PAUPERISM IN THE TENEMENTS.
The reader who has followed with me the fate of the Other Half thus
far, may not experience much of a shock at being told that in eight
years 135,595 families in New York were registered as asking or
receiving charity. Perhaps, however, the intelligence will rouse him
that for five years past one person in every ten who died in this city
was buried in the Potter's Field. These facts tell a terrible story.
The first means that in a population of a million and a half, very
nearly, if not quite, half a million persons were driven, or chose, to
beg for food, or to accept it in charity at some period of the eight
years, if not during the whole of it. There is no mistake about these
figures. They are drawn from the records of the Charity Organization
Society, and represent the time during which it has been in existence.
It is not even pretended that the record is complete. To be well within
the limits, the Society's statisticians allow only three and a half to
the family, instead of the four and a half that are accepted as the
standard of calculations which deal with New York's population as a
whole. They estimate upon the basis of their every-day experience that,
allowing for those who have died, moved away, or become for the time
being at least self-supporting, eighty-five per cent. of the registry
are still within, or lingering upon, the borders of dependence.
Precisely how the case stands with this great horde of the indigent
is shown by a classification of 5,169 cases that were investigated by
the Society in one year. This was the way it turned out: 327 worthy of
continuous relief, or 6.4 per cent.; 1,269 worthy of temporary relief,
or 24.4 per cent.; 2,698 in need of work, rather than relief, or 52.2
per cent.; 875 unworthy of relief, or 17 per cent.
That is, nearly six and a half per cent, of all were utterly
helpless--orphans, cripples, or the very aged; nearly one-fourth needed
just a lift to start them on the road of independence, or of permanent
pauperism, according to the wisdom with which the lever was applied.
More than half were destitute because they had no work and were unable
to find any, and one-sixth were frauds, professional beggars, training
their children to follow in their foot-steps--a veritable "tribe of
Ishmael," tightening its grip on society as the years pass, until
society shall summon up pluck to say with Paul, "if any man will not
work neither shall he eat," and stick to it. It is worthy of note that
almost precisely the same results followed a similar investigation in
Boston. There were a few more helpless cases of the sort true charity
accounts it a gain to care for, but the proportion of a given lot that
was crippled for want of work, or unworthy, was exactly the same as in
this city. The bankrupt in hope, in courage, in purse, and in purpose,
are not peculiar to New York. They are found the world over, but we
have our full share. If further proof were wanted, it is found in the
prevalence of pauper burials. The Potter's Field stands ever for utter,
hopeless surrender. The last the poor will let go, however miserable
their lot in life, is the hope of a decent burial. But for the five
years ending with 1888 the average of burials in the Potter's Field
has been 10.03 per cent. of all. In 1889 it was 9.64. In that year
the proportion to the total mortality of those who died in hospitals,
institutions, and in the Almshouse was as 1 in 5.
[Illustration: A FLAT IN THE PAUPER BARRACKS, WEST THIRTY-EIGHTH
STREET, WITH ALL ITS FURNITURE.]
The 135,595 families inhabited no fewer than 31,000 different
tenements. I say tenements advisedly, though the society calls them
buildings, because at least ninety-nine per cent. were found in the big
barracks, the rest in shanties scattered here and there, and now and
then a fraud or an exceptional case of distress in a dwelling-house
of better class. Here, undoubtedly, allowance must be made for the
constant moving about of those who live on charity, which enables
one active beggar to blacklist a dozen houses in the year. Still the
great mass of the tenements are shown to be harboring alms-seekers.
They might almost as safely harbor the small-pox. That scourge is not
more contagious than the alms-seeker's complaint. There are houses that
have been corrupted through and through by this pestilence, until their
very atmosphere breathes beggary. More than a hundred and twenty pauper
families have been reported from time to time as living in one such
tenement.
The truth is that pauperism grows in the tenements as naturally as
weeds in a garden lot. A moral distemper, like crime, it finds there
its most fertile soil. All the surroundings of tenement-house life
favor its growth, and where once it has taken root it is harder to
dislodge than the most virulent of physical diseases. The thief is
infinitely easier to deal with than the pauper, because the very fact
of his being a thief presupposes some bottom to the man. Granted that
it is bad, there is still something, a possible handle by which to
catch him. To the pauper there is none. He is as hopeless as his own
poverty. I speak of the _pauper_, not of the honestly poor. There is
a sharp line between the two; but athwart it stands the tenement, all
the time blurring and blotting it out. "It all comes down to character
in the end," was the verdict of a philanthropist whose life has been
spent wrestling with this weary problem. And so it comes down to the
tenement, the destroyer of individuality and character everywhere.
"In nine years," said a wise and charitable physician, sadly, to me,
"I have known of but a single case of permanent improvement in a poor
tenement family." I have known of some, whose experience, extending
over an even longer stretch, was little better.
The beggar follows the "tough's" rule of life that the world owes him
a living, but his scheme of collecting it stops short of violence. He
has not the pluck to rob even a drunken man. His highest flights take
in at most an unguarded clothes-line, or a little child sent to buy
bread or beer with the pennies he clutches tightly as he skips along.
Even then he prefers to attain his end by stratagem rather than by
force, though occasionally, when the coast is clear, he rises to the
height of the bully. The ways he finds of "collecting" under the cloak
of undeserved poverty are numberless, and often reflect credit on the
man's ingenuity, if not on the man himself. I remember the shock with
which my first experience with his kind--her kind, rather, in this
case: the beggar was a woman--came home to me. On my way to and from
the office I had been giving charity regularly, as I fondly believed,
to an old woman who sat in Chatham Square with a baby done up in a
bundle of rags, moaning piteously in sunshine and rain, "Please, help
the poor." It was the baby I pitied and thought I was doing my little
to help, until one night I was just in time to rescue it from rolling
out of her lap, and found the bundle I had been wasting my pennies upon
just rags and nothing more, and the old hag dead drunk. Since then I
have encountered bogus babies, borrowed babies, and drugged babies
in the streets, and fought shy of them all. Most of them, I am glad
to say, have been banished from the street since; but they are still
occasionally to be found. It was only last winter that the officers
of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children arrested an
Italian woman who was begging along Madison Avenue with a poor little
wreck of a girl, whose rags and pinched face were calculated to tug
hard at the purse-strings of a miser. Over five dollars in nickles
and pennies were taken from the woman's pockets, and when her story of
poverty and hunger was investigated at the family's home in a Baxter
Street tenement, bank-books turned up that showed the Masonis to be
regular pauper capitalists, able to draw their check for three thousand
dollars, had they been so disposed. The woman was fined $250, a worse
punishment undoubtedly than to have sent her to prison for the rest of
her natural life. Her class has, unhappily, representatives in New York
that have not yet been brought to grief.
Nothing short of making street begging a crime has availed to clear
our city of this pest to an appreciable extent. By how much of an
effort this result has been accomplished may be gleaned from the fact
that the Charity Organization Society alone, in five years, caused the
taking up of 2,594 street beggars, and the arrest and conviction of
1,474 persistent offenders. Last year it dealt with 612 perambulating
mendicants. The police report only 19 arrests for begging during the
year 1889, but the real facts of the case are found under the heading
"vagrancy." In all, 2,633 persons were charged with this offence, 947
of them women. A goodly proportion of these latter came from the low
groggeries of the Tenth Ward, where a peculiar variety of the female
tramp-beggar is at home, the "scrub." The scrub is one degree perhaps
above the average pauper in this, that she is willing to work at least
one day in the week, generally the Jewish Sabbath. The orthodox Jew can
do no work of any sort from Friday evening till sunset on Saturday,
and this interim the scrub fills out in Ludlow Street. The pittance
she receives for this vicarious sacrifice of herself upon the altar
of the ancient faith buys her rum for at least two days of the week
at one of the neighborhood "morgues." She lives through the other
four by begging. There are distilleries in Jewtown, or just across its
borders, that depend almost wholly on her custom. Recently, when one
in Hester Street was raided because the neighbors had complained of
the boisterous hilarity of the hags over their beer, thirty two aged
"scrubs" were marched off to the station-house.
It is curious to find preconceived notions quite upset in a review of
the nationalities that go to make up this squad of street beggars. The
Irish head the list with fifteen per cent., and the native American
is only a little way behind with twelve per cent., while the Italian,
who in his own country turns beggary into a fine art, has less than
two per cent. Eight per cent. were Germans. The relative prevalence of
the races in our population does not account for this showing. Various
causes operate, no doubt, to produce it. Chief among them is, I think,
the tenement itself. It has no power to corrupt the Italian, who comes
here in almost every instance to work--no beggar would ever emigrate
from anywhere unless forced to do so. He is distinctly on its lowest
level from the start. With the Irishman the case is different. The
tenement, especially its lowest type, appears to possess a peculiar
affinity for the worse nature of the Celt, to whose best and strongest
instincts it does violence, and soonest and most thoroughly corrupts
him. The "native" twelve per cent. represent the result of this
process, the hereditary beggar of the second or third generation in the
slums.
The blind beggar alone is winked at in New York's streets, because the
authorities do not know what else to do with him. There is no provision
for him anywhere after he is old enough to strike out for himself.
The annual pittance of thirty or forty dollars which he receives
from the city serves to keep his landlord in good humor; for the rest
his misfortune and his thin disguise of selling pencils on the street
corners must provide. Until the city affords him some systematic way
of earning his living by work (as Philadelphia has done, for instance)
to banish him from the street would be tantamount to sentencing him to
death by starvation. So he possesses it in peace, that is, if he is
blind in good earnest, and begs without "encumbrance." Professional
mendicancy does not hesitate to make use of the greatest of human
afflictions as a pretence for enlisting the sympathy upon which it
thrives. Many New Yorkers will remember the French school-master who
was "blinded by a shell at the siege of Paris," but miraculously
recovered his sight when arrested and deprived of his children by the
officers of Mr. Gerry's society. When last heard of he kept a "museum"
in Hartford, and acted the overseer with financial success. His sign
with its pitiful tale, that was a familiar sight in our streets
for years and earned for him the capital upon which he started his
business, might have found a place among the curiosities exhibited
there, had it not been kept in a different sort of museum here as a
memento of his rascality. There was another of his tribe, a woman, who
begged for years with a deformed child in her arms, which she was found
to have hired at an almshouse in Genoa for fifteen francs a month. It
was a good investment, for she proved to be possessed of a comfortable
fortune. Some time before that, the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, that found her out, had broken up the dreadful
padrone system, a real slave trade in Italian children, who were
bought of poor parents across the sea and made to beg their way on
foot through France to the port whence they were shipped to this city,
to be beaten and starved here by their cruel masters and sent out to
beg, often after merciless mutilation to make them "take" better with a
pitying public.
But, after all, the tenement offers a better chance of fraud on
impulsive but thoughtless charity, than all the wretchedness of the
street, and with fewer risks. To the tender-hearted and unwary it
is, in itself, the strongest plea for help. When such a cry goes up
as was heard recently from a Mott Street den, where the family of a
"sick" husband, a despairing mother, and half a dozen children in
rags and dirt were destitute of the "first necessities of life," it
is not to be wondered at that a stream of gold comes pouring in to
relieve. It happens too often, as in that case, that a little critical
inquiry or reference to the "black list" of the Charity Organization
Society, justly dreaded only by the frauds, discovers the "sickness"
to stand for laziness, and the destitution to be the family's stock in
trade; and the community receives a shock that for once is downright
wholesome, if it imposes a check on an undiscriminating charity that is
worse than none at all.
The case referred to furnished an apt illustration of how thoroughly
corrupting pauperism is in such a setting. The tenement woke up early
to the gold mine that was being worked under its roof, and before the
day was three hours old the stream of callers who responded to the
newspaper appeal found the alley blocked by a couple of "toughs," who
exacted toll of a silver quarter from each tearful sympathizer with the
misery in the attic.
A volume might be written about the tricks of the professional beggar,
and the uses to which he turns the tenement in his trade. The Boston
"widow" whose husband turned up alive and well after she had buried
him seventeen times with tears and lamentation, and made the public
pay for the weekly funerals, is not without representatives in New
York. The "gentleman tramp" is a familiar type from our streets, and
the "once respectable Methodist" who patronized all the revivals in
town with his profitable story of repentance, only to fall from grace
into the saloon door nearest the church after the service was over,
merely transferred the scene of his operations from the tenement to the
church as the proper setting for his specialty. There is enough of real
suffering in the homes of the poor to make one wish that there were
some effective way of enforcing Paul's plan of starving the drones into
the paths of self-support: no work, nothing to eat.
[Illustration: COFFEE AT ONE CENT.]
The message came from one of the Health Department's summer doctors,
last July, to the King's Daughters' Tenement-house Committee, that
a family with a sick child was absolutely famishing in an uptown
tenement. The address was not given. The doctor had forgotten to
write it down, and before he could be found and a visitor sent to the
house the baby was dead, and the mother had gone mad. The nurse found
the father, who was an honest laborer long out of work, packing the
little corpse in an orange-box partly filled with straw, that he might
take it to the Morgue for pauper burial. There was absolutely not a
crust to eat in the house, and the other children were crying for
food. The great immediate need in that case, as in more than half of
all according to the record, was work and living wages. Alms do not
meet the emergency at all. They frequently aggravate it, degrading
and pauperizing where true help should aim at raising the sufferer
to self-respect and self-dependence. The experience of the Charity
Organization Society in raising, in eight years, 4,500 families out of
the rut of pauperism into proud, if modest, independence, without alms,
but by a system of "friendly visitation," and the work of the Society
for Improving the Condition of the Poor and kindred organizations along
the same line, shows what can be done by well-directed effort. It is
estimated that New York spends in public and private charity every year
a round $8,000,000. A small part of this sum intelligently invested
in a great labor bureau, that would bring the seeker of work and the
one with work to give together under auspices offering some degree of
mutual security, would certainly repay the amount of the investment in
the saving of much capital now worse than wasted, and would be prolific
of the best results. The ultimate and greatest need, however, the
real remedy, is to remove the cause--the tenement that was built for
"a class of whom nothing was expected," and which has come fully up to
the expectation. Tenement-house reform holds the key to the problem
of pauperism in the city. We can never get rid of either the tenement
or the pauper. The two will always exist together in New York. But by
reforming the one, we can do more toward exterminating the other than
can be done by all other means together that have yet been invented, or
ever will be.