WORKING WAY DOWN
After some years' experience in missions and mission churches, I would
find it very hard if I were a workingman living in a tenement not to
be antagonistic to them; for, in large measure, such work is done on
the assumption that people are poor and degraded through laxity in
morals. The scheme of salvation is a salvation for the individual;
social salvation is out of the question. Social conditions cannot be
touched, because in all rotten social conditions, there is a thin red
line which always leads to the rich man or woman who is responsible
for them.
Coming in contact with these ugly social facts continuously, led me to
this belief. It came very slowly as did also the opinion that the
missionary himself or the pastor, be he as wise as Solomon, as
eloquent as Demosthenes, as virtuous as St. Francis, has no social
standing whatever among the people whose alms support the
institutions, religious and philanthropic, of which these men are the
executive heads. The fellowship of the saints is a pure fiction, has
absolutely no foundation in fact in a city like New York except as
the poor saints have it by themselves.
Tim Grogan jolted me into a new political economy; the crowded streets
of the East Side on a summer night gave me a new theology. I stood one
night in August on the tower of the old church and looked down upon
the sweltering mass that covered the roofs, fire escapes and
sidewalks. The roofs were littered with naked and half-naked children
panting for breath. Down on the crowded streets thousands of little
children darted in and out like sparrows, escaping as if by miracle
the vehicles of all sorts and descriptions. Crowded baby-carriages
lined the sidewalks. The stoops, too, were crowded. What a mass of
humans! What a ganglia of living wires! As I looked on this vast
multitude, I questioned the orthodox theology that held me in its
grip. Most of these people belonged to another race. And I stood at
that moment firmly rooted in the belief that this multitude was
inevitably doomed! Let me put it frankly, even though it seems brutal:
doomed to hell!
I am unable to analyze the quick currents of thought that went through
my mind at that instant. I cannot explain how the change came. I know
that there came to me a bigger thought than any I had ever known, and
that thought so thrilled me with human feeling, with love for men,
that I said to my soul: "Soul, if this multitude is doomed to hell, be
brave; gird up your loins and go with them!"
In that tenement district people were being murdered by the tens of
thousands by tuberculosis, by defective plumbing, by new diseases born
of the herding of men and women like cattle. I made some feeble
attempt to investigate, to ascertain, to acquaint myself with the
facts, and my investigation led me to this result--a result that the
lapse of years has not altered; that the private ownership of
tenements--the private profits in housing--was not only the mother of
the great white plague, but of most of the plagues down there that
endanger health. It led me to the belief also that the struggle for
bodily health, the struggle to survive, was so fierce as to leave
little time for soul health or mental health! It was a source of
continual wonder to me that people so helpless and so neglected were
as good as they were, or as healthy as they were. It did not seem
reasonable to lay the blame at the doors of the owners of the
tenements. Many of them had a tenement only as a source of income--and
to acquire the tenement had taken long years of savings, earnings and
sacrifices. It was part of the great game of business, the game of
"live I, die you!"
The churches and synagogues are of little vital importance there,
because they ignore social conditions, or largely ignore them. And
there is a reason for this also, and the reason is that they are
supported by the people--the very people who perpetuate the evils
against which prophet, priest and pastor ought to cry out
continually. The protest against such conditions is a negligible
quantity.
There is a protest, an outcry, but it is related neither to the church
nor to the synagogue. The East Side has a soul, but it is not an
ecclesiastical soul! It is a soul that is alive--so much alive to the
interest of the people that many times I felt ashamed of myself when I
listened to the socialistic orators on the street corners and in the
East Side halls. They were stirring up the minds of the people. They
were not merely making them discontented with conditions, but they
were offering a programme of reconstruction--a programme that included
a trowel as well as a sword.
The soul of the East Side expressed itself in the Yiddish press,
daily, weekly, and monthly, and in Yiddish literature, and in the
spoken word of the propagandist whose ideal, though limited in
literary expression, made him a flame of living fire. It was this soul
of the East Side that drove me against my will to study the relation
of politics to the condition of the people. One of the first things
that I discovered was the grip that Tammany had on the people. Every
saloon keeper was a power in the community. Men, of any force of
character whatever, who were willing to hold their hands behind their
backs for Tammany graft, were singled out by the organization for some
moiety of honour. Small merchants found it to their advantage to keep
on the right side of the saloon keepers and the Tammany leaders. I
remember trying to express this thought in an uptown church to a
wealthy congregation; and I remember distinctly, also, that I was
rebuked by one of the leading lights of the missionary society of
which I was a part. I was informed that my business was to "save
souls," and in my public addresses to tell how I saved them; that
political conditions must be left to the politicians--and it was done.
To the old church at the corner of Market and Henry streets came
Dowling. He followed me as a matter of fellowship--we loved each
other. And came also Dave Ranney, the "puddler from Pittsburg."
On the first anniversary of Dave's conversion, I gathered a hundred
wastrels of the Bowery together and gave them a dinner at the church.
Dave, of course, was the guest of honour. When my guests were full and
warm, they became reminiscent, and I urged them, a few of them, to
tell us their stories--to unfold the torn manuscripts of their lives.
Dave told his first.
"Boys," he said, "I was one of de toughest gazabos what ever hung
aroun' de square. I met dis man an' tried t' bleed 'im, but it warn't
no go--'e was on to de game and cudn't be touch't.
"I giv'd 'im a song an' dance story fur weeks. One day 'e sez to me,
sez 'e, 'Chum!'--well, say boys, when I went out an' had a luk at
meself, sez I, 'Ye dhirty loafer, if a man like dat calls y' "chum,"
why don't y' take a brace an' get on de dead level?' So I did an' I've
been on de dead level ever since--ain't I, boss?"
I was able to place Dave as janitor of the church. After he had been
there for a while and comfortably housed in the janitor's quarters in
the basement, he thought it a propitious time to be reconciled to his
wife; so we arranged to have Mary come down and inspect the place. We
put extra work into the cleaning of the quarters, furnishing it with
some sticks of furniture. Reconciliations were getting to be an old
story with Mary, and Dave knew he was going to have difficulty in this
new attempt. He finally persuaded her to make a visit to the church.
When he was ready, Dave, in a most apologetic tone, said:
"There is just one thing lacking here."
"What is it Dave?"
"A white tie."
"Where?"
"On you."
The white tie as ecclesiastical appendage I had avoided. I despised
it. But Dave assured me that if Mary came down to look the church
over, she would be more interested in my appearance than in the
appearance of the church, because what she really wanted was an
assurance that Dave was "on the square!" and if he could introduce
her to a real minister as his friend, it would enhance his chance.
I sent Dave to the Bowery for a five cent white string tie, and I
borrowed a Prince Albert coat. There was an old stovepipe hat in the
church--sort of legacy from former pastorates--and it was trotted out,
carefully brushed and put on the study table. Then Mary appeared! Dave
had instructed me to put up a "tall talk," so I put up the tallest
possible. Mary inspected the church, the quarters and the minister;
then she looked at Dave and said in an undertone--"This looks on the
level."
"You bet your sweet life!" Dave said.
So Mary was installed as "the lady of the temple" at Sixty-one Henry
Street, and for seven years ministered to the poor and the needy, and
kept in order the House of God. After her death, Dave remained at the
church about a year; then he became my successor as missionary to the
lodging houses on the Bowery, where he still works--a sort of humble
doctor of the humanities; feeding the hungry, clothing the naked,
comforting men in despair.
It seemed to me at that time that what a weak church like that most
needed was a strong, powerful church to put its arms around it and
give it support. I interviewed Dr. Parkhurst, as I was Chairman of a
Committee of the City Vigilance League which he organized. The result
was that Dr. Parkhurst's church gave it for a year support and
absolute independence of action at the same time. Then the Rev. John
Hopkins Dennison, who had been Dr. Parkhurst's assistant, superseded
me in the care of the church, and was able to bring to its support
help that I could not have touched. Mr. Dennison's service to that
church is worthy of a better record than it has yet received. He
performed brilliant service, intensified the life of the church and
gathered around it a band of noble people. He transformed the tower of
the church into a kind of modern monastery in which he lived himself,
and in which Dowling, the old Irish tinker, had a place also, and
which he made a centre of ten years' missionary work chiefly among the
lodging houses where I found him.
One day Dowling was walking along the Bowery when a hand was laid
roughly on his shoulder and a voice said:
"Ain't you Dowling?"
"Yes."
"What did you do with the loot?"
In the Sepoy Rebellion in India, he had looted the palace of a Rajah
with two other soldiers. The most valuable items of the booty were
several bamboo canes stuffed with diamonds, rubies and sapphires. In
the act of burying them for protection and hiding, one of the soldiers
was shot dead; the other two escaped and separated, and all these
years each of them had lived in the suspicion that the other had gone
back for the loot, and they both discovered on the Bowery that
neither of them had and that this valuable stuff was buried in far-off
India. Dowling wrote to the Governor-General and told of his part in
the affair and volunteered to come out and locate it. But by this time
his body was wasted, his steps were tottering and his head bent.
Five-hundred dollars were appropriated by the Indian Government to
take him out; but Dowling was destined for another journey; and, in
the old tower that he loved so well and where he was beloved by every
one who knew him, he lay down and died. They buried him in Plainfield,
N.J., and his friends put over him a stone bearing these words that
were so characteristic of his life:
"HE WENT ABOUT DOING GOOD"
My next service was in a city of a second class beyond the Mississippi
River. I had been invited as a pulpit supply in one of its largest
churches, but when I arrived I found them in a wrangle over the pastor
who had just left and by whose recommendation I was to fill the
pulpit. I arrived in the city on a Sunday morning and went from my
hotel to the church prepared to preach. I stood for a few minutes in
the vestibule, and what I heard led me to go straight out again, never
to return.
My first impression of the city was that it contained more vital
democracy than any city I had ever been in. It takes an Old World
proletarian a long time to outgrow a sense of subserviency. As a
missionary and almoner of the rich in New York, this sense was very
strong in me. In the West I felt this vital democracy so keenly and
saw the vision of political independence so clearly, that my very
blood seemed to change. Politically, I was born again.