and who later was to become head of the American 

 Federation of Labor, Roosevelt drafted and introduced 

 a bill in the New York legislature to help clean up the 

 conditions. Passed in 1884, the bill was declared uncon- 

 stitutional in 1885 by the New York State Court of 

 Appeals which said, "It cannot be perceived how the 

 cigar maker is to be improved in his health or his morals 

 by forcing him from his home and its hallowed asso- 

 ciations and beneficent influences, to ply his trade 

 elsewhere." 



Roosevelt said publicly that the judges "knew noth- 

 ing whatever of tenement house conditions." Later, 

 when Roosevelt became the state's governor, he helped 

 clean up the situation, but it was really technology that 

 helped end the deplorable tenement conditions of the 

 19th century cigar makers. In 1900, the New York State 

 Tenement House Commission said: 



Through the invention of a machine called the 

 suction table, the manufacture of cigars is 

 being gradually removed into factories; and 

 it is the opinion of those best acquainted with 

 the trade that it will soon disappear from the 

 tenement houses. 



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