Part 1

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THE PERIL AND THE PRESERVATION OF THE HOME

Being the William L. Bull Lectures for the Year 1903

by

JACOB A. RIIS

Author of “The Making of an American,” “The Battle with the Slum,” etc.

Philadelphia George W. Jacobs & Co. Publishers

Copyright, 1903, by George W. Jacobs & Company, Published May, 1903

The Letter Establishing the Lectureship

For many years, it has been my earnest desire to found a Lectureship on Christian Sociology, meaning thereby the application of Christian principles to the social, industrial, and economic problems of the time, in my alma mater, the Philadelphia Divinity School. My object in founding this Lectureship is to secure the free, frank, and full consideration of these subjects with special reference to the Christian aspects of the questions involved, which have heretofore, in my opinion, been too much neglected in such discussion. It would seem that the time is now ripe and the moment an auspicious one for the establishment of this Lectureship, at least tentatively.

I therefore make the following offer to continue for at least a period of three years, with the hope that these lectures may excite such an interest, particularly among the undergraduates of the Divinity School, that I shall be justified, with the approval of the authorities of the Divinity School, in placing the Lectureship on a more permanent foundation.

I herewith pledge myself to contribute the sum of six hundred dollars annually, for a period of three years, to the payment of a lecturer on Christian Sociology, whose duty it shall be to deliver a course of not less than four lectures to the students of the Divinity School, either at the school or elsewhere, as may be deemed most advisable, on the application of Christian principles to the social, industrial, and economic problems and needs of the times; the said lecturer to be appointed annually by a committee of five members: the Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania; the Dean of the Divinity School; a member of the Board of Overseers; and two of the Associate Alumni, one of whom shall be chosen by the Alumni Association, and the other to be myself.

Furthermore, if it shall be deemed desirable that the lectures shall be published, I pledge myself to the additional payment of from one to two hundred dollars for such purpose.

To secure the full, frank, and free consideration of the questions involved, it is my desire that the opportunity shall be given from time to time to the representatives of each school of economic thought to express their views in these lectures.

The only restriction I wish placed on the lecturer is that he shall be a believer in the moral teachings and principles of the Christian religion as the true solvent of our social, industrial, and economic problems. Of course, it is my intention that a new lecturer shall be appointed by the committee each year, who shall deliver the course of lectures for the ensuing year.

WILLIAM L. BULL.

All Saints’ Cathedral,

Spokane, Washington,

January 1, 1901.

The Committee:

O. W. WHITAKER, Bishop of the Diocese of Pennsylvania. WILLIAM M. GROTON, Dean of the Philadelphia Divinity School. J. DEWOLF PERRY, LYMAN P. POWELL, WILLIAM L. BULL.

Contents

I. OUR SINS IN THE PAST 11

II. OUR FIGHT FOR THE HOME 65

III. OUR PLIGHT IN THE PRESENT 117

IV. OUR GRIP ON THE TO-MORROW 155

List of Illustrations

LECTURE II

At the Old Five Points 90

The “Old Church Tenements” 92

Gotham Court 94

Midnight in Gotham Court 94

The Alderman’s Tenements 96

Little Susie 98

Tenement Where a Home was Murdered 100

A “Drunken” Flat 102

In a Baxter Street Yard 104

Shanty Dwellings in a Tenement Yard 104

Washing in an Italian Flat; the Tea 106 Kettle Used as a Wash Boiler

Pietro and his Father 108

Sister Irene and her Little Ones 110

The Open Trench in the Potter’s Field 112

“The Way Out”—Bedtime in the Five Points 114 House of Industry Nursery

LECTURE III

A Typical Tenement House Block 126

The Only Bathtub in the Block 128

The Riverside Tenements 130

Lodgers at “Five Cents a Spot” 132

They “Lived Nowhere” 136

Joining “the Club” 138

Hell on Earth 140

The City and Suburban Homes Company’s 142 Model Tenements; The Alfred Corning Clark Block

The “To-morrow” 144

It is Five Years Since the Bend Became a 146 Park

In the Public School of To-day 150

Saluting the Flag 152

I

OUR SINS IN THE PAST

I

OUR SINS IN THE PAST

AT the very outset of my discussion of the peril and the preservation of the American home, I am confronted with an apparent contradiction that would seem to deny my premises, my contention that upon the preservation of the home depends the vitality of our Republic; that, if the home were gone, we should be fighting against overwhelming odds in the battle to maintain it and would as surely lose. But I think you will find that the contradiction is only apparent. I refer to the fact—let me state it right here and have the enemy all in front, I like it that way—that, whereas in my own great city I attribute to our unhappy housing conditions (those conditions which have given to New York the bad name of “the homeless city,”) most of the troubles that have made our municipal government a by-word in the past and raised doubts in the minds of some as to the fitness of our people, of any people, to govern themselves rightly; yet in this city of yours to which I have come to make the arraignment, the one among all our great communities that has the distinction of having preserved the home ideal most nearly, you are, as far as any one can make out, no better off than we. It has sometimes seemed that you were even worse off. You have your fight, as we have ours. But do not let it discourage you if, for the time being, you are outnumbered. The point is that there are more to help every time. Looking back now on the many battles in my city, I can see that every defeat we suffered was really a victory; it showed us how to do better next time. So is defeat always gain in the cause of right, if we would only see it. We grow to the stature of men under it. Is it not, when it comes to that, just a question whether you believe firmly enough in your own cause? Faith can move mountains of indifference, even here in Pennsylvania.

I said it seemed a contradiction, and yet only seemed so. It is because I am sure your sufferings have been _in spite_ of your homes, not because of any _lack_ of them. Standing the other day on a mountain-side in New Hampshire, with a matchless view stretching out before me, I said to my friend, the good rector and faithful pastor of the parish: “Here everybody must surely be good. How can they help it?”

He looked at me sadly and said, pointing to the scattered farms lying so peacefully in the landscape: “If you could go with me into those homes and see the things I see in too many of them you would quit your Mulberry Bend and transfer your battle with the slum to our hillsides.”

I think, if you will permit me to say it, that your great and splendid city has been I am almost tempted to say pauperized in its citizenship by great wealth and perilous prosperity; by a pampered prosperity that is not good for anybody in the long run. However, that is politics, which I shall not discuss. The President of the United States says that my opinion in that quarter is no good at all, and you are free to adopt his view. I will endorse his views—most of them—anywhere. I seek in mine an explanation of the civic apathy that has betrayed your town, as it has mine, into the grasp of a boss and of boss politics. It may be that I am mistaken. It may be that I put too much of the blame on the piggeries. I used to say that a man cannot be expected to live like a pig and vote like a man, and I had reference to the tenements, some of which surely deserve to be called by no other name. I was very sure of my ground until the industrial troubles of the last summer seemed to cut it partly from under me; for then I had people who were well-to-do, educated, and who ought to know better, right in my own town, come and upbraid me for always fighting the battle with the slum. “What is the use?” they said; “they won’t be content.” Since that time I have thought that perhaps there may be pigs in parlors, too. No, thank God, they will _not_ be content. Let me say right here, so that we may understand one another, that the whole of my manhood’s life has been given and what remains of it will be given, please God, to fighting the things, _all of them_, that go to debase and degrade manhood and womanhood; so I understand a Christian’s duty.

In that I know I have not erred. If I have laid too much stress on the piggeries, it but proves that the peril of the home is not the only one that besets our Republic, and that we need be up and doing. But still I believe that the home is the mainstay; that it rather proves the home to be beset with perils not in the cities only. All the more am I convinced that around it only can the fight be waged successfully; and I have full faith that just because you have preserved the home better than have we, when the day of waking comes, you will throw off the nightmare that has plagued your dreams with such a jolt as will warn it off for good and all and tempt it to return no more. Of that I am sure. God speed you in the fight!

I shall not in this place have to enter into a protracted argument to prove that the home is the pivot of all and why it is so. We _know_ that it is so, that it has been so in all ages; that the home-loving peoples have been the strong peoples in all time, those that have left a lasting impression on the world. Stable government is but the protection the law throws around the home, and the law itself is the outgrowth of the effort to preserve it. The Romans, whose heirs we are in most matters pertaining to the larger community life, and whose law our courts are expounding yet, set their altars and their firesides together,—_pro aris et pro foces_; and their holiest oaths were by their household gods. I have always thought that in that lay the secret of their strength, and that in the separation of the fireside and the altar lies the great peril of our day. When for the fireside we got a hole in the floor and a hot air register, we lost not only the lodestone that drew the scattered members of the family to a common focus, but with it went too often the old and holy sense of home: “I and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Rome perished when most of her people became propertyless—homeless. Whenever I think of it there comes to my mind a significant passage in the testimony of the secretary of the Prison Association in my city before a legislative committee appointed to investigate the draft riots of 1863. The mob, he said, came, as did eighty per cent. of the crime in the metropolis, from the element in the population “whose homes had ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent and desirable to afford what are regarded as ordinary wholesome influences of home and family.” The household god of the slum tenement is too apt to be the boss with his corruption of the neighbor ideal into utter selfishness. On that road lies destruction.

In France, many years ago, a voice was raised in warning: “Kill the home and you destroy family, manhood, patriotism.” The warning was vain, and the home-loving Germans won easily over the people in whose language there is not even a word to describe What we express in the word “home.”

How much of the strength of the old New England home went into the making of our Republic you know as well as I. It is that thought which makes me pause when I remember that in their day one in twenty-five of the people lived in cities, whereas now the showing is one in three, with all of the influences of the city seeming to push against the chief prop of the State, the home. Is it not the chief prop? Imagine a nation of homeless men, a nation deserving the epithet, “the homeless people”; what would it have to preserve, what to fight for? And however given to peace we all may be, in the last analysis the test of a nation’s fitness to live is that it will fight for its life. No! wipe out the home and the whole structure totters and falls. Even if it hang together yet a while, it is not worth preserving, not worth fighting for.

If we had any doubt about it, we have had some information upon the subject given us in recent years, in my state and in yours. It was here in your city that the Children’s Aid Society demonstrated, in a way that did us all good through and through, that the old plan of bringing up children in squads, which had been tried until it sickened them and us, was bad, and that placing them out in families made all the difference in the world. We knew it before, but we needed to be told it in just that way. We had the experience over again in New York; they had it in Boston; they have had it everywhere. But very lately we have had a piece of testimony to that effect that ought to settle the matter. It was an old scandal in our city that practically all the babies in the Foundling Hospital died there; none lived to grow up. I say scandal, not in the sense that any one was to blame. They tried hard enough. Men are not monsters to see a defenseless baby die without trying to help it. In the worst Tammany days, we had herds of Jersey cows on Randall’s Island, kept expressly for those waifs. Everything was done that pity and experience could suggest, but nothing availed. The babies died, and there was no help for it. Until four years ago, when a joint committee of the State Charities’ Aid Association and the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, took them off the hands of the city authorities and put them in homes. The first year after that the mortality among them fell to a little over _fifty_ per cent., the second year it was just beyond _thirty_ per cent. and the fourth, which was last year, it had fallen to _ten and seven-tenths_ per cent., a figure quite below the mortality among all the children under two years of age in the whole city. And the experience in Brooklyn was just the same.

What did it mean? It meant this, and nothing less, that these children had come at last to their rights; that every baby is entitled to one pair of mother’s arms around its neck; that its God-given right is a home,—a _home_; and that, when man robs it of that right, it will not stay. And small blame to it! It shows that even foundling babies have good sense. They stayed, these, in such numbers—their death rate fell below the ordinary death rate of all the children of their age—because they were _picked_ homes they were put into. It meant, friends, that God puts a little child in a home because He wants it to grow up with that as its most precious heritage, its spark of heaven that ever beckons it to its true home beyond. It means that you cannot herd human beings in battalions and expect them to develop the qualities of individuality, of character, that make citizenship upon which to build the Republic that shall be the hope of to-morrow as well as the shelter of to-day. We tried that with the “communities” that wiped out the family and substituted the barrack for the home. But happily they wiped out themselves. No, brethren, upon the home rests our moral character; our civic and political liberties are grounded there; virtue, manhood, citizenship grow there. We forget it to our peril. For American citizenship in the long run, will be, _must be_, what the American home is.

And this home, how does it look to me? The ideal, always in my mind, is that of a man with his feet upon the soil and his children growing up there. So, it seems to me, we should have responsible citizenship by the surest road. But that ideal is unattainable in our cities. We must find another there. And I ask, as the minimum standard, less than which I will not take, isolation enough in the teeming crowds to secure the privacy without which individuality cannot grow and character is fearfully handicapped. I ask light and air, at least as plentiful and as good as they have it in the great cattle barns I have seen in my own old home, where their cows are their most precious possession, because through them the people make their living. I ask an environment in which a man may think himself a respectable citizen, an environment that has no suggestion of the pigsty. You have no business to try to persuade an American citizen that that is his place. It is treason against the republic. I ask, above all, the mother who makes the home; I want the mother. Without her, home is but an empty name.

What, then, of the barrack that destroys privacy, whose crowds make life loathsome, whose restricted and narrow quarters compel the use of the family room only for eating and sleeping; not the latter even when the summer heats come and the people, to live, must sleep on the roof or out on the fire-escape? What of those things which send the children to the street, there to grow such character as they can; that smother in them even the instinct for the open, for the fields and the woods that is like the last open window for the soul; rob them of those resources of mind and heart that make them respond quickly to the robin’s and the daisy’s appeal and make them at home in God’s nature; that give them the gutter for a playground, and the saloon, as they grow, for their natural meeting-place,—their only one, indeed; for it is only just beginning to dawn upon us that in neglecting that function of the public school, we have been guilty of a fearful and wicked waste.

What of these; and what of the need—the need of making the rent—that sends the mother to the factory, leaving perhaps the little ones behind, locked in as the only alternative of the street? Locked in and left to the chance, the awful chance, of a fire in that tenement with the children helpless to get out and no one knowing of their plight. I say it with a shudder, for I have had to record as a reporter too many—oh! God! too many by far—of these things which wring the heart of a man. What of the grinding need that sends the mother to the shop and so knocks the big and the strong prop from under the home?

Or, perhaps, the children go along. Then there is no home; for I do not call the cheerless room to which they return for their evening meal, tired and worn and spiritless, to sleep but not to play—I do not call that home.

We know the curse of child labor. We know it to our sorrow and loss. Experience has taught us that it is loss, all loss, ever tending downward; that, however we figure it, the result is always the same: where men alone work, they earn the support of the family; where men and women work, they together earn the support, with nothing to spare; and where men, women and children work, they do that and no more; so that nothing is gained and everything is lost. Child-life and citizenship are lost; for the children of to-day are the men of to-morrow. We know it to our cost, and you have the lesson before you, though you do not seem to have learned it. When you do, you will find the cost appalling.

What else was the meaning of the testimony given before the Coal Strike Commission, that moved its members to tears and anger by turns? And why in the twelfth census has Pennsylvania fallen from the sixteenth to the twentieth place on the list of states that send their children to school? It is true that there has been no absolute retrogression, for while in 1890 there were over two per cent. of your children between the ages of ten and fourteen years who could neither read nor write, in 1900 the illiterates numbered barely over one in a hundred. But that one is one too many, and why is he there? Because, according to the showing of the factory inspectors—and the factory inspectors are always optimists—there were thirty-five thousand of your children at work, who should have been in school, not counting the breaker-boys in your mines. As to them, the coal operators owned up to thirty thousand being in the mines who never should have been there.

So we are not alone in our sins against childhood. New York is first among the great industrial states, Pennsylvania is second, and this is the showing we make as toward the citizenship of to-morrow: New York fourteenth, Pennsylvania twentieth. Even South Dakota and Wyoming are ahead of Pennsylvania, and Utah a long way ahead of New York. Industrial States! The industrial supremacy that is bought at the expense of childhood’s rights tends directly to man’s enslavement. It is too dearly bought. Sins against childhood are sins against the home, are cheating the world of its to-morrow. And you salve your consciences in vain with the thought that those illiterate ones are the children of foreigners. _You_ let them in, to be your Americans of the day that is coming;—you sent for them, your critics say, to underbid the labor that sought a higher wage because they wanted American homes,—and it is your business to see to it that they, or their children, at all events, fit into the state of which you have made them part. Or woe to that state!

You need not marvel that in the commonwealth that forgets its duty to the home even to that extent, you have a heavy contract on your hands to redeem its greatest city. It is the same conscience that is asleep there. It is all of a piece. Every once in awhile I hear some one growl against foreign missions because the money and the strength put into them are needed at home. I did it myself when I did not know better, God forgive me. I know better now; and I will tell you how I found out. I became interested in a strong religious awakening in my own old city of Copenhagen, and I set about investigating it. It was then that I learned what others have learned before me, and what was the fact there, that for every dollar you give away to convert the heathen abroad, God gives you ten dollars’ worth of purpose to deal with your heathen at home. So, as you set about crushing out selfishness, greed and evil in the state, you step on the snake’s head at home,—in your own city.