to show you whence came the deadly apathy that was to blame for our
plight. Our conscience was asleep and the Church that should have kept
it awake slept, too. We cannot afford to forget it yet, for that
conscience of ours is none too robust, or else it is singularly drowsy
in spells. I am thinking of the time, only a little while ago, when
Theodore Roosevelt was Police Commissioner in New York, and of his
astonished look when churchmen, citizens from whom he should have
expected support, and did expect it, for his appeal was to them direct,
came to him daily to plead for “discretion” in the enforcement of the
laws he was sworn to carry out. Not all of them did this—he had many
strong backers among the clergy and lay-brethren—but too many. You
should have been with me in those days and you would have understood
what that fight was. The saloon was the enemy, and, in a single week
during that struggle, it wrecked eight homes by tragedies, with which I,
as a police reporter, was called to deal. I am not speaking now of the
numberless tragedies that drag their slow lengths through the years, but
of those that reached the acute stage in my sight that week. Four
desperate wives were driven to suicide and two were murdered by drunken
husbands. One aged woman was beaten to death by her beastly son when she
refused him money to continue his debauch. And a policeman was killed in
the street by drunken marauders. That was the showing; and it was for
discretion in dealing with that enemy those people strove, calling the
President of the Police Board “hasty.” They were “men of the highest
character, but they failed to appreciate the responsibility” which that
character imposed upon them.
They called Roosevelt hasty. It was time that some one got up some speed
in New York. More than a hundred years ago (to be exact, in 1797) the
legislature of New York prohibited soap factories on Manhattan Island,
south of Grand Street, in the interest of the public good. Within seven
weeks after the order was issued, the same legislature amended its act,
giving the Health Board discretion in the premises; and the biggest soap
factory in the land is below Grand Street to-day. The power of soap is
great.
Do you know that article of discretion in Philadelphia? In my town, it
has built up tenement blocks almost solid, ninety-three per cent.
covered with brick and mortar; it has penned tenants in burning
tenements with stairs of wood that should have been fireproof; it has
filled the pockets of the builder and wrung the heart of the tenant,
until, in despair, he refused to believe in either God or man. That is
what “discretion” has come to with us. Oh! for red blood in the veins of
Christians, for a muscular faith that, rather than stand by and see such
things done, will fight till—till some one dies. That is the kind of
faith that moves the world, mountains and all, and fills the churches!
Not sermons, but service! So we win victories that tell.
Now do you wonder that the common people, so deserted by their best
friend, took the first proffered hand held out to help? To this
multitude, toiling for their daily bread until it fills the landscape to
the exclusion of all else, until time and chance are lost to them to
lift up their heads and get the wider view—to them, disheartened and
sore, comes the boss with his self-seeking and says: “I am your friend.”
And he proves it: he gets Pat a job, gets Jim on the force, looks after
John who broke his leg and gets him into the hospital that was full;
attends to Dan when he gets into trouble with the police. What more
natural than that they should give him their votes and their support?
The more powerful he, the better able to help. Anyway, is he not their
friend? Observe, that it all proceeds on the neighborly principle,
debased to suit the slum; but it is still the idea of the neighbor:
binding up the wounds, taking the man who has fallen among thieves to
the inn and leaving money to have him tended. They knew the plan better
than did we, they whom we deserted, churchmen and Christians though we
were.
What if the boss robs the city! The poor man, going home to his
tenement, overhears the well-dressed citizen comment upon it with
qualified displeasure: “Say what you will, he may be a great rascal, but
he gets there, you’ll own. And he’s got the dough.” It is every one for
himself in his sight. Is it hard to understand that he, too, falls in
with the scheme?
[Illustration:
AT THE OLD FIVE POINTS
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.]
And now, that I have put the blame where it belongs, let us turn and
look at the other side of it, at the day of awakening. It was a long
day, for our sleep had been deep, and it was not easy to stay awake long
at a time for a considerable period after we had tumbled out. The Five
Points first aroused us. The slum there had got to the point where it
was no longer to be borne. Dickens’s pen had pricked us, and the
warnings of Charles Loring Brace and his contemporaries began to make us
listen. There followed the period of good intentions, but little sense,
that gave us Gotham Court and the Big Flat. They were built as model
tenements—heaven save the mark! by men who meant well and did badly.
They are the kind to keep your eye on. The Big Flat became a thieves’
runway, because, unconsciously, the builders had furnished the chance by
making it reach through the block, opening upon both streets, in a
neighborhood where such a convenience to a man fleeing from the police
was a regular windfall. Before its final destruction, it achieved the
reputation of being the worst tenement in New York. Gotham Court was a
close second. In some other important respects that concerned the home
life of the people, it was easily first. A sanitary official counted 146
cases of sickness among its thousand tenants in 1862, among them all
kinds of infectious disease, from measles to smallpox. It harbored one
of the most notorious gangs that ever made lower New York unsafe. Time
after time, before it was torn down, less than half a dozen years ago,
it was posted as hopeless and fit for nothing else. Yet it was built as
a model tenement by a Quaker of good intentions. He certainly did his
part in the paving of that infernal door-yard that is said to be laid
with good intentions not backed by good sense or hard work.
[Illustration:
THE “OLD CHURCH TENEMENTS”
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.]
This Quaker had a brother who also built houses for the poor, and, it is
recorded, meant well, too; but the milk of human kindness was soured in
him when his neighbor, the alderman, knocked him down in a quarrel over
the dividing line between their lots. It was against the Quaker’s
principles to fight, but he found a way of paying off his enemy that is
a whole volume of commentaries on graceless human nature: he built a
tenement upon his own lot right on the line and with a big dead wall so
close to his neighbor’s windows that his tenants could get neither sun
nor air. They lived in darkness ever after. The fact that, for want of
access, his house was useless and stood idle for years, did not stay his
revenge. That old Quaker was a hater from way back. His “wall of wrath,”
as I used to call it, killed more innocent babes and cursed more lives
than any other work of man I ever heard of. One wonders what that man’s
dreams were at night. The mere thought of it used to give me the
shivers, and I never slept so sweetly as the night when I had seen that
wall laid low by wreckers whom I had set on.
Yet it did not die in its sins. I like to think of that. Before the end
came to Gotham Court, we had grown a real conscience. The canker that
had crept in and was eating out the home and the heart of the people was
arraigned in the churches, as it should have been a long while
before—not in this church or in that church, but in _the churches_.
Christian men took hold of the Court and did the most and the best with
it that could be done,—which makes me think that only yesterday I had a
letter from the son of one of those two brothers, young Bayard Cutting,
pleading for support for the work of Bishop Brent out in the
Philippines; and it was as I would have expected. You see, as I said, it
is all one thing. These men are among the strongest of the backers of
the movement to provide homes for the poor of New York, and have been
for years; and for that very reason they are the natural supporters of
such a work as that which the good Bishop is doing on that far foreign
shore.
[Illustration:
GOTHAM COURT
From “How the Other Half Lives.”
Copyright, 1890, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]
[Illustration:
MIDNIGHT IN GOTHAM COURT
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.]
But, as I said, they did the best with the Court that could be done. The
best was bad, and therefore it had to go. Yet, in comparison with what
it had been, life even in Double Alley had become comparatively decent
before the wreckers boarded up the entrance to it. There were homes in
that alley where the word had been as a mockery before. I knew of some;
I will tell you the story of Susie Rocco and her home. And we had
learned something there; we had added to good intentions the knowledge
of the facts, which is the first and most important ingredient in good
sense when you come to deal with things. I am going now to show you some
of the pictures I promised you, and you shall have more hereafter. Think
not that any of them are irrelevant because they are of things that
were. Those things are but shadows of what may come again, if we lose
our grip and once more let our conscience fall asleep, believing we have
done so much that all is well. To avoid that, keep ever a firm grasp of
the facts. You will fight in vain for the people’s homes till you know
what afflicts them. The glory of our present-day Christianity is that at
last it plants itself squarely on the facts—seeks them out first and
then applies the remedy. Never fear them. If they clash in any way with
scholastic theory or even theology, make sure that they _are_ the facts,
then seek the fault in your theory. And always remember that human souls
live in bodies. If you want to reach the soul, you must reckon with the
man in the body; or your preaching will be vain.
[Illustration:
THE ALDERMAN’S TENEMENTS]
Here, now, is one of the Five Points in the day of its worst disgrace
(see illustration facing page 90), but the Point itself was by no means
the worst of that neighborhood. These adjoining buildings, I suppose you
would call them shanties, and I do not know that I should object to the
term, give a general idea of the character of that vicious slum. They
were houses surviving from a much earlier day, built for the occupation
of one family, and no doubt in that day there were homes in them as good
as might be found anywhere. It was when they came to contain from ten to
twenty families each that the slum moved in. With four families keeping
house in one room—that was the record made by a missionary who had that
district in charge—short work was made of the home. I used to laugh at
that missionary’s story of how, when he asked in hopeless bewilderment
how they managed to get along, one of the tenants said, “Well enough
until one of the other three took a boarder, then trouble began.”
But there was little enough to laugh at; less still, when the big
buildings sprang up that you see behind the shanties. They are the
double-deckers of to-day. They were supposed to be a “way out,” for at
least they had room for the teeming populations; but it turned out the
other way. They gave the home the hardest blow of all, and to-day they
are the curse that cleaves to us for our sins of the past, and with
which we will have to struggle while we live. I have said a good deal so
far, and shall have more to say before I am done, about murder. It is
not a nice word, but right here is an instance of what I mean. The
particular houses that show in the picture were built by one Buddensiek,
whose name we all came to know in the after years. I heard of it first
when I went with the health inspector to investigate a complaint of foul
stenches that was made by the tenants in those houses. The explanation
proved simple. The builder had merely run the soil-pipe three feet or so
into the ground without connecting it with the sewer. That time he
escaped indictment. It is somehow not so easy to bring a man to book who
poisons his tenants with bad plumbing as the one who sticks a knife into
his neighbor. Some years after when, grown bold, he neglected to put
lime in his mortar and his tenements fell down and killed his workmen
before the tenants got into them, the jail claimed him at last on a
charge of manslaughter.
[Illustration:
LITTLE SUSIE
From “The Children of the Poor.”
Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]
And now here are the “old church tenements” I spoke of (see illustration
facing page 92); upon the records of the Health Department “among the
largest contributors to the hospitals” in the city. The cellar, where
the tenants paid two and three dollars a month,—that was before the day
when the whole population of “cave-dwellers,” more than five thousand in
number, was dragged out upon the street by the police and not allowed to
go back—was the old vault in which the sexton stored corpses in the days
when the building was a church. Do you wonder, when you come to think of
it, that the church lost its grip upon the people of that day, and that
some of the feeling of that still survives? Do you wonder that these
people were not attracted by a scheme of salvation that meant damnation
in this life, so far as they could see? I do not. Bear in mind the old
church for a little while; I shall have more to tell you of that. That,
too, was atoned for, thank God!
[Illustration:
TENEMENT WHERE A HOME WAS MURDERED]
This is Gotham Court (see illustration facing page 94), that stood,
until three or four years ago, almost on the identical spot where George
Washington lived when he was the first President of this Republic. His
house was directly across the street, and in his day it was of course as
fine a neighborhood as there was in the city. Within sixty years after
his death, the slum had moved in. That tells the story of the mighty
strides New York took towards metropolitan greatness, and of the perils
that hedged in our path in the race for sudden wealth. For that was the
time when we forgot. When I made a census of the Court some years before
it was demolished, I found one hundred and forty-two families there. It
happened that just half of them were Italians and the other half the
original Irish, except that there were two German families there.
Perhaps you can imagine the kind of time those two German families were
having. The process of displacing the Hibernian element with the Italian
is not altogether a peaceful one, as the constant presence of the
policemen in the alley bore witness. It was an Irishman, of course, who
told me, when I asked him why the policeman was there, that it was “all
on account of them two Dutch families in the alley; they make so much
trouble that no one can stand it.” Nobody else would have thought of it.
I shall not try to describe to you in detail what life meant in that
place, for it is gone now and I am glad. One Christmas when I was Santa
Claus in the alley for the King’s Daughters, two hundred little girls
came out of it and claimed dolls from me. They might have told you. Do
you see the “wall of wrath” of which I spoke? Wait till I will give you
a better view of it. There, now, are the Alderman’s tenements (see
illustration facing page 96) that were cursed by it, as were his tenants
all the days of their lives. But the wall, too, is gone. It went one
Christmas, and in its fall it was to me as if I heard again the chorus
of angels’ voices singing, “Peace on earth, good-will towards men.” I
had never heard any angels’ voices in that alley before.
[Illustration:
A “DRUNKEN” FLAT
From “How the Other Half Lives.”
Copyright, 1890, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]
Here is one of the little girls who got my dolls (see illustration
facing page 98), little Susie Rocco, whose story I promised to tell you.
Susie was as good a girl as you can find in Philadelphia, search where
you may. Perhaps she was not very well instructed in the higher ethics
of things. It may be that Mrs. Carrie Nation would not have approved of
her, because the work she did and by which she helped her mother run the
household was pasting covers on pocket-flasks, whiskey flasks, which, I
suppose, come under the ban entirely. Susie did not, I know. She was not
concerned about that; she was concerned about helping her mother, and,
though I am no champion of the whiskey flask, I stand with Susie. Her
father was a loafer and when he ran away at last and the mother fell ill
and Susie’s work gave out, the evil days came that are never far away in
a slum alley. Everything went to the pawnshop, last of all the mother’s
wedding ring. I should have sent that first, but she was a woman; I am a
man. She had to go to the hospital then; the doctor said so. It was the
only place where she could be properly cared for.
Susie wept. She was afraid of the hospital. You know it, all of you who
have had any dealings with the poor, that one of their very real
hardships is that, when most they need that friend, they are afraid of
him. Susie could not bear the thought. She cast about in the house for
something that was yet of value enough to take to the pawnshop, so that
she might stay the evil day, and she found my doll. It was not a nice
doll by that time; it was very much in need of the hospital itself. But
to Susie it was precious beyond compare, for was it not her doll baby?
She did it up in a newspaper and carried it to the pawnshop with tears,
for she was bringing the greatest sacrifice of all. And that bad man,
when he unrolled the bundle and saw what it held, smashed the doll
angrily against the stove and put little Susie out into the street.
There she stood and wept, as if she would cry her eyes out, and there
one of the King’s Daughters found her; and that was how I came to know
Susie and her story.
Better days came for her and her mother, for the ladies took them up and
cared for them. They were made happy and I ought to have been, but I was
not. Let me confess it right here and have done with it. I am no
scrapper; I have too much else to do to go around picking quarrels with
everybody. I try hard to do as the Apostle says: “live peaceably with
all men as far as in me lies”; but how can it lie very far in anybody
with that kind of a pawnbroker in the landscape? I own that the notion
of having one little round with that man, just one little one, has
charms that I cannot get around.
[Illustration:
IN A BAXTER STREET YARD]
[Illustration:
SHANTY DWELLINGS IN A TENEMENT YARD
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.]
To this tenement (see illustration facing page 100) my business as a
police reporter led me. A home had been murdered there: a drunken
husband had killed his wife. I know it is a common belief that
drunkenness accounts for pretty nearly all the poverty there is. I do
not find it so. It did in this case and there are enough such and to
spare; but I think the verdict of the Association for Improving the
Condition of the Poor, once upon a time, came nearer the truth, namely,
that forty per cent. of the helpless poverty was due to drunkenness, or
the drunkenness due to the poverty. I forget the exact way they put it,
but that was the sense of it, and it was good sense. Suppose you had to
live in such a place as this! (See illustration facing page 102.) Do you
think human life would seem especially precious or sacred, and don’t you
think you would run to the saloon as, by comparison, far the more decent
and human spot in that place? I know I would; and I think that one of
our worst offenses against the brother is, after letting him be robbed
of his home to leave him at the mercy of the saloon as the one place of
human companionship for him, the one humanly decent spot in all his
environment. I said “letting him be robbed.” There lies on my table a
report of the Health Department of the year 1869, and it opens at the
page upon which is recorded the result of a tour of the Sanitary
Committee through the tenement-house districts that year. They found
that the landlords kept those houses “as a business and generally as a
speculation. He was seeking a certain percentage on his outlay, and that
percentage very rarely fell below fifteen per cent. and frequently
exceeded thirty—the complaint was universal among the tenants that _they
were entirely uncared for_—the agent’s instructions were simple but
emphatic: collect the rents in advance, or, failing, eject the
occupant.” You see the scheme of the robbery. It is plain enough.
[Illustration:
WASHING IN AN ITALIAN FLAT; THE TEA KETTLE USED AS A WASH BOILER]
Out of such conditions came little Antonia Candia, stripped by an
inhuman stepmother and beaten with a red-hot poker until her body was
one mass of burns and bruises. That stepmother went to jail a long while
since, but we have need still of the services of the Children’s Society
that has thrown a strong and watchful arm around more than one hundred
thousand little ones in the slum where the home had been wrecked. They
are the ones that need our care, if only because (I have said it before
and I shall have yet to say it many times) they are our own to-morrow. I
remember the case of a bright little lad in an East-side tenement whose
home had given him up to the street, as do those homes right along. All
day he carried the growler from the shop where his father worked to the
saloon on the corner, and when evening came he was missing. It was
Saturday and he did not come home that night. They sought him all day
Sunday in vain. Monday morning when they opened the shop, they found him
in the cellar where he had crept after drinking of the beer, and where
the rats had found _him_. Not even his mother could recognize him.
These are the ones to look out for; and the aged and helpless. Nor need
we marvel much if those whose lives have been spent in the crowds turn
their backs upon the country, upon the woods and the fields, when we
offer them a refuge there. The tenement has robbed them of their
resources, of the individuality that makes a man good company for
himself. It is only a man who can think that is at home in the fields.
The slum never thinks; it is all the time trying to forget. There is
nothing good to think of, nothing worth remembering.
[Illustration:
PIETRO AND HIS FATHER
From “The Children of the Poor.”
Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]
These are ours to care for. The tramp, the lazy man, is entitled only to
be locked up. Only the other day, I was invited to come to Boston and
join in a discussion of the tramp problem before a distinguished body
there; and I refused. I do not think there is a tramp problem which hard
labor behind strong bars cannot solve. It is just a question of human
laziness. Save the young, and lock up the old man who will not work. A
fellow whom I found sitting in a Baxter Street yard, smoking his pipe
contentedly, gave me points on that. (See illustration facing page 104.)
He was willing to be photographed for ten cents; but, before I could
train my camera on him, his mind had evolved possibilities not to be
neglected. He was smoking a clay pipe that had, perhaps, cost a cent,
but I suppose it was an effort to hold it between his teeth while I made
ready, for he made a demand for twenty-five cents if he was to be
photographed in character, pipe and all.
In that yard were habitations built of old boards and discarded roof
tin, in which lived men, women and children that had been crowded out of
the tenements. (See illustration facing page 104.) The rent collector
did not miss them, however. They paid regularly for their piggeries. I
feel almost like apologizing to the pig; no pig would have been content
to live in such a place without a loud outcry.
Though the flats in the tenements were not much better. How strong do
you think the home feeling can be in a place where the family tea kettle
does weekly duty on Mondays as a wash-boiler? That was a condition I
actually found there. (See illustration facing page 106.) Think of the
attraction such a place must have for father and the boys when they come
home from work in the evening! We shall cry out against the saloon in
vain until we give them something better. And a better substitute for
the saloon was never offered than in that old legislative committee’s
prescription: “To prevent drunkenness give every man a clean and
comfortable home.”
[Illustration:
SISTER IRENE AND HER LITTLE ONES]