CHARITABLE EFFORT
All those hints and glimpses of a larger and more satisfying democracy,
which literature and our own hopes supply, have a tendency to slip away
from us and to leave us sadly unguided and perplexed when we attempt to
act upon them.
Our conceptions of morality, as all our other ideas, pass through a
course of development; the difficulty comes in adjusting our conduct,
which has become hardened into customs and habits, to these changing
moral conceptions. When this adjustment is not made, we suffer from the
strain and indecision of believing one hypothesis and acting upon
another.
Probably there is no relation in life which our democracy is changing
more rapidly than the charitable relation--that relation which obtains
between benefactor and beneficiary; at the same time there is no point
of contact in our modern experience which reveals so clearly the lack of
that equality which democracy implies. We have reached the moment when
democracy has made such inroads upon this relationship, that the
complacency of the old-fashioned charitable man is gone forever; while,
at the same time, the very need and existence of charity, denies us the
consolation and freedom which democracy will at last give.
It is quite obvious that the ethics of none of us are clearly defined,
and we are continually obliged to act in circles of habit, based upon
convictions which we no longer hold. Thus our estimate of the effect of
environment and social conditions has doubtless shifted faster than our
methods of administrating charity have changed. Formerly when it was
believed that poverty was synonymous with vice and laziness, and that
the prosperous man was the righteous man, charity was administered
harshly with a good conscience; for the charitable agent really blamed
the individual for his poverty, and the very fact of his own superior
prosperity gave him a certain consciousness of superior morality. We
have learned since that time to measure by other standards, and have
ceased to accord to the money-earning capacity exclusive respect; while
it is still rewarded out of all proportion to any other, its possession
is by no means assumed to imply the possession of the highest moral
qualities. We have learned to judge men by their social virtues as well
as by their business capacity, by their devotion to intellectual and
disinterested aims, and by their public spirit, and we naturally resent
being obliged to judge poor people so solely upon the industrial side.
Our democratic instinct instantly takes alarm. It is largely in this
modern tendency to judge all men by one democratic standard, while the
old charitable attitude commonly allowed the use of two standards, that
much of the difficulty adheres. We know that unceasing bodily toil
becomes wearing and brutalizing, and our position is totally untenable
if we judge large numbers of our fellows solely upon their success in
maintaining it.
The daintily clad charitable visitor who steps into the little house
made untidy by the vigorous efforts of her hostess, the washerwoman, is
no longer sure of her superiority to the latter; she recognizes that her
hostess after all represents social value and industrial use, as over
against her own parasitic cleanliness and a social standing attained
only through status.
The only families who apply for aid to the charitable agencies are those
who have come to grief on the industrial side; it may be through
sickness, through loss of work, or for other guiltless and inevitable
reasons; but the fact remains that they are industrially ailing, and
must be bolstered and helped into industrial health. The charity
visitor, let us assume, is a young college woman, well-bred and
open-minded; when she visits the family assigned to her, she is often
embarrassed to find herself obliged to lay all the stress of her
teaching and advice upon the industrial virtues, and to treat the
members of the family almost exclusively as factors in the industrial
system. She insists that they must work and be self-supporting, that the
most dangerous of all situations is idleness, that seeking one's own
pleasure, while ignoring claims and responsibilities, is the most
ignoble of actions. The members of her assigned family may have other
charms and virtues--they may possibly be kind and considerate of each
other, generous to their friends, but it is her business to stick to the
industrial side. As she daily holds up these standards, it often occurs
to the mind of the sensitive visitor, whose conscience has been made
tender by much talk of brotherhood and equality, that she has no right
to say these things; that her untrained hands are no more fitted to
cope with actual conditions than those of her broken-down family.
The grandmother of the charity visitor could have done the industrial
preaching very well, because she did have the industrial virtues and
housewifely training. In a generation our experiences have changed, and
our views with them; but we still keep on in the old methods, which
could be applied when our consciences were in line with them, but which
are daily becoming more difficult as we divide up into people who work
with their hands and those who do not. The charity visitor belonging to
the latter class is perplexed by recognitions and suggestions which the
situation forces upon her. Our democracy has taught us to apply our
moral teaching all around, and the moralist is rapidly becoming so
sensitive that when his life does not exemplify his ethical convictions,
he finds it difficult to preach.
Added to this is a consciousness, in the mind of the visitor, of a
genuine misunderstanding of her motives by the recipients of her
charity, and by their neighbors. Let us take a neighborhood of poor
people, and test their ethical standards by those of the charity
visitor, who comes with the best desire in the world to help them out of
their distress. A most striking incongruity, at once apparent, is the
difference between the emotional kindness with which relief is given by
one poor neighbor to another poor neighbor, and the guarded care with
which relief is given by a charity visitor to a charity recipient. The
neighborhood mind is at once confronted not only by the difference of
method, but by an absolute clashing of two ethical standards.
A very little familiarity with the poor districts of any city is
sufficient to show how primitive and genuine are the neighborly
relations. There is the greatest willingness to lend or borrow anything,
and all the residents of the given tenement know the most intimate
family affairs of all the others. The fact that the economic condition
of all alike is on a most precarious level makes the ready outflow of
sympathy and material assistance the most natural thing in the world.
There are numberless instances of self-sacrifice quite unknown in the
circles where greater economic advantages make that kind of intimate
knowledge of one's neighbors impossible. An Irish family in which the
man has lost his place, and the woman is struggling to eke out the
scanty savings by day's work, will take in the widow and her five
children who have been turned into the street, without a moment's
reflection upon the physical discomforts involved. The most maligned
landlady who lives in the house with her tenants is usually ready to
lend a scuttle full of coal to one of them who may be out of work, or to
share her supper. A woman for whom the writer had long tried in vain to
find work failed to appear at the appointed time when employment was
secured at last. Upon investigation it transpired that a neighbor
further down the street was taken ill, that the children ran for the
family friend, who went of course, saying simply when reasons for her
non-appearance were demanded, "It broke me heart to leave the place, but
what could I do?" A woman whose husband was sent up to the city prison
for the maximum term, just three months, before the birth of her child
found herself penniless at the end of that time, having gradually sold
her supply of household furniture. She took refuge with a friend whom
she supposed to be living in three rooms in another part of town. When
she arrived, however, she discovered that her friend's husband had been
out of work so long that they had been reduced to living in one room.
The friend, however, took her in, and the friend's husband was obliged
to sleep upon a bench in the park every night for a week, which he did
uncomplainingly if not cheerfully. Fortunately it was summer, "and it
only rained one night." The writer could not discover from the young
mother that she had any special claim upon the "friend" beyond the fact
that they had formerly worked together in the same factory. The husband
she had never seen until the night of her arrival, when he at once went
forth in search of a midwife who would consent to come upon his promise
of future payment.
The evolutionists tell us that the instinct to pity, the impulse to aid
his fellows, served man at a very early period, as a rude rule of right
and wrong. There is no doubt that this rude rule still holds among many
people with whom charitable agencies are brought into contact, and that
their ideas of right and wrong are quite honestly outraged by the
methods of these agencies. When they see the delay and caution with
which relief is given, it does not appear to them a conscientious
scruple, but as the cold and calculating action of a selfish man. It is
not the aid that they are accustomed to receive from their neighbors,
and they do not understand why the impulse which drives people to "be
good to the poor" should be so severely supervised. They feel,
remotely, that the charity visitor is moved by motives that are alien
and unreal. They may be superior motives, but they are different, and
they are "agin nature." They cannot comprehend why a person whose
intellectual perceptions are stronger than his natural impulses, should
go into charity work at all. The only man they are accustomed to see
whose intellectual perceptions are stronger than his tenderness of
heart, is the selfish and avaricious man who is frankly "on the make."
If the charity visitor is such a person, why does she pretend to like
the poor? Why does she not go into business at once?
We may say, of course, that it is a primitive view of life, which thus
confuses intellectuality and business ability; but it is a view quite
honestly held by many poor people who are obliged to receive charity
from time to time. In moments of indignation the poor have been known to
say: "What do you want, anyway? If you have nothing to give us, why not
let us alone and stop your questionings and investigations?" "They
investigated me for three weeks, and in the end gave me nothing but a
black character," a little woman has been heard to assert. This
indignation, which is for the most part taciturn, and a certain kindly
contempt for her abilities, often puzzles the charity visitor. The
latter may be explained by the standard of worldly success which the
visited families hold. Success does not ordinarily go, in the minds of
the poor, with charity and kind-heartedness, but rather with the
opposite qualities. The rich landlord is he who collects with sternness,
who accepts no excuse, and will have his own. There are moments of
irritation and of real bitterness against him, but there is still
admiration, because he is rich and successful. The good-natured
landlord, he who pities and spares his poverty-pressed tenants, is
seldom rich. He often lives in the back of his house, which he has owned
for a long time, perhaps has inherited; but he has been able to
accumulate little. He commands the genuine love and devotion of many a
poor soul, but he is treated with a certain lack of respect. In one
sense he is a failure. The charity visitor, just because she is a person
who concerns herself with the poor, receives a certain amount of this
good-natured and kindly contempt, sometimes real affection, but little
genuine respect. The poor are accustomed to help each other and to
respond according to their kindliness; but when it comes to worldly
judgment, they use industrial success as the sole standard. In the case
of the charity visitor who has neither natural kindness nor dazzling
riches, they are deprived of both standards, and they find it of course
utterly impossible to judge of the motive of organized charity.
Even those of us who feel most sorely the need of more order in
altruistic effort and see the end to be desired, find something
distasteful in the juxtaposition of the words "organized" and "charity."
We say in defence that we are striving to turn this emotion into a
motive, that pity is capricious, and not to be depended on; that we mean
to give it the dignity of conscious duty. But at bottom we distrust a
little a scheme which substitutes a theory of social conduct for the
natural promptings of the heart, even although we appreciate the
complexity of the situation. The poor man who has fallen into distress,
when he first asks aid, instinctively expects tenderness, consideration,
and forgiveness. If it is the first time, it has taken him long to make
up his mind to take the step. He comes somewhat bruised and battered,
and instead of being met with warmth of heart and sympathy, he is at
once chilled by an investigation and an intimation that he ought to
work. He does not recognize the disciplinary aspect of the situation.
The only really popular charity is that of the visiting nurses, who by
virtue of their professional training render services which may easily
be interpreted into sympathy and kindness, ministering as they do to
obvious needs which do not require investigation.
The state of mind which an investigation arouses on both sides is most
unfortunate; but the perplexity and clashing of different standards,
with the consequent misunderstandings, are not so bad as the moral
deterioration which is almost sure to follow.
When the agent or visitor appears among the poor, and they discover that
under certain conditions food and rent and medical aid are dispensed
from some unknown source, every man, woman, and child is quick to learn
what the conditions may be, and to follow them. Though in their eyes a
glass of beer is quite right and proper when taken as any
self-respecting man should take it; though they know that cleanliness is
an expensive virtue which can be required of few; though they realize
that saving is well-nigh impossible when but a few cents can be laid by
at a time; though their feeling for the church may be something quite
elusive of definition and quite apart from daily living: to the visitor
they gravely laud temperance and cleanliness and thrift and religious
observance. The deception in the first instances arises from a wondering
inability to understand the ethical ideals which can require such
impossible virtues, and from an innocent desire to please. It is easy to
trace the development of the mental suggestions thus received. When A
discovers that B, who is very little worse off than he, receives good
things from an inexhaustible supply intended for the poor at large, he
feels that he too has a claim for his share, and step by step there is
developed the competitive spirit which so horrifies charity visitors
when it shows itself in a tendency to "work" the relief-giving agencies.
The most serious effect upon the poor comes when dependence upon the
charitable society is substituted for the natural outgoing of human love
and sympathy, which, happily, we all possess in some degree. The
spontaneous impulse to sit up all night with the neighbor's sick child
is turned into righteous indignation against the district nurse,
because she goes home at six o'clock, and doesn't do it herself. Or the
kindness which would have prompted the quick purchase of much needed
medicine is transformed into a voluble scoring of the dispensary,
because it gives prescriptions and not drugs; and "who can get well on a
piece of paper?"
If a poor woman knows that her neighbor next door has no shoes, she is
quite willing to lend her own, that her neighbor may go decently to
mass, or to work; for she knows the smallest item about the scanty
wardrobe, and cheerfully helps out. When the charity visitor comes in,
all the neighbors are baffled as to what her circumstances may be. They
know she does not need a new pair of shoes, and rather suspect that she
has a dozen pairs at home; which, indeed, she sometimes has. They
imagine untold stores which they may call upon, and her most generous
gift is considered niggardly, compared with what she might do. She ought
to get new shoes for the family all round, "she sees well enough that
they need them." It is no more than the neighbor herself would do, has
practically done, when she lent her own shoes. The charity visitor has
broken through the natural rule of giving, which, in a primitive
society, is bounded only by the need of the recipient and the resources
of the giver; and she gets herself into untold trouble when she is
judged by the ethics of that primitive society.
The neighborhood understands the selfish rich people who stay in their
own part of town, where all their associates have shoes and other
things. Such people don't bother themselves about the poor; they are
like the rich landlords of the neighborhood experience. But this lady
visitor, who pretends to be good to the poor, and certainly does talk as
though she were kind-hearted, what does she come for, if she does not
intend to give them things which are so plainly needed?
The visitor says, sometimes, that in holding her poor family so hard to
a standard of thrift she is really breaking down a rule of higher living
which they formerly possessed; that saving, which seems quite
commendable in a comfortable part of town, appears almost criminal in a
poorer quarter where the next-door neighbor needs food, even if the
children of the family do not.
She feels the sordidness of constantly being obliged to urge the
industrial view of life. The benevolent individual of fifty years ago
honestly believed that industry and self-denial in youth would result in
comfortable possessions for old age. It was, indeed, the method he had
practised in his own youth, and by which he had probably obtained
whatever fortune he possessed. He therefore reproved the poor family for
indulging their children, urged them to work long hours, and was utterly
untouched by many scruples which afflict the contemporary charity
visitor. She says sometimes, "Why must I talk always of getting work and
saving money, the things I know nothing about? If it were anything else
I had to urge, I could do it; anything like Latin prose, which I had
worried through myself, it would not be so hard." But she finds it
difficult to connect the experiences of her youth with the experiences
of the visited family.
Because of this diversity in experience, the visitor is continually
surprised to find that the safest platitude may be challenged. She
refers quite naturally to the "horrors of the saloon," and discovers
that the head of her visited family does not connect them with "horrors"
at all. He remembers all the kindnesses he has received there, the free
lunch and treating which goes on, even when a man is out of work and not
able to pay up; the loan of five dollars he got there when the charity
visitor was miles away and he was threatened with eviction. He may
listen politely to her reference to "horrors," but considers it only
"temperance talk."
The charity visitor may blame the women for lack of gentleness toward
their children, for being hasty and rude to them, until she learns that
the standard of breeding is not that of gentleness toward the children
so much as the observance of certain conventions, such as the
punctilious wearing of mourning garments after the death of a child. The
standard of gentleness each mother has to work out largely by herself,
assisted only by the occasional shame-faced remark of a neighbor, "That
they do better when you are not too hard on them"; but the wearing of
mourning garments is sustained by the definitely expressed sentiment of
every woman in the street. The mother would have to bear social blame, a
certain social ostracism, if she failed to comply with that requirement.
It is not comfortable to outrage the conventions of those among whom we
live, and, if our social life be a narrow one, it is still more
difficult. The visitor may choke a little when she sees the lessened
supply of food and the scanty clothing provided for the remaining
children in order that one may be conventionally mourned, but she
doesn't talk so strongly against it as she would have done during her
first month of experience with the family since bereaved.
The subject of clothes indeed perplexes the visitor constantly, and the
result of her reflections may be summed up somewhat in this wise: The
girl who has a definite social standing, who has been to a fashionable
school or to a college, whose family live in a house seen and known by
all her friends and associates, may afford to be very simple, or even
shabby as to her clothes, if she likes. But the working girl, whose
family lives in a tenement, or moves from one small apartment to
another, who has little social standing and has to make her own place,
knows full well how much habit and style of dress has to do with her
position. Her income goes into her clothing, out of all proportion to
the amount which she spends upon other things. But, if social
advancement is her aim, it is the most sensible thing she can do. She is
judged largely by her clothes. Her house furnishing, with its pitiful
little decorations, her scanty supply of books, are never seen by the
people whose social opinions she most values. Her clothes are her
background, and from them she is largely judged. It is due to this fact
that girls' clubs succeed best in the business part of town, where
"working girls" and "young ladies" meet upon an equal footing, and where
the clothes superficially look very much alike. Bright and ambitious
girls will come to these down-town clubs to eat lunch and rest at noon,
to study all sorts of subjects and listen to lectures, when they might
hesitate a long time before joining a club identified with their own
neighborhood, where they would be judged not solely on their own merits
and the unconscious social standing afforded by good clothes, but by
other surroundings which are not nearly up to these. For the same
reason, girls' clubs are infinitely more difficult to organize in little
towns and villages, where every one knows every one else, just how the
front parlor is furnished, and the amount of mortgage there is upon the
house. These facts get in the way of a clear and unbiassed judgment;
they impede the democratic relationship and add to the
self-consciousness of all concerned. Every one who has had to do with
down-town girls' clubs has had the experience of going into the home of
some bright, well-dressed girl, to discover it uncomfortable and perhaps
wretched, and to find the girl afterward carefully avoiding her,
although the working girl may not have been at home when the call was
made, and the visitor may have carried herself with the utmost courtesy
throughout. In some very successful down-town clubs the home address is
not given at all, and only the "business address" is required. Have we
worked out our democracy further in regard to clothes than anything
else?
The charity visitor has been rightly brought up to consider it vulgar to
spend much money upon clothes, to care so much for "appearances." She
realizes dimly that the care for personal decoration over that for one's
home or habitat is in some way primitive and undeveloped; but she is
silenced by its obvious need. She also catches a glimpse of the fact
that the disproportionate expenditure of the poor in the matter of
clothes is largely due to the exclusiveness of the rich who hide from
them the interior of their houses, and their more subtle pleasures,
while of necessity exhibiting their street clothes and their street
manners. Every one who goes shopping at the same time may see the
clothes of the richest women in town, but only those invited to her
receptions see the Corot on her walls or the bindings in her library.
The poor naturally try to bridge the difference by reproducing the
street clothes which they have seen. They are striving to conform to a
common standard which their democratic training presupposes belongs to
all of us. The charity visitor may regret that the Italian peasant
woman has laid aside her picturesque kerchief and substituted a cheap
street hat. But it is easy to recognize the first attempt toward
democratic expression.
The charity visitor finds herself still more perplexed when she comes to
consider such problems as those of early marriage and child labor; for
she cannot deal with them according to economic theories, or according
to the conventions which have regulated her own life. She finds both of
these fairly upset by her intimate knowledge of the situation, and her
sympathy for those into whose lives she has gained a curious insight.
She discovers how incorrigibly bourgeois her standards have been, and it
takes but a little time to reach the conclusion that she cannot insist
so strenuously upon the conventions of her own class, which fail to fit
the bigger, more emotional, and freer lives of working people. The
charity visitor holds well-grounded views upon the imprudence of early
marriages, quite naturally because she comes from a family and circle
of professional and business people. A professional man is scarcely
equipped and started in his profession before he is thirty. A business
man, if he is on the road to success, is much nearer prosperity at
thirty-five than twenty-five, and it is therefore wise for these men not
to marry in the twenties; but this does not apply to the workingman. In
many trades he is laid upon the shelf at thirty-five, and in nearly all
trades he receives the largest wages in his life between twenty and
thirty. If the young workingman has all his wages to himself, he will
probably establish habits of personal comfort, which he cannot keep up
when he has to divide with a family--habits which he can, perhaps, never
overcome.
The sense of prudence, the necessity for saving, can never come to a
primitive, emotional man with the force of a conviction; but the
necessity of providing for his children is a powerful incentive. He
naturally regards his children as his savings-bank; he expects them to
care for him when he gets old, and in some trades old age comes very
early. A Jewish tailor was quite lately sent to the Cook County
poorhouse, paralyzed beyond recovery at the age of thirty-five. Had his
little boy of nine been but a few years older, he might have been spared
this sorrow of public charity. He was, in fact, better able to well
support a family when he was twenty than when he was thirty-five, for
his wages had steadily grown less as the years went on. Another tailor
whom I know, who is also a Socialist, always speaks of saving as a
bourgeois virtue, one quite impossible to the genuine workingman. He
supports a family consisting of himself, a wife and three children, and
his two parents on eight dollars a week. He insists it would be criminal
not to expend every penny of this amount upon food and shelter, and he
expects his children later to care for him.
This economic pressure also accounts for the tendency to put children to
work overyoung and thus cripple their chances for individual
development and usefulness, and with the avaricious parent also leads to
exploitation. "I have fed her for fourteen years, now she can help me
pay my mortgage" is not an unusual reply when a hardworking father is
expostulated with because he would take his bright daughter out of
school and put her into a factory.
It has long been a common error for the charity visitor, who is strongly
urging her "family" toward self-support, to suggest, or at least
connive, that the children be put to work early, although she has not
the excuse that the parents have. It is so easy, after one has been
taking the industrial view for a long time, to forget the larger and
more social claim; to urge that the boy go to work and support his
parents, who are receiving charitable aid. She does not realize what a
cruel advantage the person who distributes charity has, when she gives
advice.
The manager in a huge mercantile establishment employing many children
was able to show during a child-labor investigation, that the only
children under fourteen years of age in his employ were protégés who had
been urged upon him by philanthropic ladies, not only acquaintances of
his, but valued patrons of the establishment. It is not that the charity
visitor is less wise than other people, but she has fixed her mind so
long upon the industrial lameness of her family that she is eager to
seize any crutch, however weak, which may enable them to get on.
She has failed to see that the boy who attempts to prematurely support
his widowed mother may lower wages, add an illiterate member to the
community, and arrest the development of a capable workingman. As she
has failed to see that the rules which obtain in regard to the age of
marriage in her own family may not apply to the workingman, so also she
fails to understand that the present conditions of employment
surrounding a factory child are totally unlike those which obtained
during the energetic youth of her father.
The child who is prematurely put to work is constantly oppressed by this
never ending question of the means of subsistence, and even little
children are sometimes almost crushed with the cares of life through
their affectionate sympathy. The writer knows a little Italian lad of
six to whom the problems of food, clothing, and shelter have become so
immediate and pressing that, although an imaginative child, he is unable
to see life from any other standpoint. The goblin or bugaboo, feared by
the more fortunate child, in his mind, has come to be the need of coal
which caused his father hysterical and demonstrative grief when it
carried off his mother's inherited linen, the mosaic of St. Joseph, and,
worst of all, his own rubber boots. He once came to a party at
Hull-House, and was interested in nothing save a gas stove which he saw
in the kitchen. He became excited over the discovery that fire could be
produced without fuel. "I will tell my father of this stove. You buy no
coal, you need only a match. Anybody will give you a match." He was
taken to visit at a country-house and at once inquired how much rent was
paid for it. On being told carelessly by his hostess that they paid no
rent for that house, he came back quite wild with interest that the
problem was solved. "Me and my father will go to the country. You get a
big house, all warm, without rent." Nothing else in the country
interested him but the subject of rent, and he talked of that with an
exclusiveness worthy of a single taxer.
The struggle for existence, which is so much harsher among people near
the edge of pauperism, sometimes leaves ugly marks on character, and the
charity visitor finds these indirect results most mystifying. Parents
who work hard and anticipate an old age when they can no longer earn,
take care that their children shall expect to divide their wages with
them from the very first. Such a parent, when successful, impresses the
immature nervous system of the child thus tyrannically establishing
habits of obedience, so that the nerves and will may not depart from
this control when the child is older. The charity visitor, whose family
relation is lifted quite out of this, does not in the least understand
the industrial foundation for this family tyranny.
The head of a kindergarten training-class once addressed a club of
working women, and spoke of the despotism which is often established
over little children. She said that the so-called determination to break
a child's will many times arose from a lust of dominion, and she urged
the ideal relationship founded upon love and confidence. But many of the
women were puzzled. One of them remarked to the writer as she came out
of the club room, "If you did not keep control over them from the time
they were little, you would never get their wages when they are grown
up." Another one said, "Ah, of course she (meaning the speaker) doesn't
have to depend upon her children's wages. She can afford to be lax with
them, because even if they don't give money to her, she can get along
without it."
There are an impressive number of children who uncomplainingly and
constantly hand over their weekly wages to their parents, sometimes
receiving back ten cents or a quarter for spending-money, but quite as
often nothing at all; and the writer knows one girl of twenty-five who
for six years has received two cents a week from the constantly falling
wages which she earns in a large factory. Is it habit or virtue which
holds her steady in this course? If love and tenderness had been
substituted for parental despotism, would the mother have had enough
affection, enough power of expression to hold her daughter's sense of
money obligation through all these years? This girl who spends her
paltry two cents on chewing-gum and goes plainly clad in clothes of her
mother's choosing, while many of her friends spend their entire wages on
those clothes which factory girls love so well, must be held by some
powerful force.
The charity visitor finds these subtle and elusive problems most
harrowing. The head of a family she is visiting is a man who has become
black-listed in a strike. He is not a very good workman, and this, added
to his agitator's reputation, keeps him out of work for a long time. The
fatal result of being long out of work follows: he becomes less and less
eager for it, and gets a "job" less and less frequently. In order to
keep up his self-respect, and still more to keep his wife's respect for
him, he yields to the little self-deception that this prolonged idleness
follows because he was once blacklisted, and he gradually becomes a
martyr. Deep down in his heart perhaps--but who knows what may be deep
down in his heart? Whatever may be in his wife's, she does not show for
an instant that she thinks he has grown lazy, and accustomed to see her
earn, by sewing and cleaning, most of the scanty income for the family.
The charity visitor, however, does see this, and she also sees that the
other men who were in the strike have gone back to work. She further
knows by inquiry and a little experience that the man is not skilful.
She cannot, however, call him lazy and good-for-nothing, and denounce
him as worthless as her grandmother might have done, because of certain
intellectual conceptions at which she has arrived. She sees other
workmen come to him for shrewd advice; she knows that he spends many
more hours in the public library reading good books than the average
workman has time to do. He has formed no bad habits and has yielded only
to those subtle temptations toward a life of leisure which come to the
intellectual man. He lacks the qualifications which would induce his
union to engage him as a secretary or organizer, but he is a constant
speaker at workingmen's meetings, and takes a high moral attitude on the
questions discussed there. He contributes a certain intellectuality to
his friends, and he has undoubted social value. The neighboring women
confide to the charity visitor their sympathy with his wife, because
she has to work so hard, and because her husband does not "provide."
Their remarks are sharpened by a certain resentment toward the
superiority of the husband's education and gentle manners. The charity
visitor is ashamed to take this point of view, for she knows that it is
not altogether fair. She is reminded of a college friend of hers, who
told her that she was not going to allow her literary husband to write
unworthy potboilers for the sake of earning a living. "I insist that we
shall live within my own income; that he shall not publish until he is
ready, and can give his genuine message." The charity visitor recalls
what she has heard of another acquaintance, who urged her husband to
decline a lucrative position as a railroad attorney, because she wished
him to be free to take municipal positions, and handle public questions
without the inevitable suspicion which unaccountably attaches itself in
a corrupt city to a corporation attorney. The action of these two women
seemed noble to her, but in their cases they merely lived on a lesser
income. In the case of the workingman's wife, she faced living on no
income at all, or on the precarious one which she might be able to get
together.
She sees that this third woman has made the greatest sacrifice, and she
is utterly unwilling to condemn her while praising the friends of her
own social position. She realizes, of course, that the situation is
changed by the fact that the third family needs charity, while the other
two do not; but, after all, they have not asked for it, and their plight
was only discovered through an accident to one of the children. The
charity visitor has been taught that her mission is to preserve the
finest traits to be found in her visited family, and she shrinks from
the thought of convincing the wife that her husband is worthless and she
suspects that she might turn all this beautiful devotion into
complaining drudgery. To be sure, she could give up visiting the family
altogether, but she has become much interested in the progress of the
crippled child who eagerly anticipates her visits, and she also suspects
that she will never know many finer women than the mother. She is
unwilling, therefore, to give up the friendship, and goes on bearing her
perplexities as best she may.
The first impulse of our charity visitor is to be somewhat severe with
her shiftless family for spending money on pleasures and indulging their
children out of all proportion to their means. The poor family which
receives beans and coal from the county, and pays for a bicycle on the
instalment plan, is not unknown to any of us. But as the growth of
juvenile crime becomes gradually understood, and as the danger of giving
no legitimate and organized pleasure to the child becomes clearer, we
remember that primitive man had games long before he cared for a house
or regular meals.
There are certain boys in many city neighborhoods who form themselves
into little gangs with a leader who is somewhat more intrepid than the
rest. Their favorite performance is to break into an untenanted house,
to knock off the faucets, and cut the lead pipe, which they sell to the
nearest junk dealer. With the money thus procured they buy beer and
drink it in little free-booter's groups sitting in the alley. From
beginning to end they have the excitement of knowing that they may be
seen and caught by the "coppers," and are at times quite breathless with
suspense. It is not the least unlike, in motive and execution, the
practice of country boys who go forth in squads to set traps for rabbits
or to round up a coon.
It is characterized by a pure spirit for adventure, and the vicious
training really begins when they are arrested, or when an older boy
undertakes to guide them into further excitements. From the very
beginning the most enticing and exciting experiences which they have
seen have been connected with crime. The policeman embodies all the
majesty of successful law and established government in his brass
buttons and dazzlingly equipped patrol wagon.
The boy who has been arrested comes back more or less a hero with a tale
to tell of the interior recesses of the mysterious police station. The
earliest public excitement the child remembers is divided between the
rattling fire engines, "the time there was a fire in the next block,"
and all the tense interest of the patrol wagon "the time the drunkest
lady in our street was arrested."
In the first year of their settlement the Hull-House residents took
fifty kindergarten children to Lincoln Park, only to be grieved by their
apathetic interest in trees and flowers. As they came back with an
omnibus full of tired and sleepy children, they were surprised to find
them galvanized into sudden life because a patrol wagon rattled by.
Their eager little heads popped out of the windows full of questioning:
"Was it a man or a woman?" "How many policemen inside?" and eager little
tongues began to tell experiences of arrests which baby eyes had
witnessed.
The excitement of a chase, the chances of competition, and the love of a
fight are all centred in the outward display of crime. The parent who
receives charitable aid and yet provides pleasure for his child, and is
willing to indulge him in his play, is blindly doing one of the wisest
things possible; and no one is more eager for playgrounds and vacation
schools than the conscientious charity visitor.
This very imaginative impulse and attempt to live in a pictured world of
their own, which seems the simplest prerogative of childhood, often
leads the boys into difficulty. Three boys aged seven, nine, and ten
were once brought into a neighboring police station under the charge of
pilfering and destroying property. They had dug a cave under a railroad
viaduct in which they had spent many days and nights of the summer
vacation. They had "swiped" potatoes and other vegetables from
hucksters' carts, which they had cooked and eaten in true brigand
fashion; they had decorated the interior of the excavation with stolen
junk, representing swords and firearms, to their romantic imaginations.
The father of the ringleader was a janitor living in a building five
miles away in a prosperous portion of the city. The landlord did not
want an active boy in the building, and his mother was dead; the janitor
paid for the boy's board and lodging to a needy woman living near the
viaduct. She conscientiously gave him his breakfast and supper, and left
something in the house for his dinner every morning when she went to
work in a neighboring factory; but was too tired by night to challenge
his statement that he "would rather sleep outdoors in the summer," or to
investigate what he did during the day. In the meantime the three boys
lived in a world of their own, made up from the reading of adventurous
stories and their vivid imaginations, steadily pilfering more and more
as the days went by, and actually imperilling the safety of the traffic
passing over the street on the top of the viaduct. In spite of vigorous
exertions on their behalf, one of the boys was sent to the Reform
School, comforting himself with the conclusive remark, "Well, we had fun
anyway, and maybe they will let us dig a cave at the School; it is in
the country, where we can't hurt anything."
In addition to books of adventure, or even reading of any sort, the
scenes and ideals of the theatre largely form the manners and morals of
the young people. "Going to the theatre" is indeed the most common and
satisfactory form of recreation. Many boys who conscientiously give all
their wages to their mothers have returned each week ten cents to pay
for a seat in the gallery of a theatre on Sunday afternoon. It is their
one satisfactory glimpse of life--the moment when they "issue forth from
themselves" and are stirred and thoroughly interested. They quite simply
adopt as their own, and imitate as best they can, all that they see
there. In moments of genuine grief and excitement the words and the
gestures they employ are those copied from the stage, and the tawdry
expression often conflicts hideously with the fine and genuine emotion
of which it is the inadequate and vulgar vehicle.
As in the matter of dress, more refined and simpler manners and mode of
expressions are unseen by them, and they must perforce copy what they
know.
If we agree with a recent definition of Art, as that which causes the
spectator to lose his sense of isolation, there is no doubt that the
popular theatre, with all its faults, more nearly fulfils the function
of art for the multitude of working people than all the "free galleries"
and picture exhibits combined.
The greatest difficulty is experienced when the two standards come
sharply together, and when both sides make an attempt at understanding
and explanation. The difficulty of making clear one's own ethical
standpoint is at times insurmountable. A woman who had bought and sold
school books stolen from the school fund,--books which are all plainly
marked with a red stamp,--came to Hull House one morning in great
distress because she had been arrested, and begged a resident "to speak
to the judge." She gave as a reason the fact that the House had known
her for six years, and had once been very good to her when her little
girl was buried. The resident more than suspected that her visitor knew
the school books were stolen when buying them, and any attempt to talk
upon that subject was evidently considered very rude. The visitor wished
to get out of her trial, and evidently saw no reason why the House
should not help her. The alderman was out of town, so she could not go
to him. After a long conversation the visitor entirely failed to get
another point of view and went away grieved and disappointed at a
refusal, thinking the resident simply disobliging; wondering, no doubt,
why such a mean woman had once been good to her; leaving the resident,
on the other hand, utterly baffled and in the state of mind she would
have been in, had she brutally insisted that a little child should lift
weights too heavy for its undeveloped muscles.
Such a situation brings out the impossibility of substituting a higher
ethical standard for a lower one without similarity of experience, but
it is not as painful as that illustrated by the following example, in
which the highest ethical standard yet attained by the charity recipient
is broken down, and the substituted one not in the least understood:--
A certain charity visitor is peculiarly appealed to by the weakness and
pathos of forlorn old age. She is responsible for the well-being of
perhaps a dozen old women to whom she sustains a sincerely affectionate
and almost filial relation. Some of them learn to take her benefactions
quite as if they came from their own relatives, grumbling at all she
does, and scolding her with a family freedom. One of these poor old
women was injured in a fire years ago. She has but the fragment of a
hand left, and is grievously crippled in her feet. Through years of pain
she had become addicted to opium, and when she first came under the
visitor's care, was only held from the poorhouse by the awful thought
that she would there perish without her drug. Five years of tender care
have done wonders for her. She lives in two neat little rooms, where
with her thumb and two fingers she makes innumerable quilts, which she
sells and gives away with the greatest delight. Her opium is regulated
to a set amount taken each day, and she has been drawn away from much
drinking. She is a voracious reader, and has her head full of strange
tales made up from books and her own imagination. At one time it seemed
impossible to do anything for her in Chicago, and she was kept for two
years in a suburb, where the family of the charity visitor lived, and
where she was nursed through several hazardous illnesses. She now lives
a better life than she did, but she is still far from being a model old
woman. The neighbors are constantly shocked by the fact that she is
supported and comforted by a "charity lady," while at the same time she
occasionally "rushes the growler," scolding at the boys lest they jar
her in her tottering walk. The care of her has broken through even that
second standard, which the neighborhood had learned to recognize as the
standard of charitable societies, that only the "worthy poor" are to be
helped; that temperance and thrift are the virtues which receive the
plums of benevolence. The old lady herself is conscious of this
criticism. Indeed, irate neighbors tell her to her face that she doesn't
in the least deserve what she gets. In order to disarm them, and at the
same time to explain what would otherwise seem loving-kindness so
colossal as to be abnormal, she tells them that during her sojourn in
the suburb she discovered an awful family secret,--a horrible scandal
connected with the long-suffering charity visitor; that it is in order
to prevent the divulgence of this that she constantly receives her
ministrations. Some of her perplexed neighbors accept this explanation
as simple and offering a solution of this vexed problem. Doubtless many
of them have a glimpse of the real state of affairs, of the love and
patience which ministers to need irrespective of worth. But the
standard is too high for most of them, and it sometimes seems
unfortunate to break down the second standard, which holds that people
who "rush the growler" are not worthy of charity, and that there is a
certain justice attained when they go to the poorhouse. It is certainly
dangerous to break down the lower, unless the higher is made clear.
Just when our affection becomes large enough to care for the unworthy
among the poor as we would care for the unworthy among our own kin, is
certainly a perplexing question. To say that it should never be so, is a
comment upon our democratic relations to them which few of us would be
willing to make.
Of what use is all this striving and perplexity? Has the experience any
value? It is certainly genuine, for it induces an occasional charity
visitor to live in a tenement house as simply as the other tenants do.
It drives others to give up visiting the poor altogether, because, they
claim, it is quite impossible unless the individual becomes a member of
a sisterhood, which requires, as some of the Roman Catholic sisterhoods
do, that the member first take the vows of obedience and poverty, so
that she can have nothing to give save as it is first given to her, and
thus she is not harassed by a constant attempt at adjustment.
Both the tenement-house resident and the sister assume to have put
themselves upon the industrial level of their neighbors, although they
have left out the most awful element of poverty, that of imminent fear
of starvation and a neglected old age.
The young charity visitor who goes from a family living upon a most
precarious industrial level to her own home in a prosperous part of the
city, if she is sensitive at all, is never free from perplexities which
our growing democracy forces upon her.
We sometimes say that our charity is too scientific, but we would
doubtless be much more correct in our estimate if we said that it is not
scientific enough. We dislike the entire arrangement of cards
alphabetically classified according to streets and names of families,
with the unrelated and meaningless details attached to them. Our feeling
of revolt is probably not unlike that which afflicted the students of
botany and geology in the middle of the last century, when flowers were
tabulated in alphabetical order, when geology was taught by colored
charts and thin books. No doubt the students, wearied to death, many
times said that it was all too scientific, and were much perplexed and
worried when they found traces of structure and physiology which their
so-called scientific principles were totally unable to account for. But
all this happened before science had become evolutionary and scientific
at all, before it had a principle of life from within. The very
indications and discoveries which formerly perplexed, later illumined
and made the study absorbing and vital.
We are singularly slow to apply this evolutionary principle to human
affairs in general, although it is fast being applied to the education
of children. We are at last learning to follow the development of the
child; to expect certain traits under certain conditions; to adapt
methods and matter to his growing mind. No "advanced educator" can allow
himself to be so absorbed in the question of what a child ought to be
as to exclude the discovery of what he is. But in our charitable efforts
we think much more of what a man ought to be than of what he is or of
what he may become; and we ruthlessly force our conventions and
standards upon him, with a sternness which we would consider stupid
indeed did an educator use it in forcing his mature intellectual
convictions upon an undeveloped mind.
Let us take the example of a timid child, who cries when he is put to
bed because he is afraid of the dark. The "soft-hearted" parent stays
with him, simply because he is sorry for him and wants to comfort him.
The scientifically trained parent stays with him, because he realizes
that the child is in a stage of development in which his imagination has
the best of him, and in which it is impossible to reason him out of a
belief in ghosts. These two parents, wide apart in point of view, after
all act much alike, and both very differently from the pseudo-scientific
parent, who acts from dogmatic conviction and is sure he is right. He
talks of developing his child's self-respect and good sense, and leaves
him to cry himself to sleep, demanding powers of self-control and
development which the child does not possess. There is no doubt that our
development of charity methods has reached this pseudo-scientific and
stilted stage. We have learned to condemn unthinking, ill-regulated
kind-heartedness, and we take great pride in mere repression much as the
stern parent tells the visitor below how admirably he is rearing the
child, who is hysterically crying upstairs and laying the foundation for
future nervous disorders. The pseudo-scientific spirit, or rather, the
undeveloped stage of our philanthropy, is perhaps most clearly revealed
in our tendency to lay constant stress on negative action. "Don't give;"
"don't break down self-respect," we are constantly told. We distrust the
human impulse as well as the teachings of our own experience, and in
their stead substitute dogmatic rules for conduct. We forget that the
accumulation of knowledge and the holding of convictions must finally
result in the application of that knowledge and those convictions to
life itself; that the necessity for activity and a pull upon the
sympathies is so severe, that all the knowledge in the possession of the
visitor is constantly applied, and she has a reasonable chance for an
ultimate intellectual comprehension. Indeed, part of the perplexity in
the administration of charity comes from the fact that the type of
person drawn to it is the one who insists that her convictions shall not
be unrelated to action. Her moral concepts constantly tend to float away
from her, unless they have a basis in the concrete relation of life. She
is confronted with the task of reducing her scruples to action, and of
converging many wills, so as to unite the strength of all of them into
one accomplishment, the value of which no one can foresee.
On the other hand, the young woman who has succeeded in expressing her
social compunction through charitable effort finds that the wider
social activity, and the contact with the larger experience, not only
increases her sense of social obligation but at the same time recasts
her social ideals. She is chagrined to discover that in the actual task
of reducing her social scruples to action, her humble beneficiaries are
far in advance of her, not in charity or singleness of purpose, but in
self-sacrificing action. She reaches the old-time virtue of humility by
a social process, not in the old way, as the man who sits by the side of
the road and puts dust upon his head, calling himself a contrite sinner,
but she gets the dust upon her head because she has stumbled and fallen
in the road through her efforts to push forward the mass, to march with
her fellows. She has socialized her virtues not only through a social
aim but by a social process.
The Hebrew prophet made three requirements from those who would join the
great forward-moving procession led by Jehovah. "To love mercy" and at
the same time "to do justly" is the difficult task; to fulfil the first
requirement alone is to fall into the error of indiscriminate giving
with all its disastrous results; to fulfil the second solely is to
obtain the stern policy of withholding, and it results in such a dreary
lack of sympathy and understanding that the establishment of justice is
impossible. It may be that the combination of the two can never be
attained save as we fulfil still the third requirement--"to walk humbly
with God," which may mean to walk for many dreary miles beside the
lowliest of His creatures, not even in that peace of mind which the
company of the humble is popularly supposed to afford, but rather with
the pangs and throes to which the poor human understanding is subjected
whenever it attempts to comprehend the meaning of life.