CHAPTER VIII

KANSAS CITY AND ITS HEAVY LADEN

"_All religions are beautiful which make us good people._"--AUERBACH.

Just before the opening of the great harvests of Kansas, I reached Kansas City. Ten thousand men had congregated there in anticipation of work. The season was late and the harvest would not begin for a week or ten days. The men must be right at hand. While all of them could be classed as homeless, migratory wage-earners, they were not all penniless by any means. Only a small percentage of them were without actual means of subsistence, although there were probably a thousand of really penniless men in Kansas City when I reached there, men who must beg, or steal, to make existence possible.

By actual experience I soon found that immediate work was unobtainable. On the eve of my first night in the city I sat with a number of unfortunates on the projection of the foundation of the Salvation Army Hotel. Beside me was a stout young man of good manner and with a pleasant, open face. Turning to him in a casual way, I said, "Where can a fellow find work?"

"I don't know, unless you get a job down on the railroad," he replied. "I live in Indianapolis. I'm out here to work in the Kansas harvests, but I'm sorry I started so soon for I'm here about two weeks in advance of the work. It has been such a cold, late Spring."

Just then a police officer came down the street--it is remarkable how unpleasant a drink or two will make a policeman,--and rapped us up with the ingratiating command to "Move on!"

After the officer had passed, I again took a seat, but the boy remarked, "You had better not sit down again. He may return any moment, and he'll club you. He clubbed me yesterday and I haven't gotten over it yet."

So we got up and walked toward the Employment Office to investigate the work he had spoken of, and as we walked I noticed that my companion limped,--the result of the "clubbing" he had received from the policeman.

I could not help thinking of his needs and his situation. Seeking to draw him out, I asked as if I sought to have him treat, "Have you the price of a beer?"

"No," he replied, "if I had I would buy something to eat."

"Are you hungry?"

With a forced laugh he replied, "Yes, I spent my last dime last night for a meal. I held it in my hand so long it had grown rusty but I had to let it go at last."

Putting my hand in my pocket and pulling out a silver dollar, I laughingly remarked, "Well, I'm not broke, but I will be when this little lump of sugar is gone. I'll tell you, Jack, I'm a believer in combines, the kind of combine that a hundred cents make, and we'll go shares on this one."

I wish all Kansas City could have seen the expression of hope that lit up that starving lad's face. My sharing with him was something more substantial than the sermon or inexpensive advice usually handed to the starving man.

"Well," I said, "we're partners now, and we may as well be broke as to have only this, so let's go and eat it."

I led him away from the neighborhood of the City Hall and the City Jail, and the Board of Health and the Helping Hand Mission, and out of all that black and heartless region, to where we could get a clean meal without being poisoned by some cheap slum eating house. We talked as we went along, and I asked him where he had spent the previous night.

"Down in the yards in a freight car, and it rained nearly all night. The car leaked, and at about two or three o'clock in the morning it grew very cold. I suffered a lot. I was afraid of being arrested, for we're not allowed to sleep in the yards. But the watchman was decent and let me stay until daylight."

I had heard of the "Helping Hand" Mission Lodging House, known to those who are forced into it as the "House of Blazes," and I asked him why he had not gone there.

"There was no room," he replied.

Coming from the chop-house we went to an employment office, where we read upon the blackboard:

"Wanted--Fifty men in Oklahoma, $1.35 a day, free shipment."

We stepped inside for further information and found that board would be three dollars and a half a week. The boy studied for a moment and then said:

"Let's go."

"You go," I replied, "you are strong enough for the work, but I'm not. I may meet you down that way when the harvest opens."

"I think I will go," he replied. "It's hard work, ten hours a day, and if I lose two days out of the week by bad weather or sickness or a hundred other reasons, or buy a few things I've got to have, I will be in debt to the company at the end of the week. But it's better than to stay here and beg or starve. Some fellows can 'mooch' but that's one thing I've never got low enough to do, and I hope I never will. It's only a bare existence there, but as you say, the harvest will soon be open. I'll go."

Suiting the action to the word, he went in, obtained his transportation, and on coming out, shook my hand with both his own while he earnestly said good-bye and begged of me to be sure to meet him again if possible. He started off, and as he reached the first corner on his way to the depot, he stooped down and rubbed his knee as if in pain, but cheerfully, and with a final wave of farewell, he straightened up and disappeared.

But he could not disappear from my thoughts, this starving and shelterless boy, down and out, ill-used, yet ever ready at the first suggestion of hope to rush again into life's battle. And so I have related this incident of meeting him at length, although it was nothing in comparison with some of the terrible things I learned that afternoon. In fact, rarely in any city, have I seen so much human misery publicly exposed, and in so small a space, as I did there, around the block bounded by Main and Delaware, and Fourth and Fifth Streets.

I saw men driven like animals, eight at a time, into the bull pen of the city jail. When night fell and the streets were ablaze with light I was still walking about and observing. I felt in my pockets. The last cent of my dollar was gone. The chop-house had left me broke. So I began to inquire where the homeless and penniless could find shelter.

In the main, I found that conditions were the same as in Denver, except that Kansas City had the "Helping Hand" institution, to which I have referred,--an ostensibly "religious" institution, backed up in its operations by the co-operation of the city authorities.

Recalling what I thought I knew about this institution, it required some courage to trust myself to its tender mercies, but I determined to try it and learn about the actual conditions existing there.

I went first to their religious service, where I heard an exceptionally able address on the features of Christ's humanitarianism, and on the wonderful merit which there was in the application of the "square deal" principle between man and man, individually and collectively.

The house was filled with a large number of men whose broken appearance told only too plainly that the world was not dealing kindly and "squarely" with _them_. When the speaker had ended his address the men were asked to come forward and thereby signify that they had accepted the teachings of Christ as they were interpreted by the preacher. Not a man stepped forward.

That night, as a destitute workingman, at this same place I asked for a bed. I was told I could have one but was expected to do two hours' work for it.

"I am perfectly willing to do so," I replied.

The office was caged in by a heavy iron wire as though to be protected from thieves. The man at the desk said:

"Well, leave me your hat, and when you have done your work in the morning you will get it."

I humbly handed him my hat, and numbering it he threw it on a pile of many others. He was obviously holding my hat as a ransom, fearing to trust my honor.

I was given a bed check corresponding to the number of my hat, and told to go upstairs. A man sat at a desk on which an old, smoky kerosene lamp was burning. He showed me into a room in which _one hundred and sixteen men_ were sleeping. He did not turn up the light, even for a moment, so that I might see the kind of a bed I was getting into. He explained this by saying he feared to awaken the dead-tired, half-starved individuals on the bunks. As a result I was afraid to get into my bed at all, but laid down on the outside of the covering and stayed there all night. Not a word had been said about supper or a bath.

The odor of the hundred unwashed bodies was nauseating. There was the usual consumptive and asthmatic coughing, and the expectoration upon the floor; there were no cuspidors, and the air was stifling.

Not far from me I heard a young man moaning, and every few moments he would exclaim, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" I went to him and asked:

"What is the matter?"

"Oh, I am suffering from inflammatory rheumatism," he groaned.

I felt of his arms and hands, and found them burning hot and swollen hard from his elbows to his finger-tips.

"Can't I go out and get something for you?" I anxiously asked.

"I don't know what to tell you to get. I need a doctor."

I called an attendant. The sufferer asked if he could get a doctor from the city hall across the street.

"No, not until nine o'clock to-morrow morning," was the answer.

The man had two rags about twelve inches long and three inches wide. All night long, at intervals of every twenty or thirty minutes, he went to the water faucet, wet these rags, and bound them upon his arms.

I thought by contrast of New York City's wonderful Municipal Emergency Home, and of the kind medical treatment given at any hour of the night to its inmates.

On arising in the morning we went down-stairs and waited an hour for our breakfasts. We could see our hats piled up behind the iron bars.

When the long wait was over, we were given a breakfast consisting of dry bread, stewed prunes, and some liquid stuff called coffee, without milk or sugar. What a hungry man would eat at that table, if he had been able to stomach it, wouldn't amount to a value of over three cents a meal. While we ate we were supposed to refresh ourselves spiritually by reading the religious mottoes on the wall. "Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest," "Blessed are the Merciful," "He came to preach deliverance to the captives," and "When did you write Mother last?"

After that so-called breakfast I was sent to work in the long, poorly ventilated room, in which the hundred and sixteen men, unwashed, diseased, and foul, had slept the previous night. I worked two long hours making beds and cleaning floors, in payment of the three-cent meal I could not eat, and the bed I dared not get into. The Mission people valued our meal at ten cents, and our beds at ten cents, and we were paying for it at labor at ten cents an hour, while at every other place in the city employers and the municipality were paying twenty and twenty-five cents an hour for common labor.

The boys who had paid their ten cents for a bed sat out in the office, and stood a chance of getting a job at twenty or twenty-five cents an hour at the labor bureau, but the boys whose hats were held as a ransom had no such opportunity.

It was not a "square deal." And right there I saw one instance of its demoralizing tendency. In the room where I was at work a young boy was dressing himself. He looked up at a coat and hat which hung by the door, and asked me, with an innocent look:

"Whose hat is that?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think it's a tramp's?"

"I don't know, but I wouldn't take it if I were you."

After a moment's thought he said:

"I've got a job this morning if I can get there, but I can't stay here for two hours and get it."

In a few minutes I noticed that the boy and hat were both gone. I suppose he thought it a fair exchange since he had been compelled to leave his own in the office, and who will say it was not?

The floors were filthy, the beds rotten. The blankets were stiff and the sheets ragged; they were both contaminated with all the filth of diseased and unwashed men. I don't believe the blankets had been changed for years or the sheets for weeks.

It seemed to be the custom of the superintendent of this place to keep up a show of cleanliness by making the men and boys do the scrubbing for nothing. When a bed is to be looked at by a "charitably inclined" visitor, clean pillow slips and sheets are put on, but they are for exhibition purposes only. As for the beds that are actually in use, they are well worth the immediate attention of the Kansas City health authorities.

Only the real inmates, and not the casual visitors, can know the "Helping Hand" for what it is in practice. Morally, it is a breeder of crime, and not an aid in any way to the recovery of self-respect. The only commendable feature about it is the Labor Bureau run in connection,--an adjunct that every Municipal Emergency Home should have.

Such a Bureau is proof that the cry of men not wanting to work is a false cry. I wish those who pay heed to it could have seen the object lesson that morning when those hundreds of middle aged men, young men and boys, almost tumbled over one another in their eagerness to reach the window and get the jobs of carpet-sweeping, dish-washing, store-clerking, stenography, and other kinds of work that were being given out.

Can such a rich city as Kansas City afford with impunity to neglect its duty to its "hewers of wood and drawers of water?"