The Spirit of the Ghetto, Hutchins Hapgood

Just finished reading Hapgood's The Spirit of the Ghetto, written in 1902. I fully expected this to be a vaguely offensive study of how Jews -- particularly Eastern European ones -- on the Lower East Side looked, behaved, thought, conversed, and prayed differently from native-born Americans. If it weren't an anthropological treatment of the "Other," I imagined, it would be a celebration of the Jewish people for their steadfast commitment to an ancient (and oft-punished) religion; for their excitement about intellectual and political perfectability; and for their hard-working, bone-breaking efforts in climbing out of poverty.

To some extent, that's exactly what this was about. Hapgood looks at the Jews as a people with a defined culture, one that can be identified through conversation, writing, theater, art, values, and (a bit by) work. He looks at the output of this culture and critiques it -- often coming out on the side of these products being worthwhile, fresh, and, in some cases, extraordinary. He also points out flaws in narrative (in the case of writing and theater) or a tendency toward melodrama (in the case of all of the creative pieces.)

What's remarkable, if anything, about the book is the respect with which Hapgood treats the Jews, especially at a time when a huge number of Americans (Henry James, for example) preferred to see them as conniving rabble. So the questions I have to ask about this book aren't as clear-cut as they might be; rather, they need to be considered contextually, rather than simply textually. What makes Hapgood so interested in this neighborhood? What are his experiences outside of those he records in this book? How does he get there? How does he get to talk to the people he talks to? What are his motives? These questions can only be answered if I go here:

http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/index.html

A couple of things I can note right now:

1) This is not exactly a "boosterism" book, but it also does not cover the aspects of the Lower East Side that many reformers would choose to emphasize -- overcrowding, illness, infant mortality, crime, prostitution, and other kinds of vice. Is this written to respond to reformers, to balance out the dire stories people are reading about the area and its people?

2) Nothing here is obviously slumming in the sense of organized tourism or self-identified uptowners visiting places of ill-repute. But there are some places in which a kind of slumming may be discerned:

p. 251 in his discussion of Abraham Cahan, "Apropos of Cahan's love of truth, and that word 'unpleasant,' a discussion which took place a few years ago on the appearance of Zangwill's play, The Children of the Ghetto, is illuminative. That poetic drama represented the life of the poor Ghetto Jew with sympathy and truth; but for that very reason it was severely criticized by some uptown Israelites. Many of these, no doubt, had religious objections to a display on the stage of those customs and observances of their race which touched upon the 'holy law.' But some rich German Jews, practically identified with American life, and desiring for practical and social purposes to make little of their racial distinction, deprecated the literature which portrayed the life of those Jews who still have distinctively national traits and customs...."

This one's good because it displays the relationship between wealthy (often German) Jews who have no interest in "slumming" and the poor (often Eastern-European) Jews who live in the slums. In this way, the fact that a native-born, non-Jewish writer is interested in depicting this community is notable, helping to identify what could prompt someone to study the neighborhood as he does. The passage also points up the class differences in the Jewish community -- Hapgood is not interested, clearly, in Jews as Jews. He's interested in poor Jews. And that's important.

p. 269-271, "In spite of the fact that the Jews have been at all times and in all countries tenacious of their domestic peculiarities and their religion, the special character of the Ghetto will pass away in favorably conditioned America. The picturesqueness it now possesses will disappear...."

Here and in a few other passages, Hapgood brings up the issue of "picturesqueness" and that's something I think is key to the bohemian interest in the Lower East Side. What the artists and writers he discusses seem to have in common (whether they live on the LES or not) is a vision of the neighborhood as picturesque in its poverty, worthy of record simply because people in poverty are more interesting to look at than other people. Note, of course, that they're talking about people and not buildings. I want to develop this more in terms of the piece I posted earlier from Pamuk on the "picturesque." Why do people like Abraham Cahan, Jacob Epstein, Bernard Gussow, John Sloan, and George Bellows find this place so rich for inspiration? I think there's something in here about realism and modernism in literature and art, but I'll need to do more reading on that to make this a fuller picture.

Another useful point in this passage is how certain Hapgood is of the Jews ability to assimilate into American society. This sentiment is pretty bold and, I think, a good piece of evidence that the study of the Lower East Side is, in some ways, part of a vision of America as capacious enough to make Americans of everyone. That's not a vision everyone shared, so it's important to call out.

p. 295, "Mr. Imber looks upon America as the 'land of the bluff' and as such admires it. But he disapproves of our reform movements. He thinks the recent attempt to reform the east side was due to the desire of the rich to divert attention from their own vices. He doesn't approve of reform any way."

I'm not sure how useful this quote is in general, but I have to agree with Imber at least in spirit, if not in fact. The rich had their own vices, of course, but they were invested in those vices being spatially separate from their regular lives. That's one reason the Lower East Side inspired the imagination -- it became a playground for the middle-classes.