The Battle with the Slum - Chapters I-III



CHAPTER I.
BATTLING AGAINST HEAVY ODDS

THE slum I speak of is our own. We made it, but let us be glad we have no 
patent on the manufacture. It is not, as one wrote with soul quite too 
patriotic to let the Old World into competition on any terms, "the 
offspring of the American factory system." Not that, thank goodness! It 
comes much nearer to being a slice of original sin which makes right of 
might whenever the chance offers. When to-day we clamor for air and light 
and water as man's natural rights because necessary to his being, we are 
merely following in the track Hippocrates trod twenty-five centuries ago. 
How like the slums of Rome were to those of New York any one may learn 
from Juvenal's Satires and Gibbon's description of Rome under Augustus. "I 
must live in a place where there are no fires, no nightly alarms," cries 
the poet, apostle of commuters. "Already is Ucalegon shouting for water, 
already is he removing his chattels; the third story in the house you live 
in is already in a blaze. You know nothing about it. For if the alarm 
begin from the bottom of the stairs, he will be the last to be burned whom 
a single tile protects from the rain where the tame pigeons lay their 
eggs." (Clearly they had no air-shafts in the Roman tenements!) "Codrus 
had a bed too small for his Procula; six little jugs, the ornament of his 
sideboard, and a little can, besides, beneath it.… What a height it is 
from the lofty roofs from which a potsherd tumbles on your brains. How 
often cracked and chipped earthenware falls from the windows.… Pray and 
bear about with you the miserable wish that they may be contented with 
throwing down only what the broad basins have held.… If you can tear 
yourself away from the games in the circus, you can buy a capital house at 
Sora, or Fabrateria, or Frasino, for the price at which you are now hiring 
your dark-hole for one year. There you will have your little garden… live 
there enamoured of the pitchfork.… It is something to be able in any spot 
to have made oneself proprietor even of a single lizard… None but the 
wealthy can sleep in Rome."(1)

   One reads with a grim smile of the hold-ups of old: "'Where do you come 
from?' he (policeman?) thunders out. 'You don't answer? Speak or be 
kicked! Say, where do you hang out?' It is all one whether you speak or 
hold your tongue; they beat you just the same, and then, in a passion, 
force you to give bail to answer for the assault… I must be off. Let those 
stay… for whom it is an easy matter to get contracts for building temples, 
clearing rivers, constructing harbors, cleansing sewers, etc."(2) Not even 
in the boss and his pull can we claim exclusive right.

   Rome had its walls, as New York has its rivers, and they played a like 
part in penning up the crowds. Within space became scarce and dear, and 
when there was no longer room to build in rows where the poor lived, they 
put the houses on top of one another. That is the first chapter of the 
story of the tenement everywhere. Gibbon quotes the architect Vitruvius, 
who lived in the Augustan age, as complaining of "the common though 
inconvenient practice of raising houses to a considerable height in the 
air. But the loftiness of the buildings, which often consisted of hasty 
work and insufficient material, was the cause of frequent and fatal 
accidents, and it was repeatedly enacted by Augustus as well as by Nero 
that the height of private dwellings should not exceed the measure of 
seventy feet above the ground."

   "Repeatedly" suggests that the jerry-builder was a hard nut to crack 
then as now. As to Nero's edict, New York enacted it for its own 
protection in our own generation.

   Step now across eighteen centuries and all the chapters of the dreary 
story to the middle of the century we have just left behind, and look upon 
this picture of the New World's metropolis as it was drawn in public 
reports at a time when a legislative committee came to New York to see how 
crime and drunkenness came to be the natural crop of a population "housed 
in crazy old buildings, crowded, filthy tenements in rear yards, dark, 
damp basements, leaking garrets, shops, outhouses, and stables converted 
into dwellings, though scarcely fit to shelter brutes," or in towering 
tenements, "often carried up to a great height without regard to the 
strength of the foundation walls." What matter? They were not intended to 
last. The rent was high enough to make up for the risk--to the property. 
The tenant was not considered. Nothing was expected of him, and he came up 
to the expectation, as men have a trick of doing. "Reckless slovenliness, 
discontent, privation, and ignorance were left to work out their 
inevitable results, until the entire premises reached the level of 
tenanthouse dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not, the miserable 
hordes that crowded beneath smouldering, water-rotted roofs, or burrowed 
among the rats of clammy cellars."(3)

   We had not yet taken a lesson from Nero. That came later. But otherwise 
we were abreast. No doubt the Roman landlord, like his New York brother of 
a later day, when called to account, "urged the filthy habits of his 
tenants as an excuse for the condition of the property." It has been the 
landlord's plea in every age. "They utterly forgot," observes the 
sanitarian who was set to clean up, "that it was the tolerance of those 
habits which was the real evil, and that for this they themselves were 
alone responsible."(4)

   Those days came vividly back to me last winter, when in a Wisconsin 
country town I was rehearsing the story of the long fight, and pointing 
out its meaning to us all. In the audience sat a sturdy, white-haired, old 
farmer who followed the recital with keen interest, losing no word. When 
he saw this picture of one of the Five Points, he spoke out loud: "Yes! 
that is right. I was there." It turned out that he and his sister had 
borne a hand in the attack upon that stronghold of the slum by the forces 
of decency, in 1849 and 1850, which ended in the wiping out of the city's 
worst disgrace. It was the first pitched battle in the fight. Soon after 
he had come west and taken homestead land; but the daily repetition during 
a lifetime of the message to men, which the woods and the fields and God's 
open sky have in keeping, had not dulled his ears to it, and after fifty 
years his interest in his brothers in the great city was as keen as ever, 
his sympathies as quick. He had driven twenty miles across the frozen 
prairie to hear my story. It is his kind who win such battles, and a few 
of them go a long way.

   A handful of Methodist women made the Five Points decent. To understand 
what that meant, look at the "dens of death" in Baxter Street, which were 
part of it, "houses," says the health inspector,(5) "into which the 
sunlight never enters … that are dark, damp, and dismal throughout all the 
days of the year, and for which it is no exaggeration to say that the 
money paid to the owners as rent is literally the 'price of blood.'" It 
took us twenty-four years after that to register the conviction in the 
form of law that that was good cause for the destruction of a tenement in 
cold blood; but we got rid of some at that time in a fit of anger. The 
mortality officially registered in those "dens of death" was 17.5 per cent 
of their population. We think now that the death-rate of New York is yet 
too high at 19 or 20 in a thousand of the living.

   A dozen steps away in Mulberry Street, called "Death's Thoroughfare" in 
the same report, were the "Old Church Tenements," part of the Five Points 
and nearly the worst part. "One of the largest contributors to the 
hospitals," this repulsive pile had seen the day when men and women sat 
under its roof and worshipped God. When the congregation grew rich, it 
handed over its house to the devil and moved uptown. That is not putting 
it too strong. Counting in the front tenements that shut out what little 
air and sunshine might otherwise have reached the wretched tenants, it had 
a population of 360 according to the record, and a mortality of 75 per 
thousand!

   The sketches of the Fourth Ward and Wooster Street barracks are 
reproduced from an old report of the Association for Improving the 
Condition of the Poor. They rightly made out, those early missionaries, 
that the improvement must begin with the people's homes, or not at all, 
and allowed no indifference on the part of the public to turn them from 
their path. It is worth the while of Chicago and the other Western cities 
that are growing with such joyful metropolitan ambitions, to notice that 
their slums look to-day very much as New York's did then. In fifty years 
how will it be? "The offspring of municipal neglect" the Assembly 
Committee of 1857 called our "tenement-house" system. "Forgetfulness of 
the poor" was the way a citizens' council put it. It comes to the same 
thing. Whether seen from the point of view of the citizen, the 
philanthropist, or the Christian, the slum is the poorest investment a 
city can make, and once made it is not easily unmade. In a Mississippi 
river town, when pleading for the turning over to the people's use of some 
vacant land on the river-shore that would make a fine breathing space, I 
was told that by and by they would consider it. Just now it was too 
valuable for factory purposes. When the city had grown opulent, in say 
twenty-five years, they would be willing to hand it over. Fatal delusion! 
Men do not grow that kind of sense as they grow rich. The land will be 
always "too valuable." When we in New York were scandalized at last into 
making a park of the Mulberry Bend, it cost us a million and a half, and 
it had made the slum a fixture, not to be dislodged. No! the way to fight 
the slum is to head it off. It is like fighting a fire. Chasing it up is 
hard and doubtful work; the chances are that you will not overtake it till 
the house is burned down.

   There were those who thought when the Civil War was over, that a big 
fire would not be the worst thing that could happen to New York; and, if 
it could have burned sense into men's minds as it burned up the evidence 
of their lack of it, they would have been right. But forty per cent--the 
rent some of the barracks brought--is a powerful damper on sense and 
conscience, even with the cholera at the door. However, the fear of it 
gave us the Citizens' Council of Hygiene, and New York heard the truth for 
once.

   "Not only," it ran, "does filth, overcrowding, lack of privacy and 
domesticity, lack of ventilation and lighting, and absence of supervision 
and of sanitary regulation still characterize the greater number of the 
tenements; but they are built to a greater height in stories; there are 
more rear houses built back to back with other buildings, correspondingly 
situated on parallel streets; the courts and alleys are more greedily 
encroached upon and narrowed into unventilated, unlighted, damp, and well-
like holes between the many-storied front and rear tenements; and more 
fever-breeding wynds and culs-de-sac are created as the demand for the 
humble homes of the laboring poor increases."(6) The Council, which was 
composed of sixteen of New York's most distinguished physicians, declared 
that by ordinary sanitary management the city's death-rate should be 
reduced thirty per cent. Its judgment has been more than borne out. In the 
thirty-five years that have passed since, it has in fact been reduced over 
fifty per cent.

   Men and women were found living in cellars deep down under the ground. 
One or two of those holes are left still in Park Street near the Five 
Points Mission, but they have not been used as living-rooms for a 
generation. In cellars near the river the tide rose and fell, compelling 
the tenants "to keep the children in bed till ebb-tide." The plumber had 
come upon the field, but his coming brought no relief. His was not a case 
of conscience. "Untrapped soil pipes opened into every floor and poisoned 
the tenants."

   Where the "dens of death" were in Baxter Street, big barracks crowded 
out the old shanties. More came every day. I remember the story of those 
shown in the picture. They had been built only a little while when 
complaint came to the Board of Health of smells in the houses. A sanitary 
inspector was sent to find the cause. He followed the smell down in the 
cellar and, digging there, discovered that the waste pipe was a blind. It 
had simply been run three feet into the ground and was not connected with 
the sewer.

   The houses were built to sell. That they killed the tenants was no 
concern of builder's. His name, by the way, was Buddensiek. A dozen years 
after, when it happened that a row of tenements he was building fell down 
ahead of time, before they were finished and sold, and killed the workmen, 
he was arrested and sent to Sing Sing for ten years, for manslaughter.

   That time he had forgotten to put lime in the mortar. It was just sand. 
When the houses fell in the sight of men, the law was at last able to make 
him responsible. It failed in the matter of the soil pipe. It does 
sometimes to this very day. Knocking a man in the head with an axe, or 
sticking a knife into him, goes against the grain. Slowly poisoning a 
hundred so that the pockets of one be made to bulge may not even banish a 
man from respectable society. We are a queer lot in some things. However, 
that is hardly quite fair to society. It is a fact that that part of it 
which would deserve the respect of its fellow-citizens has got rid of its 
tenement-house property in recent years. It speculates in railway shares 
now.

   Twenty cases of typhoid fever from a single house in one year was the 
record that had gone unconsidered. Bedrooms in tenements were dark 
closets, utterly without ventilation. There couldn't be any. The houses 
were built like huge square boxes, covering nearly the whole of the lot. 
Some light came in at the ends, but the middle was always black. Forty 
thousand windows, cut by order of the Health Board that first year, gave 
us a daylight view of the slum: "damp and rotten and dark, walls and 
banisters sticky with constant moisture." Think of living babies in such 
hell-holes; and make a note of it, you in the young cities who can still 
head off the slum where we have to wrestle with it for our sins. Put a 
brand upon the murderer who would smother babies in dark holes and 
bedrooms. He is nothing else. Forbid the putting of a house five stories 
high, or six, on a twenty-five foot lot, unless at least thirty-five per 
cent of the lot be reserved for sunlight and air. Forbid it absolutely, if 
you can. It is the devil's job, and you will have to pay his dues in the 
end, depend on it.

   And while you are about it make a note of a fact we let go unheeded too 
long to our harm, and haven't grasped fully yet. The legislative committee 
of 1857 said it: "to prevent drunkenness provide every man with a clean 
and comfortable home." Call it paternalism, crankery, any other hard name 
you can think of, all the same it goes down underneath the foundation of 
things. I have known drunkards to wreck homes a plenty in my time; but I 
have known homes, too, that made drunkards by the shortest cut. I know a 
dozen now--yes, ten dozen--from which, if I had to live there, I should 
certainly escape to the saloon with its brightness and cheer as often and 
as long as I could to brood there perhaps over the fate which sowed 
desolation in one man's path that another might reap wealth and luxury. 
That last might not be my way, but it is a human way, and it breeds hatred 
which is not good mortar for us to build with. It does not bind. Let us 
remember that and just be sensible about things, or we shall not get 
anywhere.

   By which I do not mean that we are not getting anywhere; for we are. 
Look at Gotham Court, described in the health reports of the sixties as a 
"packing-box tenement" of the hopeless back-to-back type, which meant that 
there was no ventilation and could be none. The stenches from the 
"horribly foul cellars" with their "infernal system of sewerage" must 
needs poison the tenants all the way up to the fifth story. I knew the 
court well, knew the gang that made its headquarters with the rats in the 
cellar, terrorizing the helpless tenants; knew the well-worn rut of the 
dead-wagon and the ambulance to the gate, for the tenants died there like 
flies in all seasons, and a tenth of its population was always in the 
hospital. I knew the story of how it had been built by a Quaker with good 
intentions, but without good sense, for the purpose of rescuing people 
from the awful cellar-holes they burrowed in around there,--this within 
fifty-one years of the death of George Washington, who lived just across 
the street on the crest of Cherry Hill when he was President,--and how in 
a score of years from the time it was built it had come to earn the 
official description, "a nuisance which, from its very magnitude, is 
assumed to be unremovable and irremediable."(7) That was at that time. But 
I have lived to see it taken in hand three times, once by the landlord 
under compulsion of the Board of Health, once by Christian men bent upon 
proving what could be done on their plan with the worst tenement house. 
And a good deal was accomplished. The mortality was brought below the 
general death-rate of the city, and the condition of the living was made 
by comparison tolerable. Only the best was bad in that spot, on account of 
the good Quaker's poor sense, and the third time the court was taken in 
hand it was by the authorities, who destroyed it, as they should have done 
a generation before. Oh, yes, we are getting there; but that sort of thing 
takes time.

   Going through Whitechapel, London, about the time we were making ready 
to deal with Gotham Court as it deserved, I photographed Green Dragon yard 
as typical of what I saw about me. Compare the court and the yard and see 
the difference between our slum problem and that of Old World cities. 
Gotham Court contained 142 families when I made a canvass of it in the old 
days, comprising over 700 persons, not counting the vagrants who infested 
the cellars. The population of green Dragon Yard was greater than the 
sight of it would lead you to expect, for in Whitechapel one room flats 
were the rule; but with its utmost crowding it came nowhere near the 
court. Sullen discontent was the badge of it. Gotham Court was in an 
active state of warfare at all hours, for its population was evenly 
divided between Irish and Italians, with only two German families, who 
caught it from both sides. But there was hope in that, for they were on 
the move; before the court was torn down, one-third of its tenants were 
Greeks. Their slum over yonder is dead, black, given over to smoky 
chimneys and bad draughts, with redeyed and hopeless men and women forever 
blowing the bellows on ineffectual fires. Ours is alive if it is with 
fighting. There is yeast in it, and bright skies without, if not within. I 
don't believe there is a bellows to be had in New York. Our slum, with its 
greater crowd, has more urgent need of sharp attention, chiefly because of 
the overflow of theirs which it receives. But after all, even that 
represents what still had courage and manhood enough to make it want to 
get away and do better. We shall "get there" if we don't give up. It 
sometimes seems to me that their only hope is to get here.

   Speaking of the fair beginning of Gotham Court reminds me of the Big 
Flat in Mott Street, a mighty tenement with room for a hundred families 
that was another instance of reform still-born; by which I mean that it 
came before we were ready for it, and willing to back it up; also before 
we knew just how. That house was built by the philanthropists of those 
days on such a generous scale that it reached clear through the block to 
Elizabeth Street. It had not occurred to the builders that the 
neighborhood was one in which such an arrangement might prove of special 
convenience to the lawbreakers with which it swarmed. Thieves and thugs 
made it a runway, and decent people shunned it. Other philanthropists, 
with the will but without the wisdom that was needed, took it up and tried 
to make a workingwoman's home of it; but that end was worse than the 
beginning. The women would have none of the rules that went with the 
philanthropy, and the Big Flat lapsed back among the slum tenements and 
became the worst of a bad lot. I speak of it here because just now the 
recollection of it is a kind of a milestone in the battle with the slum. 
Twenty years after, A. T. Stewart, the merchant prince, set another in the 
Park Avenue Hotel which he intended for his working-girls; and that was a 
worse failure than the first, for it never served the purpose he intended 
for it. And now, just as I am writing this, they are putting the finishing 
touches to a real woman's hotel up-town which will not be a failure, 
though it will hardly reach the same class which the remodellers of the 
Big Flat had in mind. However, we shall get there, too, now we know the 
way.

   Slowly, with many setbacks, we battled our way into the light. A Board 
of Health had come with the cholera panic in 1866. The swine that ran at 
large in the streets, practically the only scavengers, were banished. The 
cholera and the yellow fever that had ravaged the city by turns never came 
back. The smallpox went its way, too,(8) and was heard of again only once 
as an epidemic, till people had forgotten what it was like,--enough to 
make them listen to the anti-vaccination cranks,--and politics had the 
health department by the throat again and held the gate open. We acquired 
tenement house laws, and the process of education that had begun with the 
foraging ground of the swine was extended step by step to the citizen's 
home. Short steps and cautious were they. Every obstacle which the 
landlord's cunning and the perversion of the machinery of the law to serve 
his interests could devise was thrown in the way. It was a new doctrine to 
that day that any power should intervene between him and the tenants who 
represented his income, and it was held to be a hardship if not downright 
robbery. The builder took the same view. Every tenement house plan was the 
subject of hot debate between the Health Board and the builder, or his 
architect. The smallest air-shaft had to be wrung out of him, as it were, 
by main strength. The church itself was too often on the side of the 
enemy, where its material interests were involved. Trinity, the wealthiest 
church corporation in the land, was in constant opposition as a tenement 
house landlord, and finally, to save a few hundred dollars, came near 
upsetting the whole structure of tenement law that had been built up in 
the interest of the toilers and of the city's safety with such infinite 
pains. The courts were reluctant. Courts in such matters record rather 
than lead the state of the public mind, and now that the immediate danger 
of an epidemic was over, the public mind had a hard time grasping the fact 
that bettering the housing of the poor was simple protection for the 
community. When suit was brought against a bad landlord, judges demanded 
that the department must prove not only that a certain state of soil 
saturation, for instance, was dangerous to health, but that some one had 
been actually made sick by that specified nuisance. Fat-boilers, slaughter-
house men, and keepers of other nuisances made common cause against the 
new decency, and with these obstacles in front, the Sanitarians found the 
enemy constantly recruited from the rear. With the immense immigration 
that poured in after the Civil War, the evil with which they were 
struggling grew enormously. Economic problems other than the old one of 
rent came to vex us. The sweater moved into the East Side tenements. Child-
labor grew and swelled.

   The tenement had grown its logical crop. In the sweating conspiracy it 
is a prime factor. Its extortionate rates make the need, and the need of 
the poor was ever the opportunity of their oppressor. What they have to 
take becomes the standard of all the rest. Sweating is only a modern name 
for it. The cause is as old as the slum itself.

   However, the new light was not without its allies. Chief among them was 
the onward march of business that wiped out many a foul spot which had 
sorely tried the patience of us all. A carriage factory took the place of 
the Big Flat when it had become a disgusting scandal. Jersey Street, a 
short block between Mulberry and Crosby streets, to which no Whitechapel 
slum could hold a candle, became a factory street. No one lives there now. 
The last who did was murdered by the gang that grew as naturally out of 
its wickedness as a toadstool grows on a rotten log. He kept the saloon on 
the corner of Crosby Street. Saloon and tenements are gone together. Where 
they were are rows of factories, empty and silent at night. A man may go 
safely there now at any hour. I should not have advised strangers to try 
that when it was at its worst, though Police Headquarters was but a block 
away.

   I photographed that phase of the battle with the slum just before they 
shut in the last tenement in the block with a factory building in its 
rear. It stood for a while after that down in a deep sort of pocket with 
not enough light struggling down on the brightest of days to make out 
anything clearly in the rooms,--truly a survival of the unfittest; but the 
tenants stayed. They had access through a hallway on Crosby Street; they 
had never been used to a yard; as for the darkness, that they had always 
been used to. They were "manured to the soil," in the words of Mrs. 
Partington. But at length business claimed the last foot of the block, and 
peace came to it and to us.

   All the while we were learning. It was emphatically a campaign of 
education. When the cholera threatened there was the old disposition to 
lie down under the visitation and pray. The council pointed to the fifteen 
hundred cases of smallpox ferreted out by its inspectors "in a few days," 
and sternly reminded the people of Lord Palmerston's advice to those who 
would stay an epidemic with a national fast, that they had better turn to 
and clean up. We pray nowadays with broom in hand, and the prayer tells. 
Do not understand me as discouraging the prayer; far from it. But I would 
lend an edge to it with the broom that cuts. That kind of foolishness we 
got rid of; the other kind that thinks the individual's interest superior 
to the public good--that is the thing we have got to fight till we die. 
But we made notches in that on which to hang arguments that stick. Human 
life then counted for less than the landlord's profits; to-day it is 
weighed in the scale against them. Property still has powerful pull. 
"Vested rights" rise up and confront you, and no matter how loudly you may 
protest that no man has the right to kill his neighbor, they are still 
there. No one will contradict you, but they won't yield--till you make 
them. In a hundred ways you are made to feel that vested rights are 
sacred, if human life is not. But the glory is that you can make them 
yield. You couldn't then.

   We haven't reached the millennium yet. But let us be glad. A hundred 
years ago they hanged a woman on Tyburn Hill for stealing a loaf of bread. 
To-day we destroy the den that helped make her a thief.

(1. Satire III, Juvenal)
(2. Ibid.)

(3. Report of Select-Committee of Assembly, New York, 1857)

(4. New York Health Department Report, 1866, Appendix A, p. 6)

(5. Report of Board of Health, New York, 1869, p. 346)

(6. Council of Hygiene's Report, 1866)

(7. Health Department Report, 1870, p. III)

(8. They had "health wardens" in the old days, and the Council of Hygiene 
tells of the efficient way two of them fought the smallpox. One stood at 
the foot of the stairs and yelled to those minding a patient in the next 
story to "put pieces of camphor about the clothes of the sick and 
occasionally throw a piece on the hot stove." The other summoned the 
occupants of a smallpox smitten tenement to the hall door and cautioned 
them to say nothing about it to any one, or he would send them all to the 
pesthouse!)



CHAPTER II.
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.

   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(1) 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.

   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!

   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.(2) 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.

   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,(3)--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.

   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 wellknown 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.

   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 enbloc at the city's expense.

   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.

   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 uptown 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.

   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.

   A year later, I passed that same way on the night of election.(4) 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!"

   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 fortuitus. 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 
reelection 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.

(1. 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)

(2. 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)

(3. 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)

(4. 1898, when Roosevelt was elected Governor after a fierce fight with 
Tammany)



CHAPTER III.
THE DEVIL'S MONEY

THAT was what the women called it, and the name stuck and killed the 
looters. The young men of the East Side began it, and the women finished 
it. It was a campaign of decency against Tammany, that one of 1901 of 
which I am going to make the record brief as may be, for we all remember 
it; and also, thank God, that decency won the fight.

   If ever inhuman robbery deserved the name, that which caused the 
downfall of Tammany surely did. Drunk with the power and plunder of four 
long unchallenged years, during which the honest name of democracy was 
pilloried in the sight of all men as the active partner of blackmail and 
the brothel, the monstrous malignity reached a point at last where it was 
no longer to be borne. Then came the crash. The pillory lied. Tammany is 
no more a political organization than it is the benevolent concern it is 
innocently supposed to be by some people who never learn. It neither knows 
nor cares for principles. "Koch?" said its President of the Health 
Department when mention was made in his hearing of the authority of the 
great German doctor, "who is that man Koch you are talking about?" And he 
was typical of the rest. His function was to collect the political revenue 
of the department, and the city was overrun with smallpox for the first 
time in thirty years. The police force, of whom Roosevelt had made heroes, 
became the tools of robbers. Robbery is the business of Tammany. For that, 
and for that only, is it organized. Politics are merely the convenient 
pretence. I do not mean that every Tammany man is a thief. Probably the 
great majority of its adherents honestly believe that it stands for 
something worth fighting for,--for personal freedom, for the people's 
cause,--and their delusion is the opportunity of scoundrels. They have 
never understood its organization or read its history.

   For a hundred years that has been an almost unbroken record of fraud 
and peculation. Its very founder, William Mooney, was charged with being a 
deserter from the patriot army to the British forces. He was later on 
removed from office as superintendent of the almshouse for swindling the 
city. Aaron Burr plotted treason within its councils. The briefest survey 
of the administration of the metropolis from his day down to that of Tweed 
shows a score of its conspicuous leaders removed, indicted, or tried, for 
default, bribe-taking, or theft; and the fewest were punished. The civic 
history of New York to the present day is one long struggle to free itself 
from its blighting grip. Its people's parties, its committees of seventy, 
were ever emergency measures to that end, but they succeeded only for a 
season. There have been decent Tammany mayors, but not for long. There 
have been attempts to reform the organization from within, but they have 
been failures. You cannot reform an "organized appetite" except by 
reforming it away. And then there would be nothing left of the 
organization.

   For whatever the rank and file have believed, the organization has 
never been anything else but the means of satisfying the appetite that 
never will be cloyed. Whatever principles it has professed, they have 
served the purpose only of filling the pockets of the handful of men who 
rule its inner councils and use it to their own enrichment and our loss 
and disgrace. We have heard its most successful leader testify brazenly 
before the Mazet legislative committee that he was in politics working for 
his own pocket all the time. That was his principle. And his followers 
applauded till the room rang.

   That is the Tammany which has placed murderers and gamblers in its high 
seats. That is the Tammany which you have to fight at every step when 
battling with the slum; the Tammany which, unmasked and beaten by the 
Parkhurst and Lexow disclosures, came back with the Greater New York to 
exploit the opportunity reform had made for itself, and gave us a lesson 
we will not soon forget. For at last it dropped all pretence and showed 
its real face to us.

   Civil service reform was thrown to the winds; the city departments were 
openly parcelled out among the district leaders: a $2000 office to one,--
two $1000 to another to even up. That is the secret of the "organization" 
which politicians admire. It does make a strong body. How it served the 
city in one department, the smallpox epidemic bore witness. That 
department, the pride of the city and its mainstay in days of danger, was 
wrecked. The first duty of the new president, when the four years were 
over and Tammany out again, was to remove more than a hundred and fifty 
useless employees. Their only function had been to draw the salaries which 
the city paid. The streets that had been clean became dirty--the "voter" 
was back "behind the broom"--and they swarmed once more with children for 
whom there was no room in school. Officials who drew big salaries starved 
the inmates of the almshouse on weak tea and dry bread, and Bellevue, the 
poor people's hospital, became a public scandal. In one night there were 
five drunken fights, one of them between two of the attendants who dropped 
the corpse they were carrying to the morgue and fought over it. The 
tenements were plunged back into the foulness of their worst day; the 
inspectors were answerable, not to the Health Board, but to the district 
leader, and the landlord who stood well with him thumbed his nose at them 
and at their orders to clean up. The neighborhood parks, acquired at such 
heavy sacrifice, lay waste. Tammany took no step toward improving them. 
One it did take up at Fort George; and though the property only cost the 
city $600,000, the bills for taking it were $127,467. That is the true 
Tammany style. In the Seward Park, where the need of relief was greatest, 
Tammany election district captains built booths, rent free, for the sale 
of dry goods and fish. That was "their share." Wealthy corporations were 
made to pay heavily for "peace"; timid storekeepers were blackmailed. One, 
a Jew, told his story: he was ordered to pay five dollars a week for 
privilege of keeping open Sundays. He paid, and they asked ten. When he 
refused, he was told that it would be the worse for him. He closed up. The 
very next week he was sued for a hundred dollars by a man of whom he had 
never borrowed anything. He did not defend the suit, and it went against 
him. In three days the sheriff was in his store. He knew the hopelessness 
of it then, and went out and mortgaged his store and paid the bill. The 
next week another man sued him for a hundred dollars he did not owe. He 
went and threw himself on his mercy, and the man let him off for the costs.

   He was one of the many thousands of toilers who look with fear to the 
approaching summer because it is then the hot tenement kills their babies. 
Their one chance of life then depends upon the supply of ice that is 
hawked from door to door in small pieces, since tenements have rarely 
other refrigerator than the draughty airshaft. The greed of politicians 
plotted to deprive them of even this chance. They had control of docks and 
means of transportation and they cornered the supply, raising the price 
from thirty to sixty cents a hundred pounds and suppressing the five-cent 
piece. Some of them that sat in high official station grew rich, but the 
poor man's babies died and he saw at last the quality of the friendship 
Tammany professed for him. The push-cart pedlers, blackmailed and driven 
from pillar to post, saw it. They had escaped from unbearable tyranny in 
their old home to find a worse where they thought to be free; for to their 
oppressors yonder at least their women were sacred.

   It is difficult to approach calmly what is left of the diabolical 
recital. The police, set once more to collecting blackmail from saloon 
keepers, gambling hells, policy shops, and houses of ill fame,under a 
chief who on a policeman's pay became in a few short years fairly bloated 
with wealth, sank to the level of their occupation or into helpless or 
hopeless compliance with the apparently inevitable. The East Side, where 
the home struggled against such heavy odds, became a sinkhole of undreamt-
of corruption. The tenements were overrun with lewd women who paid the 
police for protection and received it. Back of them the politician who 
controlled all and took the profits. This newspaper arraignment published 
in January, 1901, tells the bald truth:

   "Imagine, if you can, a section of the city territory completely 
dominated by one man, without whose permission neither legitimate nor 
illegitimate business can be conducted; where illegitimate business is 
encouraged and legitimate business discouraged; where the respectable 
residents have to fasten their doors and windows summer nights and sit in 
their rooms with asphyxiating air and one hundred degrees temperature, 
rather than try to catch the faint whiff of breeze in their natural 
breathing places--the stoops of their homes; where naked women dance by 
night in the streets, and unsexed men prowl like vultures through the 
darkness on "business" not only permitted, but encouraged, by the police; 
where the education of infants begins with the knowledge of prostitution 
and the training of little girls is training in the arts of Phryne; where 
American girls brought up with the refinements of American homes are 
imported from small towns up-state, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New 
Jersey, and kept as virtually prisoners as if they were locked up behind 
jail bars until they have lost all semblance of womanhood; where small 
boys are taught to solicit for the women of disorderly houses; where there 
is an organized society of young men whose sole business in life is to 
corrupt young girls and turn them over to bawdy houses; where men walking 
with their wives along the street are openly insulted; where children that 
have adult diseases are the chief patrons of the hospitals and 
dispensaries; where it is the rule, rather than the exception, that 
murder, rape, robbery, and theft go unpunished--in short, where the 
premium of the most awful forms of vice is the profit of the politicians.

   "There is no 'wine, woman, and song' over there. The 'wine' is stale 
beer, the 'woman' is a degraded money-making machine, and the 'song' is 
the wail of the outraged innocent. The political backers have got it down 
to what has been called a 'cash-register, commutation-ticket basis,' 
called so from the fact that in some of these places they issued tickets, 
on the plan of a commutation mealticket, and had cash registers at the 
entries."

   Lest some one think the newspaper exaggerating after all, let me add 
Bishop Potter's comment before his Diocesan Convention. He will not be 
suspected of sensationalism:

   "The corrupt system, whose infamous details have been steadily 
uncovered to our increasing horror and humiliation, was brazenly ignored 
by those who were fattening on its spoils; and the world was presented 
with the astounding spectacle of a great municipality whose civic 
mechanism was largely employed in trading in the bodies and souls of the 
innocent and defenceless. What has been published in this connection is 
but the merest hint of what exists--and exists, most appalling of all, as 
the evidence has come to me under the seal of confidence in overwhelming 
volume and force to demonstrate--under a system of terrorism which compels 
its victims to recognize that to denounce it means the utter ruin, so far 
as all their worldly interests are concerned, of those who dare to do so. 
This infamous organization for making merchandise of girls and boys, and 
defenceless men and women, has adroitly sought to obscure a situation 
concerning which all honest people are entirely clear, by saying that vice 
cannot be wholly suppressed. Nobody has made upon the authorities of New 
York any such grotesque demand. All that our citizens have asked is that 
the government of the city shall not be employed to protect a trade in 
vice, which is carried on for the benefit of a political organization. The 
case is entirely clear. No Mephistophelian cunning can obscure it, and I 
thank God that there is abundant evidence that the end of such a condition 
of things is not far off."

   It was, indeed, coming. But Tammany, gorged with power and the lust of 
it, neither saw nor heeded. At a meeting of young men on the East Side, 
one of them, responding to an address by Felix Adler, drew such a heart-
rending picture of the conditions prevailing there that the echoes of the 
meeting found its way into the farthest places: "Now you go," he said, "to 
your quiet home in a decent street where no harm comes to you or your wife 
or children in the night, for it is their home. And we--we go with our 
high resolves, the noble ambitions you have stirred, to our tenements 
where evil lurks in the darkness at every step, where innocence is 
murdered in babyhood, where mothers bemoan the birth of a daughter as the 
last misfortune, where virtue is sold into a worse slavery than ever our 
fathers knew, and our sisters betrayed by paid panders; where the name of 
home is as a bitter mockery, for alas! we have none. These are the 
standards to which we go from here." And then followed the whole amazing 
story of damning conspiracy between power and vice in those tenements 
before which a whole city stood aghast.

   A meeting was called the following day by Dr. Adler, of men and women 
who had the welfare of their city at heart, and when they had heard the 
story, they resolved that they would not rest till those things were no 
longer true. One of their number was the Rev. Robert Paddock, the priest 
in charge of Bishop Potter's Pro-Cathedral, right in the heart of it all 
in Stanton Street. He set about gathering evidence that would warrant the 
arraignment of the evil-doers in his district; but when he brought it to 
the police he was treated with scorn and called liar.

   The measure was nearly full. Bishop Potter came back from the East, 
where he had been travelling, and met his people. Out of that meeting came 
the most awful arraignment of a city government which the world has ever 
heard. "Nowhere else on earth," the Bishop wrote to the Mayor of New York, 
"certainly not in any civilized or Christian community, does there exist 
such a situation as defiles and dishonors New York to-day."

   "In the name of these little ones," his letter ran, "these weak and 
defenceless ones, Christian and Hebrew alike, of many races and tongues, 
but homes in which God is feared and His law revered, and virtue and 
decency honored and exemplified, I call upon you, sir, to save these 
people, who are in a very real way committed to your charge, from a living 
hell, defiling, deadly, damning, to which the criminal supineness of the 
constituted authorities set for the defence of decency and good order, 
threatens to doom them."

   The Mayor's virtual response was to put the corrupt Chief of Police in 
practically complete and irresponsible charge of the force. Richard 
Croker, the boss of Tammany Hall, had openly counselled violence at the 
election then pending (1900), and the Chief in a general order to the 
force repeated the threat. But they had reckoned without Governor 
Roosevelt. He compelled the Mayor to have the order rescinded, and removed 
the District Attorney who had been elected on the compact platform "to 
hell with reform." The whole city was aroused. The Chamber of Commerce 
formed a Committee of Fifteen which soon furnished evidence without stint 
of the corruption that was abroad. The connection between the police and 
the gambling dens was demonstrated, and also that the police were the mere 
tools of "politics." In 237 tenements that were investigated 290 flats 
were found harboring prostitutes in defiance of law. The police were 
compelled to act. The "Cadets," who lived by seducing young girls and 
selling them to their employer at $25 a head, were arrested and sent to 
jail for long terms. They showed fight, and it developed that they had a 
regular organization with political affiliations.

   The campaign of 1901 approached. Judge Jerome went upon the stump and 
rattled the brass checks from the cash-register that paid for the virtue 
of innocent girls, the daughters of his hearers. The mothers of the East 
Side, the very Tammany women themselves, rose and denounced the devil's 
money, and made their husbands and brothers go to the polls and vote their 
anger.(1) The world knows the rest. The "Red Light" of the East Side 
damned Tammany to defeat. Seth Low was elected mayor. Decency once more 
moved into the City Hall and into the homes of the poor. Croker abdicated 
and went away, and a new day broke for our harassed city.

   That, in brief, is the story of the campaign that discharged the devil 
as paymaster, and put his money out of circulation--for good, let us all 
hope.

(1. Up to that time I wrote of Tammany as "she"; but I dropped it then as 
an outrage upon the sex. "It" it is and will remain hereafter. I am 
ashamed of ever having put the stigma on the name of woman)