ROOSEVELT COMES----MULBERRY STREET'S GOLDEN AGE
See now how things fall out. Hardly had I sent the chapter to the
printer in which I posted proofreaders as enemies of mankind when
here comes the proof of the previous one with a cordial note of
thanks from this particular enemy "for the inspiration" he found
in it. So then I was mistaken, as I have been often before, and owe
him the confession. Good land! what are we that we should think
ourselves always right, or, lest we do wrong, sit idle all our lives
waiting for light? The light comes as we work toward it. Roosevelt
was right when he said that the only one who never makes mistakes
is the one who never does anything. Preserve us from him; from the
man who eternally wants to hold the scales even and so never gets
done weighing--never hands anything over the counter. Take him away
and put red blood into his veins. And let the rest of us go ahead
and make our mistakes--as few as we can, as many as we must; only
let us go ahead.
All of which has reference to other things I have in mind, not to
the proof-reader, against whom I have no grudge to-day. As for him,
perhaps, he is just a sign that the world moves.
Move it did at last in the year (1894) that gave us the Lexow
Investigating Committee, the Citizens' Seventy, and reform. Tammany
went out, speeded on its way by Dr. Parkhurst, and an administration
came in that was pledged to all we had been longing and laboring
for. For three years we had free hands and we used them. Mayor
Strong's administration was not the millennium, but it brought New
York much nearer to it than it had ever been, and it set up some
standards toward which we may keep on striving with profit to
ourselves. The Mayor himself was not a saint. He was an honest
gentleman of sturdy purpose to do the right, and, normally, of
singular practical wisdom in choosing the men to help him do it,
but with an intermittent delusion that he was a shrewd politician.
When it came uppermost he made bargains and appointed men to office
who did their worst to undo what good the Warings, the Roosevelts,
and their kind had wrought. In the struggle that ensued Mayor Strong
was always on the side of right, but when he wanted most to help
he could not. It is the way of the world. Nevertheless, as I said,
it moved.
How far we came is history, plain to read in our streets that will
never again be as dirty as they were, though they may not be as clean
as Waring left them; in the threescore splendid new school-houses
that stand as monuments of those busy years; in the open spots
that let the sunlight into the slum where it was darkest and most
foul; in the death rate that came down from 26.32 per thousand of
the living in 1887 to 19.53 in 1897. That was the "Ten Years' War"
[Footnote: Now, "The Battle with the Slum."] I wrote about and have
here before referred to. The three years of the Strong administration
saw all the big battles in which we beat the slum. I am not going
to rehearse them, for I am trying to tell my own story, and now I am
soon done with it. I carried a gun as a volunteer in that war, and
that was all; not even in the ranks at that. I was ever an irregular,
given to sniping on my own hook. Roosevelt, indeed, wanted me to
have a seat among Mayor Strong's official advisers; but we had it
out over that when he told me of it, and the compact we made that
he should never ask that service of me he has kept. So he spared
the Mayor much embarrassment; for, as I said, I am not good in the
ranks, more is the pity: and me he saved for such use as I could be
of, which was well. For shortly it all centred in Mulberry Street,
where he was.
We were not strangers. It could not have been long after I wrote
"How the Other Half Lives" that he came to the _Evening Sun_ office
one day looking for me. I was out, and he left his card, merely
writing on the back of it that he had read my book and had "come
to help." That was all, and it tells the whole story of the man. I
loved him from the day I first saw him; nor ever in all the years
that have passed has he failed of the promise made then. No one
ever helped as he did. For two years we were brothers in Mulberry
Street. When he left I had seen its golden age. I knew too well
the evil day that was coming back to have any heart in it after
that.
Not that we were carried heavenward "on flowery beds of ease" while it
lasted. There is very little ease where Theodore Roosevelt leads,
as we all of us found out. The lawbreaker found it out who predicted
scornfully that he would "knuckle down to politics the way they all
did," and lived to respect him, though he swore at him, as the one
of them all who was stronger than pull. The peace-loving citizen
who hastened to Police Headquarters with anxious entreaties to
"use discretion" in the enforcement of unpopular laws found it out
and went away with a new and breathless notion welling up in him
of an official's sworn duty. That was it; that was what made the
age golden, that for the first time a moral purpose came into the
street. In the light of it everything was transformed.
[Illustration: President Theodore Roosevelt of the Police Board.]
Not all at once. It took us weary months to understand that the
shouting about the "enforcement of the dead Excise Law" was lying
treachery or rank ignorance, one as bad as the other. The Excise Law
was not dead. It was never so much alive as under Tammany, but it
was enforced only against those saloon-keepers who needed discipline.
It was a Tammany club, used to drive them into camp with; and it
was used so vigorously that no less than eight thousand arrests
were made under it in the year before Roosevelt made them all close
up. Pretty lively corpse, that! But we understood at last, most of
us; understood that the tap-root of the police blackmail was there,
and that it had to be pulled up if we were ever to get farther.
We understood that we were the victims of our own shamming, and we
grew to be better citizens for it. The police force became an army
of heroes--for a season. All the good in it came out; and there
is a lot of it in the worst of times. Roosevelt had the true
philosopher's stone that turns dross to gold, in his own sturdy
faith in his fellow-man. Men became good because he thought them
so.
By which I am not to be understood as meaning that he just voted
them good--the police, for instance--and sat by waiting to see the
wings grow. No, but he helped them sprout. It is long since I have
enjoyed anything so much as I did those patrol trips of ours on
the "last tour" between midnight and sunrise, which earned for him
the name of Haroun al Roosevelt. I had at last found one who was
willing to get up when other people slept--including, too often,
the police--and see what the town looked like then. He was more than
willing. I laid out the route, covering ten or a dozen patrol-posts,
and we met at 2 A.M. on the steps of the Union League Club, objects
of suspicion on the part of two or three attendants and a watchman
who shadowed us as night-prowlers till we were out of their bailiwick.
I shall never forget that first morning when we travelled for three
hours along First and Second and Third avenues, from Forty-second
Street to Bellevue, and found of ten patrolmen just one doing his
work faithfully. Two or three were chatting on saloon corners and
guyed the President of the Board when he asked them if that was
what they were there for. One was sitting asleep on a butter-tub
in the middle of the sidewalk, snoring so that you could hear him
across the street, and was inclined to be "sassy" when aroused
and told to go about his duty. Mr. Roosevelt was a most energetic
roundsman and a fair one to boot. It was that quality which speedily
won him the affection of the force. He hunted high and low before
he gave up his man, giving him every chance. We had been over one
man's beat three times, searching every nook and cranny of it, and
were reluctantly compelled to own that he was not there, when the
"boss" of an all-night restaurant on Third Avenue came out with
a club as we passed and gave the regulation signal raps on the
sidewalk. There was some trouble in his place. Three times he
repeated the signal calling for the patrolman on the beat before
he turned to Roosevelt, who stood by, with the angry exclamation:--
"Where in thunder does that copper sleep? He orter'd tole me when
he giv' up the barber-shop, so's a fellow could find him."
[Illustration: "One was sitting asleep on a butter-tub."]
We didn't find him then, but he found the President of the Board
later on when summoned to Police Headquarters to explain why he had
changed his sleeping quarters. The whole force woke up as a result
of that night's work, and it kept awake those two years, for, as
it learned by experience, Mr. Roosevelt's spectacles might come
gleaming around the corner at any hour. He had not been gone a year
before the Chief found it necessary to transfer half the force in
an up-town precinct to keep it awake. The firemen complained that
fires at night gained too much headway while the police slept.
There was no Roosevelt to wake them up.
Looking after his patrolmen was not the only errand that took him
abroad at night. As Police President, Mr. Roosevelt was a member
of the Health Board, and sometimes it was the tenements we went
inspecting when the tenants slept. He was after facts, and learned
speedily to get them as he could. When, as Governor, he wanted
to know just how the Factory Law was being executed, he came down
from Albany and spent a whole day with me personally investigating
tenements in which sweating was carried on. I had not found
a Governor before, or a Police President either, who would do it;
but so he learned exactly what he wanted to know, and what he ought
to do, and did it.
I never saw Theodore Roosevelt to better advantage than when he
confronted the labor men at their meeting-place, Clarendon Hall.
The police were all the time having trouble with strikers and
their "pickets." Roosevelt saw that it was because neither party
understood fully the position of the other and, with his usual
directness, sent word to the labor organizations that he would
like to talk it over with them. At his request I went with him to
the meeting. It developed almost immediately that the labor men
had taken a wrong measure of the man. They met him as a politician
playing for points, and hinted at trouble unless their demands were
met. Mr. Roosevelt broke them off short:
"Gentlemen!" he said, with that snap of the jaws that always made
people listen, "I asked to meet you, hoping that we might come to
understand one another. Remember, please, before we go farther,
that the worst injury any one of you can do to the cause of labor
is to counsel violence. It will also be worse for himself. Understand
distinctly that order will be kept. The police will keep it. Now
we can proceed."
I was never so proud and pleased as when they applauded him to the
echo. He reddened with pleasure, for he saw that the best in them
had come out on top, as he expected it would.
It was of this incident that a handle was first made by Mr. Roosevelt's
enemies in and out of the Police Board--and he had many--to attack
him. It happened that there was a music hall in the building in
which the labor men met. The yellow newspapers circulated the lie
that he went there on purpose to see the show, and the ridiculous
story was repeated until the liars nearly persuaded themselves that
it was so. They would not have been able to understand the kind
of man they had to do with, had they tried. Accordingly they fell
into their own trap. It is a tradition of Mulberry Street that
the notorious Seeley dinner raid was planned by his enemies in the
department of which he was the head, in the belief that they would
catch Mr. Roosevelt there. The diners were supposed to be his
"set."
Some time after that I was in his office one day when a police
official of superior rank came in and requested private audience
with him. They stepped aside and the policeman spoke in an undertone,
urging something strongly. Mr. Roosevelt listened. Suddenly I
saw him straighten up as a man recoils from something unclean and
dismiss the other with a sharp: "No, sir! I don't fight that way."
The policeman went out crestfallen. Roosevelt took two or three
turns about the floor, struggling evidently with strong disgust.
He told me afterward that the man had come to him with what he said
was certain knowledge that his enemy could that night be found in
a known evil house up-town, which it was his alleged habit to visit.
His proposition was to raid it then and so "get square." To the
policeman it must have seemed like throwing a good chance away.
But it was not Roosevelt's way; he struck no blow below the belt.
In the Governor's chair afterward he gave the politicians whom he
fought, and who fought him, the same terms. They tried their best
to upset him, for they had nothing to expect from him. But they
knew and owned that he fought fair. Their backs were secure. He
never tricked them to gain an advantage. A promise given by him
was always kept to the letter.
Failing to trap him only added to the malignity of his enemies.
Roosevelt was warned that he was "shadowed" night and day, but he
laughed their scheming to scorn. It is an article of faith with
him that an honest man has nothing to fear from plotters, and he
walked unharmed among their snares. The whole country remembers the
yearlong fight in the Police Board and Mayor Strong's vain attempt
to remove the obstructionist who, under an ill-conceived law,
was able to hold up the scheme of reform. Most of the time I was
compelled to stand idly by, unable to help. Once I eased my feelings
by telling Commissioner Parker in his own office what I thought
of him. I went in and shut the door, and then told it all to him.
Nor did I mince matters; I might not get so good a chance again.
Mr. Parker sat quite still, poking the fire. When I ceased at last,
angry and exasperated, he looked up and said calmly:--
"Well, Mr. Riis, what you tell me has at least the merit of
frankness."
You see how it was. I should never have been able to help in the Board.
Out of it, my chance came at last when it was deemed necessary to
give the adversary "a character." Mr. Roosevelt had been speaking
to the Methodist ministers, and as usual had carried all before
him. The community was getting up a temper that would shortly put
an end to the deadlock in the Police Board and set the wheels of
reform moving again. Then one day we heard that Commissioner Parker
had been invited by the Christian Endeavorers of an up-town church
to address them on "Christian Citizenship." That was not consecrated
common sense. I went to the convention of Endeavorers the next
week and told them so. I asked them to send a despatch to Governor
Black then and there endorsing Roosevelt and Mayor Strong, and
urging him to end the deadlock that made public scandal by removing
Commissioner Parker; and they did. I regret to say that I felt
compelled to take a like course with the Methodist ministers, for
so I grieved a most good-natured gentleman, Colonel Grant, who was
Mr. Parker's ally in the Board. Grant was what was described as "a
great Methodist." But I feel sure that Brother Simmons would have
approved of me. I was following the course he laid down. The one
loyal friend Mr. Roosevelt had in the Board was Avery D. Andrews,
a strong, sensible, and clean young man, who stood by his chief to
the last, and left with him a good mark on the force.
The yellow newspapers fomented most industriously the trouble in
the Board, never failing to take the wrong side of any question.
One of them set about doling out free soup that winter, when work
was slack, as a means, of course, of advertising its own "charity."
Of all forms of indiscriminate almsgiving, that is the most offensive
and most worthless, and they knew it, or they would not have sent
me a wheedling invitation to come and inspect their "relief work,"
offering to have a carriage take me around. I sent word back that
I should certainly look into the soup, but that I should go on foot
to it. Roosevelt and I made the inspection together. We questioned
the tramps in line, and learned from their own lips that they had
come from out of town to take it easy in a city where a man did
not have to work to live. We followed the pails that were carried
away from the "relief station" by children, their contents sometimes
to figure afterwards as "free lunch" in the saloon where they had
been exchanged for beer; and, knowing the facts, we denounced the
thing as a nuisance. The paper printed testimonials from Commissioners
Parker and Grant, who certified from Mulberry Street, which they
had not left, that the soup was a noble Christian charity, and so
thought it evened things up, I suppose. I noticed, however, that
the soup ran out soon after, and I hope we have seen the last of
it. We can afford to leave that to Philadelphia, where common sense
appears to be drowned in it.
I had it out with them at last all together. When I have told of
it let the whole wretched thing depart and be gone for good. It was
after Roosevelt had gone away. That he was not there was no bar to
almost daily attacks on him, under which I chafed, sitting at the
meetings as a reporter. I knew right well they were intended to
provoke me to an explosion that might have given grounds for annoying
me, and I kept my temper until one day, when, the subject of dives
being mentioned, Commissioner Parker drawled, with the reporter
from the soup journal whispering in his ear:--
"Was not--er-r--that the place where--er--r--Mr. Roosevelt went to
see a show with his friend?"
He was careful not to look in my direction, but the reporter did,
and I leaped at the challenge. I waited until the Board had formally
adjourned, then halted it as Mr. Parker was trying to escape. I
do not now remember what I said. It would not make calm reading, I
suspect. It was the truth, anyhow, and came pretty near being the
whole truth. Mr. Parker fled, putting his head back through the
half-closed door to explain that he "only knew what that reporter
told" him. In the security of his room it must have occurred to
him, however, that he had another string to his bow; for at the
next session Commissioner Grant moved my expulsion because I had
"disturbed the Board meeting." But President Moss reminded him
curtly that I had done nothing of the kind, and that ended it.
One of the early and sensational results of reform in Mulberry
Street was the retirement of Superintendent Byrnes. There was not
one of us all who had known him long who did not regret it, though
I, for one, had to own the necessity of it; for Byrnes stood for
the old days that were bad. But, chained as he was in the meanness
and smallness of it all, he was yet cast in a different mould.
Compared with his successor, he was a giant every way. Byrnes was
a "big policeman." We shall not soon have another like him, and
that may be both good and bad. He was unscrupulous, he was for
Byrnes--he was a policeman, in short, with all the failings of
the trade. But he made the detective service great. He chased the
thieves to Europe, or gave them license to live in New York on
condition that they did not rob there. He was a Czar, with all an
autocrat's irresponsible powers, and he exercised them as he saw
fit. If they were not his, he took them anyhow; police service
looks to results first. There was that in Byrnes which made me
stand up for him in spite of it all. Twice I held Dr. Parkhurst
from his throat, but in the end I had to admit that the Doctor
was right. I believed that, untrammelled, Byrnes might have been
a mighty engine for good, and it was with sorrow I saw him go. He
left no one behind him fit to wear his shoes.
[Illustration: Chief of Police Thomas Byrnes]
Byrnes was a born policeman. Those who hated him said he was also
a born tyrant. He did ride a high horse when the fit was on him and
he thought it served his purpose. So we came into collision in the
early days when he was captain in Mercer Street. They had a prisoner
over there with a story which I had cause to believe my rivals had
obtained. I went to Byrnes and was thundered out of the station-house.
There he was boss and it suited him to let me see it. We had not met
before. But we met again that night. I went to the Superintendent
of Police, who was a Republican, and, applying all the pressure
of the _Tribune_, which I served, got from him an order on Captain
Byrnes to let me interview his prisoner. Old Mr. Walling tore his
hair; said the thing had never been done before, and it had not.
But I got the order and got the interview, though Byrnes, black
with rage, commanded a policeman to stand on either side of the
prisoner while I talked to him. He himself stood by, glaring at
me. It was not a good way to get an interview, and, in fact, the
man had nothing to tell. But I had my way and I made the most of
it. After that Captain Byrnes and I got along. We got to think a
lot of each other after a while.
Perhaps he was a tyrant because he was set over crooks, and
crooks are cowards in the presence of authority. His famous "third
degree" was chiefly what he no doubt considered a little wholesome
"slugging." He would beat a thief into telling him what he wanted
to know. Thieves have no rights a policeman thinks himself bound
to respect. But when he had to do with men with minds he had other
resources. He tortured his prisoner into confession in the Unger
murder case by locking him up out of reach of a human voice, or
sight of a human face, in the basement of Police Headquarters, and
keeping him there four days, fed by invisible hands. On the fifth
he had him brought up through a tortuous way, where the tools he
had used in murdering his partner were displayed on the walls as
if by accident. Led into the Inspector's presence by the jailer,
he was made to stand while Byrnes finished a letter. Then he turned
his piercing glance upon him with a gesture to sit. The murderer
sank trembling upon a lounge, the only piece of furniture in the
room, and sprang to his feet with a shriek the next instant: it was
the one upon which he had slaughtered his friend, all blood-bespattered
as then. He sprawled upon the floor, a gibbering, horror-stricken
wretch, and confessed his sin.
As in this instance, so in the McGloin murder case, the moral
certainty of guilt was absolute, but the legal evidence was lacking.
McGloin was a young ruffian who had murdered a saloon-keeper at a
midnight raid on his place. He was the fellow who the night before
he was hanged invited the Chief of Detectives to "come over to the
wake; they'll have a devil of a time." For six months Byrnes had
tried everything to bring the crime home to him, but in vain. At
last he sent out and had McGloin and his two "pals" arrested, but
so that none of them knew of the plight of the others. McGloin
was taken to Mulberry Street, and orders were given to bring the
others in at a certain hour fifteen or twenty minutes apart. Byrnes
put McGloin at the window in his office while he questioned him.
Nothing could be got out of him. As he sat there a door was banged
below. Looking out he saw one of his friends led across the yard in
charge of policemen. Byrnes, watching him narrowly, saw his cheek
blanch; but still his nerve held. Fifteen minutes passed; another
door banged. The murderer, looking out, saw his other pal led in
a prisoner. He looked at Byrnes. The Chief nodded:--
"Squealed, both."
It was a lie, and it cost the man his life. "The jig is up then,"
he said, and told the story that brought him to the gallows.
I could not let Byrnes go without a word, for he filled a large
space in my life. It is the reporter, I suppose, who sticks out
there. The boys called him a great faker, but they were hardly
just to him in that. I should rather call him a great actor, and
without being that no man can be a great detective. He made life
in a mean street picturesque while he was there, and for that
something is due him. He was the very opposite of Roosevelt--quite
without moral purpose or the comprehension of it, yet with a streak
of kindness in him that sometimes put preaching to shame. Mulberry
Street swears by him to-day, even as it does, under its breath,
by Roosevelt. Decide from that for yourself whether his presence
there was for the good or the bad.
In writing "How the Other Half Lives" I had been at great pains
not to overstate my case. I knew that it would be questioned, and
was anxious that no flaws should be picked in it, for, if there
were, harm might easily come of it instead of good. I saw now that
in that I had been wise. The Gilder Tenement-House Commission more
than confirmed all that I had said about the tenements and the
schools. The Reinhardt Committee was even more emphatic on the topic
of child labor. I was asked to serve on the Seventy's sub-committee
on Small Parks. In the spring of 1896, the Council of Confederated
Good Government Clubs appointed me its general agent, and I held
the position for a year, giving all my spare time to the planning
and carrying out of such work as it seemed to me ought to make
a record for a reform administration. We wanted it to last. That
was a great year. They wanted a positive programme, and my notions
of good government were nothing if not positive. They began and ended
with the people's life. We tore down unfit tenements, forced the
opening of parks and playgrounds, the establishment of a truant school
and the remodelling of the whole school system, the demolition of
the overcrowded old Tombs and the erection on its site of a decent
new prison. We overhauled the civil courts and made them over new
in the charter of the Greater New York. We lighted dark halls;
closed the "cruller" bakeries in tenement-house cellars that had
caused the loss of no end of lives, for the crullers were boiled
in fat in the early morning hours while the tenants slept, and when
the fat was spilled in the fire their peril was awful. We fought
the cable-car managers at home and the opponents of a truant school
at Albany. We backed up Roosevelt in his fight in the Police Board,
and--well, I shall never get time to tell it all. But it was a
great year. That it did not keep the Good Government clubs alive
was no fault of my programme. It was mine, I guess. I failed to
inspire them with the faith that was in me. I had been going it
alone so long that I did not know how to use the new tool that had
come to hand. There is nothing like an organization if you know
how to use it. I did not. Perhaps, also, politics had something to
do with it. They were in for playing the game. I never understood
it.
But if I did not make the most of it, I had a good time that year.
There were first the two small parks to be laid out over on the
East Side, where the Gilder Commission had pointed to the smothering
crowds. I had myself made a member of the Citizens' Committee that
was appointed to locate them. It did not take us any nine years or
six, or three. We did the business in three weeks, and having chosen
the right spots, we went to the Legislature with a bill authorizing
the city to seize the property at once, ahead of condemnation, and
it was passed. We were afraid that Tammany might come back, and
the event proved that we were wise. You bring up the people slowly
to a reform programme, particularly when it costs money. They will
pay for corruption with a growl, but seem to think that virtue
ought always to be had for nothing. It makes the politicians' game
easy. They steal the money for improvements, and predict that reform
will raise the tax-rate. When the prophecy comes true, they take
the people back in their sheltering embrace with an "I told you
so!" and the people nestle there repentant. There was a housing
conference at which that part of the work was parcelled out: the
building of model tenements to the capitalists who formed the City
and Suburban Homes Company; the erection of model lodging-houses
to D. O. Mills, the banker philanthropist, who was anxious to help
that way. I chose for the Good Government clubs the demolition
of the old tenements. It was my chance. I hated them. A law had
been made the year before empowering the Health Board to seize and
destroy tenement-house property that was a threat to the city's
health, but it had remained a dead letter. The authorities hesitated
to attack property rights, vested rights. Charles G. Wilson, the
President of the Board, was a splendid executive, but he was a
holdover Tammany appointee, and needed backing.
Now that Theodore Roosevelt sat in the Health Board, fresh from his
war on the police lodging-rooms of which I told, they hesitated no
longer. I put before the Board a list of the sixteen worst rear
tenements in the city outside of the Bend, and while the landlords
held their breath in astonishment, they were seized, condemned,
and their tenants driven out. The Mott Street Barracks were among
them. In 1888 the infant death-rate among the 350 Italians they
harbored had been 325 per thousand--that is to say, one-third of
all the babies died that year. That was the kind of evidence upon
which those rear tenements were arraigned. Ninety-four of them,
all told, were seized that year, and in them there had been in four
years 956 deaths--a rate of 62.9 when the general city death-rate
was 24.63. I shall have once more, and for the last time, to refer
to "A Ten Years' War" for the full story of that campaign. As I
said, it was great.
[Illustration: The Mott Street Barracks]
Conceive, if you can, the state of mind of a man to whom a dark,
overcrowded tenement had ever been as a personal affront, now
suddenly finding himself commissioned with letters of marque and
reprisal, as it were, to seize and destroy the enemy wherever found,
not one at a time, but by blocks and battalions in the laying out
of parks. I fed fat my ancient grudge and grew good humor enough to
last me for a dozen years in those two. They were the years when,
in spite of hard work, I began to grow stout, and honestly, I think
it was tearing down tenements that did it. Directly or indirectly,
I had a hand in destroying seven whole blocks of them as I count
it up. I wish it had been seventy.
The landlords sued, but the courts sided with the Health Board.
When at last we stopped to take breath we had fairly broken the
back of the slum and made precedents of our own that would last a
while. Mr. Roosevelt was personally sued twice, I think, but that
was all the good it did them. We were having our innings that time,
and there were a lot of arrears to collect. The city paid for the
property that was taken, of course, and more than it ought to have
paid, to my way of thinking. The law gave the owner of a tenement
that was altogether unfit just the value of the brick and timbers
that were in it. It was enough, for "unfit" meant murderous, and
why should a man have a better right to kill his neighbor with a
house than with an axe in the street? But the lawyers who counseled
compromise bought Gotham Court, one of the most hopeless slums
in the Fourth Ward, for nearly $20,000. It was not worth so many
cents. The Barracks with their awful baby death-rate were found to
be mortgaged to a cemetery corporation. The Board of Health gave
them the price of opening one grave for their share, and tore down
the rear tenements. A year or two later I travelled to Europe on
an ocean steamer with the treasurer of that graveyard concern. We
were ten days on the way, and I am afraid he did not have altogether
a good time of it. The ghost of the Barracks would keep rising out
of the deep before us, sitting there in our steamer chairs, from
whichever quarter the wind blew. I suppose he took it as a victory
when the Court of Appeals decided upon a technicality that the
Barracks should not have been destroyed; but so did I, for they were
down by that time. The city could afford to pay. We were paying
for our own neglect, and it was a good lesson.
I have said more than once in these pages that I am not good
at figuring, and I am not; a child could do better. For that very
reason I am going to claim full credit for every time I do a sum
right. It may not happen again. Twice during that spell, curiously
enough, did I downright distinguish myself in that line. I shall
never be able to tell you how; I only know that I did it. Once
was when I went before the Board of Estimate and Apportionment to
oppose an increase in the appropriation for the Tombs which the
Commissioner of Correction had asked for. His plea was that there
had been a large increase in the census of the prison, and he marched
up a column of figures to prove it. To the amazement of the Board,
and really, if the truth be told, of myself, I demonstrated clearly
from his own figures that not only had there been no increase, but
that there could not be without criminally overcrowding
the wretched old prison, in which already every cell had two inmates,
and some three. The exhibit was so striking that the Commissioner
and his bookkeeper retired in confusion. It was just the power of
the facts again. I wanted to have the horrid old pile torn down,
and had been sitting up nights acquainting myself with all that
concerned it. Now it is gone, and a good riddance to it.
[Illustration: Gotham Court.]
The other computation was vastly more involved. It concerned the
schools, about which no one knew anything for certain. The annual
reports of the Department of Education were models of how to
say a thing so that no one by any chance could understand what it
was about. It was possible to prove from them that, while there
was notoriously a dearth of school accommodation, while children
knocked vainly for admission and the Superintendent clamored for
more schools, yet there were ten or twenty thousand seats to spare.
But it was not possible to get the least notion from them of what
the real need was. I tried for many months, and then set about
finding out for myself how many children who ought to be in school
were drifting about the streets. The truant officers, professionally
discreet, thought about 800. The Superintendent of Schools guessed
at 8000. The officers of the Association for the Improvement of
the Condition of the Poor, with an eye on the tenements, made it
150,000. I canvassed a couple of wards from the truant officers'
reports, and Dr. Tracy compared the showing with the statistics
of population. From the result I reasoned that there must be
about 50,000. They scorned me at the City Hall for it. It was all
guess-work they said, and so it was. We had first to have a school
census, and we got one, so that we might know where we were at. But
when we had the result of that first census before us, behold! it
showed that of 339,756 children of school age in the city, 251,235
were accounted for on the roster of public or private schools,
28,452 were employed, and 50,069 on the street or at home. So that,
if I am not smart at figuring, I may reasonably claim to be a good
guesser.
The showing that a lack of schools which threw an army of children
upon the street went hand in hand with overcrowded jails made us
get up and demand that something be done. From the school executive
came the helpless suggestion that the thing might be mended by
increasing the classes in neighborhoods where there were not enough
schools from sixty to seventy-five. Forty or forty-five pupils is
held to be the safe limit anywhere. But the time had passed for
such pottering. New York pulled itself together and spent millions
in building new schools while "the system" was overhauled; we dragged
in a truant school by threatening the city authorities with the
power of the State unless they ceased to send truants to institutions
that received child criminals. But a man convinced against his will
is of the same opinion still; we shall have to do that all over
again next. My pet scheme was to have trained oculists attached to
the public schools, partly as a means of overcoming stupidity--half
of what passes for that in the children is really the teacher's; the
little ones are near-sighted; they cannot see the blackboard--partly
also that they might have an eye on the school buildings and help
us get rid of some where they had to burn gas all day. That was
upset by the doctors, who were afraid that "private practice would
be interfered with." We had not quite got to the millennium yet. It
was so with our bill to establish a farm school to win back young
vagrants to a useful life. It was killed at Albany with the challenge
that we "had had enough of reform in New York." And so we had, as
the events showed. Tammany came back.
But not to stay. We had secured a hold during those three years
which I think they little know of. They talk at the Wigwam of the
"school vote," and mean the men friends and kin of the teachers on
whom the machine has a grip, or thinks it has; but there is another
school vote that is yet to be heard from, when the generation that
has had its right to play restored to it comes to the polls. That
was the great gain of that time. It was the thing I had in mind back
of and beyond all the rest. I was bound to kill the Bend, because
it was bad. I wanted the sunlight in there, but so that it might
shine on the children at play. That is a child's right, and it is
not to be cheated of it. And when it is cheated of it, it is not
the child but the community that is robbed of that beside which
all its wealth is but tinsel and trash. For men, not money, make
a country great, and joyless children do not make good men.
[Illustration: A Tenement House Air-shaft]
So when the Legislature, urged by the Tenement House Commission,
made it law that no public school should ever again be built in New
York without an outdoor playground, it touched the quick. Thereafter
it was easy to rescue the small parks from the landscape gardener
by laying them under the same rule. It was well we did it, too,
for he is a dangerous customer, hard to get around. Twice he has
tried to steal one of the little parks we laid out, the one that is
called Seward Park, from the children, and he "points with pride"
almost to the playground in the other, which he laid out so badly
that it was a failure from the start. However, we shall convert
him yet; everything in its season.
The Board of Education puzzled over its end of it for a while. The
law did not say how big the playground should be, and there was
no precedent. No, there was not. I found the key to that puzzle,
at least one that fitted, when I was Secretary of the Small Parks
Committee. It was my last act as agent of the Good Government clubs
to persuade Major Strong to appoint that committee. It made short
work of its task. We sent for the police to tell us where they had
trouble with the boys, and why. It was always the same story: they
had no other place to play in than the street, and there they broke
windows. So began the trouble. It ended in the police-station and
the jail. The city was building new schools by the score. We got a
list of the sites, and as we expected, they were where the trouble
was worst. Naturally so; that was where the children were. There,
then, was our field as a playground committee. Why not kill two
birds with one stone, and save money by making them one? By hitching
the school and the boys' play together we should speedily get rid
of the truant. He was just there as a protest against the school
without play.
We asked the Board of Education to make their school playgrounds
the neighborhood recreation centres. So they would not need to
worry over how big they should be, but just make them as big as
they could, whether on the roof or on the ground. They listened,
but found difficulties in "the property." Odd, isn't it, this
disposition of the world to forever make of the means the end, to
glorify the establishment! It was the same story when I asked them
to open the schools at night and let in the boys to have their
clubs there. The saloon was bidding for them, and bidding high, but
the School Board hesitated because a window might be broken or a
janitor want extra pay for cleaning up. Before a reluctant consent
was given I had to make a kind of promise that I would not appear
before the Board again to argue for throwing the doors wider still.
But it isn't going to keep me from putting in the heaviest licks I
can, in the campaign that is coming, for turning the schools over
to the people bodily, and making of them the neighborhood centre
in all things that make for good, including trades-union meetings
and political discussions. Only so shall we make of our schools
real corner-stones of our liberties. So, also, we shall through
neighborhood pride restore some of the neighborhood feeling, the
_home_ feeling that is now lacking in our cities to our grievous
loss. Half the tenement-house population is always moving, and
to the children the word "home" has no meaning. Anything that will
help change that will be a great gain. And that old Board is gone
long since, anyhow.
The club prevailed in the end. At least one school let it in, and
though the boys did break a window-pane that winter with a ball,
they paid for it like men, and that ghost was laid. The school
playground holds aloof yet from the neighborhood except in the long
vacation. But that last is something, and the rest is coming. It
could not be coming by any better road than the vacation schools,
which are paving the way for common sense everywhere. "Everything
takes ten years." said Abram S. Hewitt, when he took his seat as
the chairman of the Small Parks Committee. Ten years before, when
he was Mayor, he had put through the law under which the Mulberry
Bend had been at last wiped out. We held our meetings at the City
Hall, where I had been spurned so often. All things come to those
who wait--and fight for them. Yes, fight! I say it advisedly.
I have come to the time of life when a man does not lay about him
with a club unless he has to. But--eternal vigilance is the price
of liberty! To be vigilant is to sit up with a club. We, as a
people, have provided in the republic a means of fighting for our
rights and getting them, and it is our business to do it. We shall
never get them in any other way. Colonel Waring was a wise man as
well as a great man. His declaration that he cleaned the streets
of New York, all prophecies to the contrary notwithstanding, by
"putting a man instead of a voter behind every broom," deserves to
be put on the monument we shall build by and by to that courageous
man, for it is the whole gospel of municipal righteousness in a
nutshell. But he never said anything better than when he advised
his fellow-citizens to fight, not to plead, for their rights. So
we grow the kind of citizenship that sets the world, or anyhow our
day, ahead. We will all hail the day when we shall be able to lay
down the club. But until it comes I do not see that we have any
choice but to keep a firm grip on it.