OMAHA AND HER HOMELESS
"_A good mayor is useful; a man should not recoil before the good he
may be able to do._"--HUGO.
In the Antelope State, on the Big Muddy River, on a plateau rising from
the west bank of the river is built the city of Omaha, the metropolis
of the State, with a population of 150,000 people. Omaha was called
the "Gate City" on account of its important commercial position when
it was founded in 1854. It was one of the first to breathe of the
mighty progress of civilization in our great West; and, like all of
our growing Western cities, is eminently an industrial center--meat
packing, breweries, smelters, machine shops, brick yards,--and it is
an important railway center. Because of all of this, it continually
beckons through its portals a vast number of the army of the seekers
after work. Omaha, too, boasts of its culture and humanity, and of a
social distinction around which cluster names which in the years to
come will be intimately connected with the history of the country.
I reached Omaha on a Sunday morning in September. What a gloomy day
for the penniless toiler this God's day is, in the great city, when
unwashed, unfed, and homeless, he walks the streets! All places for
obtaining work are closed and he can simply drift until Monday morning,
when industrial activity is resumed.
I found the city of Omaha spending thousands of dollars for the
entertainment and amusement of visitors to the annual convention of a
great fraternal organization. While its stores and blocks and public
buildings had been placed on dress parade with gaudy decorations, and
while the glad hand of hospitality was stretched out to these guests
from thousands of its citizens, there was no welcome for the honest
laborer who might happen to be homeless and penniless within its gates,
and no provision for him but the filthy concrete floor of the huge
steel cages, beneath the crumbling plastered walls of the city jail.
I walked down the darker streets in the lower part of the city where
the out-of-work are forced to gather. In Boston I thought I had never
seen such a gathering of human misery as I found on Boston Common, but
nowhere have I found that condition so evident in a smaller way than in
Omaha.
Approaching a policeman, I asked for the public baths. It was my first
test to find out what our Western cities were doing to provide that
great sanitary necessity. I was told there was "nothing doing," and
the policeman glanced significantly towards the "Big Muddy." I do not
know of a single public bath west of Chicago except in Denver.
I then decided to try for the first time the Young Men's Christian
Association, which poses as an institution assisting those needing
help, and which is supported by benevolently inclined contributors
and its income enhanced in the same way. When I applied at the Omaha
Y. M. C. A. for a free bed and bath, a most affable, well-dressed,
neat-looking clerk behind the desk assured me nothing would give him
greater pleasure than to accommodate me, but their beds and rooms were
fixed up "pretty nicely," in fact, too nicely to be given away. Then I
asked for a bath, and he assured me that was a member's privilege only.
I then sought the Salvation Army. My answer there was to the effect
that if they gave fellows like me free beds they would be overrun every
night.
Next I went to the Union Gospel Mission on Douglas Street. The door to
the lodging house upstairs was locked. Downstairs a gospel meeting was
being held. I waited until the meeting was concluded. The dormitory
was not open, there were bright lights there, and people were going to
their beds. I approached the attendant, who was closing the door, and
asked him if he would give me a bed. He kept right on closing the door
in my face, meanwhile saying that he wished that he had a free bed
himself, that he slept in the street when he hadn't "the price."
I then applied to members of the Volunteers of America. They could do
nothing for me as they had no lodging house, but thought I might find
shelter at the City Mission. I went there and found the place locked
and dark. It was a reception about as cordial as that which I received
once at Genoa where I went to visit the birthplace of Columbus. After
standing on tiptoe reaching up and ringing the bell of that curious
house for about five minutes a barber stepped out of the house next
door and said in a mixture of Italian and broken English: "Eh, Miestro
Colombo, eh not-a-to-home. No ring-a-de bell so damn-a loud. Miestro
Colombo eh dead, all a-right dead,--yes-a-four hundred years!"
Later with two or three other "down and outs," I lay down on the grass
in Jefferson Park. Very soon a policeman came along and drove us out.
"How many times have I got to tell you fellows to get out of here? Now,
_get_ out of here!"
A short time afterward I met another policeman and asked him where I
could get a free bed, telling him I was broke. He looked at me rather
savagely and said, "You can't get nothing like that in this town." Then
he added, "You might go to the city jail, but it is chock full now that
the car strike is on."
By this time it was midnight. From down in the lower part of the
city I saw a man standing listlessly on the curbing. In a moment he
sat down. I strolled along and sat down beside him. He was penniless,
starving, had eaten nothing since morning, and had no place to rest,
but he was not hopeless. In fact, he was in a rather happy mood, for
he had a place to work ten miles out in the country, on a farm for one
dollar and a half a day and board, and if he made good it would be an
all winter job. Soon after daybreak he was going to start out. When I
told him I, too, was without a place to sleep, he told me I was welcome
to his blankets which he had down in an old shed under the tracks where
the owner had let him spread them down the night before. He doubted,
however, whether I could stand it.
"I tried it last night, but if there was one I believe there were ten
thousand rats infesting the place. I was fearful of losing myself for
one minute for fear they might attack me, and so I spent the night just
as I am spending this one. The farmer did not want me to come out until
Monday morning, although I wanted to go out Saturday with him when he
hired me."
Thoroughly tired out, I bade my hopeful midnight acquaintance
good-night, and sought my hotel. As I lay in my comfortable bed I
thought of the homeless, moneyless ones who belonged to Omaha that
night and who were shelterless and hungry.
The next day I visited the City Jail. There I found eight ten-by-ten
cells, the bull-pens. Crowded into a single one of these, I counted
fourteen men. The shocking closeness of the place was stifling, and I
hurried out.
I saw, far up the street, a great mob pressing down, and as soon as I
got within hearing and seeing distance, I made out two men driving a
team of horses hitched to an old wagon partly filled with potatoes. The
men were driving directly down the car track, hindering the traffic
of the cars. Two policemen stood back of these men trying to get hold
of the lines, and they were beating them or trying to beat them into
insensibility. The men's shirts were torn into shreds and the blood
ran down over their faces and over their clothes to the bottom of the
wagon. I did not find what the trouble was about, but it was as though
I had caught a leaf from those other days of social unrest, when the
poor of France cried for bread, and the thoughtless paid so dearly for
their folly.
There was no place for a homeless man in Omaha that night--not even in
the city jail. A strike was on.