"Our Alien Neighbors": Coping with the Depression on the Lower East Side

"Our Alien Neighbors" and Citizenship

By the mid-1990's, following the fall of Communism, American politicians began to focus more and more on perceived internal threats to civil order. Immigrants have often been easy targets for fears of reformers. The battle cry of the most recent wave of welfare reform has been the conviction that to dismantle welfare will rid urban areas of poverty and to require citizenship will rid cities of their foreignness.

The persistence of poverty and foreignness in urban America has long plagued reformers. Half a century ago, as the welfare state was itself being constructed, the persistence of poverty and of immigrants' ways took center stage for debates among policymakers and social welfare advocates. On the Lower East Side during the Depression immigrants themselves, mostly Jews and Italians, coped with the economic crisis by utilizing traditional strategies for survival. By the onset of the New Deal most of these strategies had proved insufficient. New Deal policymakers and social welfare advocates brought relief, but only to those deemed worthy. The deserving poor were those who agreed to relinquish certain behavior associated with slum living and forego an attachment to foreign ways. During the Depression immigrants faced difficult challenges and had to make difficult choices.

On the Lower East Side during the Depression the emerging official culture and the rooted local immigrant culture clashed. The relationship between official and ethnic culture is little understood. But John Bodnar has argued that it was during the New Deal era that the American nation-state succeeded in distorting many expressions of ethnic culture, and American culture became nationalized. ¹

During the 1930's government power on the state and local level exploded. On New York's Lower East Side that meant federal funds became available for the first time in history for public projects. Tenements were razed, highways built, and pushcarts removed. But along with the creation of the welfare state came a crackdown on aliens and "alien" culture. Monies would be available to clean up the slums if immigrants modified and sanitized their behavior as well.

A stark division does not always exist between official culture and ethnic culture. Certainly, East Siders wanted better living conditions but not necessarily at the expense of being told how to behave. Some, particularly older East Siders, resisted breaking ties of "descent" from ethnic culture. ²

The large number of Jews who had already left the Lower East Side by the time of the Depression was more ambivalent. Even as they celebrated their assimilation into the American mainstream, many waxed nostalgic about the "good old days of poverty." Now outsiders, their memories tempered the reality of the conflicts raging on the East Side; sometimes these memories may have caused ex-East Siders to play a more active role as they attempted to mediate the conflicts. They looked back to the East Side as a lieu de memoire, a site of memory, but also celebrated their ascent of the ladder from rags to riches. On pilgrimages back to the East Side members of the Grand Street Boys Association, for example, returned to celebrate their escape from the ghetto but looked back to an idealized past. ³ Ethnic memory colored the debate then as it does now.

Yet despite reinventions and drastic change, the Lower East Side remained an immigrant neighborhood throughout the Depression. Historiographic literature of the Lower East Side underestimates the tenacity of an ethnic and working-class lifestyle throughout the 1930's. Historians of the Lower East Side experience, like those of the immigrant experience in general, stress the relative rapidity of assimilation and the disappearance of the immigrant Lower East Side. ⁴

Between 1920 and 1930 the Lower East Side lost 40 percent of its population. ⁵ Yet despite this exodus, in 1930 the Lower East Side was still 39 percent Jewish. Italians comprised the other major ethnic group. Well...