procession that fills our prisons; where the sunlight does not enter,
deeds of darkness naturally belong. When at last we fully understood
this, we began to tear down the worst of the rookeries that had murdered
the home. Nearly the worst of them all was the Mott Street barracks.
There were some six hundred Italians living in that row when it was at
its worst, and it was one of the few places I have known in which the
rent actually rose as you went up-stairs. There was a little sunlight up
there, but only darkness and dirt down below. The yard between the front
and rear tenement—think of calling such a crack a yard—was five feet,
ten inches wide. I remember that well. Theodore Roosevelt held one end
of the tape line when we measured it, and I the other. By the time we
had got up indignation enough to settle with the barracks, he had come
into the municipal government of our city and made things go. The
showing upon which we arraigned the barracks was, that during a season
when we watched it, one-third of the babies there had died, killed by
the house. So we tore down the rear tenements, and when we did we found
that the mortgage on the property, with its awful baby death rate, was
held by a cemetery corporation!
To me the barracks seemed as nearly hell on earth as could be; but let
me give you a glimpse of the veritable hell here below. Whatever you may
think of the one hereafter, you need not doubt its existence here. One
night, when I went through one of the worst dives I ever knew, my camera
caught and held this scene that I set before you. (See illustration
facing page 140.) When I look upon that unhappy girl’s face, I think
that the grace of God can reach that “lost woman” in her sins; but what
about the man who made a profit on the slum that gave her up to the
street? She _did not sleep home_, that was where the mischief began.
What about us who let that slum grow unchallenged, and who took from
those in it, with the home on earth the hope of heaven? _We_ need the
grace of God, if any one does. That is our fight—for the home in which
the girl may sleep securely, in which she will want to stay; thank God!
we are winning it at last.
[Illustration:
HELL ON EARTH
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.]
For see: these tenements have homes in them. (See illustration facing
page 142.) They were built by the City and Suburban Homes Company with
money subscribed by Christian men and women. Foremost among them all
that good woman to whom we owe so much in this new day of ours, the wife
of Bishop Potter. They are called the Alfred Corning Clark Buildings,
and stand in West 68th and 69th Streets, in that neighborhood where the
“social ideals minted themselves upon the lives of the people at the
rate of seven saloon thoughts to one educational thought.” The plan of
the City and Suburban Homes Company is that of philanthropy and five per
cent. They limit their income to five per cent., and have so far
received four. Their tenants are happy, as well they may be, and the
owners have good cause to be the same. They have done us a very notable
service in their work; since those houses were built, others have been
added and provision made for some fifteen or sixteen hundred families.
Four per cent. on such an investment is enough to settle it in the sight
of us all that real homes _can_ be provided for the multitude even on
Manhattan Island, and therefore must be; also, that the slum landlord
must stop building houses that kill his tenants; that murder is murder,
whether it is done with an axe or with a house.
[Illustration:
THE CITY AND SUBURBAN HOMES COMPANY’S MODEL TENEMENTS THE ALFRED
CORNING CLARK BLOCK
From “The Battle with the Slum.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.]
I should like to tell you of that godless municipal “charity” which
herded old thieves and old tramps and young homeless lads, who were
adrift in the great city, in those vile dens called police station
lodging rooms, and of the war upon it that was won at last; but I have
written so much and so often about it, and about my own experience in
one of those dens, where I was beaten and robbed, and where my little
dog was killed, when I was a homeless boy myself, and I have not the
time to repeat it. You have fought that same fight in Philadelphia and
won it, too. Our battle went dead against us, until that man with honest
purpose came among us and set things right. I shall never forget the
night he and I spent in touring the police stations together until we
brought up in the Church Street station, where the thing happened of
which I have just spoken. Standing there, I told him my story and he
cried angrily, “Did they do that to you? I’ll smash them to-morrow.” And
he did. And so that foul disgrace came to an end. Thank God for Theodore
Roosevelt!
There remained the awful nuisance of the cheap lodging houses in the
Bowery, where thieves recruit their broken-up gangs among the young men
who are stranded there, coming from everywhere out in the country. They
have a standing army of lodgers, from thirteen to sixteen thousand
homeless men and lads; and we knew not what to do with them, until there
arose among us a philanthropist who gave of his fortune to solve this
problem also. He gave a million or more, and gave so wisely that his
work, the great Mills houses, have become one of the real benefactions
of to-day. There are two of them and they shelter a constant population
of twenty-six hundred lodgers. They are so well managed that they return
a profit, even a very good profit, upon the investment. So they are free
from the taint of alms-giving and the man who lives in them can and does
keep his self-respect. Mr. D. O. Mills deserves a place among the real
benefactors of our day.
[Illustration:
THE “TO-MORROW”
From “The Children of the Poor.”
Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]
I am to speak to you next of the to-morrow. Here it sits in a wagon, two
of the children of the poor whose only playground is their father’s
truck. (See illustration facing page 144.) “Was” I should have said. I
took their picture before the day of Colonel Waring, and when they
stepped out of the truck they landed in a street where the mud was over
half a foot in depth. You never saw anything like it, and pray that you
never may. We solaced ourselves with the belief in those days that no
one could clean our streets, that it was an impossible job. That was the
day of the man who “can’t,” or rather who won’t. When one of the other
kind came with his broom, he gave the children their first playground,
though it was not a good one, and his broom swept some of the cobwebs
out of our heads at the same time. “A man instead of a voter behind
every broom,” that was his watch-word, and it cleaned our streets and
cleaned our politics for a season. Just remember it; it applies to other
kinds of dirt than that which lies in the street.
The children got a playground, but not the kind they needed. We had to
put our hands deep into our pockets to give them that. Over on that
East-side, where three hundred and twenty-four thousand persons were
penned up upon seven hundred and eleven acres of land, out of reach and
out of sight of a green spot, we tore down block after block of old
buildings, paying a million dollars for each block, and making the best
bargain of our lives in doing it. It was marvelous how long it took us
to see that this was good sense, and we were not alone in that, either.
A year ago, when I spoke in this city about children and their rights, I
was shown a square that had been laid out as a playground for the little
ones, but that was wholly neglected and gone to wreck. That was not good
sense. I looked for better among the people of Philadelphia where
Benjamin Franklin lived; and I expect to find it, too.
The Mulberry Bend we laid by the heels; that was the worst pigsty of
all, and here again let me hark back to the murder I have spoken of so
often. I do not believe that there was a week in all the twenty years I
had to do with the den, as a police reporter, in which I was not called
to record there a stabbing or shooting affair, some act of violence. It
is now five years since the Bend became a park (see illustration facing
page 146), and the police reporter has not had business there once
during that time; not once has a shot been fired or a knife been drawn.
That is what it means to let the sunlight in and give the boys their
rights in a slum like that!
[Illustration:
IT IS FIVE YEARS SINCE THE BEND BECAME A PARK
From “The Making of an American.”
Copyright, 1901, by the Macmillan Company.]
Of this boy of the slum we shall speak together further. He is just what
you let him be: good, if you give him the chance; bad, if you will have
none of him. Take the home out of his life, and you handicap him forever
and mortgage your own future with the heaviest of mortgages. It is since
that understanding began to dawn upon us that we have seized playgrounds
right and left, wherever we had the chance. I have in mind one which we
got away from a corporation on the West-side—it goes a little hard with
me to own that it was a church corporation, because by that time the
church ought to have had better sense. It was an old burial ground where
some of the old-time New Yorkers lay who, in their day, neglected their
boys and gave us the heritage of the slum. I hope that they have seen
their mistake: I am sure they have, and that their ears are rejoiced by
the patter of little children’s feet where once there was the silence;
for they are echoing the better to-morrow, those little feet.
I wish I had time to tell you the whole story of what we have learned as
to that in these last ten years, but it is too long. Let it be enough to
say that, wherever we have destroyed the slum that killed the home and
given the children a chance, there order has moved in where violence and
gang rule were before, and the police are having a vacation. We are
extending that program of ours right and left. Seven years ago we had
not one school playground in New York; now we have a law which says that
never another public school shall be built without an outdoor playground
for the children. And we have been building more than three-score new
and splendid schools since then. Some of these schools have the
playgrounds on the street, and some on the roof, and in the latter, last
year, Mayor Low’s Board of Education put brass bands in the summer
evenings during the long vacation, and invited in the neighborhood. If
you have any doubts about the millennium’s coming nearer, you should
have been there then. It seemed to me when I saw three thousand children
dancing to the tune of “Sunday Afternoon” on top of the school that had
been used so long as a kind of jail in which to lock them up for the
convenience of some one who wanted to get rid of them—it seemed to me
then, as if we had put on seven league boots in the race to distance the
slum and the janitor. Both of them lost their grip on those children
then and there, and for all time; though the janitor strove hard against
fate. He tried to drive them away with a club when we were not looking;
and when he was caught at that, he reported that those roof playgrounds
were no good: they were too hot in summer and too cold in winter. So, it
would appear, is most of the rest of the earth.
However, his day is past and the children’s is coming. The school of the
new day is “built beautiful,” quite like a palace, and our women hang
the walls of the class-rooms with handsome pictures that open windows
for the souls of the little ones, who sit and look on. There are still
some growlers who think that the money put into handsome stone and
wrought iron and polished wood is wasted. They are wrong; we never made
a better investment, unless it be in the playgrounds which are part of
those schools. All these things help to restore ideals. What is the
matter with the slum is that it lacks ideals. Where _they_ are made to
grow, there comes the irresistible demand for the home that is the
essence of good, and then we are on the home stretch.
[Illustration:
IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL OF TO-DAY]
Our vacation schools gather in the boys, to teach them sloyd and how to
handle useful tools (see illustration facing page 150), and the girls to
teach them cooking; and, on alternate days, the men and boys and the
women and girls are taught swimming at our public baths. Over on the
West-side, where one of our neighborhood parks is being laid out, the
Park Department even went into teaching the young lads truck-farming
last summer. From that sort of school no one “plays hookey.” We shall
shortly have no truant question at all, or, if we do, we shall be in a
position to deal with it easily, for there need be no quibbling about
the proper disposal of the lad who deserts the school of the new
dispensation.
I once found a little fellow picking bones and rags under an ash dump,
the only home he knew being a vile shed under that pile of rubbish. That
dump was in the identical spot where now one of our new recreation piers
extends into the North River. If he had been left there, to grow up as
he could—and he could neither read nor write—he would have grown
naturally into the tough who says that the world owes him a living,
which he is bound to collect as easily as he can, especially without any
work. It is a lie; the world owes no man a living. It is like a bank
upon which you draw according to the amount of work you put into it and
no more. But the boy was not left there, and, as I said, the dump that
cursed his life has been replaced by a park and a play-pier. The band
comes there in the evening and the crowds from the tenements, young and
old; and, on the long summer days in the vacation season, the
kindergartner comes and gathers her class, and there in the open they
study with one another the first lessons of the new political science
that shall draw us closer together and restore to us the neighborly
feeling, and the lost home with it.
When we build our altar on that ground, we shall hear no more of empty
churches. The life has come back. How great was the yearning for it,
none of us may ever know. The other day, a little lad, watching the
lighted Christmas tree in a settlement in my city, whispered anxiously
to the head-worker when the distribution of presents began: “Shall we
not worship the tree?” No, but we shall worship together, they and we,
God in the hearts that were at last opened to let them in—to let the
lost neighbor in—in His name.
[Illustration:
SALUTING THE FLAG
From “The Children of the Poor.”
Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.]
Here they come, an army with banners to help us win the fight for the
home! They are the children of the very poor, sometimes too ragged to
attend the public school, and sometimes kept out because they do not
know our language. They are the children of foreigners who brought them
here that they might live in a free land, at once the only and the
greatest heritage they could leave them. If you doubt that they are on
our side in the fight, go and hear them salute the flag in the morning
(see illustration facing page 152), promising “our hearts, our heads and
our hands to our country—one country, one language, one flag!” And never
doubt or distrust them again, for to do so is to distrust God, whose
children they are, even if we rejected them, and to reject the republic
which is to be His means of bringing us together again.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
OUR GRIP ON THE TO-MORROW
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV
OUR GRIP ON THE TO-MORROW
IN concluding these lectures, I wish first of all to extend to
Philadelphia my hearty thanks for the ready and patient hearing she has
given to this fight for the American home, upon which all depends. The
great audiences that have attended, whether in church or hall, are in
themselves the best guarantee that the fight will be won, that the
to-morrow is safe. There is needed only the strong and informed public
opinion that sees clearly the peril, to set a barrier against the
inroads of the slum. Without that we fight in vain. If Philadelphia or
Boston or Connecticut were to be deaf to the evils of sweating, we
should be powerless against them in New York, or vice versa. If, on the
other hand, public opinion from the Mississippi to the Hudson condemns
tenement-made goods, their market will be gone and our fight won. The
protest of Oshkosh against the home conditions that degrade manhood and
womanhood in New York is registered at Albany in a hundred echoes from
my own state and makes our annual struggle with the selfish interests,
that for profit seek to sacrifice the home, so much easier. We shall
win, I know it; for, in my own time, I have seen this protest against
the abandonment of the brother swell from scattered voices here and
there to an angry chorus, that first shamed decent men, who did not
know, out of the owning of slum tenements, and afterwards drove
Christian men, who did know and who cared, too, into it with the result
that we have seen. We shall win the fight—indeed! I have spoken to
little purpose if you do not see with me that we _must_ win the fight
for the people’s homes, if we would live as a nation.
And now this to-morrow! Let me bring you face to face with it as it
confronted me one day, years ago, in East 16th Street directly opposite
St. George’s Church. It stood there in the person of a ragamuffin,
typical, in his rags and dirt, of his kind and quite in the character;
for he was engaged in slinging mud. He dug it out of the gutter by the
fistful and distributed it impartially all over the church across the
way. Why the church, I wondered as I watched him. He, the boy, had no
stouter friend than its stalwart rector. Why then throw mud at his
church? I went up to ask and for once he was taken unawares. I was upon
him before he saw me and put my hand upon his shoulder! and that moment
I knew what I wanted to know, what ailed the lad. The years that have
passed have added many details to the record of his case, but nothing of
the first importance. It was all clear to me that instant; for he turned
like a hunted wild beast, his fistful of mud gripped tight, to confront
the enemy—it could be nothing else. In all his dreary little life no
hand had ever been laid upon his shoulder in kindness. That was the
story. That _is_ the story too often yet. Every man’s hand raised
against him, his was raised against the world that would have none of
him. It was self-defense. I saw it and was dumb.
Presently I remembered that I had started to interview him, and asked
questions. He did not answer them, but his looks were more eloquent than
words; and, at the hard places, another street Arab, a degree less dirty
and less spiteful than he, ventured responses that let in the light.
Read and write he could not, never went to school. I stared at that;
visions of truant officers, of compulsory education laws, rose up before
me. I little knew then the true condition of things—it was years after
that that our first school census showed us fifty thousand children in
the street who should have been on the school-benches, but were shut out
for lack of room. What did he know? Nothing. But, said I impatiently,
what can he do, what does he do?
“He?” said the other boy with a contempt for my lack of understanding,
which he made no effort to conceal, “He throws stones!” And mud. That
was all, all we had taught him in his apprenticeship of the street, his
preparation for the citizenship that was to come. That was _our_ end of
the story.
We have been busy since making inquiries concerning this lad who is our
to-morrow. We have been at work among the underpinnings to see how fared
the props upon which we build character, citizenship—the same thing in
the end. When the test comes, they are convertible terms. And the props
were not there—they were gone! What had become of them? I have shown you
how beset is the home whence came the boy who throws the mud. There is
no stronger prop under the character that forms in the growing boy than
his home. The tenement is a destroyer of home and of character, of the
individuality that makes character tell. A homeless city—a city without
civic pride, without citizen virtue, a despoiler of children, a
destroyer of the to-morrow.
Did I tell you of my friend whose house stands in a garden with a
sand-heap in which the children dig and romp with their cat and the
kittens and the terrier dog? Of how the dog _will_ try to smother a
kitten now and then in an opportune sand-hole, with the children ever on
the watch to avert the threatened catastrophe? And of how they did avert
it, until one unlucky day they found a dead kitten in the sand-heap.
Whereupon the little girl rushed into her mother’s presence with it in
her apron and cried out indignantly:
“There, mamma, a perfectly good cat spoiled!”
Just so with these children of the tenement. Perfectly good, as good as
any on the avenue with the brown stone mansions, they are spoiled in the
tenement house slum, and the loss is ours, an irreparable loss. The
chief prop under the character of the growing boy is gone. Nothing can
replace it; nothing ever does.
The school is another. How about the lad’s school? The census of which I
spoke told us that story seven years ago; and we were surprised. It
would have been more to the point had there been no cause for surprise.
Two chief props of the to-morrow, of the state—the home and the
school—and both neglected! Fifty thousand children in the street who
should have been in school! Where the prop had not been knocked out,
what had our neglect made of it?
I remember my efforts to catechize a sewing class of girls, all out of
the public school, on the subject of Napoleon, of whom there was a big
picture on a poster just across the street. Not one of them knew who he
was. They thought the picture was of some wild west show character,
Buffalo Bill perhaps. Yes, there was one who “believed she had heard of
the gentleman before.” She said it timidly and was evidently not sure
that she might not be doing an injury to some innocent citizen who might
rise and object. This was what she had heard “that he had two wives.”
Not that he was a great general, not that he was a soldier, a lawgiver,
a ruler, a leader of men; but that he had two wives. It was Napoleon
scaled down to the level of the slum.
We found out what our neglect had made of the public school when three
applicants for appointment as policemen under Theodore Roosevelt wrote
in their examination papers that five of the thirteen states that formed
the union were, “England, Ireland, Wales, Belfast, and Cork”! Another
wrote that Lincoln was murdered by Ballington Booth! We had made our
public schools into stuffing machines. Where they should have taught the
young to think, they jammed them full of all sorts of things that made
manikins of them—not men. And the “truants” we made by slamming the
school-doors in their faces, we took and locked up in a jail behind iron
bars, with burglars and thieves and bad boys of every kind, and divided
them there—not into the good and the bad; not into the sheep and the
goats, remembering that in mingling them there was fearful danger, for
how should the young burglar, bursting with pride in his exploit, keep
from bragging of it to his admiring side-partner?—not that way were they
classified, with a sense of the peril of such a contact, but into squads
according to height: four feet, four feet seven, and over four feet
seven! That was how we ran our school machinery, without sense or soul;
and, where there is neither, character does not grow. That prop—the
school—was gone, knocked out from under the boy, the to-morrow.
However, we have done our best to put it back since we made out how
badly off we were, for we understand at last the peril of that. Our
schools are every day getting nearer to the ideal school that turns out
men and women who think, to do the work of the world. The reformatory I
spoke of is no longer guilty of such outrages upon common sense. It is
to-day leading the way in an attempt to restore, as nearly as possible,
family life and family training in home groups, instead of the deadening
institution life, to the children whose greatest misfortune was that
they never knew home in the saving sense while they—and we—could so
easily have been saved.
And now here is a prop which, certainly during a most critical period of
the boy’s life, should stand ahead even of the school. I mean his play.
Froebel, the great kindergartner who gave us the best legacy of the
nineteenth century to its successor, said that play is “the normal
occupation of the child through which he first perceives moral
relations.” Upon this truth and the other, that the child “learns by
doing,” he built his whole common sense system, which we now know to be
the right beginning of all education, whether of rich or poor. How have
we dealt with this strong bulwark? As sacredly should it be guarded as
the right of habeas corpus; the one is not of greater moment to the
commonwealth than the other. You cannot make a good citizen out of the
lad whom you denied a chance to kick a ball across lots when that was
his ambition and his right. I have said it before: it takes a whole boy
to make a whole man.