THE OUTWORKS OF THE SLUM TAKEN
I said that we got our grip when the civic conscience awoke in 1879. In
that year the slum was arraigned in the churches. The sad and shameful
story was told of how it grew and was fostered by avarice that saw in
the homeless crowds from over the sea only a chance for business, and
exploited them to the uttermost; how Christianity, citizenship, human
fellowship, shook their skirts clear of the rabble that was only good
enough to fill the greedy purse, and how the rabble, left to itself,
improved such opportunities as it found after such fashion as it knew;
how it ran elections merely to count its thugs in, and fattened at the
public crib; and how the whole evil thing had its root in the tenements,
where the home had ceased to be sacred,--those dark and deadly dens in
which the family ideal was tortured to death, and character was
smothered; in which children were "damned rather than born" into the
world, thus realizing a slum kind of foreordination to torment, happily
brief in many cases. The Tenement House Commission long afterward
called the worst of the barracks "infant slaughter houses," and showed,
by reference to the mortality lists, that they killed one in every five
babies born in them.
[Illustration: The Rear Tenement grows up. An Alley condemned by the
Council of Hygiene.]
The story shocked the town into action. Plans for a better kind of
tenement were called for, and a premium was put on every ray of light
and breath of air that could be let into it. It was not much, for the
plans clung to the twenty-five-foot lot which was the primal curse, and
the type of tenement evolved, the double-decker of the "dumb-bell"
shape, while it seemed at the time a great advance upon the black, old
packing-box kind, came with the great growth of our city to be a worse
peril than what had gone before. But what we got was according to our
sense. At least the will was there. Money was raised to build model
houses, and a bill to give the health authorities summary powers in
dealing with tenements was sent to the legislature. The landlords held
it up until the last day of the session, when it was forced through by
an angered public opinion, shorn of its most significant clause, which
proposed the licensing of tenements and so their control and effective
repression. However, the landlords had received a real set-back. Many of
them got rid of their property, which in a large number of cases they
had never seen, and tried to forget the source of their ill-gotten
wealth. Light and air did find their way into the tenements in a
half-hearted fashion, and we began to count the tenants as "souls."
That is another of our milestones in the history of New York. They were
never reckoned so before; no one ever thought of them as "souls." So,
restored to human fellowship, in the twilight of the air-shaft that had
penetrated to their dens, the first Tenement House Committee[11] was
able to make them out "better than the houses" they lived in, and a long
step forward was taken. The Mulberry Bend, the wicked core of the
"bloody Sixth Ward," was marked for destruction, and all slumdom held
its breath to see it go. With that gone, it seemed as if the old days
must be gone too, never to return. There would not be another Mulberry
Bend. As long as it stood, there was yet a chance. The slum had backing,
as it were.
[Footnote 11: The Adler Tenement House Committee of 1884. It was the
first citizens' commission. The legislative inquiry of 1856 was
conducted by a Select Committee of the Assembly.]
[Illustration: Professor Felix Adler.]
What was it like? says a man at my elbow, who never saw it. Like nothing
I ever saw before, or hope ever to see again. A crooked three-acre lot
built over with rotten structures that harbored the very dregs of
humanity. Ordinary enough to look at from the street, but pierced by a
maze of foul alleys, in the depths of which skulked the tramp and the
outcast thief with loathsome wrecks that had once laid claim to the name
of woman. Every foot of it reeked with incest and murder. Bandits'
Roost, Bottle Alley, were names synonymous with robbery and red-handed
outrage. By night, in its worst days, I have gone poking about their
shuddering haunts with a policeman on the beat, and come away in a
ferment of anger and disgust that would keep me awake far into the
morning hours planning means of its destruction. That was what it was
like. Thank God, we shall never see another such!
[Illustration: A Cellar Dive in the Bend.]
That was the exhibit that urged us on. But the civic conscience was not
very robust yet, and required many and protracted naps. It slumbered
fitfully eight long years, waking up now and then with a start, while
the Bend lay stewing in its slime. I wondered often, in those years of
delay, if it was just plain stupidity that kept the politicians from
spending the money which the law had put within their grasp; for with
every year that passed, a million dollars that could have been used for
small park purposes was lost.[12] But they were wiser than I. I
understood when I saw the changes which letting in the sunshine worked.
They were not of the kind that made for their good. We had all believed
it, but they knew it all along. At the same time, they lost none of the
chances that offered. They helped the landlords in the Bend, who
considered themselves greatly aggrieved because their property was
thereafter to front on a park instead of a pigsty, to transfer the whole
assessment of half a million dollars for park benefit to the city. They
undid in less than six weeks what it had taken considerably more than
six years to do; but the park was cheap at the price. We could afford to
pay all it cost to wake us up. When finally, upon the wave of wrath
excited by the Parkhurst and Lexow disclosures, reform came with a shock
that dislodged Tammany, it found us wide awake, and, it must be
admitted, not a little astonished at our sudden access of righteousness.
[Footnote 12: The Small Parks law of 1887 allowed the expenditure of
a million dollars a year for the making of neighborhood parks; but
only as payment for work done or property taken. If not used in any
one year, that year's appropriation was lost.]
The battle went against the slum in the three years that followed, until
it found backing in the "odium of reform" that became the issue in the
municipal organization of the greater city. Tammany made notes. The cry
meant that we were tired of too much virtue. Of what was done, how it
was done, and why, during those years, I shall have occasion to speak
further in these pages. Here I wish to measure the stretch we have come
since I wrote "How the Other Half Lives," thirteen years ago. Some of it
we came plodding, and some at full speed; some of it in the face of
every obstacle that could be thrown in our way, wresting victory from
defeat at every step; some of it with the enemy on the run. Take it all
together, it is a long way. Much of it will not have to be travelled
over again. The engine of municipal progress once started as it has been
in New York, may slip many a cog with Tammany as the engineer; it may
even be stopped for a season; but it can never be made to work backward.
Even Tammany knows that, and gropes desperately for a new hold, a
certificate of character. In the last election (1901) she laid loud
claim to having built many new schools, though she had done little more
than to carry out the plans of the previous reform administration,
where they could not be upset. As a matter of fact we had fallen behind
again, sadly. But even the claim was significant.
How long we strove for those schools, to no purpose! Our arguments, our
anger, the anxious pleading of philanthropists who saw the young on the
East Side going to ruin, the warning year after year of the
superintendent of schools that the compulsory education law was but an
empty mockery where it was most needed, the knocking of uncounted
thousands of children for whom there was no room,--uncounted in sober
fact; there was not even a way of finding out how many were
adrift,[13]--brought only the response that the tax rate must be kept
down. Kept down it was. "Waste" was successfully averted at the spigot;
at the bunghole it went on unchecked. In a swarming population like that
you must have either schools or jails, and the jails waxed fat with the
overflow. The East Side, that had been orderly, became a hotbed of child
crime. And when, in answer to the charge made by a legislative committee
(1895) that the father forced his child into the shop, on a perjured age
certificate, to labor when he ought to have been at play, that father,
bent and heavy-eyed with unceasing toil, flung back the charge with the
bitter reproach that we gave him no other choice, that it was either the
street or the shop for his boy, and that perjury for him was cheaper
than the ruin of the child, we were mute. What, indeed, was there to
say? The crime was ours, not his. That was seven years ago. Once since
then have we been where we could count the months to the time when every
child that knocked should find a seat in our schools; but Tammany came
back. Once again, now, we are catching up. Yesterday Mayor Low's reform
government voted six millions of dollars for new schools. The school
census law that was forgotten almost as soon as made (the census was to
be taken once in two years, but was taken only twice) is to be enforced
again so that we know where we stand. In that most crowded neighborhood
in all the world, where the superintendent lately pleaded in vain for
three new schools, half a dozen have been built, the finest in this or
any other land,--great, light, and airy structures, with playgrounds on
the roof; and all over the city the like are going up. The briefest of
our laws, every word of which is like the blow of a hammer driving the
nails home in the coffin of the bad old days, says that never one shall
be built without its playground.
[Footnote 13: The first school census was taken in 1895 by order of
the legislature. It showed that there were 50,069 children of school
age in New York City out of school and unemployed. The number had
been variously estimated from 5000 to 150,000.]
And not for the child's use only. The band shall play there yet and
neighbor meet neighbor in such social contact as the slum has never
known to its undoing. Even as I write this the band is tuning up and the
children dancing to its strains with shouts of joy. The president of the
board of education and members of the board lead in the revolt against
the old. Clergymen applaud the opening of the school buildings on Sunday
for concerts, lectures, and neighborhood meetings. Common sense is
having its day. The streets are cleaned.
The slum has even been washed. We tried that on Hester Street years ago,
in the age of cobblestone pavements, and the result fairly frightened
us. I remember the indignant reply of a well-known citizen, a man of
large business responsibility and experience in the handling of men, to
whom the office of street-cleaning commissioner had been offered, when I
asked him if he would accept. "I have lived," he said, "a blameless life
for forty years, and have a character in the community. I cannot
afford--no man with a reputation can afford--to hold that office; it
will surely wreck it." It made Colonel Waring's reputation. He took the
trucks from the streets. Tammany, in a brief interregnum of vigor under
Mayor Grant, had laid the axe to the unsightly telegraph poles and
begun to pave the streets with asphalt, but it left the trucks and the
ash barrels to Colonel Waring as hopeless. Trucks have votes; at least
their drivers have. Now that they are gone, the drivers would be the
last to bring them back; for they have children, too, and the rescued
streets gave them their first playground. Perilous, begrudged by
policeman and storekeeper, though it was, it was still a playground.
[Illustration: It costs a Dollar a Month to sleep in these Sheds.]
But one is coming in which the boy shall rule unchallenged. The Mulberry
Bend Park kept its promise. Before the sod was laid in it two more were
under way in the thickest of the tenement house crowding, and though the
landscape gardener has tried twice to steal them, he will not succeed.
Play piers and play schools are the order of the day. We shall yet
settle the "causes that operated sociologically" on the boy with a
lawn-mower and a sand heap. You have got your boy, and the heredity of
the next one, when you can order his setting.
Social halls for the older people's play are coming where the saloon has
had a monopoly of the cheer too long. The labor unions and the reformers
work together to put an end to sweating and child-labor. The gospel of
less law and more enforcement acquired standing while Theodore Roosevelt
sat in the governor's chair rehearsing to us Jefferson's forgotten
lesson that "the whole art and science of government consists in being
honest." With a back door to every ordinance that touched the lives of
the people, if indeed the whole thing was not the subject of open
ridicule or the vehicle of official blackmail, it seemed as if we had
provided a perfect municipal machinery for bringing the law into
contempt with the young, and so for wrecking citizenship by the shortest
cut.
Of free soup there is an end. It was never food for free men. The last
spoonful was ladled out by yellow journalism with the certificate of the
men who fought Roosevelt and reform in the police board that it was
good. It is not likely that it will ever plague us again. Our experience
has taught us a new reading of the old word that charity covers a
multitude of sins. It does. Uncovering some of them has kept us busy
since our conscience awoke, and there are more left. The worst of them
all, that awful parody on municipal charity, the police station lodging
room, is gone, after twenty years of persistent attack upon the foul
dens,--years during which they were arraigned, condemned, indicted by
every authority having jurisdiction, all to no purpose. The stale beer
dives went with them and with the Bend, and the grip of the tramp on our
throat has been loosened. We shall not easily throw it off altogether,
for the tramp has a vote, too, for which Tammany, with admirable
ingenuity, found a new use, when the ante-election inspection of lodging
houses made them less available for colonization purposes than they had
been. Perhaps I should say a new way of very old use. It was simplicity
itself. Instead of keeping tramps in hired lodgings for weeks at a daily
outlay, the new way was to send them all to the island on short
commitments during the canvass, and vote them from there _en bloc_ at
the city's expense.
[Illustration: Mulberry Street Police Station. Waiting for the Lodging
to open.]
Time and education must solve that, like so many other problems which
the slum has thrust upon us. They are the forces upon which, when we
have gone as far as our present supply of steam will carry us, we must
always fall back; and this we may do with confidence so long as we keep
stirring, if it is only marking time, when that is all that can be done.
It is in the retrospect that one sees how far we have come, after all,
and from that gathers courage for the rest of the way. Thirty-two years
have passed since I slept in a police station lodging house, a lonely
lad, and was robbed, beaten, and thrown out for protesting; and when the
vagrant cur that had joined its homelessness to mine, and had sat all
night at the door waiting for me to come out,--it had been clubbed away
the night before,--snarled and showed its teeth at the doorman, raging
and impotent I saw it beaten to death on the step. I little dreamed then
that the friendless beast, dead, should prove the undoing of the
monstrous wrong done by the maintenance of these evil holes to every
helpless man and woman who was without shelter in New York; but it did.
It was after an inspection of the lodging rooms, when I stood with
Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the police board, in the one where
I had slept that night, and told him of it, that he swore they should
go. And go they did, as did so many another abuse in those two years of
honest purpose and effort. I hated them. It may not have been a very
high motive to furnish power for municipal reform; but we had tried
every other way, and none of them worked. Arbitration is good, but there
are times when it becomes necessary to knock a man down and arbitrate
sitting on him, and this was such a time. It was what we started out to
do with the rear tenements, the worst of the slum barracks, and it
would have been better had we kept on that track. I have always
maintained that we made a false move when we stopped to discuss damages
with the landlord, or to hear his side of it at all. His share in it was
our grievance; it blocked the mortality records with its burden of human
woe. The damage was all ours, the profit all his. If there are damages
to collect, he should foot the bill, not we. Vested rights are to be
protected, but, as I have said, no man has a right to be protected in
killing his neighbor.
[Illustration: Night in Gotham Court.]
However, they are down, the worst of them. The community has asserted
its right to destroy tenements that destroy life, and for that cause. We
bought the slum off in the Mulberry Bend at its own figure. On the rear
tenements we set the price, and set it low. It was a long step. Bottle
Alley is gone, and Bandits' Roost. Bone Alley, Thieves' Alley, and
Kerosene Row,--they are all gone. Hell's Kitchen and Poverty Gap have
acquired standards of decency; Poverty Gap has risen even to the height
of neckties. The time is fresh in my recollection when a different kind
of necktie was its pride; when the boy-murderer--he was barely
nineteen--who wore it on the gallows took leave of the captain of
detectives with the cheerful invitation to "come over to the wake.
They'll have a hell of a time." And the event fully redeemed the
promise. The whole Gap turned out to do the dead bully honor. I have not
heard from the Gap, and hardly from Hell's Kitchen, in five years. The
last news from the Kitchen was when the thin wedge of a column of
negroes, in their up-town migration, tried to squeeze in, and provoked a
race war; but that in fairness should not be laid up against it. In
certain local aspects it might be accounted a sacred duty; as much so as
to get drunk and provoke a fight on the anniversary of the battle of the
Boyne. But on the whole the Kitchen has grown orderly. The gang rarely
beats a policeman nowadays, and it has not killed one in a long while.
So, one after another, the outworks of the slum have been taken. It has
been beaten in many battles; even to the double-decker tenement on the
twenty-five-foot lot have we put a stop. But its legacy is with us in
the habitations of two million souls. This is the sore spot, and as
against it all the rest seems often enough unavailing. Yet it cannot be.
It is true that the home, about which all that is to work for permanent
progress must cluster, is struggling against desperate odds in the
tenement, and that the struggle has been reflected in the morals of the
people, in the corruption of the young, to an alarming extent; but it
must be that the higher standards now set up on every hand, in the
cleaner streets, in the better schools, in the parks and the clubs, in
the settlements, and in the thousand and one agencies for good that
touch and help the lives of the poor at as many points, will tell at no
distant day, and react upon the homes and upon their builders. In fact,
we know it is so from our experience last fall, when the summons to
battle for the people's homes came from the young on the East Side. It
was their fight for the very standards I spoke of, their reply to the
appeal they made to them.
To any one who knew that East Side ten years ago, the difference
between that day and this in the appearance of the children whom he sees
there must be striking. Rags and dirt are now the exception rather than
the rule. Perhaps the statement is a trifle too strong as to the dirt;
but dirt is not harmful except when coupled with rags; it can be washed
off, and nowadays is washed off where such a thing would have been
considered affectation in the days that were. Soap and water have worked
a visible cure already that goes more than skin-deep. They are moral
agents of the first value in the slum. And the day is coming soon now,
when with real rapid transit and the transmission of power to suburban
workshops the reason for the outrageous crowding shall cease to exist.
It has been a long while, a whole century of city packing, closer and
more close; but it looks as if the tide were to turn at last. Meanwhile,
philanthropy is not sitting idle and waiting. It is building tenements
on the humane plan that lets in sunshine and air and hope. It is putting
up hotels deserving of the name for the army that but just now had no
other home than the cheap lodging houses which Inspector Byrnes fitly
called "nurseries of crime." These also are standards from which there
is no backing down, even if coming up to them is slow work: and they are
here to stay, for they pay. That is the test. Not charity, but
justice,--that is the gospel which they preach.
[Illustration: A Mulberry Bend Alley.]
Flushed with the success of many victories, we challenged the slum to a
fight to the finish in 1897, and bade it come on. It came on. On our
side fought the bravest and best. The man who marshalled the citizen
forces for their candidate had been foremost in building homes, in
erecting baths for the people, in directing the self-sacrificing labors
of the oldest and worthiest of the agencies for improving the condition
of the poor. With him battled men who had given lives of patient study
and effort to the cause of helping their fellow-men. Shoulder to
shoulder with them stood the thoughtful workingman from the East Side
tenement. The slum, too, marshalled its forces. Tammany produced its
notes. It pointed to the increased tax rate, showed what it had cost to
build schools and parks and to clean house, and called it criminal
recklessness. The issue was made sharp and clear. The war cry of the
slum was characteristic: "To hell with reform!" We all remember the
result. Politics interfered, and turned victory into defeat. We were
beaten. I shall never forget that election night. I walked home through
the Bowery in the midnight hour, and saw it gorging itself, like a
starved wolf, upon the promise of the morrow. Drunken men and women sat
in every doorway, howling ribald songs and curses. Hard faces I had not
seen for years showed themselves about the dives. The mob made merry
after its fashion. The old days were coming back. Reform was dead, and
decency with it.
[Illustration: "In the hallway I ran across two children, little tots,
who were inquiring their way to 'the commissioner.'"]
A year later, I passed that same way on the night of election.[14] The
scene was strangely changed. The street was unusually quiet for such a
time. Men stood in groups about the saloons, and talked in whispers,
with serious faces. The name of Roosevelt was heard on every hand. The
dives were running, but there was no shouting, and violence was
discouraged. When, on the following day, I met the proprietor of one of
the oldest concerns in the Bowery,--which, while doing a legitimate
business, caters necessarily to its crowds, and therefore sides with
them,--he told me with bitter reproach how he had been stricken in
pocket. A gambler had just been in to see him, who had come on from the
far West, in anticipation of a wide-open town, and had got all ready to
open a house in the Tenderloin. "He brought $40,000 to put in the
business, and he came to take it away to Baltimore. Just now the cashier
of ---- Bank told me that two other gentlemen--gamblers? yes, that's
what you call them--had drawn $130,000 which they would have invested
here, and had gone after him. Think of all that money gone to Baltimore!
That's what you've done!"
[Footnote 14: 1898, when Roosevelt was elected Governor after a
fierce fight with Tammany.]
I went over to police headquarters, thinking of the sad state of that
man, and in the hallway I ran across two children, little tots, who were
inquiring their way to "the commissioner." The older was a hunchback
girl, who led her younger brother (he could not have been over five or
six years old) by the hand. They explained their case to me. They came
from Allen Street. Some "bad ladies" had moved into the tenement, and
when complaint was made that sent the police there, the children's
father, who was a poor Jewish tailor, was blamed. The tenants took it
out of the boy by punching his nose till it bled. Whereupon the children
went straight to Mulberry Street to see "the commissioner" and get
justice. It was the first time in twenty years that I had known Allen
Street to come to police headquarters for justice and in the discovery
that the legacy of Roosevelt had reached even to the little children I
read the doom of the slum, despite its loud vauntings.
No, it was not true that reform was dead, with decency. We had our
innings four years later and proved it; of which more farther on. It was
not the slum that had won; it was we who had lost. We were not up to the
mark,--not yet. We may lose again, more than once, but even our losses
shall be our gains, if we learn from them. And we are doing that. New
York is a many times cleaner and better city to-day than it was twenty
or even ten years ago. Then I was able to grasp easily the whole plan
for wresting it from the neglect and indifference that had put us where
we were. It was chiefly, almost wholly, remedial in its scope. Now it is
preventive, constructive, and no ten men could gather all the threads
and hold them. We have made, are making, headway, and no Tammany has the
power to stop us. They know it, too, at the Hall, and were in such
frantic haste to fill their pockets this last time that they abandoned
their old ally, the tax rate, and the pretence of making bad government
cheap government. Tammany dug its arms into the treasury fairly up to
the elbows, raising taxes, assessments, and salaries all at once, and
collecting blackmail from everything in sight. Its charges for the
lesson it taught us came high; but we can afford to pay them. If to
learning it we add common sense, we shall discover the bearings of it
all without trouble. Yesterday I picked up a book,--a learned
disquisition on government,--and read on the title-page, "Affectionately
dedicated to all who despise politics." That was not common sense. To
win the battle with the slum, we must not begin by despising politics.
We have been doing that too long. The politics of the slum are apt to be
like the slum itself, dirty. Then they must be cleaned. It is what the
fight is about. Politics are the weapon. We must learn to use it so as
to cut straight and sure. That is common sense, and the golden rule as
applied to Tammany.
Some years ago, the United States government conducted an inquiry into
the slums of great cities. To its staff of experts was attached a
chemist, who gathered and isolated a lot of bacilli with fearsome Latin
names, in the tenements where he went. Among those he labelled were the
_Staphylococcus pyogenes albus_, the _Micrococcus fervidosus_, the
_Saccharomyces rosaceus_, and the _Bacillus buccalis fortuitis_. I made
a note of the names at the time, because of the dread with which they
inspired me. But I searched the collection in vain for the real
bacillus of the slum. It escaped science, to be, identified by human
sympathy and a conscience-stricken community with that of ordinary human
selfishness. The antitoxin has been found, and it is applied
successfully. Since justice has replaced charity on the prescription the
patient is improving. And the improvement is not confined to him; it is
general. Conscience is not a local issue in our day. A few years ago, a
United States senator sought reëlection on the platform that the
decalogue and the golden rule were glittering generalities that had no
place in politics, and lost. We have not quite reached the millennium
yet, but since then a man was governor in the Empire State, elected on
the pledge that he would rule by the ten commandments. These are facts
that mean much or little, according to the way one looks at them. The
significant thing is that they are facts, and that, in spite of slipping
and sliding, the world moves forward, not backward. The poor we shall
have always with us, but the slum we need not have. These two do not
rightfully belong together. Their present partnership is at once
poverty's worst hardship and our worst blunder.