How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New YorkRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Tenement houses -- New York (State) -- New York
Perhaps the Bohemian quarter is hardly the proper name to give to the
colony, for though it has distinct boundaries it is scattered over a
wide area on the East Side, in wedge-like streaks that relieve the
monotony of the solid German population by their strong contrasts.
The two races mingle no more on this side of the Atlantic than on the
rugged slopes of the Bohemian mountains; the echoes of the thirty
years' war ring in New York, after two centuries and a half, with
as fierce a hatred as the gigantic combat bred among the vanquished
Czechs. A chief reason for this is doubtless the complete isolation of
the Bohemian immigrant. Several causes operate to bring this about: his
singularly harsh and unattractive language, which he can neither easily
himself unlearn nor impart to others, his stubborn pride of race, and
a popular prejudice which has forced upon him the unjust stigma of
a disturber of the public peace and an enemy of organized labor. I
greatly mistrust that the Bohemian on our shores is a much-abused man.
To his traducer, who casts up anarchism against him, he replies that
the last census (1880) shows his people to have the fewest criminals of
all in proportion to numbers. In New York a Bohemian criminal is such a
rarity that the case of two firebugs of several years ago is remembered
with damaging distinctness. The accusation that he lives like the "rat"
he is, cutting down wages by his underpaid labor, he throws back in the
teeth of the trades unions with the counter-charge that they are the
first cause of his attitude to the labor question.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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