Books by two famous early 20th century social reformers reveal the tragic details of the difficult lives these Bohemian families led. Most of us living today have not experienced and could not imagine the travails of life that were their daily portion. No wonder that they passed down so few stories of their lives to us!

Jacob Riis

Jacob Riis was a famous turn-of-the-century photographer and chronicler of the poor and the downtrodden in New York City. In "How the Other Half Lives", published in 1890, he describes in vivid detail what life was like for different groups of New York's poor. He writes in his introduction that:

"... the poor but thrifty Bohemian might be picked out by the sombre hue of his life ... struggling against heavy odds in the big human bee-hives of the East Side. ... The Bohemian is the only foreigner with any considerable representation in the city who counts no wealthy man of his race, none who has not to work hard for a living, or has got beyond the reach of the tenement."

Riis saw the Bohemians as an isolated group. Though they lived near German enclaves, the two groups did not mingle any more than they had done in Europe, having been on opposite sides since the Thirty Years War 250 years earlier. Among the causes for this isolation, he includes:

"... his singularly hard and unattractive language, which he can neither easily himself unlearn nor impart to others, his stubborn pride of race, and a popular prejudice which has forced upon him the unjust stigma of a disturber of the public peace and an enemy of organized labor."

In reality, many Bohemians, including the family and eventually many descendants of Frantisek (Frank) Sismilich, were often quite vocal supporters of the labor movement. While the popular perception at the time was that the willingness of the Bohemians to perform the unskilled work in automated cigarmaking businesses caused the decline of the craftsmen's lot, the die had already been cast in favor of molds and bunch-breaking machines independent of these immigrants, and the meager existence the Bohemians could eke out in cigarmaking was one of the few avenues of work open to non-English speakers. So even though in Bohemia most cigarmakers had been women, in New York most Bohemian men had no choice but to adopt this occupation.

The fewer than 1,500 Bohemian immigrants who lived in New York City in 1870 grew to over 8,000 in 1880 and ultimately to upwards of 26,000 in 1900, during the era of Riis' research. Riis devoted an entire chapter of his book to "The Bohemians - Tenement-House Cigarmaking". It makes fascinating reading.

Samuel Gompers

Samuel Gompers, an English immigrant lad of Jewish descent, began working as a cigarmaker as a teenager, in the era of the craftsman and before the rise of the tenement houses. He described a work environment of the 1860's where

"any kind of an old loft served as a cigar shop. If there were enough windows, we had sufficient light for our work; if not, it was apparently no concern of the management. The toilet facilities were a water-closet and a sink. Our towels were the bagging that came around the bales of tobacco. Cigar shops were always dusty from the tobacco stems and powdered leaves. Benches and work tables were not designed to enable the workmen to adjust bodies and arms comfortably to work surface. Each workman supplied his own cutting board and knife blade. The tobacco leaf was prepared by strippers who drew the leaves from the heavy stem and put them in pads of about fifty. The leaves had to be handled carefully to prevent tearing. The craftsmanship of the cigarmaker was shown in his ability to utilize wrappers to the best advantage, to shave off the unusable to a hairbreadth, to roll so as to cover holes in the leaf, and to use both hands so as to make a perfectly shaped and rolled product."

Even as a youth he was interested in improving the lot of the cigar workers. He joined the union and became a veteran of the futile effort to resist the mold-and-filler system. Hand-in-hand with this system and the flood of unskilled immigrant labor came the rise of the tenement-house business model in the early 1870's.

"The manufacturers bought or rented a block of tenements and subrented the apartments to cigarmakers who with their families lived and worked in three or four rooms. The cigarmakers paid rent to their employer for living room which was their work space, bought from him their supplies, furnished their own tools, received in return a small wage for completed work, sometimes in scrip or in supplies from the company store on the ground floor. The whole family - old and young - had to work in order to earn a livelihood - work early and late, Sunday as well as Monday. The system was degrading to employer and workman. It killed craft skill and demoralized the industry."

It was during this time period, in 1872, when Samuel Gompers began forming a new cigarmakers union to organize these immigrant Bohemian cigarmakers who were shunned by the older, established unions. Part of this work involved visiting the workers apartments and preparing detailed reports which were published serially in a New York newspaper in 1881. He said of this effort,

"I tried to bring to those who had not seen the squalor of those dwelling places of poor immigrant workers a picture that would appeal to their hearts and their stomachs an their intelligence. The little children with their old-young faces and work-weary figures mutely condemned the crime industry was committing against them. There was nothing in those tenements to stimulate cleanliness and discrimination of mind and body."

In the 1870's, Gompers left cigarmaking to work in the union movement exclusively, and from there on American history was made. The Cigarmakers Union became the powerful base from which Gompers built the American labor movement. He formed as an umbrella group the powerful American Federation of Labor, which later merged to become today's AFL-CIO, the preeminent labor organization in the United States.

Cigarmaking and Frantisek (Frank) Sismilich's Family

Frantisek (Frank) Sismilich, who emigrated to the United States in 1868, settled with his family sometime prior to 1876 among the teeming immigrant masses in the tenements of the Bohemian enclave on the Lower East Side of New York City. They eked out what was, by all of the fragmentary family stories handed down over the last century, a meager existence in tenement houses long since demolished on streets which no longer exist. By 1876 at the latest they resided at 214 Third Street, then from 1879 until 1883 at 100 Cannon Street (now the site of the Baruch housing complex).

According to the 1880 census, Frantisek worked as a cigarmaker. His daughters were listed as working in the cigar factory with him, and the family's oral tradition is that the girls job was to paint the hand-decorated labels which adorned the cigars.