THE REIGN OF RUM.
Where God builds a church the devil builds next door--a saloon, is
an old saying that has lost its point in New York. Either the devil
was on the ground first, or he has been doing a good deal more in the
way of building. I tried once to find out how the account stood, and
counted to 111 Protestant churches, chapels, and places of worship of
every kind below Fourteenth Street, 4,065 saloons. The worst half of
the tenement population lives down there, and it has to this day the
worst half of the saloons. Uptown the account stands a little better,
but there are easily ten saloons to every church to-day. I am afraid,
too, that the congregations are larger by a good deal; certainly the
attendance is steadier and the contributions more liberal the week
round, Sunday included. Turn and twist it as we may, over against every
bulwark for decency and morality which society erects, the saloon
projects its colossal shadow, omen of evil wherever it falls into the
lives of the poor.
Nowhere is its mark so broad or so black. To their misery it sticketh
closer than a brother, persuading them that within its doors only is
refuge, relief. It has the best of the argument, too, for it is true,
worse pity, that in many a tenement-house block the saloon is the one
bright and cheery and humanly decent spot to be found. It is a sorry
admission to make, that to bring the rest of the neighborhood up to
the level of the saloon would be one way of squelching it; but it is
so. Wherever the tenements thicken, it multiplies. Upon the direst
poverty of their crowds it grows fat and prosperous, levying upon it
a tax heavier than all the rest of its grievous burdens combined. It
is not yet two years since the Excise Board made the rule that no
three corners of any street-crossing, not already so occupied, should
thenceforward be licensed for rum-selling. And the tardy prohibition
was intended for the tenement districts. Nowhere else is there need of
it. One may walk many miles through the homes of the poor searching
vainly for an open reading-room, a cheerful coffee-house, a decent club
that is not a cloak for the traffic in rum. The dramshop yawns at every
step, the poor man's club, his forum and his haven of rest when weary
and disgusted with the crowding, the quarrelling, and the wretchedness
at home. With the poison dealt out there he takes his politics, in
quality not far apart. As the source, so the stream. The rumshop turns
the political crank in New York. The natural yield is rum politics. Of
what that means, successive Boards of Aldermen, composed in a measure,
if not of a majority, of dive-keepers, have given New York a taste. The
disgrace of the infamous "Boodle Board" will be remembered until some
corruption even fouler crops out and throws it into the shade.
What relation the saloon bears to the crowds, let me illustrate by a
comparison. Below Fourteenth Street were, when the Health Department
took its first accurate census of the tenements a year and a half ago,
13,220 of the 32,390 buildings classed as such in the whole city.
Of the eleven hundred thousand tenants, not quite half a million,
embracing a host of more than sixty-three thousand children under
five years of age, lived below that line. Below it, also, were 234 of
the cheap lodging-houses accounted for by the police last year, with
a total of four millions and a half of lodgers for the twelvemonth,
59 of the city's 110 pawnshops, and 4,065 of its 7,884 saloons. The
four most densely peopled precincts, the Fourth, Sixth, Tenth, and
Eleventh, supported together in round numbers twelve hundred saloons,
and their returns showed twenty-seven per cent. of the whole number
of arrests for the year. The Eleventh Precinct, that has the greatest
and the poorest crowds of all--it is the Tenth Ward--and harbored
one-third of the army of homeless lodgers and fourteen per cent. of
all the prisoners of the year, kept 485 saloons going in 1889. It
is not on record that one of them all failed for want of support. A
number of them, on the contrary, had brought their owners wealth and
prominence. From their bars these eminent citizens stepped proudly into
the councils of the city and the State. The very floor of one of the
bar-rooms, in a neighborhood that lately resounded with the cry for
bread of starving workmen, is paved with silver dollars!
East Side poverty is not alone in thus rewarding the tyrants that
sweeten its cup of bitterness with their treacherous poison. The Fourth
Ward points with pride to the honorable record of the conductors of
its "Tub of Blood," and a dozen bar-rooms with less startling titles;
the West Side to the wealth and "social" standing of the owners of
such resorts as the "Witches' Broth" and the "Plug Hat" in the region
of Hell's Kitchen three-cent whiskey, names ominous of the concoctions
brewed there and of their fatally generous measure. Another ward,
that boasts some of the best residences and the bluest blood on
Manhattan Island, honors with political leadership in the ruling
party the proprietor of one of the most disreputable Black-and-Tan
dives and dancing-hells to be found anywhere. Criminals and policemen
alike do him homage. The list might be strung out to make texts for
sermons with a stronger home flavor than many that are preached in
our pulpits on Sunday. But I have not set out to write the political
history of New York. Besides, the list would not be complete. Secret
dives are skulking in the slums and out of them, that are not labelled
respectable by a Board of Excise and support no "family entrance."
Their business, like that of the stale-beer dives, is done through
a side-door the week through. No one knows the number of unlicensed
saloons in the city. Those who have made the matter a study estimate
it at a thousand, more or less. The police make occasional schedules
of a few and report them to headquarters. Perhaps there is a farce in
the police court, and there the matter ends. Rum and "influence" are
synonymous terms. The interests of the one rarely suffer for the want
of attention from the other.
[Illustration: A DOWNTOWN "MORGUE."]
With the exception of these free lances that treat the law openly
with contempt, the saloons all hang out a sign announcing in fat
type that no beer or liquor is sold to children. In the down-town
"morgues" that make the lowest degradation of tramp-humanity pan out a
paying interest, as in the "reputable resorts" uptown where Inspector
Byrnes's men spot their worthier quarry elbowing citizens whom the
idea of associating with a burglar would give a shock they would not
get over for a week, this sign is seen conspicuously displayed. Though
apparently it means submission to a beneficent law, in reality the sign
is a heartless, cruel joke. I doubt if one child in a thousand, who
brings his growler to be filled at the average New York bar, is sent
away empty-handed, if able to pay for what he wants. I once followed a
little boy, who shivered in bare feet on a cold November night so that
he seemed in danger of smashing his pitcher on the icy pavement, into
a Mulberry Street saloon where just such a sign hung on the wall, and
forbade the barkeeper to serve the boy. The man was as astonished at
my interference as if I had told him to shut up his shop and go home,
which in fact I might have done with as good a right, for it was after
1 A.M., the legal closing hour. He was mighty indignant too,
and told me roughly to go away and mind my business, while he filled
the pitcher. The law prohibiting the selling of beer to minors is about
as much respected in the tenement-house districts as the ordinance
against swearing. Newspaper readers will recall the story, told little
more than a year ago, of a boy who after carrying beer a whole day
for a shopful of men over on the East Side, where his father worked,
crept into the cellar to sleep off the effects of his own share in the
rioting. It was Saturday evening. Sunday his parents sought him high
and low; but it was not until Monday morning, when the shop was opened,
that he was found, killed and half-eaten by the rats that overran the
place.
All the evil the saloon does in breeding poverty and in corrupting
politics; all the suffering it brings into the lives of its thousands
of innocent victims, the wives and children of drunkards it sends forth
to curse the community; its fostering of crime and its shielding of
criminals--it is all as nothing to this, its worst offence. In its
affinity for the thief there is at least this compensation that, as
it makes, it also unmakes him. It starts him on his career only to
trip him up and betray him into the hands of the law, when the rum
he exchanged for his honesty has stolen his brains as well. For the
corruption of the child there is no restitution. None is possible. It
saps the very vitals of society; undermines its strongest defences, and
delivers them over to the enemy. Fostered and filled by the saloon, the
"growler" looms up in the New York street boy's life, baffling the most
persistent efforts to reclaim him. There is no escape from it; no hope
for the boy, once its blighting grip is upon him. Thenceforward the
logic of the slums, that the world which gave him poverty and ignorance
for his portion "owes him a living," is his creed, and the career of
the "tough" lies open before him, a beaten track to be blindly followed
to a bad end in the wake of the growler.