Elizabeth Verklan was a Short-Term Research Fellow at NYPL in 2017, and is an assistant professor in women, gender, and sexuality studies at Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. She is currently working on her book (tentatively titled) Objects of Desire: Transnational Feminism, Feminist Inquiry, and Global Fashion, under contract with the University of Illinois Press, that explores the ways in which sweatshops are framed and represented in and to the U.S.

There is perhaps no better place to study the early workings of the U.S. garment industry than New York City, and most especially the Manuscripts and Archives Division at NYPL. Last summer, I spent four weeks at the Manuscripts and Archives Division hoping to learn how some of the nation’s earliest anti-sweatshop campaigns narrated the problem of sweatshops. This research is part of my larger book project wherein I examine how sweatshops are represented in and throughout U.S. media, throughout history. In particular, my second chapter, “The Politics of Labor and Immigration in the Shadow of the Sweatshop,” examines the role of news media in explaining and conveying the importance of sweatshops to the U.S. public. Part of this chapter examines the anti-sweatshop discourse of Progressive Era (1890-1920) New York City specifically, and I came to the Manuscripts and Archives Division to explore the records of Jacob Riis.

The Jacob Riis papers and the Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement records from 1891 to 1916 provided me with some historical context into one of the early twentieth century’s most influential anti-sweatshop advocates. Jacob Riis played a crucial role in publicizing the issue of sweatshops to the public with his exposé-style book, How the Other Half Lives (1890). As Daniel Bender’s Sweated Work, Sweated Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor outlines, many social reformers and consumer groups of the time came to cite Riis’ prominent text as inspiring their work. Riis’s text is also cited in several government reports and hearings concerning sweatshops, and Riis himself accompanied government officials on tours and sanitation inspections during this time. In sum, Riis’ role in the development of how people in the U.S. think and speak about sweatshops is significant, and my ability to explore some of his personal papers at the Manuscripts and Archives Division was very important to helping me understand who he was and how he thought about the “social good.”

As Daniel Bender and Richard Greenwald argue in Sweatshop USA, the way people discussed and thought about sweatshops at the time they emerged (~1890-5) is inseparable from other social anxieties concerning race, immigration, and labor. The wave of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe between 1880 and 1920 ignited cultural anxieties about job loss, disease, and social unrest on the part of U.S. citizens. Many social reformers of the time felt that the perceived ills of immigration and immigrants could be remedied through efforts to “Americanize” the foreign-born. While I was aware of these kinds of social welfare campaigns, I was unaware that many of these campaigns actually trained and recruited immigrants into working in the garment factories and sweatshops themselves. Oddly enough, the efforts of Jacob Riis and the Jacob Riis Settlement house undertook some of these very campaigns.

Through my research in the Jacob Riis papers and Jacob Riis Neighborhood Settlement records I learned that despite his prominent role in documenting the conditions in sweatshops, Riis also promoted education and training for work in garment factories, and placed girls in jobs within New York’s factories. This aspect of Riis’ work is interesting because while he definitely took issue with the kinds of work happening within tenements in the garment industry (which came to be known as sweatshops), he also simultaneously extolled the merits of factory work, including garment work. Riis, like many of his contemporaries, perceived manual labor as necessary for immigrants, because it was believed to “Americanize” them; it was thought that this labor and training could transform the immigrant (often xenophobically presumed lazy) into a productive American worker.

Riis’ work is interesting because it demonstrates how perceptions of who is thought of as “American,” and what being “American” constitutes. In Riis’ time, while social reformers took issue with sweatshops, they still perceived garment work as an immigrant’s job that could provide the training and discipline necessary to “Americanizing” the foreign-born. As Bender and Greenwald argue, sweatshops were defined against the American factory system, which was considered efficient, clean, and emblematic of an “American” way of working. Promoting training for immigrants in factory work was a way to both curb sweatshop exploitation, but also “Americanize” people deemed foreign to an American way of life. As I argue in my book, understanding how social reformers thought about labor then is important to understanding how people think about sweatshops and labor violations now, because we have inherited the concept from people like Riis.

My time in the Manuscripts and Archives Division, made possible by my New York Public Library Short-Term Research Fellowship, has enriched my understanding of how social reformers like Riis were thinking about immigration as a problem, and how best to remedy it. Were it not for my time at NYPL I would never have known of Riis’ involvement in Americanization campaigns, or the dual role he occupies in U.S. garment industry history.