THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL CENTERS.
The centralization of the interests of the tenement-house population is not
understood by those who broaden their mental, if not their active, interest
by reading and travel; who in the varied interest of a broader life are
forced to see the multiplicity of factors that enter into the settlement of
every problem. This is what we mean by knowing the relation of things;
marking the distinction between those who see only and those who
comprehend. The man who is a machine set in the place where he bears his
relation to the whole by an authority which he dares not question loses all
opportunity to comprehend his relation to that whole. He is interested in
immediate results as related to himself only. This is the relation which
the mass of the tenement-house workers and voters bear to life.
The people of whole sections live entirely within certain geographical
lines, every interest centered within these limits.
The race sections are logical, based on the law of natural selection; of
family interest. The first generation of immigrants naturally hold the
second generation of home-makers near them, and these together hold the
relatives and friends who follow. Three generations are not infrequently
found in the same house, each maintaining its own home. The new arrivals
keep alive the foreign home traditions, the foreign home habits of living.
Poverty and greed make the people crowd together. The last arrivals are
taught what their predecessors have learned of American life and law. The
race section perpetuates itself; it retains all that it can of the old
life, and interprets the new according to the lessons learned from
environment, and power as it is exercised on the people. Each race section
has its own thoroughfare. The people on the street use their own language,
and trade in shops of their own countrymen. In some sections newspapers are
published in the language of the section, giving prominence to the local
news. Were it not for the public schools, one wonders what would be the
result of this race centralization.
[Illustration: SATURDAY MORNING ON THE EAST SIDE.]
The writer once met a man who had voted for twenty-three years in one ward.
For sixteen of these years he had cast his vote from one house in Orchard
Street. He had never been farther north than Houston Street, farther south
than Hester and had never crossed the Bowery. He had positive convictions
on every subject relating to the ward; he knew the life history of every
political leader in that portion of the city; could rehearse the disasters
that had followed every man who failed to fall in line at the polls; knew
what saloon-keepers were forced to obey the law, and who "didn't care a
cent" for the law; knew why this man could put his goods on the walk and
why the other man could not. He protected his own two daughters from the
evils of his home environment as he saw them; was strict to rigorousness
about their home-coming; watched the kind of people who moved into the
house in which he lived, and doubtless kept it above the average of the
neighborhood by his watchfulness. But he did not know who was President of
the United States, and did not consider it the business of the poor man. He
refused a "job" under the city, because he didn't want to be "beholden." It
was all right for the man who needed a job to take it. The only grievance
the man had was that the Hebrews were crowding into the neighborhood. This
was an invasion of his personal rights; they had their own place on the
south side of Grand Street, as the Italians had west of the Bowery, and
coming into that region north of Grand Street was an intrusion on the
personal rights of himself and his countrymen. The first thing which would
happen, if they--his own people--did not look sharp, would be the Hebrews
would have a say in politics. The man's mental attitude is typical of the
race settlement, the race political rights theory in many sections of New
York; the difference is only in the race dominant.
This man was a porter, who for seventeen years was employed in an East Side
department store, working in a sub-cellar nine hours a day for nine dollars
a week. He could not read, though he came to this country when five years
of age. He became a wage-earner at eleven. His daughters became
wage-earners at fourteen, having attended public schools until that age.
The pride with which this man referred to his daughters' education made one
comprehend the gradual absorption by the foreign peoples who come to us of
American ideas. Those girls knew they were not educated; they had been
forced to contrast their mental equipment with that of the "club ladies,"
as they called the residents at the College Settlement, where the club of
which they were members met. They, too, had been satisfied until brought
into relationship with those who represented another world. The revelation,
because of contact with the minds of these college-trained women, showed
them, so far as they could comprehend it, their own lack of mental
training, the first step in their true education.
Women are by nature more conservative than men; they cling longer to early
traditions and habits; find it more difficult to adopt new habits of
thought. The more closely they are surrounded by people of their own way of
life, their own habits of thinking, the more strongly intrenched are they
in the customs and habits of their native country, the less are the homes
they regulate modified by the new environment. The result is that whole
sections of New York to-day are as foreign as the villages from which the
people in them came. There are women in New York whose children and
grandchildren were born in the city who cannot speak English, nor
understand it beyond the merest assent or dissent. Their lives in old age
are pitiable.
A sweet, motherly German once said to the writer, and but a short time ago:
"I am so lonely. I cannot speak English. I never learn it. I sit in my
daughter's house, where German is not used. The children all want to be
Americans; they will not talk German. When I sit at the table, I never
speak. They all talk, but I do not understand. Sometimes I ask, and the
children say they have not time to tell me. They buy only the English
papers, and so I cannot read. I wish I had learned English when I first
came. I was young then, but I had eight children after I came here, and I
did everything for them. I could not take the time, I thought. I see now
the children could have taught me. Now they have not the time." This woman
was a German in her sympathies, her interests, her standards. Positive race
antagonism existed between her and her family. She measured everything by
German life and rule, and lived a critic among a people her own only in
blood. In answer to the question, she explained that her husband learned
English for his "work." The family attended the mission church when they
attended church. She attended the German services, but the rest of the
family, even her husband, the English services. Her constant plaint was: "I
am so lonely. Some day I never speak all day. At the table they speak
English."
Hundreds of women like this one sit in homes in New York in which they have
no part, barred out by the fact that they speak a foreign tongue. One of
the mistakes made in even our church work has been the maintaining of
distinctive church services in a foreign tongue. In so far as the churches
have done this, they have been an obstruction to good citizenship for time,
whatever they may have accomplished for eternity, for the people they call
their own.
One of the most earnest of missionary workers in New York, an American
citizen born in Italy, protested vigorously to the writer on the policy of
maintaining church services in New York in a foreign tongue. "You cannot
make a united people using many languages. I would preach that to the
people all the time. I use English words in my sermons to my own people,
and I tell them to learn English; it is better for them in business. The
women ought to learn, for they lose their children. They go away from them
because they do not speak the English. In New York they are the victims of
oppression, my people, because they cannot speak English. They have to bow
the head to the yoke because they are foreigners in a strange land in which
they vote. It is a great wrong to them and to the country. It makes the
'boss.'"
The first interest of the mother in the tenement, as of the mother
everywhere, is the support of her children; to get for them all that she
can. She would prefer that her husband should be honest, which may mean
that the only dishonesty of which she has any comprehension is stealing
money or other tangible property. In politics the tenement-house women have
only a secondary interest. They accept without question the statements of
their male relatives as to issues and men. Even this degree of interest
represents only the most intelligent of the tenement-house women. The
charge that a man used his political position and affiliations to further
his own advancement, that he purchased the votes and enthusiasms of less
clever voters, would mean to the women educated in their conception of
right and wrong under the systems of machine politics that the man was
intelligent and trying to do the best he could for his family and his
friends. To say that he refused to rally voters to support the party that
gave him a position because he was convinced that the party was dishonest
in the use it made of the victory it gained at the polls, would arouse the
deepest contempt for the man. He would be considered not only untrue to his
family, but to his friends. Had he remained in close relation to the
politicians who gave him his chance, he would not only provide for his
family, but his friends would have the benefit of his influence; he could
give them a chance in time.
[Illustration: THE PAST, PRESENT AND MIDDLE PERIOD.]
The man of brains they see drop his tools, take off his overalls and stand
in high hat, and eventually frock-coat, the center of a crowd of men who
smile at his nod, though they worked shoulder to shoulder but a short time
ago--in a trench, perhaps; yes, even came over in the same ship with him.
The women do not understand the process of evolution, but they see the
results. They soon know that from street sweeper to car conductor, the man
who has become a politician under a strong partisan government regulates,
and often decides, the wage-earning opportunities of the greater portion of
the men in the tenement-house sections. They learn, these women, that it is
not a question of how faithful the worker is in the discharge of his duty
that insures him work, but that it is some mysterious influence they call
"politics," that means work and wages or no work and no wages, and
suffering. This conception of the relation of the petty politician to the
voters' chance to earn even a meager and uncertain living under the sway of
his influence rarely excites more than passing indignation from the women
who suffer most because of the system. When the women of the politician's
family grow arrogant and snobbish, then the floods of eloquence break loose
for a time, and the listener may learn many things of which he would
otherwise be ignorant. The increased power of the petty henchman rarely
enables him to change the way of living of his family. Sometimes he does
not when he can, for he knows that he increases his power as he lives on
the level of the average voter in his district. The less conscience he
has, the more patient he is in waiting for the day when his district is
only one factor in his political strength.
Even the little children reveal deference to the family of the man who is
known to have "pull." There came to an East Side library one afternoon a
little girl better dressed than any child who had yet appeared there. She
was impudent, noisy, aggressive. In the game-room she cheated in the games,
and finally broke up several games of checkers and dominoes by pushing over
the boards. No child resented this. The little girl when spoken to seemed
astonished by the reprimand. As she was leaving, the writer said to her: "I
am sorry, little girl, but I shall have to tell you that you must not come
here again unless you mean to obey; you must not talk in the reading-room,
and in the games you must play fair. I hope I shall not have to tell you
not to come here again." The child stared in astonishment. She went out on
the street. In a few minutes several little girls who had frequented the
rooms for months came running back in great excitement, one saying
breathlessly: "Why, that little girl's father is a school trustee; she does
just as she likes in school." "Yes," added another, "and now she says she
won't come here any more. She's awful mad." From her point of view this was
a calamity. "Well, I hope she will not come if she cannot behave," was the
comment made. The children stood aghast. The trustee system had been
abolished in New York at least two years when this incident occurred. Later
the writer found that the father was in the council of Tammany Hall.
A boy of the same neighborhood rang the bell, interfered with children
leaving the house, and broke the windows. The time for kindly persuasion
ended. When the members of a woman's club in that section using that house
were consulted, it was made perfectly clear to the writer that worse
troubles would follow if the boy were arrested, for he would not be
detained and he would be more ugly than ever. His father was a ward leader
who had formerly been a street sweeper, then foreman of the gang, etc.,
going through the gradations that mark the making of the minor "boss." This
boy bullied little children, stole their toys, would break up their games.
Yet to have him join in their play was evidently an honor which they bore
much to retain. He was only fourteen, yet he was found to be the leader of
a gang of boys in the most disgusting immoralities. Even this did not rouse
the mothers of the neighborhood to fight for their children's protection.
The boy was spreading immorality of a disgusting nature through a whole
neighborhood. The evil he wrought was told in tears in private, but denied
in public through fear of the father's power in preventing the accusers'
husbands and sons from getting work--one result of the Tammany system that
enslaves homes and blasts the innocence of little children in New York.
A clever, hard-working Irish woman was once telling the writer the story of
her life and that of her children. At the time she was deeply interested in
the future of four nephews, who were the motherless sons of her brother.
Out of her experience with sons-in-law she enunciated her conclusions: "I
tell me brother, don't let them b'ys learn politics; it's a mighty poor
thrade. Sure, when Tammany's in they're all right; but when Tammany's out,
where are they? Sure, it's a mighty poor thrade, as I learnt to me sorrer.
Betther have them blacksmiths, sez I, like their grandfather at home. I do
hope he be's listening to me, for they're foine b'ys." It will be easier
for the four "b'ys" to learn politics than any other "thrade," for it is an
open union making one demand, obedience to the "boss."
To this woman Tammany was an employer good to the poor man--a doctrine that
is taught to the smallest boy. He breathes it in the air; he nurses it in
the milk that nourishes him. As he gets older he adds a new article to his
faith. The Tammany system is the protector of his liberties. It does not
restrict him in his right of private judgment. As one studies the race
sections, the discovery is made that hundreds of votes are cast for Tammany
candidates in the belief that obnoxious restrictions on the sale of liquor
on Sundays will be removed, or that the laws will not be enforced. The hope
of raising the moral tone of the voters is futile while any portion of them
justify the casting of a ballot for the sole reason that it will make it
possible for the voter to break the law with impunity. The most
demoralizing legislation is that which makes a man a sneak as well as a
law-breaker. May the day be hastened when no man who stands in moral
rectitude in the presence of man and God will be forced to maintain what he
believes his rights in defiance of the law. We are a cosmopolitan country,
owing power and greatness to the sons and daughters of many lands. The
Puritan conception of government is out of place to-day. The larger
conception of man not controlled by the law, but the master in himself of
the restraints it would place upon him, is the American conception of
manhood, and toward this the best legislative action must trend. Thinking
men and women who have studied the social conditions of New York know that
no more calamitous influence is set in motion in New York than a sense of
injustice that protects and justifies to the people the breaking of a law.
When this goes farther, and any considerable number of the citizens combine
for the purpose of overcoming it by defying or by ignoring it, the
foundations of the government are threatened. It is time for fanaticism to
feel the pressure of broad-minded balanced public opinion. A law
administered at the demand and according to the conscience of people
unaffected by its administration, used by them against an equally
intelligent class who feel that personal liberty has been curtailed at the
expense of their right of judgment, is class legislation. No greater evil
influence has been active in New York than the creating of a sentiment that
endorsed the breaking of the liquor laws. It has been a prolific source of
blackmail; it has enabled politicians, who live at the public expense, to
pose to men whose personal right of judgment had been curtailed as the
apostles of freedom. The short-sighted friends of temperance have by their
misdirected activities created political capital for the men who in
official life have made New York's problems.
Legislation enacted without the will of the people governed is provocative
of two things: contempt and defiance of the law; unrest that makes for
antagonism to government. The lower in the scale of reason the voter is,
the less able he is to get any point of view but his own. His comprehension
of the rights of others depends on the comprehension of his rights
expressed in the law designed for his regeneration. He certainly never goes
higher in the scale of reason while he defies the law in satisfying his
sense of justice and freedom; he cannot rise in the scale of living while
he stoops to acts he would avoid if his sense of justice were not outraged.
He justifies his act because of his sense of oppression. He cannot respond
to any effort looking to the general good of the city while he smarts under
a sense of liberties curtailed by the very people who ask for his help.
When President Roosevelt was Police Commissioner he enforced the law
governing the sale of liquor on Sunday. The city was torn asunder for
weeks. The discussion filled the columns of the daily press. The fact,
after weeks of discussion with one group of tenement-house women--all the
wives of skilled workers--was finally made clear that the law was at fault,
if fault there was, not the Commissioner. The law, if bad, must be
repealed; but as long as it was the law it must be enforced. During this
discussion much light was obtained. One woman told how cleverly the law
was evaded by the liquor dealer two doors from her house. He hired the back
room on the top floor of the house next door, keeping the liquor in a
closet. The men in the secret entered the house two doors distant, went up
to the roof and down the scuttle to the room where the liquor was to be
had. Some of the group listened to her description with flashing eyes. When
she finished she was given to understand that she had played the part of
traitor. It was all right for her to do it. She was safe. Her husband was
in a good, independent position; it made no difference to him how much
trouble came because of her "telling tales." To others it was a disgrace
that men who had only a few cents to spend for a little pleasure with their
friends should have to sneak like thieves, as one of the women expressed
it. All condemned having the liquor in their own homes in quantities, as
they condemned the illegal selling. "When a man sneaks in like that he
stays longer and spends more than when he can walk in openly and walk out
again as he does other days. When he has it in the house he never stops
treating and drinking until it's gone." The "free lunch" was deplored; but
every one of the forty-five women decided that it was the only meal fit to
eat that hundreds of laboring men ever had; that men were forced to eat at
lunch counters in barrooms and buy liquor who would never go there if
their mothers and wives knew how to cook. They claimed that the women would
cook for their families if they knew how. They did not know how. They were
forced to go to work in factories as soon as they left school, and never
had a chance to learn anything about housekeeping; their mothers never knew
how to keep house. Could a stronger argument for domestic science teaching
in our public schools be advanced?
When the High License bill was before the Legislature at Albany several
years ago, the writer was asked to speak at a mothers' meeting in one of
the poorest sections of what was then the city of Brooklyn. On her way to
the mission she counted nineteen liquor saloons on three blocks; in every
case they were on the lower floor of a tenement house. The hall was over a
pork and provision store; a loft without any attempt at more than broom
cleanliness, walls bare, grimy, and seeming to ooze grease. The atmosphere
of smoked meat was sickening. Nothing in the way of a shelter could have
been more barren and repellent, yet it was a mission maintained by a
church.
About one hundred women--the wives of day laborers and longshoremen--were
present. Some were bareheaded: several with babies in their arms. The
subject chosen was the High License bill. It was a discussion. At least ten
of the women spoke. The scene will never be forgotten. One woman, about
thirty, after listening intently, rose with a baby on her arm, and turning
passionately to those in the hall, said: "Why don't yer talk honest? Every
one of us drink. Some of us, not many, drink because we love it. Most of us
drink because we're discouraged and don't know what else to do. We're
fools; it don't help us; it makes it worse. Some of us would never touch it
if it were not brought to us. We know that anything that would take away
the drink from our doors would save us. Drive them out!" She turned to the
platform appealingly. "Drive them out, so that we, yes, and the men, would
have to walk four or five blocks to them, and we'll be different. It is
easy sending the children now. Make it harder! Make it harder!"
"Shall we close them?"
"You couldn't do it," she said. "You couldn't do that. Make it cost more to
start them, and there won't be so many. They'll be farther apart, and they
won't try so hard to make us drink. Many a woman has learned to drink
because she had to pass the holes to get to her home. Tell the truth like
me, or say whether I'm telling the truth!" was her appeal to the audience.
The flood-gates were opened. Every woman agreed with the first speaker that
the saloon could never be abolished; it could be regulated. Beer, they
thought, to most women was a greater temptation than strong liquors. The
number of saloons near their homes they thought the heaviest burden the
poor man's family had to bear. They understood perfectly that the brewers
paid for the licenses, and that the saloons were the meeting places where
votes were controlled. They thought the saloons ought to be open at least
Sunday afternoon, but they would have them close earlier Saturday night.
They thought that any law that made a man a sneak to get a drink was an
evil. They saw that such a law enabled the politician to say which man
could sell liquor and which could not. One of them, who could neither read
nor write, had discovered that the saloons selling a certain brewer's beer
had more freedom than any of the saloons selling other beers; they thought
the saloon-keepers paid either in money or drinks for the votes of the men
who frequented their places in the interest of the politicians who owned
the saloons or protected them. There was not the slightest evidence that
one woman there saw any dishonesty in the system. There were no principles
in politics, only men. Things remained with them the same no matter who was
elected. It was a district which was under the control of one party, having
an unquestioned majority, which steadily increased through the efforts of a
shrewd leader who had no visible means of support.
The section in which this group of women lived was a long, narrow strip
bordering on the East River. The residences of a population each occupying
its own house at this time held the reeking tenements in check on the east.
Within ten years this has been wholly changed. The handsome old residences
have become tenement houses, overcrowded, uncared for, occupied by people
now at the level of former despised neighbors. The better class of the
laborers' families have left the houses bordering on the river, and these
have been given over to the poorest and most hopeless of the day laborers.
There is a thoroughfare which has stores brilliantly lighted for five
blocks. Every want of the people can be supplied in them. The people, old
and young, settle placidly in the region. It is their world. The language
of the little children on the streets, from early morning until late at
night, is appalling. A kindergarten was started, but the people who started
it did not have money enough to secure the right kind of a room, nor to
make the room attractive, nor to keep it so clean that that would in itself
make it more attractive than the homes of the children. It was finally
given up, because even the small amount expended was not forthcoming at the
end of the third year. It could have had four times the number of children
the room would accommodate at one time, but no one cared enough to support
it.
[Illustration: A SOCIAL CENTER BECOMES POLITICAL.]
The half-grown boys are coarse-looking, use profane and coarse language
unknowingly in their ordinary conversation on the street. Their attitude
toward girls is brutal. The girls of this section are free in their
manners, slangy and coarse in their conversation. They earn the lowest
wages paid to women in the factories and lofts that abound in the region.
The schoolhouses are old and dark; the streets are neglected and dirty. The
smoky, grimy mission-room disappeared long ago. Not one influence is at
work to raise the general moral tone of this community, the voting power of
which outnumbers four to one regions where every influence in and out of
the homes tends to develop moral standards and political intelligence in
the same political unit.
The region is a social plague spot, neglected and allowed to spread. It
does not present as a special feature to arouse activity the evils of the
"Red Light" district, but only the blasting influence of a region sunk in
the apathy of deadened moral natures, killed by the hopelessness of
changing the environment of their homes until it represents all they ask of
life. The poverty of the people makes well-nourished bodies impossible, and
lack of physical power makes moral resistance impossible.
Recently in one of the most crowded of the tenement-house sections of New
York, where the grip of poverty holds degradation, where the people live as
remote from American civilization as when in their own land, the writer
viewed the parade in the evening of the voters of the district, who had
been the guests of the district leader, a State Senator, at an outing.
These outings are the annual "round-ups" of the voters. The expenses of
these outings run into the five figures, it is said, in this district.
Boats and a grove are hired. Chowder, coffee, sandwiches and beer are
provided free. Games of chance, to which, it is whispered, the district
leaders are not disinterested observers, and athletics are the features of
the outings. The return at night is an occasion for fireworks and a parade.
Caps and canes are provided for the voters often; sometimes only a ribbon
badge. The expenses are met by the sale of tickets, which sometimes sell
as high as five dollars. These tickets the liquor dealers, in fact, the
tradesmen of all kinds in the district, men holding office under the city
government who are affiliated with the leader and the men who hope to
secure rights or privileges, legal or illegal, through the leader's
influence, know it is wise to purchase. To the mass of the men of the
district it means perhaps the one day of freedom in the year, when they
have the pleasure of enjoying drinks and food wholly at the cost of
another.
In this particular parade were five thousand men, not one thousand of whom
bore the slightest outward evidence of American citizenship, but the right
to vote, as their presence in the column indicated. It scarcely seemed
possible that the scene was in America. Swarthy women and children crowded
gayly decorated fire-escapes, crowded the windows, and made movement
impossible on the streets. Arches of lights, lanterns swinging from
fire-escapes and on ropes from sidewalks to roofs, were in the colors of
the land from which these people came. The flags and bunting displayed
presented colors of a foreign land, with here and there the flag of the
country whose political destiny their votes controlled to a large degree.
The next day the white caps worn by the men in this parade appeared on the
heads of schoolboys and working boys by the hundred, the wearers proud to
wear the colors of the man who, so far as their knowledge or experience, or
that of their parents, went, was the greatest man, the man of the widest
range of authority, in the United States. What do they care who is at the
head of the city government? The men do not need to ask who is the district
leader; he finds them through his unpaid workers and the coalition is
accomplished. Soon the immigrant, turned citizen, understands the
principle. He gets work and votes for the leader. It is simple and direct.
When the extent of one's knowledge enables him to handle a broom or to sell
peanuts or bananas in the new country, and that under the supervision of a
blue-coated tyrant who levies on the voter's cart, if not his pocket, when
and where he pleases, moral arguments in a foreign tongue are not
convincing to that voter. He would rather not submit to the supervision and
its attendant tax; he would rather not have his work intermittent; but he
learns that protest increases his evils, and he submits. The blue-coated
tyrant is a friend of the "boss" who helped get his license, and it must be
right. Whatever comes to him, he must not antagonize the "boss." That is
the first lesson he learns in American citizenship, at the point where it
is most effective, his wage-earning privileges.
[Illustration: A DOORWAY ON THE EAST SIDE.]
There are leaders so strong and tactful that year after year their reign is
unquestioned. Only the police and the ambulance surgeons know when there is
an attempted revolution--when the leader's right is questioned by another
would-be leader. There is only one issue--the man; nobody cares for the
principle--if there be a difference of principle--involved.
In one of the old sections of the city in which is a ward that for forty
years has excelled in crime; a section which at the present time presents
the meanest and lowest of the tenements in New York; in which there is less
effort to counteract the evils of the environment of the homes or change
the environment due to the control of the "boss" than in any other section,
a political feud culminated in the fall of 1901, defeating the man who had
been the leader for years. It was stated that the man who won had expended
$35,000; the man who lost, $12,000 in the struggle. This is a section where
poverty is the universal inheritance of the people who make this section
home.
For weeks the section was in a condition of constant warfare. The smallest
boys were organized as gangs and shouted the name of the leader they had
chosen their hero. Boys of five wore the buttons of their heroes. From
fire-escapes, on wagons hung bits of white cloth declaring the names of
the contestants. One of these, to avoid unpleasant embarrassment, had gone
to California after the Lexow investigation. A favorite legend displayed by
his enemy's friends was, "Paddy is the man who to Californy ran." This was
displayed on one fire-escape on which opened the windows of two families,
each espousing the cause of the contending leaders. The week before the
balloting for leader the legend was kept in place by the constant vigilance
for twenty-four hours of the day by the family whose sentiments it
expressed. "Paddy" was defeated. The next morning the two neighbors, who
had been enemies for weeks, leaned, each from her own window, chatting
amicably, while the son of one was arranging the legend on the fire-escape
to include both families. On either side was gracefully arranged an
American flag, while the harp of Erin hung just in the middle of the
fire-escape. Peace reigned in Warsaw. "Paddy's" friends, like the fairies
of childhood, disappeared in the night. The whole district, as one man,
accepted the change of rulers, and the new leader's banners were thrown to
the breeze everywhere. Nothing succeeds like success in the tenement-house
regions. For a couple of weeks peace seemed to reign in the district. The
followers of the old leader found themselves displaced; new followers
controlled the favors in the district. There began a new distribution of
patronage. Then the old leader's displaced friends, with a few loyal souls,
rallied about him. He had made money enough through his political
affiliations to be defiant, and announced that the political corruption of
the party to which he had belonged compelled him to rally to the support of
the movement to overthrow it. Some of his followers were loyal to bravery,
and declared, too, against the political system. Two of them, because of
these declarations, were discharged forty-eight hours later from places in
a city department where they drew salaries of $1200 per year. Their places
were given to two of the new leader's followers. Two weeks later all had
returned to the old allegiance, and the papers announced that the head of
the Tammany system had decided that the patronage of the district would be
evenly divided between the two factions.
Independence of action is costly under such a system; costly in loss of
wages to the voter; of food, raiment, shelter to his family.
A voter who refuses to surrender the ease of his home or the pleasure of
his club for the good of the district in which his home is located is not
in a position to criticise his poor neighbor who will not jeopardize the
position secured by his vote that supports his family to maintain the
theory of American citizenship. Why should he make sacrifices to free the
city from disgrace when his independent neighbor refuses to sacrifice his
ease to protect his family from the inevitable evils of a corrupt city
government?
It was the conferring the rights of citizenship on immigrants almost as
soon as they landed that fastened on New York an evil that has grown until
the city has been held in the shackles of a spoils system that overshadows
its commercial supremacy and makes it the argument against democratic
government. The heaviest disgrace for this condition rests not on the men
who profit by the system but on the good men who permit it to develop. It
was the logical result of their indifference to the city's good and their
responsibility for that good. This inactivity on the part of the mass of
responsible citizens made the control of the city offices for personal ends
easy to the men who, because of lack of training and moral turpitude, could
not conceive of a service for other than personal ends. Shrewdness made
them see that the immigrant was the ladder on which they could climb to
political power and stability. They met the immigrant as friend and
neighbor; they secured him work; they schooled him to citizenship, and
began at once to train him in that deadliest of all influences in a
democracy, class in politics. So long as this system of education prevails,
the appearance of a candidate for local office who does not bear the
"hall-mark" of the neighborhood will be resented.
[Illustration: EARLY MORNING AMONG THE PUSHCARTS.]
As time went on and the immigrants came from many countries, a new evil
sprang up--the race section; the section where, maintaining all the
characteristics of the country from which the people came, the men exercise
the rights of citizenship at the behest of a political trainer who is able
to promise favors for obedience, and work vengeance for disobedience.
Behind him is a power which he must obey until the day comes when by his
own shrewdness he is able to cross swords with those above him in the
political system, becoming himself a dictator. In the process of his
evolution from ward heeler to district leader he has trained those who
follow him so well that he duplicates himself scores of times, increasing
his power every time he makes a follower, either by fear or favor,
perpetuating the system that makes the city, as has been aptly said, a
"gold mine" which it costs the operators nothing to work.
The man at the bottom knows the duplicate of the leader nearest his own
level; this man is his friend, his countryman often. The links in the
chain are unbroken, and the man who dares to disobey the orders issued from
the top feels not only the displeasure of the henchman, but the combined
strength of the chain, or as much of it as is necessary to compel him to
obey or to crush him. The poor man whose tool to earn a living is a shovel,
a pick or a broom is not in a position to defend his rights; he has no
public sentiment in the only world he knows to support him in any attempt
he may make to attain his rights when defrauded by the political system he,
in utter ignorance, has helped to establish. When he is thrown out of work
given to secure his vote, he has no redress. The man at the bottom must
make the rule of his life "Small favors thankfully received." His hope for
work in the future depends on keeping in friendly touch with the system;
this is the first principle of American citizenship grasped by the
naturalized citizen.
Just before our last national election a number of men employed in skilled
labor in one of our city departments were laid off. To some of those men
this loss of work meant suffering for their families; to others it meant
debt and dependence. It was startling the spirit in which this loss of work
and wages were accepted by these men. The district leader, elected by the
people to make the laws at Albany, in order "to hold his district in line"
for this election, had to provide forty-eight voters with places. He
demanded from the department forty-eight places; the work was in his
district. No one questioned his right to make this demand; these places
represented his political capital. In no way could his demands be met
except by the discharge of forty-eight men then at work who lived outside
the district. It was done. The men laid off, almost to a man, accepted it
as the fortune of the political protege. Scarcely a word of resentment was
expressed. There were removals into this special district before the next
municipal election, and new enrollments under the leader's banner,
irrespective of the political bias of the voters. Some of the men were
sullen and felt the loss of manhood; some said, "I'll vote as I like, but I
must have work;" others believed that only under this leader's banner could
a poor man hope to get his rights--the privilege to earn his living; or, in
their language, "He is hustling for his friends."
Not only does the skilled and unskilled manual laborer find that the
approval of his district leaders is necessary to secure work under the
city, but that the affiliations and power of the district leader and his
political followers can secure him work under corporations holding public
franchises. He knows that the district leader secures privileges,
licenses, votes for franchises, directly or indirectly, with the distinct
understanding that his recommendations insure places to the men who carry
them. Under corrupt city government the man in business who does not cater
to the political powers finds his privileges curtailed; that he is made the
target for petty annoyances. Especially is this true in the downtown
districts, where in the transaction of business the rights of citizens to
the streets are ignored. Until one has lived close to it, it is almost
impossible to believe the power over the working masses the smallest cog in
the political machine exercises. It is this that makes imperative the
control of the city by men of high moral standing. No amount of unselfish
philanthropy can save a city governed by the corrupt.
There are sections in the city of New York where from the time the boy is
old enough to recognize the power of a policeman he guides his life to
curry favor with this visible expression of power. He knows almost as soon
as he can talk the man who rules in the world in which he lives. He sees
his playmate defy the policeman because his father is a man of power, or
the friend of the man who rules the district. "Pull" is the law, all the
law he recognizes. He hears discussed from his earliest years the
dependence of his class on the political powers who govern, not for the
good of the city, but that they may have their rights; their rights, as
interpreted, being the securing of a place for a longer or shorter period
at the nod of a "boss." Their district is all the city thousands of the
inhabitants of these sections know. How can it be otherwise? They are never
called for any purpose to any other part of the city, unless it be the
cemetery. Family, friends, business all center within a score of blocks. If
a distance must be traversed, it is through thoroughfares that but
duplicate regions they know, all a part of the kingdom of the "boss."
When the observer sees five thousand men walking behind a banner conferred
on the leader of the district because every man in it who votes votes at
his dictation, there comes to him a faint apprehension of what political
power in the tenement-house district is. This district leader interprets
all these men know of this country or its institutions. They know that he
secures work for them; that he befriends them in time of trouble. He
interprets Christ's doctrine to them: "I was hungry and ye gave me meat;
thirsty and ye gave me drink. I was a stranger and ye took me in; naked and
ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came
unto me." This is what the district leader does, if not in person, by
proxy. Is it any wonder he can control votes? Is it any wonder that the
poor, ignorant, unequipped voter should curry favor, bow to him,
acknowledge his supremacy even to the law? For this the voter can break the
law, and the leader secure remission of the penalty. The leader's nod has
been known to guide the judge on the bench. The leader can make the
innocent suffer because his power is greater than the law to which the
innocent appeal. This is the moral doctrine with which we inoculate our
newly made citizens, and under which the children of our overcrowded
tenement houses grow up. As the boys approach manhood they know no greater
privilege than to serve the man who has the power to give them place, and
he begins to cultivate their acquaintance early.
It takes brains, moral standards, a knowledge of life and experience to put
the district leaders and their cohorts in the place they belong. Talking
against them accomplishes nothing while the majority he represents keeps
him in power, yes, makes him possible. He makes morality an evil,
dishonesty justice to the people who know him as the representative of
republican principles. They are the people. They have left one land because
it deprived them of rights. Rights as they know them are personal, and the
district leader secures them.
[Illustration: MEETING THE NEEDS OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD.]
The opposition to the reform movement by the people governed by the
district leader comes from the conviction, dimly conceived or implanted,
that the election of the men who represent it would mean that everywhere
merit and not "pull" would keep the voter at work; that business would have
to be conducted according to law; that crime would be punished; that no man
would hold the keys of the prison for their benefit, but for the protection
of the community.
One of the greatest moral lessons administered to the people of New York in
a language that all understood, and one which all classes in the community
needed, was given by the late Colonel George E. Waring. When he organized
the Department of Street Cleaning on the merit system; when he proved to
every man in the department that if he did his work no man could displace
him; that he could defend himself, a man before men, if charges were
brought against him, Colonel Waring changed the moral character of New
York. Every man in that department had his friends to whom he carried the
message; stood a free man employed by the city; a man who dared to vote as
he would though in public service; would not be deprived of the right to
earn his daily bread because of the use he made of his rights as an
American citizen. This moral lesson went into every home. The woman whose
husband handled a broom, drove a cart, held her head up, for the magic D.
S. C. had changed a "job" that enslaved her husband to an employment that
honored him.
The enforcement of the law in the gathering of the garbage; the cleanliness
of the streets in the tenement-house districts equal to those of the
avenues, for the first time in generations brought the great truth to the
consciousness of the people in the tenement-house regions that all men were
equal. That the clean streets led to clean halls and cleaner homes was
natural; and the further evolution meant clean characters, because of moral
freedom to express opinion in a ballot cast at no man's command.
And then came the summers when, for the sake of the children, extra
exertions were made to keep the streets clean. Slowly the truth dawned on
the dullest mother that the babies were not dying in such numbers; were not
so ill, because the streets were clean, the garbage collected and the
streets washed and cool. Twenty years of Colonel Waring, and the moral tone
of the most ignorant would be changed. For the right to earn his living
honestly, honorably, to cast his ballot as an American citizen, would be
guaranteed to every voter employed in a city department employing the
greatest number of voters with the least manual ability, the least
education.
A city is just as honest as the greatest number of citizens casting a
ballot with the least knowledge of its value and effect; it comes no higher
in the scale of integrity than that. Every man who stands behind a broom
because he earns what is paid him, and knows that he stays there just as
long as he continues to earn his wages, represents a wealth of manhood in a
democracy, a part of the nation's capital as a world power.
When Colonel Waring discharged the first man convicted of accepting a bribe
for collecting the refuse of the city contrary to the law of the
department, he gave a practical demonstration of the truth of the
Declaration of Independence that all men are born free and equal. He showed
by that act that the poor man who could not pay a bribe was protected by
the law; that wealth purchased no privileges at the expense of the city.
Just where the spoils system had worked its deepest degradation it received
its most effective lesson. The greatest benefit that Colonel Waring, that
man of law and order, conferred upon New York, was not its clean streets,
but the moral lesson that a city department can be administered to secure
the best interests of the people on the principles that control the best
business houses of the city.
To the shame of the city be it said that it had so long been accustomed to
the spoils system that it could not accept the theory of Colonel Waring. It
was impossible for even the philanthropic workers to believe that a man
would not be placed, if they used their personal "pull" with the head of
the department. The politicians learned quickly that the system in that
department ignored "pull." When they did accept it, they determined to
overthrow the man who robbed the spoils system of its largest perquisite
where it was most effective in numbers. The combination of the political
machines accomplished the city's disgrace in 1897. It was redeemed in 1901
by a people who had suffered cruelly; who saw in the four years of misrule
that they had made their own chains of bondage.