaudeville, they translate to the screen the energy and drive that propelled them forward on the street and the stage. There was, as Gilbert Seldes observed in the 1920s of f.a.n.n.y Brice and Al Jolson, both former street children, an almost " 'daemonic' heat and abandon" in their performances,22 the same manic energy that fueled the Marx Brothers movies and stage and screen performances by Danny Kaye, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Milton Berle (especially in his "Texaco Star Theater" television shows), and Phil Silvers (as Sergeant Bilko on television), all of whom grew up on the streets.

The former street traders performed as adults without a trace of self-consciousness or a hint of embarra.s.sment-and they never slowed down. What Irving Howe has identified as "the almost hysterical frenzy with which many of them worked" was, as he put it, a direct spin-off from their immigrant experience and their Jewish backgrounds.23 It was also a lesson learned in their youth. The street traders' and performers' energy and exuberance betrayed an anxiety that anything less than total effort would not suffice. Their customers demanded everything they had. Child newsies, peddlers, and performers had to make themselves heard, seen, and noticed; they had to create their customers and their audience out of anonymous pa.s.sers-by. There was plenty of money out there on the streets, but it had to be corralled and coerced out of adult pockets. One had to shout, gesticulate, and perform day after day. And even then, nothing was guaranteed.

From stage and screen, and later on radio and television, the former street children broadcast to the nation the lessons they had learned on the streets and their faith in themselves and in America. While a few, like Samuel Ornitz, made headlines by defying inquisitors from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, most went out of their way to parade their love of the nation, middle-cla.s.s pieties, and capitalism. James Cagney, under some suspicion in the 1930s for his activism in the Screen Actors Guild and his left-liberal politics, volunteered (through his agent brother) to star in a movie version of George M. Cohan's life not only because the role of the "d.a.m.ndest patriotic man in the country"24 would rescue his reputation, but because he considered himself as much a "Yankee Doodle Dandy" as Cohan. George Jessel dressed in his Uncle Sam suit, Eddie Cantor selling war bonds, Burns and Allen transporting their vaudeville routines into a suburban setting (with their WASP neighbors, the Mortons), Milton Berle as television's Uncle Miltie, Irving Berlin writing and singing "G.o.d Bless America"-all were unmistakably former street kids, but they were also 100 percent American and, as they never ceased to remind themselves and their audiences, very proud of it.

The street children of the city, those who attained fame and fortune in show business and those who did not, grew up with a faith in themselves and a faith in America. They had won the battle of the streets-as children-and come home with change in their pockets, enough to help support their families and buy themselves a good time. They carried into adult life the vision of a social world where one's earnings were usually sufficient to satisfy one's needs for subsistence and amus.e.m.e.nt.

Those who had been born with the century and had taken their first full-time jobs in the 1920s were hard hit by the Great Depression (with the exception, of course, of some of the Hollywood stars), but not hard enough to destroy the faith that had been built on the streets of the city. There was too much wealth in the nation. And they were too shrewd, too smart, and too disciplined by their apprenticeship on the streets to be shut out for long. Nicholas Gerros, a Greek immigrant who had shined shoes as a boy and opened up a small clothing store in the late twenties, recalled of the Depression that it "influenced [but] didn't bother me too much because I was young [i.e., new] in the business and I also was young."25 Jerre Mangione, another former street child, spent the Depression years in New York City employed in a dozen capacities as writer, critic, and editor. Through the ups and downs, he remained, as he put it, "more responsive than ever to the Horatio Alger syndrome implanted by my public-school teachers.... The promises proffered in the demonic Manhattan landscape, though often based on quicksand premises, held me enthralled."26 If the Depression tested but did not upset the street traders' faith, the boom that began on the home front during World War II and extended with periodic brief recessions through the 1960s served to reconfirm it. Those who held jobs-and very few of the former white male street traders did not-found that their paychecks were large enough to cover the necessary expenses of home and family and buy goods and services their parents had never dreamed of. Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, they accepted the social world as it was or could become with minor adjustments. They might complain about prices, taxes, and wages. They might even protest government policies and strike against employers. But they never doubted that they lived in the best of all social worlds. Their patriotism, often bordering on chauvinism as they grew older, came naturally. Whether they grew up to become movie stars, heavyweight champions of the world, steelworkers, or corner newsstand owners, they had come further than their parents and they trusted their children would do even better.

When, through the later 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, scores of intellectuals, politicians, and economists celebrated the "end of ideology" and the rising "age of affluence," they were codifying the faith in capitalism and the American political system that the street children had held all along. What G.o.dfrey Hodgson has identified as "the ideology of the liberal consensus" was not imposed from the top down.27 The former street traders did not need Daniel Bell, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Peter Drucker, W. W. Rostow, John Kenneth Galbraith, or the editors of Fortune magazine to tell them that capitalism worked, "and since World War II [as Galbraith had put it], quite brilliantly."28 It was not "false consciousness" or the hegemonic powers of the corporate state that had convinced them that this was the case; it was, rather, their particular experience as children reconfirmed in adult life.

The former street traders suffered from tunnel vision through their lifetimes. Their good fortune-and the celebration of it by mid-century ideologists and politicians-blinded them to the fate of the millions, here and abroad, who were not about to enter the age of affluence. The closure of ideological debate (a phenomenon described from opposite ends of the political spectrum by Daniel Bell and Herbert Marcuse) locked them into a one-dimensional universe of discourse where anticapitalist (equated with anti-American) arguments could be neither presented nor considered. When, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, oppositional, critical ideologies resurfaced with the civil rights and anti-war movements, they could be easily dismissed by the former street traders who, having hustled for pennies as children, could not accept the claim that America was not and had not always been the land of opportunity and beacon of freedom for the poor and oppressed.

The street children's good fortune stayed with them through the years. They were born in cities expanding in economic opportunities for young white males. They grew old amidst the economic euphoria and unprecedented supremacy this nation enjoyed in the aftermath of World War II. They retired when the Social Security system was still a marvel of solvency. By the time a prolonged economic downturn set in, in the 1970s and 1980s, their time was running out.

The street traders are no longer with us, but their influence on our culture remains as strong today as it was thirty and forty years ago. Their faith in America and in capitalism was so comforting, so proudly proclaimed, so in tune with the ideological currents of the mid-century liberal consensus, so often confirmed by their personal experience, and so vividly presented to the public that it exerted an influence far greater than it should have.

From the vantage point of the middle 1980s-with jobs disappearing from these sh.o.r.es, infrastructures collapsing, credit tightened, and overall unemployment locked at record-high levels-it would be sheer folly to retain much faith in the social and economic order the street traders trusted. And yet their optimism, their Americanism, their trust in the ability of the economy to right itself remain with us-as a barrier to the rethinking and restructuring that must take place if we are to proceed toward a more productive and more just future. The "American Century," so labeled and celebrated by Henry Luce in the 1940s, was coterminous with the street children's lifetime. But it has ended. And will not return.

While we must consign to political oblivion those who continue to espouse the old plat.i.tudes about the good life in America, we can and should remember the children of the city and the cities they grew up in. Those cities were probably as dangerous, as dirty, and as depraved as ours, but they were places of promise, of hope, of trust in the future. When we talk to our parents, grandparents, and relatives who grew up on the streets or see before us the image of James Cagney singing "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy," or the Marx brothers outwitting villans, or George Burns crooning "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" at the 1983 All-Star Game, we are momentarily brought back to that world and enriched by it.

Appendix:

A Note on Sources:

The Newsboy Studies

An invaluable source for this work have been the "newsboy studies" completed between 1902 and 1922. The child labor and child welfare reform groups and, in some states, departments of labor and industrial statistics, collected as much data as possible about working children, convinced that the data put into proper form would convert an otherwise apathetic public to their cause. Much of the material was never published. Some remains in note form or as rough drafts, interview schedules, case studies, or internal memoranda.

In the course of my research, I was able to locate and consult reports on newsboy conditions in the following cities and states (full references to these reports can be found in the Notes): New York City (19023, 1906, 1911, 1912, 1915, 191518), Buffalo (1903), Syracuse (1911), Mount Vernon (1912), Albany (1920), and Yonkers (1920), New York; Chicago, Illinois (1905, 1918); Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1911); Des Moines, Iowa (1920); Cincinnati (1908, 1917), Cleveland (19089), and Toledo (1920), Ohio; Seattle, Washington (191516); Dallas, Texas (1921); Birmingham, Alabama (1920); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1910); Detroit, Michigan (1914); Boston, Ma.s.sachusetts (1920); Baltimore, Maryland (1913, 1915, 1916); Bennington, Rutland, and Burlington, Vermont (1910); St. Louis (1910) and Kansas City (191415), Missouri; Newark, Hoboken, Paterson, Jersey City, Bayonne, Trenton, and Elizabeth, New Jersey (1912).

Statewide reports on child laborers with specific sections on newsboys were available for New Jersey (1907), Alabama (1922), Tennessee (1920), Kentucky (1919), North Carolina (1918), Oklahoma (1918), Iowa (1922), Ohio (1919), and Pennsylvania (1922).

A guide to the published reports is Children in Street Trades in the United States: A List of References, compiled by Laura A. Thompson, U.S. Department of Labor (Washington, D.C., 1925).

Unpublished reports were located in the papers of the New York Child Labor Committee, New York State Library, Albany, New York; papers of the National Child Labor Committee, Ma.n.u.script Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Jane Addams Memorial Collection and the papers of the Juvenile Protective a.s.sociation, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; and Jane Addams Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations for Ma.n.u.script and Oral History Collections AJC William E. Wiener Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee, New York, New York.

CP Oral History of Chicago-Polonia, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois.

CSS Community Service Society Papers, Rare Book and Ma.n.u.script Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, New York.

FLPS Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey, Works Projects Administration, 1942, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois.

IC Italians in Chicago Project, Ma.n.u.script Department, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois.

ICMA International Circulation Managers a.s.sociation, Reston, Virginia.

IHS Illinois Humane Society Papers, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois.

JAMC Jane Addams Memorial Collection, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois.

j.a.p Jane Addams Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

JPA Juvenile Protective a.s.sociation Papers, Special Collections, University of Illlinois at Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois.

LC Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

LDT Lea Demarest Taylor Papers, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois.

LW Lillian Wald Papers, Rare Book and Ma.n.u.script Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, New York.

NCLC National Child Labor Committee Papers, Ma.n.u.script Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

NYCLC New York Child Labor Committee Papers, New York State Library, Albany, New York.

NYWP New York World Papers, Rare Book and Ma.n.u.script Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, New York.

YIVO Oral History Collection, YIVO Inst.i.tute for Jewish Research, New York, New York.

Notes.

Chapter One.

1. David Ward, Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth Century America (New York, 1971), 51150; Sam Ba.s.s Warner, Urban Wilderness (New York, 1972), 85112.

2. On Chicago: Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade, Chicago: The Growth of a Metropolis (Chicago, 1969), 214; on Boston: Sam Ba.s.s Warner, Streetcar Suburbs (New York, 1976), 46116; on Cincinnati: Zane L. Miller, Boss c.o.x's Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (New York, 1968), 2529; on Columbus, Ohio: Roderick Duncan McKenzie, The Neighborhood: A Study of Local Life in the City of Columbus, Ohio (Chicago, 1923), 36062; on Pittsburgh: John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 19001960 (Urbana, 1982), 2125; on Manhattan: Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City (New York, 1923), 67.

3. Gerard R. Wolfe, New York: A Guide to the Metropolis (New York, 1975), 16385.

4. Ibid.

5. Glen E. Holt and Dominic A. Pacyga, Chicago: A Historical Guide to the Neighborhoods (Chicago, 1979), 1718; Mayer and Wade, Chicago, 21820.

6. William Leach, "Department Stores and Consumer Culture: The Transformation of Women in an Age of Abundance, 18901920" (unpublished paper, 1982); Susan Porter Benson, "Palace of Consumption and Machine for Selling: The American Department Store," Radical History Review, no. 21 (Fall 1979), 20811.

7. Leach, "Department Stores," 1.

8. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York, 1932), 24.

9. Leach, "Department Stores," 810.

10. Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last 100 Years (New York, 1951), 25972.

11. On the new nightlife, see Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 18901930 (Westport, Conn. 1981).

12. Erenberg, Steppin' Out, 67. Also, on vaudeville, see Russel Nye, The Unembarra.s.sed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York, 1970), 16772; Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1980), 192228.

13. Nye, Unembarra.s.sed Muse, 168.

14. Barth, City People, 211.

15. Arnold Bennett, Your United States: Impressions of a First Visit (New York, 1912), 137.

16. Erenberg, Steppin' Out, 4041.

17. Ibid., 45.

18. Ibid., 4950; Morris, Incredible New York, 243.

19. Erenberg, Steppin' Out, 14871; Nye, Unembarra.s.sed Muse, 327.

20. Morris, Incredible New York, 273.

21. H. G. Wells, The Future in America (New York, 1906), 135.

22. Robert Shackleton, The Book of Chicago (Philadelphia, 1920), 17778.

23. See, for example, Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1973); and, in reb.u.t.tal to Handlin, Rudolph J. Vecoli, "Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of the Uprooted," Journal of American History 51, no. 3 (December 1964), 40417.

24. M. E. Ravage, An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant (1917; reprint, New York, 1971), 7273.

25. James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 18501970 (Urbana, 1980); Paul Underwood Kellogg, ed., The Pittsburgh Survey, vol. 5: The Pittsburgh District: Civic Frontage (New York, 1914), 92114; Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Cla.s.s Reform, Chicago, 18801930 (New York, 1978), 641.

26. Dreiser, Color of a City, 86.

27. Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem, 2 vols. (New York, 1903), I:8.

28. Ibid., 436.

29. Ibid., 425.

30. Edith Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago, 19081935 (Chicago, 1936), 213.

31. Mike Gold, Jews Without Money (1930; reprint, New York, 1965), 100.

32. Ibid., 8889.