population. There were not houses enough; the newcomers were sheltered
abominably and charged exorbitant rents by the local landlords. There
weren't food supplies enough within reach of the growing city, and the
workers had to buy poor bread and bad meat, and to pay heavily for
them. The town had not enough sanitary appliances to dispose of the
waste which a congregation of individuals sloughs off and which, if not
properly disposed of, breeds disease. The rents and high provisions
pared away most of the incentive in the wages which must attract this
working force to Essen; poor houses and poor food made directly for
stupid, half-roused workers and for poor work. Primarily as a business
proposition, then, Herr Krupp started that group of social institutions
which have since been expanded from one motive or another, until they
supply an infinite variety of wants to the Essen workers. The firm
bought up successive plots of land, laid them out, sewered them, parked
them, and to-day, at the end of fifty years, over thirty thousand
persons are living in houses belonging to the Essen works (ten thousand
of the sixty thousand Krupp employes are thus supplied). There has been
a growth in quality as well as in numbers of houses. The buildings of
the first workmen's colony, West End, are rough, crude boxes; the new
colonies of Alfredshof and Friedrichshof are beautiful, with their red
roofs, graceful lines, lawns, housekeeping conveniences and modest
rents. Not less than seventy-seven Krupp supply stores, operated on a
profit-sharing basis, sell meat, bread, manufactured goods and household
furniture. One of the greatest bakeries in Germany is operated on a
cost basis, and there are slaughter houses, flour mills, ice making
establishments, tailor shops, etc. Hospitals, convalescent homes,
pensions, and invalidity and accident funds have been instituted, and
have since been fortified and expanded under the imperial scheme of
industrial insurance, which governs throughout Germany.
This welfare work of the Krupps has not succeeded in keeping either
trade unionism or socialism out of the ranks of the working force; it
has tended to put the workers in a position of semi-feudal dependence
for comforts and to sap their initiative; and in those bearings it
is not in accord with American ideas; but it has served to gather at
Essen, to keep there, and to keep there at a high standard of working
efficiency, one of the most remarkable labor forces in Germany.
It is solely the latter aspect of the case that concerns us here. I
think it is agreed that when it comes to armor plate, I-beams, tubes, or
rails, the Pittsburgh steel plants can beat the world. But a week's stay
among the Krupp colonies at Essen brings with it the conviction that
we in America have considerable distance to go if we are to match the
Germans in the science of improved community conditions. The question
is how some of these higher standards can be worked out in an American
industrial district where one corporation does not dominate; where you
are dealing with a much greater aggregation of people spread over a
much greater territory, and where you must work out your solution in
democratic ways through democratic agencies.
It must be borne in mind that much that I say of Pittsburgh is true of
practically all our industrial centers; our severest criticism of any
one comes not from a comparison with its fellows, but from a comparison
of the haphazard development of its social institutions with the
splendid organic development of its industrial enterprises. And more,
in the methods and scope of progressive business organizations we have
some of the most suggestive clues as to ways for municipal progress.
My first point has to do with administrative areas. The most effective
city administration cannot act to advantage unless the units through
which it operates are workable and bear some relation to the function
they are designed to perform. The radius of the old time city, as
one English writer has pointed out, was the distance you could walk
from your work in the center to a home convenient in the outskirts.
To-day, for most purposes, a city is a rapid transit proposition.
For most purposes, a municipal area can be governed most effectively
if it includes all such districts as can be reached by city workers,
by subway, steam, or surface lines. The movement for a greater
Pittsburgh, which, within the last year, has been advanced by the
merging of Allegheny and the movement for a greater Birmingham, which
is now in progress in the corresponding English industrial center, are
recognitions of this fact. The police, fire,--in fact, every department
of municipal activity is cramped and rendered less effective by
restricted bounds.
But for certain functional activities much wider areas must be
covered. The sanitary inspection force of Cleveland, for instance,
inspects dairies and slaughter-houses throughout all that part of Ohio
that supplies the Cleveland market; in contrast with the Pittsburgh
inspection service which is at present able to inspect supplies only
as they come into the city and sources in the immediate neighborhood.
Again, the sewer and water problem of Pittsburgh is a water-shed
problem. One hundred and twenty-nine towns and boroughs are dumping
their sewage into the rivers which run past Pittsburgh and from which
Pittsburgh must draw its water. No one of these governmental units can
work out its sanitary problem alone. Close co-ordination of sanitary
work is needed throughout the whole river district.
There is necessity, then, for increasing our municipal administrative
areas and for relating them to the functions which must be performed
through them; and this very fact raises the distinctive civic problem
of creating this enlarged municipal machinery, without sacrificing
that local loyalty and interest which in neighborhoods and smaller
districts make for good government. In Pittsburgh we have a central
city,--a market and office center with groups of outlying mill towns and
half-agricultural districts between. The opponents of city congestion
would break up all our big urban centers into such an open work
structure; and if the citizenship of the Pittsburgh steel district can
work out effective methods of government and high standards of community
well-being for this ganglion of working communities, it will have made
an original contribution to municipal science.
* * * * *
But let us look more carefully at this question of area as applied
to the functioning of particular social institutions. We have the
theory in America, for instance, that common school education should
be supplied by the public, and to this end, besides state subsidies
and other revenues, a general millage is laid on all taxable property
in Pittsburgh for the salaries of teachers and for other general
expenses. But the actual operation of the schools continues on an old
vestry system of ward control,--a system given up by Boston, Cleveland,
Chicago, Baltimore and other cities of Pittsburgh's class, because the
ward has proved an ineffective administrative unit. Let us see how it
works in Pittsburgh. Each ward lays and collects a tax on property
within its limits for the erection and maintenance of school buildings.
Thus, ward two in the business district, with a total of only 363
pupils, can draw on property with an assessed valuation of $37,491,708;
while ward fourteen, with 2,423 children, can draw on property worth
$34,264,077 (less taxable property and seven times as many children);
while ward thirty-one has 1,173 children and only $3,074,085 in assessed
property (or three times as many children as ward two and not one-tenth
the taxable property). No wonder, then, that the valuation of school
buildings and equipment ranges from approximately $41 per school child
in the thirty-first ward to $1,033 per school child in the second; and
the income for maintenance of buildings, etc., from $6 per school
child in the thirty-fifth ward to $84 per school child in the first. No
wonder, then, that in these ward-school buildings and their equipment
there is the utmost divergence. Our investigators found buildings every
room of which was overcrowded, with children sitting on benches, with
chairs in the aisles; wards in which basement rooms were thrown into
commission without adequate heat, light, desks or ventilation; schools
unconnected with the sewer; schools without fireproofing, without fire
escapes, without fire drills;--all these in contrast to progressive
schools in other wards with first-rate equipment, small classes, good
plumbing and adequate light. Wards which have the most children, whose
children have the least cultural environment and stimulus at home, have,
many of them, the least resources to tax for school purposes. By an
out-worn system of ward control and taxation, then, the teaching force
of Pittsburgh is supplied in districts where the work is hardest with
schoolhouses and other tools which are least effective. Some districts
have schools which in equipment and spirit rank with any in the country;
while in some the school plants ought to be scrapped offhand.
Turn to another social institution,--the hospitals. We may conceive
that the first service of hospitals is to be accessible to the sick
and injured, and that an adequate hospital system should be at all
times quickly available to the people who may have use for it. We may
compare it with the efficiency of the telephone company which, through
sub-exchanges, centrals and private connections, effectively reaches
every district. How stands the case with the hospitals of Pittsburgh?
The city is served by a group of private institutions, many of them
adequately equipped and progressively managed; but there is no system
of co-ordination between them, either in the operation of their free
wards or in the maintenance of an effective ambulance service. New
hospitals are erected under the eaves of old hospitals. Sick and injured
people are carried long, unnecessary distances at great risk. Seven
new hospitals are going up in Pittsburgh and yet, when they are all
completed and other changes which have been decided upon are carried
out, there will be a great belt of river wards, thickly populated,
without a convenient hospital plant,--wards in which we shall see
disease is most rife. This failure of a co-ordination of hospital
work in Pittsburgh is appreciated by a number of the most progressive
superintendents, and no one would welcome more than they a movement to
interlock the hospital service of the city in some effective way.
* * * * *
Another point of contrast between Pittsburgh, the industrial center, and
Pittsburgh, the community, lies in the progressiveness and invention
which have gone into the details of one and the other; for instance,
aldermen's courts which dispense justice to the working population of
Pittsburgh and deal with the minor civil business of a city of half
a million. They serve very well in an agricultural district. They
are of the vintage of the village blacksmith. But with the exception
of a few well conducted courts, the forty or more ward courts may be
said to clutter up and befog the course of minor justice, and to be
an exasperation in the conduct of civil business. They add to rather
than subtract from the business of the higher courts, and there is no
effective supervision of their operation. They compare with the new
municipal courts of Chicago about as the open forges of King John's time
compare with a Bessemer converter.
Again,--Pittsburgh is the second city in Pennsylvania in point of
population; in some respects it is the center of the most marvelous
industrial district in the world. Thousands of men and women are engaged
in hundreds of processes. But the state factory inspection department
has not so much as an office in this city. There are inspectors, but
they are not easily get-at-able for the workingman who may be laboring
under unsanitary conditions or with unprotected machinery, or for
the citizen who may know of violations of the factory acts which he
conceives it his duty to report. My conception of an adequate labor
department office in Pittsburgh is more than that of an industrial
detective bureau. My conception is rather that of a headquarters, with
an adequate force of technical experts and physicians who would be
constantly studying the work processes of the district with the idea
of eliminating wherever possible, those conditions which make for
disease; with laboratory facilities for experiment and demonstration
of protective devices calculated to reduce accidents; drawing, to this
end, upon the industrial experience of the whole world. The factory
inspector's office in Birmingham, for instance, is in close co-operation
with courts, with employers and with workmen. Within three years, its
suggestions have reduced the number of deaths due to one variety of
crane from twenty-one to three.
The old time city built a wall about it. That kept out invaders. The
invaders of a modern city are infectious diseases. In the development of
sanitary service and bureaus of health of wide powers and unquestioned
integrity, the modern city is erecting its most effective wall. In
Pittsburgh, the health authority is still a subordinate bureau without
control over appointments under the civil service, and without that
final authority which should go with its supreme responsibility
toward the health of 500,000 people. Until the present incumbent was
appointed, there had seldom or never been a physician at the head of
this bureau. For five years there had not been so much as an annual
report. Two-thirds of the appropriations to the Pittsburgh Health Bureau
are to-day engrossed in a garbage removal contract; only one-third is
free for general health purposes. With such an inadequate barricade,
we can imagine that disease has sacked Pittsburgh throughout the
years; and comparison of death rates with four cities of corresponding
size,--Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis,--for five years, shows
this to have been the case. In her average death rate per 100,000 for
typhoid fever, for diarrhoea and for enteritis, Pittsburgh was first
and highest. Pittsburgh was only fourth or next to the lowest in the
list in pulmonary tuberculosis; but in pneumonia, in bronchitis and in
other diseases of the respiratory system; and in violence other than
suicide, Pittsburgh was highest. To retrieve the lost ground of years
of neglect of health conditions has been a task upon which the present
superintendent of the Pittsburgh Bureau of Health has entered, but it is
a task in which the city must invest increasing resources. For such work
it needs more than a health bureau. It needs a health department.
My point, then, is that democracy must overhaul the social machinery
through which it operates if it would bring its community conditions up
to standards comparable to those maintained by its banks, its insurance
companies and its industrial corporations.
* * * * *
There are at least two tests to which the community can put such social
machinery. The first is that of operating efficiency. In hospitals,
in schools, in municipal departments, units of work and output can be
worked out as definitely as are the tons of the steel workers, the
voltage of the electricians, the dollars and cents of the banks. By
vigorous systems of audit and intelligent systems of budget-making,
understandable to the ordinary citizen, the community can see to it
that the output of these social institutions is comparable with the
investment it makes in them; that the taxpayer gets his money's worth.
The Bureau of Municipal Research in New York embodies this idea in its
program.
There is another, equally intensive test to which social institutions
and sanitary conditions can be put. It is conceivable that the tax
payer may get his money's worth from the municipal government, while
the families of the wage earning population and householders may be
suffering from another and irreparable form of taxation, which only
increased municipal expenditure along certain lines could relieve. So
it is that while I subscribe to the movement for stiffer standards of
municipal accounting as a basis for effective government, for knowing
the waste of a city's money, I subscribe further to the movement for
such methods of social bookkeeping as will show us the larger waste of
human life and private means; and will stand out not only for honesty
and efficiency, but for the common well-being.
Let me illustrate by the case of typhoid fever which has been epidemic
in Pittsburgh for twenty-five years. To eliminate typhoid Pittsburgh has
erected a 5-1/2 million dollar filtration plant,[14] for the years of
delay in the erection of which the city has suffered a terrible toll of
deaths and misery. There were 5,421 cases of typhoid fever in Pittsburgh
last year and 622 deaths. Computing death rate per 100,000 population
for the larger cities having the highest rates in 1901, Pittsburgh was
first with 124, New Haven second, Allegheny third; in 1902, Pittsburgh
was first, Allegheny second, Washington third; in 1903, Pittsburgh
first, Cleveland was second, Allegheny third; in 1904, Columbus was
first, Pittsburgh second, Allegheny third; in 1905, Allegheny was first,
Pittsburgh second and Columbus third; in 1906, Pittsburgh was first, and
Allegheny second. But even these figures, startling as they are, fail
to afford a grasp of the meaning of this typhoid scourge in the lives
of the wage earners of Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Survey undertook to
gauge this. In co-operation with Columbian Settlement, we collected
data as to 1,029 cases in six wards reported in one year; 448 cases
were found and studied. Of these 26 died. 187 wage earners lost 1,901
weeks' work. Other wage earners, not patients, lost 322 weeks,--a total
loss in wages of $28,899. The cost of 90 patients treated in hospitals
at public or private expense was $4,165; of 338 patients cared for at
home, $21,000 in doctors' bills, nurses, ice, foods, medicines; of 26
funerals, $3,186; a total cost of $57,250 in less than half the cases
of six wards in one year,--wards in which both income and sickness
expense were at a minimum. But there were other even more serious drains
which do not admit of tabulation. A girl of twenty-two, who worked on
stogies, was left in a very nervous condition, not as strong as before,
and consequently she could not attain her former speed. A blacksmith
will probably never work at his trade with his former strength. A
sixteen-year-old girl who developed tuberculosis was left in a weakened
physical condition. A tailor who cannot work as long hours as before,
was reduced $1 a week in wages. A boy of eight was very nervous; he
would not sit still in school and was rapidly becoming a truant. A
mother developed a case of pneumonia from over-exposure in caring for
children who had the fever, and she has not been well since. So the
story goes,--very real to the lives of the many who are so intimately
concerned. The money losses can be replaced. My figures include no
estimate of the value of human lives lost. And it is impossible to
compute in terms of dollars and cents, what it means to a family to
have the father's health so broken that he cannot work at his old job,
but has to accept easier work at less pay. It is impossible to put in
tabulated form the total value to a family of a mother's health, and
strike a proper balance when typhoid has left her a physical or nervous
wreck. It is impossible to estimate what is the cost to a boy or girl
who is obliged to leave school in order to help support the family,
because typhoid has incapacitated the natural bread-winners. Such facts
as these show the drain that typhoid has been on the vital forces of the
community. It is only one of such drains.
[14] In October there were but ninety-six cases of typhoid in Greater
Pittsburgh, as against 503 for October, 1907.
Such facts as these bring home concretely to the average workingman his
stake in good government.
* * * * *
It is not possible here to enter into a discussion, even briefly, of
the democratic methods by which a community can improve the quality and
lessen the cost of its food supplies as an integral part of the program
for building up a vigorous working population. There is a direct bearing
between these costs of living and the holding power of the wages paid in
the Pittsburgh District.
* * * * *
But there is one necessity of which there is a paramount shortage; that
is shelter. I should like you to compare the efficiency to perform the
function for which it is devised of a modern blast furnace and the
shacks which house some of the families in the Pittsburgh District.
The output of the one is pig iron; the output of the other, home life
and children. According to the tenement house census carried on by the
Pittsburgh Bureau of Health the past summer, there are 3,364 tenement
houses in the greater city. Nearly fifty per cent of these are old
dwellings built and constructed to accommodate one family and as a
rule without conveniences for the multiple households now crowded
into them. Let me give you an example,--a house on Bedford avenue,
with three families in the front and three in the rear, Negroes and
whites. The owner was notified over a year ago that the building must
be repaired and certain alterations made, but nothing has been done,
and by the veto of the governor of Pennsylvania of a bill which passed
the last Legislature, the Bureau of Health has no power to condemn such
unsanitary dwellings. In this building, two-room apartments rent for
twelve dollars a month. Water has to be obtained from a hydrant in the
yard, shared by eleven families; the foul privy vaults are also shared
by neighboring families.
Under Dr. Edwards's administration 5,063 such privy vaults have been
filled and abandoned in Pittsburgh and 8,281 sanitary water closets
installed in their place. The work is less than half done. The census
of only the first twenty wards of the older city shows a total of
nearly 6,000 vaults still existing in these wards alone. Consider
the contrast,--these old, ramshackle, unwholesome, disease breeding
appliances of the back country here in Pittsburgh, the city of the great
engineers, of mechanical invention and of progress. In a typhoid-ridden
neighborhood, a vault is an open menace to health. Investigations in
army camps and in given neighborhoods in Chicago have proved that
insects carry disease from such places to the tables and living rooms of
the people.
There are three points which I should like you to consider in connection
with this problem of shelter. The first is that the Bureau of Health,
however efficient in its supervisory work, cannot meet it single
handed. Even if through the activities of the Health Bureau, Tammany
Hall, Yellow Row and other old shacks have been torn down, even if the
owners of other old buildings are made to install sanitary appliances,
the situation is still unmet, unless new houses,--vast quantities of
new houses,--are erected to care for the increased population which
has flooded into Pittsburgh in the last ten years and which, there is
every indication, will multiply as greatly in the next ten. Real estate
dealers and builders have not been inactive in Pittsburgh, but the
situation is so serious as to demand the development of a constructive
public policy that will comprehend such elements as town planning, tax
reform, and investment at "five per cent and the public good."