THE WRECKS AND THE WASTE.
Pauperdom is to blame for the unjust yoking of poverty with punishment,
"charities" with "correction," in our municipal ministering to the
needs of the Nether Half. The shadow of the workhouse points like a
scornful finger toward its neighbor, the almshouse, when the sun sets
behind the teeming city across the East River, as if, could its stones
speak, it would say before night drops its black curtain between them:
"You and I are brothers. I am not more bankrupt in moral purpose than
you. A common parent begat us. Twin breasts, the tenement and the
saloon, nourished us. Vice and unthrift go hand in hand. Pauper, behold
thy brother!" And the almshouse owns the bitter relationship in silence.
Over on the islands that lie strung along the river and far up the
Sound the Nether Half hides its deformity, except on show-days, when
distinguished visitors have to be entertained and the sore is uncovered
by the authorities with due municipal pride in the exhibit. I shall
spare the reader the sight. The aim of these pages has been to lay bare
its source. But a brief glance at our proscribed population is needed
to give background and tone to the picture. The review begins with
the Charity Hospital with its thousand helpless human wrecks; takes
in the penitentiary, where the "tough" from Battle Row and Poverty
Gap is made to earn behind stone walls the living the world owes him;
a thoughtless, jolly convict-band with opportunity at last "to think"
behind the iron bars, but little desire to improve it; governed like
unruly boys, which in fact most of them are. Three of them were taken
from the dinner-table while I was there one day, for sticking pins
into each other, and were set with their faces to the wall in sight
of six hundred of their comrades for punishment. Pleading incessantly
for tobacco, when the keeper's back is turned, as the next best thing
to the whiskey they cannot get, though they can plainly make out the
saloon-signs across the stream where they robbed or "slugged" their
way to prison. Every once in a while the longing gets the best of some
prisoner from the penitentiary or the workhouse, and he risks his life
in the swift currents to reach the goal that tantilizes him with the
promise of "just one more drunk." The chances are at least even of his
being run down by some passing steamer and drowned, even if he is not
overtaken by the armed guards who patrol the shore in boats, or his
strength does not give out.
This workhouse comes next, with the broken-down hordes from the dives,
the lodging-houses, and the tramps' nests, the "hell-box"[22] rather
than the repair-shop of the city. In 1889 the registry at the workhouse
footed up 22,477, of whom some had been there as many as twenty times
before. It is the popular summer resort of the slums, but business is
brisk at this stand the year round. Not a few of its patrons drift
back periodically without the formality of a commitment, to take their
chances on the island when there is no escape from the alternative of
work in the city. Work, but not too much work, is the motto of the
establishment. The "workhouse step" is an institution that must be
observed on the island, in order to draw any comparison between it and
the snail's pace that shall do justice to the snail. Nature and man's
art have made these islands beautiful; but weeds grow luxuriantly in
their gardens, and spiders spin their cobwebs unmolested in the borders
of sweet-smelling box. The work which two score of hired men could do
well is too much for these thousands.
[Footnote 22: In printing-offices the broken, worn-out, and useless
type is thrown into the "hell-box," to be recast at the foundry.]
Rows of old women, some smoking stumpy, black clay-pipes, others
knitting or idling, all grumbling, sit or stand under the trees that
hedge in the almshouse, or limp about in the sunshine, leaning on
crutches or bean-pole staffs. They are a "growler-gang" of another
sort than may be seen in session on the rocks of the opposite shore at
that very moment. They grumble and growl from sunrise to sunset, at
the weather, the breakfast, the dinner, the supper; at pork and beans
as at corned beef and cabbage; at their Thanksgiving dinner as at the
half rations of the sick ward; at the past that had no joy, at the
present whose comfort they deny, and at the future without promise. The
crusty old men in the next building are not a circumstance to them. The
warden, who was in charge of the almshouse for many years, had become
so snappish and profane by constant association with a thousand cross
old women that I approached him with some misgivings, to request his
permission to "take" a group of a hundred or so who were within shot of
my camera. He misunderstood me.
"Take them?" he yelled. "Take the thousand of them and be welcome. They
will never be still, by ----, till they are sent up on Hart's Island in
a box, and I'll be blamed if I don't think they will growl then at the
style of the funeral."
And he threw his arms around me in an outburst of enthusiasm over the
wondrous good luck that had sent a friend indeed to his door. I felt it
to be a painful duty to undeceive him. When I told him that I simply
wanted the old women's picture, he turned away in speechless disgust,
and to his dying day, I have no doubt, remembered my call as the day of
the champion fool's visit to the island.
When it is known that many of these old people have been sent to the
almshouse to die by their heartless children, for whom they had worked
faithfully as long as they were able, their growling and discontent is
not hard to understand. Bitter poverty threw them all "on the county,"
often on the wrong county at that. Very many of them are old-country
poor, sent, there is reason to believe, to America by the authorities
to get rid of the obligation to support them. "The almshouse," wrote a
good missionary, "affords a sad illustration of St. Paul's description
of the 'last days.' The class from which comes our poorhouse population
is to a large extent 'without natural affection.'" I was reminded by
his words of what my friend, the doctor, had said to me a little while
before: "Many a mother has told me at her child's death-bed, 'I cannot
afford to lose it. It costs too much to bury it.' And when the little
one did die there was no time for the mother's grief. The question
crowded on at once, 'where shall the money come from?' Natural feelings
and affections are smothered in the tenements." The doctor's experience
furnished a sadly appropriate text for the priest's sermon.
Pitiful as these are, sights and sounds infinitely more saddening
await us beyond the gate that shuts this world of woe off from one
whence the light of hope and reason have gone out together. The
shuffling of many feet on the macadamized roads heralds the approach
of a host of women, hundreds upon hundreds--beyond the turn in the
road they still keep coming, marching with the faltering step, the
unseeing look and the incessant, senseless chatter that betrays the
darkened mind. The lunatic women of the Blackwell's Island Asylum are
taking their afternoon walk. Beyond, on the wide lawn, moves another
still stranger procession, a file of women in the asylum dress of dull
gray, hitched to a queer little wagon that, with its gaudy adornments,
suggests a cross between a baby-carriage and a circus-chariot. One
crazy woman is strapped in the seat; forty tug at the rope to which
they are securely bound. This is the "chain-gang," so called once
in scoffing ignorance of the humane purpose the contrivance serves.
These are the patients afflicted with suicidal mania, who cannot be
trusted at large for a moment with the river in sight, yet must have
their daily walk as a necessary part of their treatment. So this wagon
was invented by a clever doctor to afford them at once exercise and
amusement. A merry-go-round in the grounds suggests a variation of this
scheme. Ghastly suggestion of mirth, with that stricken host advancing
on its aimless journey! As we stop to see it pass, the plaintive
strains of a familiar song float through a barred window in the gray
stone building. The voice is sweet, but inexpressibly sad: "Oh, how my
heart grows weary, far from----" The song breaks off suddenly in a low,
troubled laugh. She has forgotten, forgotten----. A woman in the ranks,
whose head has been turned toward the window, throws up her hands
with a scream. The rest stir uneasily. The nurse is by her side in
an instant with words half soothing, half stern. A messenger comes in
haste from the asylum to ask us not to stop. Strangers may not linger
where the patients pass. It is apt to excite them. As we go in with him
the human file is passing yet, quiet restored. The troubled voice of
the unseen singer still gropes vainly among the lost memories of the
past for the missing key: "Oh! how my heart grows weary, far from----"
"Who is she, doctor?"
"Hopeless case. She will never see home again."
An average of seventeen hundred women this asylum harbors; the asylum
for men up on Ward's Island even more. Altogether 1,419 patients
were admitted to the city asylums for the insane in 1889, and at the
end of the year 4,913 remained in them. There is a constant ominous
increase in this class of helpless unfortunates that are thrown on
the city's charity. Quite two hundred are added year by year, and the
asylums were long since so overcrowded that a great "farm" had to
be established on Long Island to receive the surplus. The strain of
our hurried, over-worked life has something to do with this. Poverty
has more. For these are all of the poor. It is the harvest of sixty
and a hundred-fold, the "fearful rolling up and rolling down from
generation to generation, through all the ages, of the weakness, vice,
and moral darkness of the past."[23] The curse of the island haunts
all that come once within its reach. "No man or woman," says Dr. Louis
L. Seaman, who speaks from many years' experience in a position that
gave him full opportunity to observe the facts, "who is 'sent up' to
these colonies ever returns to the city scot-free. There is a lien,
visible or hidden, upon his or her present or future, which too often
proves stronger than the best purposes and fairest opportunities of
social rehabilitation. The under world holds in rigorous bondage every
unfortunate or miscreant who has once 'served time.' There is often
tragic interest in the struggles of the ensnared wretches to break
away from the meshes spun about them. But the maelstrom has no bowels
of mercy; and the would-be fugitives are flung back again and again
into the devouring whirlpool of crime and poverty, until the end is
reached on the dissecting-table, or in the Potter's Field. What can the
moralist or scientist do by way of resuscitation? Very little at best.
The flotsam and jetsam are mere shreds and fragments of wasted lives.
Such a ministry must begin at the sources--is necessarily prophylactic,
nutritive, educational. On these islands there are no flexible twigs,
only gnarled, blasted, blighted trunks, insensible to moral or social
influences."
[Footnote 23: Dr. Louis L. Seaman, late chief of staff of the
Blackwell's Island hospitals: "Social Waste of a Great City," read
before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1886.]
Sad words, but true. The commonest keeper soon learns to pick out
almost at sight the "cases" that will leave the penitentiary, the
workhouse, the almshouse, only to return again and again, each time
more hopeless, to spend their wasted lives in the bondage of the island.
The alcoholic cells in Bellevue Hospital are a way-station for a goodly
share of them on their journeys back and forth across the East River.
Last year they held altogether 3,694 prisoners, considerably more
than one-fourth of the whole number of 13,813 patients that went in
through the hospital gates. The daily average of "cases" in this, the
hospital of the poor, is over six hundred. The average daily census of
all the prisons, hospitals, workhouses, and asylums in the charge of
the Department of Charities and Correction last year was about 14,000,
and about one employee was required for every ten of this army to keep
its machinery running smoothly. The total number admitted in 1889 to
all the jails and institutions in the city and on the islands was
138,332. To the almshouse alone 38,600 were admitted; 9,765 were there
to start the new year with, and 553 were born with the dark shadow of
the poorhouse overhanging their lives, making a total of 48,918. In
the care of all their wards the commissioners expended $2,343,372. The
appropriation for the police force in 1889 was $4,409,550.94, and for
the criminal courts and their machinery $403,190. Thus the first cost
of maintaining our standing army of paupers, criminals, and sick poor,
by direct taxation, was last year $7,156,112.94.