• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 8062 0

at work in New York and was accelerated by their arrival. Some highly skilled German furniture makers, many with experience in the finest Paris workshops, did obtain custom craft work in firms like Duncan Phyfe’s. Most, however, cranked out cheap chairs and cabinets in small “slaughter shops,” with one to five employees. These outfits, competing desperately to sell their products at wholesale auctions or to large mercantile houses, underbid rivals by driving down wages so steeply that where in 1836 cabinetmakers had made from twelve to fifteen dollars a week, a decade later the majority made less than five. Shoemakers were reduced to putting-out work in cellar workshops, aided by their families.

The garment industry—the city’s largest—was utterly reconstituted. By 1855 95 percent of New York’s tailors had been born abroad; of that number 55 percent were Germans, 34 percent Irish. Some became petty contractors, bidding (and underbidding) for the right to transform the precut cloth supplied by big companies into finished suits and shirts. Some became cutters in the large firms. Most, however, sewed at home for a contractor, at piece rates so low that by the 1850s journeyman tailors, aided by their wives and children—“A tailor is nothing without a wife, and very often a child” went a maxim of German craftsmen—worked sixteen hours a day but seldom cleared more than ten dollars for a seven-day week.

Some Irish garment manufacturers did far better. Daniel Devlin came to New York in 1844 from Donegal, married the daughter of a wealthy Irish American, and did custom tailoring for the city’s leading Catholics. Devlin also pioneered in manufacturing quality discount clothing—he was one of the first in the city to use the new sewing machine—and his line proved popular with upwardly mobile immigrants. By the late 1850s Devlin and Company’s store, at the corner of Broadway and Warren, was the biggest men’s clothier in New York after Brooks Brothers. But Devlin’s accomplishments rested on a huge force of chiefly Irish workers—150 in-house cutters and clerks, and two thousand out-work tailors who labored in their boardinghouses. Devlin paid his men better than average wages by the standard of the day, but that standard was in free fall and soon plunged to seventy-five cents a day.

Female seamstresses might make as little as seventy-five cents a week—when they could find work at all in the highly seasonal and competitive industry. By 1855 two-thirds of New York’s dressmakers, seamstresses, milliners, shirtmakers and collarmakers, embroiderers, and those who turned out artificial flowers for the high-fashion hats of wealthy ladies, were foreign born (64 percent of them Irish, 14 percent German). Living right at the edge, some occasionally fell over. Two German sisters, Cecelia and Wanda Stein, migrated to New York in 1852, both unmarried, Wanda the mother of an illegitimate child. They labored at doing embroidery, but in 1855 their employer went out of business; times being particularly hard, they couldn’t find other work. With the rent due and the larder empty, having borrowed all they could and being unwilling to take up whoring, the sisters spent their last pennies on some flowers, spruced up their dreary room, and got into their bed with the six-year-old, and all took a terminal drink of prussic acid.

Below the ranks of these skilled and semiskilled immigrants lay the battalions of Irishmen and German laborers whose sheer muscle power, as even the most xenophobic New Yorkers were prepared to agree, rapidly transformed the cityscape. In 1855 Irish immigrants made up 87 percent of New York’s unskilled laborers; it was the largest single occupation for Irish males. Some slotted into existing industrial hierarchies at the bottommost ranks: at the Novelty Iron Works, they were hired for such part-time jobs as moving a newly cast thirty-five-ton bed plate through the yard and hoisting it into a ship’s hull. Irishmen also carved out particular niches, especially in construction and transport, often at the expense of African Americans.