THE BEND IS LAID BY THE HEELS
If there be any to whom the travail through which we have just come
seems like a mighty tempest in a teapot, let him quit thinking so.
It was not a small matter. To be sure, the wrong could have been
undone in a day by the authorities, had they been so minded. That
it was not undone was largely, and illogically, because no one had
a word to say in its defence. When there are two sides to a thing,
it is not difficult to get at the right of it in an argument, and
to carry public opinion for the right. But when there is absolutely
nothing to be said against a proposed reform, it seems to be human
nature--American human nature, at all events--to expect it to carry
itself through with the general good wishes but no particular lift
from any one. It is a very charming expression of our faith in the
power of the right to make its way, only it is all wrong: it will
not make its way in the generation that sits by to see it move. It
has got to be moved along, like everything else in this world, by
men. That is how we take title to the name. That is what is the
matter with half our dead-letter laws. The other half were just
still-born. It is so, at this moment, with the children's playgrounds
in New York. Probably all thinking people subscribe to-day to the
statement that it is the business of the municipality to give its
children a chance to play, just as much as to give them schools
to go to. Everybody applauds it. The authorities do not question
it; but still they do not provide playgrounds. Private charity has
to keep a beggarly half-dozen going where there ought to be forty
or fifty, as a matter of right, not of charity. Call it official
conservatism, inertia, treachery, call it by soft names or hard;
in the end it comes to this, I suppose, that it is the whetstone
upon which our purpose is sharpened, and in that sense we have
apparently got to be thankful for it. So a man may pummel his
adversary and accept him as a means of grace at the same time. If
there were no snags, there would be no wits to clear them away,
or strong arms to wield the axe. It was the same story with the
Mulberry Bend. Until the tramp lodging-houses were closed, until
the Bend was gone, it seemed as if progress were flat down impossible.
As I said, decency had to begin there, or not at all.
[Illustration: The Mulberry Bend as it was.]
Before I tackle the Bend, perhaps I had better explain how I came
to take up photographing as a--no, not exactly as a pastime. It
was never that with me. I had use for it, and beyond that I never
went. I am downright sorry to confess here that I am no good at all
as a photographer, for I would like to be. The thing is a constant
marvel to me, and an unending delight. To watch the picture come
out upon the plate that was blank before, and that saw with me for
perhaps the merest fraction of a second, maybe months before, the
thing it has never forgotten, is a new miracle every time. If I
were a clergyman I would practise photography and preach about it.
But I am jealous of the miracle. I do not want it explained to me
in terms of HO(2) or such like formulas, learned, but so hopelessly
unsatisfying. I do not want my butterfly stuck on a pin and put in
a glass case. I want to see the sunlight on its wings as it flits
from flower to flower, and I don't care a rap what its Latin name
may be. Anyway, it is not its name. The sun and the flower and
the butterfly know that. The man who sticks a pin in it does not,
and never will, for he knows not its language. Only the poet does
among men. So, you see, I am disqualified from being a photographer.
Also, I am clumsy, and impatient of details. The axe was ever more
to my liking than the graving-tool. I have lived to see the day of
the axe and enjoy it, and now I rejoice in the coming of the men
and women who know; the Jane Addamses, who to heart add knowledge
and training, and with gentle hands bind up wounds which, alas!
too often I struck. It is as it should be. I only wish they would
see it and leave me out for my sins.
But there! I started out to tell about how I came to be
a photographer, and here I am, off on the subject of philanthropy
and social settlements. To be precise, then, I began taking pictures
by proxy. It was upon my midnight trips with the sanitary police
that the wish kept cropping up in me that there were some way of
putting before the people what I saw there. A drawing might have
done it, but I cannot draw, never could. There are certain sketches
of mine now on record that always arouse the boisterous hilarity
of the family. They were made for the instruction of our first baby
in wolf-lore, and I know they were highly appreciated by him at the
time. Maybe the fashion in wolves has changed since. But, anyway,
a drawing would not have been evidence of the kind I wanted. We used
to go in the small hours of the morning into the worst tenements to
count noses and see if the law against overcrowding was violated,
and the sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I
must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist, or something. "A
man may be a man even in a palace" in modern New York as in ancient
Rome, but not in a slum tenement. So it seemed to me, and in anger
I looked around for something to strike off his fetters with. But
there was nothing.
I wrote, but it seemed to make no impression. One morning, scanning
my newspaper at the breakfast table, I put it down with an outcry
that startled my wife, sitting opposite. There it was, the thing
I had been looking for all those years. A four-line despatch from
somewhere in Germany, if I remember right, had it all. A way had
been discovered, it ran, to take pictures by flashlight. The darkest
corner might be photographed that way. I went to the office full
of the idea, and lost no time in looking up Dr. John T. Nagle, at
the time in charge of the Bureau of Vital Statistics in the Health
Department, to tell him of it. Dr. Nagle was an amateur photographer
of merit and a good fellow besides, who entered into my plans with
great readiness. The news had already excited much interest among
New York photographers, professional and otherwise, and no time
was lost in communicating with the other side. Within a fortnight
a raiding party composed of Dr. Henry G. Piffard and Richard Hoe
Lawrence, two distinguished amateurs, Dr. Nagle and myself, and
sometimes a policeman or two, invaded the East Side by night, bent
on letting in the light where it was so much needed.
At least that was my purpose. To the photographers it was a voyage
of discovery of the greatest interest; but the interest centred in
the camera and the flashlight. The police went along from curiosity;
sometimes for protection. For that they were hardly needed. It is
not too much to say that our party carried terror wherever it went.
The flashlight of those days was contained in cartridges fired from
a revolver. The spectacle of half a dozen strange men invading a
house in the midnight hour armed with big pistols which they shot
off recklessly was hardly reassuring, however sugary our speech,
and it was not to be wondered at if the tenants bolted through
windows and down fire-escapes wherever we went. But as no one was
murdered, things calmed down after a while, though months after I
found the recollection of our visits hanging over a Stanton Street
block like a nightmare. We got some good pictures; but very soon
the slum and the awkward hours palled upon the amateurs. I found
myself alone just when I needed help most. I had made out by the
flashlight possibilities my companions little dreamed of.
[Illustration: "The tenants bolted through the windows"]
I hired a professional photographer next whom I found in dire straits.
He was even less willing to get up at 2 A.M. than my friends who
had a good excuse. He had none, for I paid him well. He repaid me
by trying to sell my photographs behind my back. I had to replevin
the negatives to get them away from him. He was a pious man, I take
it, for when I tried to have him photograph the waifs in the baby
nursery at the Five Points House of Industry, as they were saying
their "Now I lay me down to sleep," and the plate came out blank
the second time, he owned up that it was his doing: it went against
his principles to take a picture of any one at prayers. So I had
to get another man with some trouble and expense. But on the whole
I think the experience was worth what it cost. The spectacle of a
man prevented by religious scruples from photographing children at
prayers, while plotting at the same time to rob his employer, has
been a kind of chart to me that has piloted me through more than
one quagmire of queer human nature. Nothing could stump me after
that. The man was just as sincere in the matter of his scruple as
he was rascally in his business dealings with me.
There was at last but one way out of it; namely, for me to get a
camera myself. This I did, and with a dozen plates took myself up
the Sound to the Potter's Field on its desert island to make my
first observations. There at least I should be alone, with no one
to bother me. And I wanted a picture of the open trench. I got
it, too. When I say that with the sunlight of a January day on the
white snow I exposed that extra-quick instantaneous plate first
for six seconds, then for twelve, to make sure I got the picture,
[Footnote: Men are ever prone to doubt what they cannot understand.
With all the accumulated information on the subject, even to this
day, when it comes to taking a snap-shot, at the last moment I
weaken and take it under protest, refusing to believe that it can
be. A little more faith would make a much better photographer of
me.] and then put the plate-holder back among the rest so that I
did not know which was which, amateur photographers will understand
the situation. I had to develop the whole twelve to get one picture.
That was so dark, almost black, from over-exposure as to be almost
hopeless. But where there is life there is hope, if you can apply
that maxim to the Potter's Field, where there are none but dead
men. The very blackness of my picture proved later on, when I came
to use it with a magic lantern, the taking feature of it. It added
a gloom to the show more realistic than any the utmost art of
professional skill might have attained.
So I became a photographer, after a fashion, and thereafter took
the pictures myself. I substituted a frying-pan for the revolver,
and flashed the light on that. It seemed more homelike. But, as I
said, I am clumsy. Twice I set fire to the house with the apparatus,
and once to myself. I blew the light into my own eyes on that
occasion, and only my spectacles saved me from being blinded for
life. For more than an hour after I could see nothing and was led
about by my companion, helpless. Photographing Joss in Chinatown
nearly caused a riot there. It seems that it was against _their_
religious principles. Peace was made only upon express assurance
being given the guardians of Joss that his picture would be hung in
the "gallery at Police Headquarters." They took it as a compliment.
The "gallery" at Headquarters is the rogues' gallery, not generally
much desired. Those Chinese are a queer lot, but when I remembered
my Christian friend of the nursery I did not find it in me to blame
them. Once, when I was taking pictures about Hell's Kitchen, I was
confronted by a wild-looking man with a club, who required me to
subscribe to a general condemnation of reporters as "hardly fit to
be flayed alive," before he would let me go; the which I did with
a right good will, though with somewhat of a mental reservation in
favor of my rivals in Mulberry Street, who just then stood in need
of special correction.
What with one thing and another, and in spite of all obstacles, I
got my pictures, and put some of them to practical use at once. I
recall a midnight expedition to the Mulberry Bend with the sanitary
police that had turned up a couple of characteristic cases of
overcrowding. In one instance two rooms that should at most have
held four or five sleepers were found to contain fifteen, a week-old
baby among them. Most of them were lodgers and slept there for "five
cents a spot." There was no pretence of beds. When the report was
submitted to the Health Board the next day, it did not make much
of an impression--these things rarely do, put in mere words--until
my negatives, still dripping from the dark-room, came to reenforce
them. From them there was no appeal. It was not the only instance
of the kind by a good many. Neither the landlord's protests nor
the tenant's plea "went" in face of the camera's evidence, and I
was satisfied.
[Illustration: Lodgers at Five Cents a Spot]
I had at last an ally in the fight with the Bend. It was needed,
worse even than in the campaign against the police lodging-houses,
for in that we were a company, in the Bend I was alone. From the
day--I think it was in the winter of 1886--when it was officially
doomed to go by act of legislature until it did go, nine years
later, I cannot remember that a cat stirred to urge it on. Whether
it was that it had been bad so long that people thought it could not
be otherwise, or because the Five Points had taken all the reform
the Sixth Ward had coming to it, or because, by a sort of tacit
consent, the whole matter was left to me as the recognized Mulberry
Bend crank--whichever it was, this last was the practical turn it
took. I was left to fight it out by myself. Which being so, I laid
in a stock of dry plates and buckled to.
The Bend was a much jollier adversary than the police lodging-houses.
It kicked back. It did not have to be dragged into the discussion
at intervals, but crowded in unbidden. In the twenty years of my
acquaintance with it as a reporter I do not believe there was a week
in which it was not heard from in the police reports, generally in
connection with a crime of violence, a murder or a stabbing affray.
It was usually on Sunday, when the Italians who lived there were
idle and quarreled over their cards. Every fight was the signal
for at least two more, sometimes a dozen, for they clung to their
traditions and met all efforts of the police to get at the facts
with their stubborn "fix him myself." And when the detectives
had given up in dismay and the man who was cut had got out of the
hospital, pretty soon there was news of another fight, and the feud
had been sent on one step. By far the most cheering testimony that
our Italian is becoming one of us came to me a year or two ago in
the evidence that on two occasions Mulberry Street had refused to
hide a murderer even in his own village. [Footnote: The Italians
here live usually grouped by "villages," that is, those from the
same community with the same patron saint keep close together.
The saint's name-day is their local holiday. If the police want to
find an Italian scamp, they find out first from what village he
hails, then it is a simple matter, usually, to find where he is
located in the city.] That was conclusive. It was not so in those
days. So, between the vendetta, the mafia, the ordinary neighborhood
feuds, and the Bend itself, always picturesque if outrageously
dirty, it was not hard to keep it in the foreground. My scrap-book
from the year 1883 to 1896 is one running comment on the Bend and
upon the official indolence that delayed its demolition nearly
a decade after it had been decreed. But it all availed nothing to
hurry up things, until, in a swaggering moment, after four years
of that sort of thing, one of the City Hall officials condescended
to inform me of the real cause of the delay. It was simply that
"no one down there had been taking any interest in the thing."
[Illustration: Bandits' Roost--a Mulberry Bend Alley.]
I could not have laid it out for him to suit my case better than he
did. It was in the silly season, and the newspapers fell greedily
upon the sensation I made. The Bend, moreover, smelled rather worse
than usual that August. They made "the people's cause" their own,
and shouted treason until the commission charged with condemning
the Bend actually did meet and greased its wheels. But at the next
turn they were down in a rut again, and the team had to be prodded
some more. It had taken two years to get a map of the proposed
park filed under the law that authorized the laying out of it. The
commission consumed nearly six years in condemning the forty-one
lots of property, and charged the city $45,498.60 for it. The Bend
itself cost a million, and an assessment of half a million was
laid upon surrounding property for the supposed benefit of making
it over from a pig-sty into a park. Those property-owners knew
better. They hired a lawyer who in less than six weeks persuaded
the Legislature that it was an injury, not a benefit. The town had
to foot the whole bill. But at last it owned the Bend.
Instead of destroying it neck and crop, it settled down complacently
to collect the rents; that is to say, such rents as it could collect.
A good many of the tenants refused to pay, and lived rent free for
a year. It was a rare chance for the reporter, and I did not miss
it. The city as landlord in the Bend was fair game. The old houses
came down at last, and for a twelvemonth, while a reform government
sat at the City Hall, the three-acre lot lay, a veritable slough of
despond filled with unutterable nastiness, festering in the sight
of men. No amount of prodding seemed able to get it out of that,
and all the while money given for the relief of the people was
going to waste at the rate of a million dollars a year. The Small
Parks Act of 1887 appropriated that amount, and it was to be had
for the asking. But no one who had the authority asked, and as the
appropriation was not cumulative, each passing year saw the loss
of just so much to the cause of decency that was waiting without.
Eight millions had been thrown away when they finally came to ask
a million and a half to pay for the Mulberry Bend park, and then
they had to get a special law and a special appropriation because
the amount was more than "a million in one year." This in spite
of the fact that we were then in the Christmas holidays with one
year just closing and the other opening, each with its unclaimed
appropriation. I suggested that to the powers that were, but they
threw up their hands: that would have been irregular and quite
without precedent. Oh, for irregularity enough to throttle precedent
finally and for good! It has made more mischief in the world,
I verily believe, than all the other lawbreakers together. At the
very outset it had wrecked my hopes of getting the first school
playground in New York planted in the Bend by simply joining park
and school together. There was a public school in the block that
went with the rest. The Small Parks Law expressly provided for
the construction of "such and so many" buildings for the comfort,
health, and "instruction" of the people, as might be necessary.
But a school in a park! The thing had never been heard of. It would
lead to conflict between two departments! And to this day there
is no playground in the Mulberry Bend, though the school is right
opposite.
[Illustration: Bottle Alley Mulberry Bend Headquarters of the Whyo
Gang.]
It was, nevertheless, that sort of thing that lent the inspiration
which in the end made the old Bend go. It was when, in the midst
of the discussion, they showed me a check for three cents, hung up
and framed in the Comptroller's office as a kind of red-tape joss
for the clerks to kow-tow to, I suppose. They were part of the
system it glorified. The three cents had miscarried in the purchase
of a school site, and, when the error was found, were checked out
with all the fuss and flourish of a transaction in millions and at
a cost, I was told, of fifty dollars' worth of time and trouble.
Therefore it was hung up to be forever admired as the ripe fruit of
an infallible system. No doubt it will be there when another Tweed
has cleaned out the city's treasury to the last cent. However, it
suggested a way out to me. Two could play at that game. There is
a familiar principle of sanitary law, expressed in more than one
ordinance, that no citizen has a right to maintain a nuisance on
his premises because he is lazy or it suits his convenience in other
ways. The city is merely the aggregate of citizens in a corporation,
and must be subject to the same rules. I drew up a complaint in
proper official phrase, charging that the state of Mulberry Bend
was "detrimental to health and dangerous to life," and formally
arraigned the municipality before the Health Board for maintaining
a nuisance upon its premises.
I have still a copy of that complaint, and, as the parting shot
to the worst slum that ever was, and, let us hope, ever will be,
I quote it here in part:--
"The Bend is a mass of wreck, a dumping-ground for all manner of
filth from the surrounding tenements. The Street-cleaning Department
has no jurisdiction over it, and the Park Department, in charge of
which it is, exercises none.
"The numerous old cellars are a source of danger to the children
that swarm over the block. Water stagnating in the holes will
shortly add the peril of epidemic disease. Such a condition as that
now prevailing in this block, with its dense surrounding population,
would not be tolerated by your department for a single day if on
private property. It has lasted here many months.
"The property is owned by the city, having been taken for the
purposes of a park and left in this condition after the demolition
of the old buildings. The undersigned respectfully represents
that the city, in the proposed Mulberry Bend park, is at present
maintaining a nuisance, and that it is the duty of your honorable
Board to see to it that it is forthwith abolished, to which end
he prays that you will proceed at once with the enforcement of the
rules of your department prohibiting the maintaining of nuisances
within the city's limits."
If my complaint caused a smile in official quarters, it was
short-lived, except in the Sanitary Bureau, where I fancy it lurked.
For the Bend was under its windows. One whiff of it was enough to
determine the kind of report the health inspectors would have to
make when forced to act. That night, before they got around, some
boys playing with a truck in the lots ran it down into one of the
cellar holes spoken of and were crushed under it, and so put a
point upon the matter that took the laughter out of it for good.
They went ahead with the park then.
When they had laid the sod, and I came and walked on it in defiance
of the sign to "keep off the grass," I was whacked by a policeman
for doing it, as I told in the "Ten Years' War." [Footnote: Now,
"The Battle with the Slum."] But that was all right. We had the
park. And I had been "moved on" before when I sat and shivered in
reeking hallways in that very spot, alone and forlorn in the long
ago; so that I did not mind. The children who were dancing there in
the sunlight were to have a better time, please God! We had given
them their lost chance. Looking at them in their delight now, it
is not hard to understand what happened: the place that had been
redolent of crime and murder became the most orderly in the city.
When the last house was torn down in the Bend, I counted seventeen
murders in the block all the details of which I remembered. No
doubt I had forgotten several times that number. In the four years
after that during which I remained in Mulberry Street I was called
only once to record a deed of violence in the neighborhood, and
that was when a stranger came in and killed himself. Nor had the
Bend simply sloughed off its wickedness, for it to lodge and take
root in some other place. That would have been something; but it
was not that. The Bend had become decent and orderly because the
sunlight was let in, and shone upon children who had at last the
right to play, even if the sign "keep off the grass" was still
there. That was what the Mulberry Bend park meant. It was the story
it had to tell. And as for the sign, we shall see the last of that
yet. The park has notice served upon it that its time is up.
[Illustration: The Mulberry Bend as it is.]
So the Bend went, and mighty glad am I that I had a hand in making
it go. The newspapers puzzled over the fact that I was not invited
to the formal opening. I was Secretary of the Small Parks Committee
at the time, and presumably even officially entitled to be bidden
to the show; though, come to think of it, our committee was a
citizens' affair and not on the pay-rolls! The Tammany Mayor who
came in the year after said that we had as much authority as "a
committee of bootblacks" about the City Hall, no more. So that it
seems as if there is a something that governs those things which
survives the accidents of politics, and which mere citizens are
not supposed to understand or meddle with. Anyway, it was best so.
Colonel Waring, splendid fellow that he was, when he grew tired of
the much talk, made a little speech of ten words that was not on
the programme, and after that the politicians went home, leaving
the park to the children. There it was in the right hands. What
mattered the rest, then?
And now let me go back from the slum to my Brooklyn home for just
a look. I did every night, or I do not think I could have stood
it. I never lived in New York since I had a home, except for the
briefest spell of a couple of months once when my family were away,
and that nearly stifled me. I have to be where there are trees
and birds and green hills, and where the sky is blue above. So we
built our nest in Brooklyn, on the outskirts of the great park,
while the fledglings grew, and the nest was full when the last of
our little pile had gone to make it snug. Rent was getting higher
all the time, and the deeper I burrowed in the slum, the more my
thoughts turned, by a sort of defensive instinct, to the country.
My wife laughed, and said I should have thought of that while we
yet had some money to buy or build with, but I borrowed no trouble
on that score. I was never a good business man, as I have said
before, and yet--no! I will take that back. It is going back on
the record. I trusted my accounts with the Great Paymaster, who
has all the money there is, and he never gave notice that I had
overdrawn my account. I had the feeling, and have it still, that
if you are trying to do the things which are right, and which you
were put here to do, you can and ought to leave ways and means to
Him who drew the plans, after you have done your own level best
to provide. Always that, of course. If then things don't come out
right, it is the best proof in the world, to my mind, that you have
got it wrong, and you have only to hammer away waiting for things
to shape themselves, as they are bound to do, and let in the light.
For nothing in all this world is without a purpose, and least of
all what you and I are doing, though we may not be able to make
it out. I got that faith from my mother, and it never put her to
shame, so she has often told me.
Neither did it me. It was in the winter when all our children had
the scarlet fever that one Sunday, when I was taking a long walk
out on Long Island where I could do no one any harm, I came upon
Richmond Hill, and thought it was the most beautiful spot I had
ever seen. I went home and told my wife that I had found the place
where we were going to live, and that sick-room was filled with
the scent of spring flowers and of balsam and pine as the children
listened and cheered with their feeble little voices. The very next
week I picked out the lots I wanted. There was a tangle of trees
growing on them that are shading my study window now as I write. I
did not have any money, but right then an insurance company was in
need of some one to revise its Danish policies, and my old friend
General C. T. Christensen thought I would do. And I did it, and
earned $200; whereupon Edward Wells, who was then a prosperous
druggist, offered to lend me what more I needed to buy the lots,
and the manager of our Press Bureau built me a house and took a
mortgage for all it cost. So before the next winter's snows we were
snug in the house that has been ours ever since, with a ridge of
wooded hills, the "backbone of Long Island," between New York and
us. The very lights of the city were shut out. So was the slum,
and I could sleep.
[Illustration: My Little Ones gathering Daisies for 'the Poors']
Fifteen summers have passed since. The house lies yonder, white
and peaceful under the trees. Long since, the last dollar of the
mortgage was paid and our home freed from debt.[Footnote: I have
had my study built on the back lawn so that I may always have it
before me, and have a quiet place at the same time, where "papa is
not to be disturbed." But, though I put it as far back as I could,
I notice that they come right in.] The flag flies from it on Sundays
in token thereof. Joy and sorrow have come to us under its roof.
Children have been born, and one we carried over the hill to the
churchyard with tears for the baby we had lost. But He to whom we
gave it back has turned our grief to joy. Of all our babies, the
one we lost is the only one we have kept. The others grew out of
our arms; I hardly remember them in their little white slips. But
he is our baby forever. Fifteen happy years of peace have they
been, for love held the course.
It was when the daisies bloomed in the spring that the children
brought in armfuls from the fields, and bade me take them to "the
poors" in the city. I did as they bade me, but I never got more
than half a block from the ferry with my burden. The street children
went wild over the "posies." They pleaded and fought to get near
me, and when I had no flowers left to give them sat in the gutter
and wept with grief. The sight of it went to my heart, and I wrote
this letter to the papers. It is dated in my scrap-book June 23,
1888:--
"The trains that carry a hundred thousand people to New York's
stores and offices from their homes in the country rush over fields,
these bright June mornings, glorious with daisies and clover blossoms.
There are too many sad little eyes in the crowded tenements, where
the summer sunshine means disease and death, not play or vacation,
that will close without ever having looked upon a field of daisies.
"If we cannot give them the fields, why not the flowers? If every
man, woman, or child coming in should, on the way to the depot,
gather an armful of wild flowers to distribute in the tenements,
a mission work would be set on foot with which all the alms-giving
of this wealthy city could not be compared.
"Then why not do it? Ask your readers to try. The pleasure of
giving the flowers to the urchins who will dog their steps in the
street, crying with hungry voices and hungry hearts for a 'posy'
will more than pay for the trouble. It will brighten the office,
the store, or the schoolroom all through the day. Let them have
no fear that their gift will not be appreciated because it costs
nothing. Not alms, but the golden rule, is what is needed in the
tenements of the poor.
"If those who have not the time or opportunity themselves will send
their flowers to 303 Mulberry Street, opposite Police Headquarters,
it will be done for them. The summer doctors employed by the Health
Department to canvass the tenements in July and August will gladly
cooperate. Let us have the flowers."
If I could have foreseen the result, I hardly think that last
paragraph would have been printed. I meant to give people a chance
to discover for themselves how much pleasure they could get out of
a little thing like taking an armful of flowers to town, but they
voted unanimously, so it seemed, to let me have it all. Flowers came
pouring in from every corner of the compass. They came in boxes,
in barrels, and in bunches, from field and garden, from town and
country. Express-wagons carrying flowers jammed Mulberry Street,
and the police came out to marvel at the row. The office was fairly
smothered in fragrance. A howling mob of children besieged it. The
reporters forgot their rivalries and lent a hand with enthusiasm
in giving out the flowers. The Superintendent of Police detailed
five stout patrolmen to help carry the abundance to points of
convenient distribution. Wherever we went, fretful babies stopped
crying and smiled as the messengers of love were laid against their
wan cheeks. Slovenly women courtesied and made way.
"The good Lord bless you," I heard as I passed through a dark
hall, "but you are a good man. No such has come this way before."
Oh! the heartache of it, and yet the joy! The Italians in the
Barracks stopped quarreling to help keep order. The worst street
became suddenly good and neighborly. A year or two after, Father
John Tabb, priest and poet, wrote, upon reading my statement that
I had seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better
than the policeman's club:--
Peacemakers ye, the daisies, from the soil
Upbreathing wordless messages of love,
Soothing of earth-born brethren the toil
And lifting e'en the lowliest above.
Ay, they did. The poet knew it; the children knew it; the slum knew
it. It lost its grip where the flowers went with their message. I
saw it.
I saw, too, that I had put my hand to a task that was too great
for me, yet which I might not give over, once I had taken it up.
Every day the slum showed me that more clearly. The hunger for
the beautiful that gnawed at its heart was a constant revelation.
Those little ones at home were wiser than I. At most I had made
out its stomach. This was like cutting windows for souls that were
being shrunk and dwarfed in their mean setting. Shut them up once
the sunlight had poured in--never! I could only drive ahead, then,
until a way opened. Somewhere beyond it was sure to do that.
And it did. Among the boxes from somewhere out in Jersey came one
with the letters I. H. N. on. I paid little attention to it then,
but when more came so marked, I noticed that they were not all from
one place, and made inquiries as to what the letters meant. So I
was led to the King's Daughters' headquarters, where I learned that
they stood for "In His Name." I liked the sentiment; I took to it
at once. And I liked the silver cross upon which it was inscribed.
I sometimes wish I had lived--no! I do not. That's dreaming. I
have lived in the best of all times, when you do not have to dream
things good, but can help make them so. All the same, when I put
on the old crusader's cross which King Christian sent me a year
ago from Denmark, and think of the valiant knights who wore it, I
feel glad and proud that, however far behind, I may ride in their
train.
[Illustration]
So I put on the silver cross, and in the Broadway Tabernacle spoke
to the members of the order, asking them to make this work theirs.
They did it at once. A committee was formed, and in the summer of
1890 it opened an office in the basement of the Mariners' Temple,
down in the Fourth Ward. The Health Department's summer doctors
were enlisted, and the work took a practical turn from the start.
There were fifty of the doctors, whose duty it was to canvass the
thirty thousand tenements during the hot season and prescribe for
the sick poor. They had two months to do it in, and with the utmost
effort, if they were to cover their ground, could only get around
once to each family. In a great many cases that was as good as
nothing. They might as well have stayed away, for what was wanted
was advice, instruction, a friendly lift out of a hopeless rut,
more than medicine. We hired a nurse, and where they pointed there
she went, following their track and bringing the things the doctor
could not give. It worked well. At the end of the year, when
we would have shut up shop, we found ourselves with three hundred
families on our hands, to leave whom would have been rank treachery.
So we took a couple of rooms in a tenement, and held on. And from
this small beginning has grown the King's Daughters' settlement,
which to-day occupies two houses at 48 and 50 Henry Street, doing
exactly the same kind of work as when they began in the next block.
The flowers were and are the open sesame to every home. They wrere
laughed at by some at the start; but that was because they did not
know. They are not needed now to open doors; the little cross is
known for a friend wherever it goes.
We sometimes hear it said, and it is true, that the poor are more
charitable among themselves than the outside world is to them.
It is because they know the want; and it only goes to prove that
human nature is at bottom good, not bad. In real straits it comes
out strongest. So, if you can only make the others see, will they
do. The trouble is, they do not know, and some of us seem to have
cotton in our ears: we are a little hard of hearing. Yet, whenever
we put it to the test, up-town rang true. I remember the widow
with three or four little ones who had to be wheeled if she were to
be able to get about as the doctor insisted. There was no nursery
within reach. And I remember the procession of baby-carriages
that answered our appeal. It strung clear across the street into
Chatham Square. Whatever we needed we got. We saw the great heart
of our city, and it was good to see.
Personally I had little to do with it, except to form the link
with the official end of it, the summer doctors, etc., and to make
trouble occasionally. As, for instance, when I surreptitiously
supplied an old couple we had charge of with plug tobacco. The
ladies took it ill, but, then, they had never smoked. I had, and
I know what it is to do without tobacco, for the doctor cut my
supply off a long while ago. Those two were old, very old, and
they wanted their pipe, and they got it. I suppose it was irregular,
but I might as well say it here that I would do the same thing again,
without doubt. I feel it in my bones. So little have I profited. But,
good land! a pipe is not a deadly sin. For the rest, I was mighty
glad to see things managed with system. It was a new experience
to me. On the _Tribune_ I had a kind of license to appeal now and
again for some poor family I had come across, and sometimes a good
deal of money came in. It was hateful to find that it did not always
do the good it ought to. I bring to mind the aged bookkeeper and
his wife whom I found in a Greene Street attic in a state of horrid
want. He had seen much better days, and it was altogether a very
pitiful case. My appeal brought in over $300, which, in my delight,
I brought him in a lump. The next morning, when going home at three
o'clock, whom should I see in a vile Chatham Street dive, gloriously
drunk, and in the clutches of a gang of Sixth Ward cutthroats,
but my protege, the bookkeeper, squandering money right and left.
I caught sight of him through the open door, and in hot indignation
went in and yanked him out, giving him a good talking to. The gang
followed, and began hostilities at once. But for the providential
coming of two policemen, we should probably have both fared ill. I
had the old man locked up in the Oak Street Station. For a wonder,
he had most of the money yet, and thereafter I spent it for him.
On another occasion we were deliberately victimized--the reporters
in Mulberry Street, I mean--by a man with a pitiful story of hardship,
which we took as truth and printed. When I got around there the
next morning to see about it, I found that some neighborhood roughs
had established a toll-gate in the alley, charging the pitying
visitors who came in shoals a quarter for admission to the show in
the garret. The man was a fraud. That was right around the corner
from a place where, years before, I used to drop a nickel in a
beggar woman's hand night after night as I went past, because she
had a baby cradled on her wheezy little hand-organ, until one night
the baby rolled into the gutter, and I saw that it was a rag baby,
and that the woman was drunk. It was on such evidence as this, both
as to them and myself, that I early pinned my faith to organized
charity as just orderly charity, and I have found good reasons
since to confirm me in the choice. If any doubt had lingered in my
mind, my experience in helping distribute the relief fund to the
tornado sufferers at Woodhaven a dozen years ago would have dispelled
it. It does seem as if the chance of getting something for nothing
is, on the whole, the greatest temptation one can hold out to frail
human nature, whether in the slum, in Wall Street, or out where
the daisies grow.
Everything takes money. Our work takes a good deal. It happened
more than once, when the bills came in, that there was nothing to
pay them with. Now these were times to put to the test my faith,
as recorded above. My associates in the Board will bear me out
that it was justified. It is true that the strain was heavy once or
twice. I recall one afternoon, as do they, when we sat with bills
amounting to $150 before us and not a cent in the bank, so the
treasurer reported. Even as she did, the mail-carrier brought two
letters, both from the same town, as it happened--Morristown, N.J.
Each of them contained a check for $75, one from a happy mother
"in gratitude and joy," the other from "one stricken by a great
sorrow" that had darkened her life. Together they made the sum
needed. We sat and looked at each other dumbly. To me it was not
strange: that was my mother's faith. But I do not think we, any
of us, doubled after that; and we had what we needed, as we needed
it.