Poverty Fiction

Many people came to America in the early 1900s looking for jobs, opportunity, and freedom, and a lot of them were kids. But what happened to all these immigrant children after they passed inspection at New York’s Ellis Island - that is, if they passed inspection? Life was not easy for immigrants. Large families lived in small, one-room tenement apartments with failing plumbing and few windows. Children had to go to school with kids from different countries and learn to read and write a new language.

Daniel De Leon was an American Marxist journalist and editor, theoretician, political, and trade union organizer. De Leon was a leading figure in American socialism and credited as the originator in revolutionary industrial unionism. In "Patriotism and Poverty", a short piece published in The Daily People paper in July 1900, De Leon discusses these two factors in connection with the exploitation of the proletariat in the context of a capitalist state.