simply go to prove that our poor human nature is at least as robust on
Avenue A as up on Fifth Avenue, if it has half a chance, and often
enough to restore one's faith in it, with no chance at all; and I might
set over against it the product of sordid and mean environment which one
has never far to seek. Good and evil go together in the tenements as in
the fine houses, and the evil sticks out sometimes merely because it
lies nearer the surface. The point is that the good does outweigh the
bad, and that the virtues that turn the balance are after all those that
make for good citizenship anywhere, while the faults are oftenest the
accidents of ignorance and lack of training, which it is the business
of society to correct. I recall my discouragement when I looked
over the examination papers of a batch of candidates for police
appointment,--young men largely the product of our public schools in
this city and elsewhere,--and read in them that five of the original New
England States were "England, Ireland, Scotland, Belfast, and Cork;"
that the Fire Department ruled New York in the absence of the Mayor,--I
have sometimes wished it did, and that he would stay away awhile; and
that Lincoln was murdered by Ballington Booth. But we shall agree, no
doubt, that the indictment of these papers was not of the men who wrote
them, but of the school that stuffed its pupils with useless trash, and
did not teach them to think. Neither have I forgotten that it was one of
these very men who, having failed, and afterward got a job as a bridge
policeman, on his first pay day went straight from his post, half frozen
as he was, to the settlement worker who had befriended him and his sick
father, and gave him five dollars for "some one who was poorer than
they." Poorer than they! What worker among the poor has not heard it? It
is the charity of the tenement that covers a multitude of sins. There
were thirteen in this policeman's family, and his wages were the biggest
item of income in the house.
Jealousy, envy, and meanness wear no fine clothes and masquerade under
no smooth speeches in the slums. Often enough it is the very nakedness
of the virtues that makes us stumble in our judgment. I have in mind the
"difficult case" that confronted some philanthropic friends of mine in a
rear tenement on Twelfth Street, in the person of an aged widow, quite
seventy I should think, who worked uncomplainingly for a sweater all day
and far into the night, pinching and saving and stinting herself, with
black bread and chicory coffee as her only fare, in order that she might
carry her pitiful earnings to her big, lazy lout of a son in Brooklyn.
He never worked. My friends' difficulty was a very real one, for
absolutely every attempt to relieve the widow was wrecked upon her
mother heart. It all went over the river. Yet one would not have had her
different.
Sometimes it is only the unfamiliar setting that shocks. When an East
Side midnight burglar, discovered and pursued, killed a tenant who
blocked his way of escape, a few weeks ago, his "girl" gave him up to
the police. But it was not because he had taken human life. "He was good
to me," she explained to the captain whom she told where to find him,
"but since he robbed the church I had no use for him." He had stolen, it
seems, the communion service in a Staten Island church. The thoughtless
laughed. But in her ignorant way she was only trying to apply the
standards of morality as they had been taught her. Stunted, bemuddled,
as they were, I think I should prefer to take my chances with her rather
than with the woman of wealth and luxury who, some years ago, gave a
Christmas party to her lap-dog, as on the whole the sounder of the two,
and by far the more hopeful.
[Illustration: BONE ALLEY]
All of which is merely saying that the country is all right, and the
people are to be trusted with the old faith in spite of the slum. And it
is true, if we remember to put it that way,--in spite of the slum. There
is nothing in the slum to warrant that faith save human nature as yet
uncorrupted. How long it is to remain so is altogether a question of the
sacrifices we are willing to make in our fight with the slum. As yet, we
are told by the officials having to do with the enforcement of the
health ordinances, which come closer to the life of the individual than
any other kind, that the poor in the tenements are "more amenable to the
law than the better class." It is of the first importance, then, that we
should have laws deserving of their respect, and that these laws should
be enforced, lest they conclude that the whole thing is a sham. Respect
for law is a very powerful bar against the slum. But what, for instance,
must the poor Jew understand, who is permitted to buy a live hen at the
market, yet neither to kill nor keep it in his tenement, and who on his
feast day finds a whole squad of policemen detailed to follow him around
and see that he does not do any of the things with his fowl for which he
must have bought it? Or the day laborer, who drinks his beer in a
"Raines law hotel," where brick sandwiches, consisting of two pieces of
bread with a brick between, are set out on the counter, in derision of
the state law which forbids the serving of drinks without "meals"? (The
Stanton Street saloon keeper who did that was solemnly acquitted by a
jury.) Or the boy, who may buy fireworks on the Fourth of July, but not
set them off? These are only ridiculous instances of an abuse that
pervades our community life to an extent that constitutes one of the
gravest perils. Insincerity of that kind is not lost on our fellow
citizen by adoption, who is only anxious to fall in with the ways of the
country; and especially is it not lost on his boy.
We shall see how it affects him. He is the one for whom we are waging
the battle with the slum. He is the to-morrow that sits to-day drinking
in the lesson of the prosperity of the big boss who declared with pride
upon the witness stand that he rules New York, that judges pay him
tribute, and that only when _he_ says so a thing "goes;" and that it is
all for what he can get out of it, "just the same as everybody else." He
sees corporations to-day pay blackmail and rob the people in return,
quite according to the schedule of Hester Street. Only there it is the
police who charge the peddler twenty cents, while here it is the
politicians taking toll of the franchises, twenty per cent. Wall Street
is not ordinarily reckoned in the slum, because of certain physical
advantages; but, upon the evidence of the day, I think we shall have to
conclude that the advantage ends there. The boy who is learning such
lessons,--how is it with him?
The president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
says that children's crime is increasing, and he ought to know. The
managers of the Children's Aid Society, after forty-six years of
wrestling with the slum for the boy, in which they have lately seemed to
get the upper hand, say in this year's report that on the East Side
children are growing up in certain districts "entirely neglected," and
that the number of such children "increases beyond the power of
philanthropic and religious bodies to cope properly with their needs."
In the Tompkins Square Lodging House the evening classes are thinning
out, and the keeper wails: "Those with whom we have dealt of late have
not been inclined to accept this privilege; how to make night school
attractive to shiftless, indifferent street boys is a difficult problem
to solve."
Perhaps it is only that he has lost the key. Across the square, the
Boys' Club of St. Mark's Place, that began with a handful, counts five
thousand members to-day, and is seeking a place to build a house of its
own. The school census man announces that no boy in that old stronghold
of the "bread or blood" brigade need henceforth loiter in the street
because there is not room in the public school, and the brigade has
disbanded for want of recruits. The shop is being shut against the boy,
and the bars let down at the playground. But from Tompkins Square,
nevertheless, came Jacob Beresheim, whose story I shall tell you
presently.
V
THE GENESIS OF THE GANG
Jacob Beresheim was fifteen when he was charged with murder. It is now
more than three years ago, but the touch of his hand is cold upon mine,
with mortal fear, as I write. Every few minutes, during our long talk on
the night of his arrest and confession, he would spring to his feet,
and, clutching my arm as a drowning man catches at a rope, demand with
shaking voice, "Will they give me the chair?" The assurance that boys
were not executed quieted him only for the moment. Then the dread and
the horror were upon him again.
Of his crime the less said the better. It was the climax of a career of
depravity that differed from other such chiefly in the opportunities
afforded by an environment which led up to and helped shape it. My
business is with that environment. The man is dead, the boy in jail. But
unless I am to be my brother's jail keeper, merely, the iron bars do
not square the account of Jacob with society. Society exists for the
purpose of securing justice to its members, appearances to the contrary
notwithstanding. When it fails in this, the item is carried on the
ledger with interest and compound interest toward a day of reckoning
that comes surely with the paymaster. We have heard the chink of his
coin on the counter, these days, in the unblushing revelations before
the Mazet Committee of degraded citizenship, of the murder of the civic
conscience, and in the applause that hailed them. And we have begun to
understand that these are the interest on Jacob's account, older, much
older than himself. He is just an item carried on the ledger. But with
that knowledge the account is at last in a way of getting squared. Let
us see how it stands.
We shall take Jacob as a type of the street boy on the East Side, where
he belonged. What does not apply to him in the review applies to his
class. But there was very little of it indeed that he missed or that
missed him.
He was born in a tenement in that section where the Tenement House
Committee found 324,000 persons living out of sight and reach of a green
spot of any kind, and where sometimes the buildings, front, middle, and
rear, took up ninety-three per cent. of all the space on the block. Such
a home as he had was there, and of the things that belonged to it he was
the heir. The sunlight was not among them. It "never entered" there.
Darkness and discouragement did, and dirt. Later on, when he took to the
dirt as his natural weapon in his battles with society, it was said of
him that it was the only friend that stuck to him, and it was true. Very
early the tenement gave him up to the street. The thing he took with him
as the one legacy of home was the instinct for the crowd, which meant
that the tenement had wrought its worst mischief upon him: it had
smothered that in him around which character is built. The more readily
did he fall in with the street and its ways. Character implies depth, a
soil, and growth. The street is all surface: nothing grows there; it
hides only a sewer.
It taught him gambling as its first lesson, and stealing as the next.
The two are never far apart. From shooting craps behind the "cop's"
back to filching from the grocer's stock or plundering a defenseless
peddler is only a step. There is in both the spice of law-breaking that
appeals to the shallow ambition of the street as heroic. Occasionally
the raids have a comic tinge. A German grocer wandered into police
headquarters the other day, with an appeal for protection against the
boys.
"Vat means dot 'cheese it'?" he asked, rubbing his bald head in helpless
bewilderment. "Efery dime dey says 'cheese it,' somedings vas gone."
To the lawlessness of the street the home opposes no obstacle, as we
have seen. Until very recently the school did not. It might have more to
offer even now. There are, at least, schools where there were none then,
and so much is gained; also, they are getting better, but too many of
them, in my unprofessional judgment, need yet to be made over, until
they are fit to turn out whole, sound boys, instead of queer manikins
stuffed with information for which they have no use, and which is none
of their business anyhow. It seemed to me sometimes, when watching the
process of cramming the school course with the sum of human knowledge
and conceit, as if it all meant that we distrusted nature's way of
growing a man from a boy, and had set out to show her a shorter cut. A
common result was the kind of mental befogment that had Abraham Lincoln
murdered by Ballington Booth, and a superficiality, a hopeless slurring
of tasks, that hitched perfectly with the spirit of the street, and left
nothing to be explained in the verdict of the reformatory, "No moral
sense." There was no moral sense to be got out of the thing, for there
was little sense of any kind in it. The boy was not given a chance to be
honest with himself by thinking a thing through; he came naturally to
accept as his mental horizon the headlines in his penny paper and the
literature of the Dare-Devil-Dan-the-Death-Dealing-Monster-of-Dakota
order, which comprise the ordinary aesthetic equipment of the slum. The
mystery of his further development into the tough need not perplex
anybody.
But Jacob Beresheim had not even the benefit of such schooling as there
was to be had. He did not go to school, and nobody cared. There was
indeed a law directing that every child should go, and a corps of truant
officers to catch him if he did not; but the law had been a dead letter
for a quarter of a century. There was no census to tell what children
ought to be in school, and no place but a jail to put those in who
shirked. Jacob was allowed to drift. From the time he was twelve till he
was fifteen, he told me, he might have gone to school three weeks,--no
more.
Church and Sunday school missed him. I was going to say that they passed
by on the other side, remembering the migration of the churches uptown,
as the wealthy moved out of, and the poor into, the region south of
Fourteenth Street. But that would hardly be fair. They moved after their
congregations; but they left nothing behind. In the twenty years that
followed the war, while enough to people a large city moved in downtown,
the number of churches there was reduced from 141 to 127. Fourteen
Protestant churches moved out. Only two Roman Catholic churches and a
synagogue moved in. I am not aware that there has been any large
increase of churches in the district since, but we have seen that the
crowding has not slackened pace. Jacob had no trouble in escaping the
Sunday school as he had escaped the public school. His tribe will have
none until the responsibility incurred in the severance of church and
state sits less lightly on a Christian community, and the church, from a
mob, shall have become an army, with von Moltke's plan of campaign,
"March apart, fight together." The Christian church is not alone in its
failure. The Jew's boy is breaking away from safe moorings rather faster
than his brother of the new dispensation. The church looks on, but it
has no cause for congratulation. He is getting nothing in place of that
which he lost, and the result is bad. There is no occasion for profound
theories about it. The facts are plain enough. The new freedom has
something to do with it, but neglect to look after the young has quite
as much. Apart from its religious aspect, seen from the angle of the
community's interest wholly, the matter is of the gravest import.
What the boy's play has to do with building character in him Froebel
has told us. Through it, he showed us, the child "first perceives moral
relations," and he made that the basis of the kindergarten and all
common-sense education. That prop was knocked out. New York never had a
children's playground till within the last year. Truly it seemed, as
Abram S. Hewitt said, as if in the early plan of our city the children
had not been thought of at all. Such moral relations as Jacob was able
to make out ran parallel with the gutter always, and counter to law and
order as represented by the policeman and the landlord. The landlord had
his windows to mind, and the policeman his lamps and the city ordinances
which prohibit even kite-flying below Fourteenth Street where the crowds
are. The ball had no chance at all. It is not two years since a boy was
shot down by a policeman for the heinous offense of playing football in
the street on Thanksgiving Day. But a boy who cannot kick a ball around
has no chance of growing up a decent and orderly citizen. He must have
his childhood, so that he may be fitted to give to the community his
manhood. The average boy is just like a little steam engine with steam
always up. The play is his safety valve. With the landlord in the yard
and the policeman on the street sitting on his safety valve and holding
it down, he is bound to explode. When he does, when he throws mud and
stones and shows us the side of him which the gutter developed, we are
shocked and marvel much what our boys are coming to, as if we had any
right to expect better treatment of them. I doubt if Jacob, in the whole
course of his wizened little life, had ever a hand in an honest game
that was not haunted by the dread of the avenging policeman. That he was
not "doing anything" was no defense. The mere claim was proof that he
was up to mischief of some sort. Besides, the policeman was usually
right. Play in such a setting becomes a direct incentive to mischief in
a healthy boy. Jacob was a healthy enough little animal.
Such fun as he had he got out of law-breaking in a small way. In this he
was merely following the ruling fashion. Laws were apparently made for
no other purpose that he could see. Such a view as he enjoyed of their
makers and executors at election seasons inspired him with seasonable
enthusiasm, but hardly with awe. A slogan, now, like that raised by
Tammany's late candidate for district attorney,--"To hell with
reform!"--was something he could grasp. Of what reform meant he had only
the vaguest notion, but the thing had the right ring to it. Roosevelt
preaching enforcement of law was from the first a "lobster" to him, not
to be taken seriously. It is not among the least of the merits of the
man that by his sturdy personality, as well as by his unyielding
persistence, he won the boy over to the passive admission that there
might be something in it. It had not been his experience.
There was the law which sternly commanded him to go to school, and which
he laughed at every day. Then there was the law to prevent child labor.
It cost twenty-five cents for a false age certificate to break that, and
Jacob, if he thought of it at all, probably thought of perjury as rather
an expensive thing. A quarter was a good deal to pay for the right to
lock a child up in a factory, when he ought to have been at play. The
excise law was everybody's game. The sign that hung in every saloon,
saying that nothing was sold there to minors, never yet barred out his
"growler" when he had the price. There was another such sign in the
tobacco shop, forbidding the sale of cigarettes to boys of his age.
Jacob calculated that when he had the money he smoked as many as fifteen
in a day, and he laughed when he told me. He laughed, too, when he
remembered how the boys of the East Side took to carrying balls of cord
in their pockets, on the wave of the Lexow reform, on purpose to measure
the distance from the school door to the nearest saloon. They had been
told that it should be two hundred feet, according to law. There were
schools that had as many as a dozen within the tabooed limits. It was in
the papers how, when the highest courts said that the law was good, the
saloon keepers attacked the schools as a nuisance and detrimental to
property. In a general way Jacob sided with the saloon keeper; not
because he had any opinion about it, but because it seemed natural. Such
opinions as he ordinarily had he got from that quarter.
When, later on, he came to be tried, his counsel said to me, "He is an
amazing liar." No, hardly amazing. It would have been amazing if he had
been anything else. Lying and mockery were all around him, and he
adjusted himself to the things that were. He lied in self-defense.
Jacob's story ends here, as far as he is personally concerned. The story
of the gang begins. So trained for the responsibility of citizenship,
robbed of home and of childhood, with every prop knocked from under him,
all the elements that make for strength and character trodden out in the
making of the boy, all the high ambition of youth caricatured by the
slum and become base passions,--so equipped he comes to the business of
life. As a "kid" he hunted with the pack in the street. As a young man
he trains with the gang, because it furnishes the means of gratifying
his inordinate vanity, that is the slum's counterfeit of self-esteem.
Upon the Jacobs of other days there was a last hold,--the father's
authority. Changed conditions have loosened that also. There is a time
in every young man's life when he knows more than his father. It is
like the measles or the mumps, and he gets over it, with a little
judicious firmness in the hand that guides. It is the misfortune of the
slum boy of to-day that it is really so, and that he knows it. His
father is an Italian or a Jew, and cannot even speak the language to
which the boy is born. He has to depend on him in much, in the new order
of things. The old man is "slow," he is "Dutch." He maybe an Irishman
with some advantages; he is still a "foreigner." He loses his grip on
the boy. Ethical standards of which he has no conception clash. Watch
the meeting of two currents in river or bay, and see the line of drift
that tells of the struggle. So in the city's life strive the currents of
the old and the new, and in the churning the boy goes adrift. The last
hold upon him is gone. That is why the gang appears in the second
generation, the first born upon the soil,--a fighting gang if the
Irishman is there with his ready fist, a thievish gang if it is the East
Side Jew,--and disappears in the third. The second boy's father is not
"slow." He has had experience. He was clubbed into decency in his own
day, and the night stick wore off the glamour of the thing. His grip on
the boy is good, and it holds.
It depends now upon chance what is to become of the lad. But the slum
has stacked the cards against him. There arises in the lawless crowd a
leader, who rules with his stronger fists or his readier wit. Around him
the gang crystallizes, and what he is it becomes. He may be a thief,
like David Meyer, a report of whose doings I have before me. He was just
a bully, and, being the biggest in his gang, made the others steal for
him and surrender the "swag," or take a licking. But that was unusual.
Ordinarily the risk and the "swag" are distributed on more democratic
principles. Or he may be of the temper of Mike of Poverty Gap, who was
hanged for murder at nineteen. While he sat in his cell at police
headquarters, he told with grim humor of the raids of his gang on
Saturday nights when they stocked up at "the club." They used to "hook"
a butcher's cart or other light wagon, wherever found, and drive like
mad up and down the avenue, stopping at saloon or grocery to throw in
what they wanted. His job was to sit at the tail of the cart with a
six-shooter and pop at any chance pursuer. He chuckled at the
recollection of how men fell over one another to get out of his way. "It
was great to see them run," he said. Mike was a tough, but with a better
chance he might have been a hero. The thought came to him, too, when it
was all over and the end in sight. He put it all in one sober,
retrospective sigh, that had in it no craven shirking of the
responsibility that was properly his: "I never had no bringing up."
There was a meeting some time after his death to boom a scheme for
"getting the boys off the street," and I happened to speak of Mike's
case. In the audience was a gentleman of means and position, and his
daughter, who manifested great interest and joined heartily in the
proposed movement. A week later, I was thunderstruck at reading of the
arrest of my sympathetic friend's son for train-wrecking up the State.
The fellow was of the same age as Mike. It appeared that he was supposed
to be attending school, but had been reading dime novels instead, until
he arrived at the point where he "had to kill some one before the end
of the month." To that end he organized a gang of admiring but less
resourceful comrades. After all, the plane of fellowship of Poverty Gap
and Madison Avenue lies nearer than we often suppose. I set the incident
down in justice to the memory of my friend Mike. If this one went astray
with so much to pull him the right way, and but the single strand
broken, what then of the other?