Part 4

Hard to understand that men fell away from the church? They must have thought that the Lord had forgotten them; but it was only the men who professed His name that had forgotten. _He_ remembered. The day will come, I hope,—I think it is on the way now,—when we shall be permitted to forget the greatest wrong of all; that it was a church corporation, the strongest and wealthiest, and alas! our own, that, for its temporal advantage and to save a paltry few hundred dollars, took up the cudgel for the enemy we were battling with and all but succeeded in upsetting the whole structure of tenement-house law we had built up with such weary toil in our effort to help the man to a level where he might own himself a man. You know the story of that and how bitterly it has rankled these many years. The church corporation was a tenement-house owner, one of the largest, if not, indeed the largest in the city, and its buildings were old and bad. It suited its purposes to let them be bad, because they were down-town where the land was rapidly getting valuable for warehouse purposes, and the tenements were all to be torn down by and by. And so it was that it achieved the reputation of being the worst of landlords, hardly a name to attract the people to its pews. We had got to the point in our fight where we had made good the claim of the tenant to at least a full supply of water in his house, though light and air were yet denied him by the builder, when that church corporation chose to contest the law ordering it to supply water in its houses, and won, for the time being, on the plea that the law was arbitrary and autocratic. They are all autocratic, the laws that are made for the protection of the poor man; they have to be while the purpose to hinder rather than help lives in his brother. We trembled on the edge of a general collapse of all our remedial laws, until the court of last resort decided that any such claim was contrary to public policy and therefore inadmissible.

It was not long after that, that a distinguished body of churchmen in my city invited me to speak to them of slum evils. And I showed them pictures of the little children from the gutter, until at last some unthinking brother made the comment: “Oh, well, they wouldn’t wash, if you gave them the chance.” Perhaps you can imagine the result. I would not have missed that opportunity for a good deal.

I am not telling you these things to rake up forgotten sins; I am trying to show you whence came the deadly apathy that was to blame for our plight. Our conscience was asleep and the Church that should have kept it awake slept, too. We cannot afford to forget it yet, for that conscience of ours is none too robust, or else it is singularly drowsy in spells. I am thinking of the time, only a little while ago, when Theodore Roosevelt was Police Commissioner in New York, and of his astonished look when churchmen, citizens from whom he should have expected support, and did expect it, for his appeal was to them direct, came to him daily to plead for “discretion” in the enforcement of the laws he was sworn to carry out. Not all of them did this—he had many strong backers among the clergy and lay-brethren—but too many. You should have been with me in those days and you would have understood what that fight was. The saloon was the enemy, and, in a single week during that struggle, it wrecked eight homes by tragedies, with which I, as a police reporter, was called to deal. I am not speaking now of the numberless tragedies that drag their slow lengths through the years, but of those that reached the acute stage in my sight that week. Four desperate wives were driven to suicide and two were murdered by drunken husbands. One aged woman was beaten to death by her beastly son when she refused him money to continue his debauch. And a policeman was killed in the street by drunken marauders. That was the showing; and it was for discretion in dealing with that enemy those people strove, calling the President of the Police Board “hasty.” They were “men of the highest character, but they failed to appreciate the responsibility” which that character imposed upon them.

They called Roosevelt hasty. It was time that some one got up some speed in New York. More than a hundred years ago (to be exact, in 1797) the legislature of New York prohibited soap factories on Manhattan Island, south of Grand Street, in the interest of the public good. Within seven weeks after the order was issued, the same legislature amended its act, giving the Health Board discretion in the premises; and the biggest soap factory in the land is below Grand Street to-day. The power of soap is great.

Do you know that article of discretion in Philadelphia? In my town, it has built up tenement blocks almost solid, ninety-three per cent. covered with brick and mortar; it has penned tenants in burning tenements with stairs of wood that should have been fireproof; it has filled the pockets of the builder and wrung the heart of the tenant, until, in despair, he refused to believe in either God or man. That is what “discretion” has come to with us. Oh! for red blood in the veins of Christians, for a muscular faith that, rather than stand by and see such things done, will fight till—till some one dies. That is the kind of faith that moves the world, mountains and all, and fills the churches! Not sermons, but service! So we win victories that tell.

Now do you wonder that the common people, so deserted by their best friend, took the first proffered hand held out to help? To this multitude, toiling for their daily bread until it fills the landscape to the exclusion of all else, until time and chance are lost to them to lift up their heads and get the wider view—to them, disheartened and sore, comes the boss with his self-seeking and says: “I am your friend.” And he proves it: he gets Pat a job, gets Jim on the force, looks after John who broke his leg and gets him into the hospital that was full; attends to Dan when he gets into trouble with the police. What more natural than that they should give him their votes and their support? The more powerful he, the better able to help. Anyway, is he not their friend? Observe, that it all proceeds on the neighborly principle, debased to suit the slum; but it is still the idea of the neighbor: binding up the wounds, taking the man who has fallen among thieves to the inn and leaving money to have him tended. They knew the plan better than did we, they whom we deserted, churchmen and Christians though we were.

What if the boss robs the city! The poor man, going home to his tenement, overhears the well-dressed citizen comment upon it with qualified displeasure: “Say what you will, he may be a great rascal, but he gets there, you’ll own. And he’s got the dough.” It is every one for himself in his sight. Is it hard to understand that he, too, falls in with the scheme?

And now, that I have put the blame where it belongs, let us turn and look at the other side of it, at the day of awakening. It was a long day, for our sleep had been deep, and it was not easy to stay awake long at a time for a considerable period after we had tumbled out. The Five Points first aroused us. The slum there had got to the point where it was no longer to be borne. Dickens’s pen had pricked us, and the warnings of Charles Loring Brace and his contemporaries began to make us listen. There followed the period of good intentions, but little sense, that gave us Gotham Court and the Big Flat. They were built as model tenements—heaven save the mark! by men who meant well and did badly. They are the kind to keep your eye on. The Big Flat became a thieves’ runway, because, unconsciously, the builders had furnished the chance by making it reach through the block, opening upon both streets, in a neighborhood where such a convenience to a man fleeing from the police was a regular windfall. Before its final destruction, it achieved the reputation of being the worst tenement in New York. Gotham Court was a close second. In some other important respects that concerned the home life of the people, it was easily first. A sanitary official counted 146 cases of sickness among its thousand tenants in 1862, among them all kinds of infectious disease, from measles to smallpox. It harbored one of the most notorious gangs that ever made lower New York unsafe. Time after time, before it was torn down, less than half a dozen years ago, it was posted as hopeless and fit for nothing else. Yet it was built as a model tenement by a Quaker of good intentions. He certainly did his part in the paving of that infernal door-yard that is said to be laid with good intentions not backed by good sense or hard work.

This Quaker had a brother who also built houses for the poor, and, it is recorded, meant well, too; but the milk of human kindness was soured in him when his neighbor, the alderman, knocked him down in a quarrel over the dividing line between their lots. It was against the Quaker’s principles to fight, but he found a way of paying off his enemy that is a whole volume of commentaries on graceless human nature: he built a tenement upon his own lot right on the line and with a big dead wall so close to his neighbor’s windows that his tenants could get neither sun nor air. They lived in darkness ever after. The fact that, for want of access, his house was useless and stood idle for years, did not stay his revenge. That old Quaker was a hater from way back. His “wall of wrath,” as I used to call it, killed more innocent babes and cursed more lives than any other work of man I ever heard of. One wonders what that man’s dreams were at night. The mere thought of it used to give me the shivers, and I never slept so sweetly as the night when I had seen that wall laid low by wreckers whom I had set on.

Yet it did not die in its sins. I like to think of that. Before the end came to Gotham Court, we had grown a real conscience. The canker that had crept in and was eating out the home and the heart of the people was arraigned in the churches, as it should have been a long while before—not in this church or in that church, but in _the churches_. Christian men took hold of the Court and did the most and the best with it that could be done,—which makes me think that only yesterday I had a letter from the son of one of those two brothers, young Bayard Cutting, pleading for support for the work of Bishop Brent out in the Philippines; and it was as I would have expected. You see, as I said, it is all one thing. These men are among the strongest of the backers of the movement to provide homes for the poor of New York, and have been for years; and for that very reason they are the natural supporters of such a work as that which the good Bishop is doing on that far foreign shore.

But, as I said, they did the best with the Court that could be done. The best was bad, and therefore it had to go. Yet, in comparison with what it had been, life even in Double Alley had become comparatively decent before the wreckers boarded up the entrance to it. There were homes in that alley where the word had been as a mockery before. I knew of some; I will tell you the story of Susie Rocco and her home. And we had learned something there; we had added to good intentions the knowledge of the facts, which is the first and most important ingredient in good sense when you come to deal with things. I am going now to show you some of the pictures I promised you, and you shall have more hereafter. Think not that any of them are irrelevant because they are of things that were. Those things are but shadows of what may come again, if we lose our grip and once more let our conscience fall asleep, believing we have done so much that all is well. To avoid that, keep ever a firm grasp of the facts. You will fight in vain for the people’s homes till you know what afflicts them. The glory of our present-day Christianity is that at last it plants itself squarely on the facts—seeks them out first and then applies the remedy. Never fear them. If they clash in any way with scholastic theory or even theology, make sure that they _are_ the facts, then seek the fault in your theory. And always remember that human souls live in bodies. If you want to reach the soul, you must reckon with the man in the body; or your preaching will be vain.

Here, now, is one of the Five Points in the day of its worst disgrace (see illustration facing page 90), but the Point itself was by no means the worst of that neighborhood. These adjoining buildings, I suppose you would call them shanties, and I do not know that I should object to the term, give a general idea of the character of that vicious slum. They were houses surviving from a much earlier day, built for the occupation of one family, and no doubt in that day there were homes in them as good as might be found anywhere. It was when they came to contain from ten to twenty families each that the slum moved in. With four families keeping house in one room—that was the record made by a missionary who had that district in charge—short work was made of the home. I used to laugh at that missionary’s story of how, when he asked in hopeless bewilderment how they managed to get along, one of the tenants said, “Well enough until one of the other three took a boarder, then trouble began.”

But there was little enough to laugh at; less still, when the big buildings sprang up that you see behind the shanties. They are the double-deckers of to-day. They were supposed to be a “way out,” for at least they had room for the teeming populations; but it turned out the other way. They gave the home the hardest blow of all, and to-day they are the curse that cleaves to us for our sins of the past, and with which we will have to struggle while we live. I have said a good deal so far, and shall have more to say before I am done, about murder. It is not a nice word, but right here is an instance of what I mean. The particular houses that show in the picture were built by one Buddensiek, whose name we all came to know in the after years. I heard of it first when I went with the health inspector to investigate a complaint of foul stenches that was made by the tenants in those houses. The explanation proved simple. The builder had merely run the soil-pipe three feet or so into the ground without connecting it with the sewer. That time he escaped indictment. It is somehow not so easy to bring a man to book who poisons his tenants with bad plumbing as the one who sticks a knife into his neighbor. Some years after when, grown bold, he neglected to put lime in his mortar and his tenements fell down and killed his workmen before the tenants got into them, the jail claimed him at last on a charge of manslaughter.

And now here are the “old church tenements” I spoke of (see illustration facing page 92); upon the records of the Health Department “among the largest contributors to the hospitals” in the city. The cellar, where the tenants paid two and three dollars a month,—that was before the day when the whole population of “cave-dwellers,” more than five thousand in number, was dragged out upon the street by the police and not allowed to go back—was the old vault in which the sexton stored corpses in the days when the building was a church. Do you wonder, when you come to think of it, that the church lost its grip upon the people of that day, and that some of the feeling of that still survives? Do you wonder that these people were not attracted by a scheme of salvation that meant damnation in this life, so far as they could see? I do not. Bear in mind the old church for a little while; I shall have more to tell you of that. That, too, was atoned for, thank God!

This is Gotham Court (see illustration facing page 94), that stood, until three or four years ago, almost on the identical spot where George Washington lived when he was the first President of this Republic. His house was directly across the street, and in his day it was of course as fine a neighborhood as there was in the city. Within sixty years after his death, the slum had moved in. That tells the story of the mighty strides New York took towards metropolitan greatness, and of the perils that hedged in our path in the race for sudden wealth. For that was the time when we forgot. When I made a census of the Court some years before it was demolished, I found one hundred and forty-two families there. It happened that just half of them were Italians and the other half the original Irish, except that there were two German families there. Perhaps you can imagine the kind of time those two German families were having. The process of displacing the Hibernian element with the Italian is not altogether a peaceful one, as the constant presence of the policemen in the alley bore witness. It was an Irishman, of course, who told me, when I asked him why the policeman was there, that it was “all on account of them two Dutch families in the alley; they make so much trouble that no one can stand it.” Nobody else would have thought of it. I shall not try to describe to you in detail what life meant in that place, for it is gone now and I am glad. One Christmas when I was Santa Claus in the alley for the King’s Daughters, two hundred little girls came out of it and claimed dolls from me. They might have told you. Do you see the “wall of wrath” of which I spoke? Wait till I will give you a better view of it. There, now, are the Alderman’s tenements (see illustration facing page 96) that were cursed by it, as were his tenants all the days of their lives. But the wall, too, is gone. It went one Christmas, and in its fall it was to me as if I heard again the chorus of angels’ voices singing, “Peace on earth, good-will towards men.” I had never heard any angels’ voices in that alley before.

Here is one of the little girls who got my dolls (see illustration facing page 98), little Susie Rocco, whose story I promised to tell you. Susie was as good a girl as you can find in Philadelphia, search where you may. Perhaps she was not very well instructed in the higher ethics of things. It may be that Mrs. Carrie Nation would not have approved of her, because the work she did and by which she helped her mother run the household was pasting covers on pocket-flasks, whiskey flasks, which, I suppose, come under the ban entirely. Susie did not, I know. She was not concerned about that; she was concerned about helping her mother, and, though I am no champion of the whiskey flask, I stand with Susie. Her father was a loafer and when he ran away at last and the mother fell ill and Susie’s work gave out, the evil days came that are never far away in a slum alley. Everything went to the pawnshop, last of all the mother’s wedding ring. I should have sent that first, but she was a woman; I am a man. She had to go to the hospital then; the doctor said so. It was the only place where she could be properly cared for.

Susie wept. She was afraid of the hospital. You know it, all of you who have had any dealings with the poor, that one of their very real hardships is that, when most they need that friend, they are afraid of him. Susie could not bear the thought. She cast about in the house for something that was yet of value enough to take to the pawnshop, so that she might stay the evil day, and she found my doll. It was not a nice doll by that time; it was very much in need of the hospital itself. But to Susie it was precious beyond compare, for was it not her doll baby? She did it up in a newspaper and carried it to the pawnshop with tears, for she was bringing the greatest sacrifice of all. And that bad man, when he unrolled the bundle and saw what it held, smashed the doll angrily against the stove and put little Susie out into the street. There she stood and wept, as if she would cry her eyes out, and there one of the King’s Daughters found her; and that was how I came to know Susie and her story.

Better days came for her and her mother, for the ladies took them up and cared for them. They were made happy and I ought to have been, but I was not. Let me confess it right here and have done with it. I am no scrapper; I have too much else to do to go around picking quarrels with everybody. I try hard to do as the Apostle says: “live peaceably with all men as far as in me lies”; but how can it lie very far in anybody with that kind of a pawnbroker in the landscape? I own that the notion of having one little round with that man, just one little one, has charms that I cannot get around.

To this tenement (see illustration facing page 100) my business as a police reporter led me. A home had been murdered there: a drunken husband had killed his wife. I know it is a common belief that drunkenness accounts for pretty nearly all the poverty there is. I do not find it so. It did in this case and there are enough such and to spare; but I think the verdict of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, once upon a time, came nearer the truth, namely, that forty per cent. of the helpless poverty was due to drunkenness, or the drunkenness due to the poverty. I forget the exact way they put it, but that was the sense of it, and it was good sense. Suppose you had to live in such a place as this! (See illustration facing page 102.) Do you think human life would seem especially precious or sacred, and don’t you think you would run to the saloon as, by comparison, far the more decent and human spot in that place? I know I would; and I think that one of our worst offenses against the brother is, after letting him be robbed of his home to leave him at the mercy of the saloon as the one place of human companionship for him, the one humanly decent spot in all his environment. I said “letting him be robbed.” There lies on my table a report of the Health Department of the year 1869, and it opens at the page upon which is recorded the result of a tour of the Sanitary Committee through the tenement-house districts that year. They found that the landlords kept those houses “as a business and generally as a speculation. He was seeking a certain percentage on his outlay, and that percentage very rarely fell below fifteen per cent. and frequently exceeded thirty—the complaint was universal among the tenants that _they were entirely uncared for_—the agent’s instructions were simple but emphatic: collect the rents in advance, or, failing, eject the occupant.” You see the scheme of the robbery. It is plain enough.