This same winter found Tateh and his daughter in the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. They had come there the previous autumn, having heard there were jobs. Tate stood in front of a loom for fifty-six hours a week. His pay was just under six dollars. The family lived in a wooden tenement on a hill. They had no heat. They occupied one room overlooking an alley in which residents customarily dumped their garbage. He feared she would fall victim to the low-class elements of the neighborhood...The dismal wooden tenements lay in endless rows. Everyone from Europe was there--the Italians, the Poles, the Belgians, the Russian Jews. The feeling was not good between the different groups. In early 1912, a state law was introduced limiting the number of hours women could work to 54 hours per week. Instead of shortening the work week as instructed, the mill owners of the American Woolen Company shorted the paychecks of their women mill workers. Despite not belonging to any union, a few Polish women went on strike on January 11 when they noticed the shorted paychecks. On January 12, 10,000 workers walked off the job, with the number soon rising to 25,000, many of whom were immigrants. Nationalities represented in the Lawrence Textile Strike include Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, French-Canadian, Slavic, and Syrian. The city of Lawrence rang its riot bells in panic. Many strikers met the next day with an organizer from the I.W.W. to set their demands--15% pay increase, 54 hour work week, double pay for overtime, elimination of bonus pay. On January 29, Anna LoPizzo was shot, allegedly by police as they broke up a picket line. Police instead arrested strike organizers Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti for the murder of LoPizzo who were at a meeting three miles away at the time of her death. After this arrest, martial law was declared and all public meetings were declared illegal. Violence around town led many children of immigrants to be sent to New York, as Tateh attempted to do with Little Girl. Around 200 children were sent away on trains, with some 5,000 people showing up at the station to receive them in a demonstration of solidarity and to assist with finding them foster homes. The success of the so-called "children's crusade" in bringing awareness and sympathy to the Lawrence strikers led the authorities to send militia to intervene with the next attempt to send children to New York. Mothers and children were clubbed and arrested. Children were separated from their parents. The brutality of this event gained national coverage and led to an investigation by Congress. Seeing the national reaction and fearing further government involvement, the mill owners gave in on March 12 to the strikers's original demands at the American Woolen Company. The Lawrence Textile Strike is sometimes called the "Bread and Roses" strike because of a speech given by Rose Schneiderman invoking the slogan, "We want Bread and Roses, too": What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist--the right to life as the rich woman has it, the right to life, and the sun, and music, and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. This rallying cry signaled to the world that workers wanted more than just economic benefits, but for their basic humanity to be recognized.
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The answer to everything seemed to be Atlantic City. The Breakers Hotel was originally a five story hotel under the name Hotel Rudolf, in existence since 1895. After a few decades of operation, Joel and Julian Hillman purchased and renamed the hotel the Breakers. The hotel underwent an extensive renovation, adding 7 stories, a banquet hall, a bathhouse, a rooftop restaurant, a façade overlooking the beach, and a special dietary kitchen. In 1931, the hotel was repurchased by Emmanuel Katz who made it the first hotel in Atlantic City to observe Kosher dietary laws. It catered mainly to Jewish clientele and was known as the "Aristocrat of Kosher hotels".
Below is a link to the Speech Accent Archive developed by George Mason University's Linguistics Program. This is an accent database containing sample readings by people with a wide variety of accents.
Try entering details about where your character might come from under Search. For example, there is a sample of a female Latvian accent that might be helpful for Little Girl! The rich lady may not be aware that young girls in the slums are stolen everyday from their parents and sold into slavery. This quote from Tateh answers Evelyn Nesbit's question as to why he chooses to keep Little Girl on a leash in the slums of the Lower East Side. Child labor and child slavery has sadly always been in high demand because children could be paid less, could fix the small parts of machines that adults might not be able to reach, rarely formed unions, and were less likely to strike. The problem with employing children, according to E.L. Doctorow, "had to do only with their endurance". In the later hours of the day, children tended to lose their efficiency and were more likely to injure themselves.
Two factors increased child labor in the late 1800s. One, the influx of immigrants from Ireland in the 1840s and later southern and eastern Europe after 1880 brought a new supply of children who often came from rural communities in which child labor was a necessity. Two, the Industrial Revolution expanded the demand and opportunities for immigrant children. In 1900, 18 percent of American laborers were under 16 years old. In the southern cotton industry, the number rose to 25 percent under 15 years old, with half of these children under 12 years old. The National Child Labor Committee, formed in 1904, used mass political action, including pamphlets, mass mailing, and photography of factory conditions to lobby for political change. Despite measures of success with these actions, it largely depended on the political climate of America at the time. For example, during the Great Depression, child labor saw a steep decline primarily because workers wanted the few available jobs to go to adults, not children. Jacob Riis was born in 1849 in Denmark and immigrated to the United States in 1870 at 21 years old. He could not find steady work and had to live at a police lodging house, a hotbed for crime and typhus fever. After several months of unemployment and homelessness, Riis contemplated suicide. Soon after this, in 1873, Riis found work with a news bureau, and later was recruited by South Brooklyn News in 1874. He became a police reporter in 1877 for the New York Tribune and the Associated Press where he worked for 23 years.
Riis was one of the first photographers to use flash powder to capture the conditions of the same lodging houses in which he once was forced to live, as well as the tenements in the Lower East Side where Tateh and Little Girl lived. He became a photojournalist for the Evening Sun in 1888 where he advocated for the poor through his photography. His Danish accent and his radical commitment to revealing the truth of the poor in New York made him an outsider even among reporters. Riis earned the nickname "the Emancipator of the Slums", in part through the impact of his book How the Other Half Lives which illuminated the sordid conditions of the tenements. How the Other Half Lives was one of the first books to successfully employ halftone reproduction of his photographs. How the Other Half Lives was one of many of Riis's books, but this book in particular gained popularity with the New York Police Commissioner and future 26th President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt accompanied Riis into the into the tenements of the city and even called Riis "the most useful citizen of New York." His photographs were largely forgotten after his death until the negatives were found and donated to the city of New York. Head over to Images for examples of his photography. |
Dramaturgy for the Ragtime musical and novel.© Eliza Pillsbury, 2018. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Eliza Pillsbury with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. Categories
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