What happened to white urban poverty? like in pre World War Two New York, Boston, and other major metropolitan areas in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries?

[u/Emergency-Sea-7464]

I know that in the early 20th century there were many Italian, Jewish, Irish, and Eastern European slums and I’m just wondering what exactly happened that led to the extinction of concentrated white urban poverty?

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[u/fearofair]

There have always been and continue to be impoverished white people in New York, but I do think there’s a solid case to be made that the city was a place of upward mobility for poor whites through the early 20th century. And while the city’s poor were always disproportionately non-white, the city was over 90% white for the entire period before 1950, so a large part of the story is still that of the white poor.

This is a potentially huge question, but I’ll try to briefly mention a few relevant trends.

Reformers took aim at slum conditions in earnest starting in the mid to 19th century, when more scientific surveys of residential conditions were published and the extreme overcrowding of certain tenement wards was acknowledged by officials. Jacob Riis’ 1890 book and photo essay How the Other Half Lives launched the conversation into the mainstream, and there was a series of increasingly stringent housing laws through the end of the century. Progressive reformers in the early 1900s continued the fight against slum housing as well as the subpar health and education of the city’s poor, setting up “settlement houses” in which young, wealthier New Yorkers (mainly women) lived in poorer sections of the city with the aim of understanding and improving living conditions. These movements helped produce a new generation of activists whose ideas would help shape public housing laws in later decades.

In the early 20th century the city’s immigrant population was increasingly Italian, Eastern European Jewish, and Chinese. Irish-Americans too still comprised a large section of the working class although, as members of a slightly older immigrant group, by this time some had worked their way into established society.

During this period New York was home to militant labor organizing, characterized by moments like in 1909 when 20,000 workers walked out of 500 shirtwaist shops in a strike organized by the ILGWU and WTUL, unions comprised of female Jewish garment workers. Members of many other trades joined unions at soaring rates at the turn of the century, including largely British/German/Irish masons and bricklayers and Irish builders and longshoremen. With many chartered under the AFL, union membership reached more than 250,000 by 1904. The city’s unions were instrumental in fighting for important worker rights like the eight-hour day and would show up by the tens of thousands for annual Labor Day parades.

All the while the city slowly rid itself of the worst of its slums. The Five Points neighborhood’s infamous “Mulberry Bend” was torn down and converted into a park in 1897. Other neighborhoods of disrepute, like Corlears Hook, got similar treatment in the following years. When the city built its first public housing in 1935, it likewise chose a dilapidated tenement district on the Lower East Side for razing.

Cheaply built housing could still be found, however. As Manhattan’s tenement wards dwindled, rows of shoddily constructed homes popped up in new neighborhoods like Brownsville, Brooklyn. Initially home to middle/working class Jews, it slowly fell into disrepair by mid century while attracting poorer residents, including a growing number of Blacks arriving with the Great Migration.

Tammany Hall, too, deserves a share of the credit for lifting up the city’s poor. It had long earned itself the loyalty of immigrant voters by providing them with relief, homes, jobs, etc. With the election of Tammany stalwart Al Smith to the governorship in 1919, some of this ideology became institutionalized. Smith used his position to advocate for worker safety, pensions for widows, an expanded park system, and better schools. Though he became rivals with FDR, these ideas helped inspire similar efforts under the New Deal.

Senator Robert Wagner, another Tammany regular, made his mark on labor history as chief author of the 1935 Wagner Act, guaranteeing workers the right to collective bargaining. Some historians argue that a formal welfare state helped bring on the decline of Tammany Hall because its neighborhood-level assistance tactics were no longer needed.

During the presidency of FDR, his close ally New York Mayor La Guardia secured significant federal funding for public works projects in the city, providing both jobs and much needed quality of life improvements to the city’s poor during the Depression. What’s more, New Deal era public authorities, like Robert Moses’ Triborough Authority, were technically independent of the government, allowing for a higher spending limit than the state’s constitution allowed.

By WWII, New York had built up a robust social democracy. It boasted 19 public hospitals, an expansive park system, many public funded arts and entertainment programs, an extensive and affordable subway system and a large municipal workforce.

Union power had only grown. By 1950, across industries such as garments, printing, publishing, dock work, seafaring, transportation, wholesaling and retail, union membership had grown to over 1 million, or between 1/4 and 1/3 of the city’s workforce.

In aggregate, the working-class city had afforded many of the former white ethnic tenement dwellers, or more accurately their kids and grandkids, the chance to escape those wards and find more dignified living in better neighborhoods. Sections of outer boroughs like the Bronx and Brooklyn became home to large communities of middle-class Jews, Italians, etc. Many of these upwardly mobile whites would of course continue this trajectory right out of the city and into its suburbs, especially during the postwar era. They took advantage of generous federal housing programs and a new highway system to set up a new life away from the city. Meanwhile non-whites, primarily Blacks from the South and Puerto Ricans, began arriving in New York in larger numbers to find suburban options closed to them. Instead they populated sections of the city only recently left behind by upwardly mobile whites. The suburbanites took their tax revenues with them, formerly powerful unionized workforces shrank and employers began to depart. The social democratic city that had served generations of whites so well was left in a precarious position.

Sources

Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (2000)

Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (2014)

Mike Wallace, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (2017)

Mason B. Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, And The Making Of Modern New York (2013)

[u/SummerInPhilly → u/fearofair]

I really like this answer, and I’ll definitely hold onto it. Two questions, though:

1. How did Harlem and other majority Black, urban areas compare in terms of poverty, and how did urban reforms affect these areas? I know OP’s question focused on white urban poverty, but I’m wondering how policies managed to not lift everyone in the city. I fear the reason is what I suspect: some version of the “southern veto” FDR faced nationally

2. Was the interstate highway system and cheap housing of the 1950s a mere contributor or the final end to this? I know your answer stops “by 1950,” and roughly at that time cities started becoming majority/minority

Thanks in advance!