Chapter I: Preface

Three years ago I published under the title "A Ten Years' War" a series of papers intended to account for the battle with the slum since I wrote "How the Other Half Lives." A good many things can happen in three years. So many things have happened in these three, the fighting has been so general all along the line and has so held public attention, that this seems the proper time to pass it all in review once more. That I have tried to do in this book, retaining all that still applied of the old volume and adding as much more. The "stories" were printed in the _Century Magazine_. They are fact, not fiction. If the latter, they would have no place here.

"The Battle with the Slum" is properly the sequel to "How the Other Half Lives," and tells how far we have come and how. "With his usual hopefulness," I read in the annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science of my book three years ago, "the author is still looking forward to better things in the future." I was not deceived then. Not in the thirty years before did we advance as in these three, though Tammany blocked the way most of the time. It is great to have lived in a day that sees such things done.

J. A. R.

RICHMOND HILL,
August 27, 1902.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction. What the Fight is about 1

CHAPTER

I. Battling against Heavy Odds 9

II. The Outworks of the Slum taken 36

III. The Devil's Money 63

IV. The Blight of the Double-decker 76

V. "Druv into Decency" 113

VI. The Mills House 154

VII. Pietro and the Jew 175

VIII. On whom shall we shut the Door? 202

IX. The Genesis of the Gang 227

X. Jim 256

XI. Letting in the Light 264

XII. The Passing of Cat Alley 310

XIII. Justice to the Boy 341

XIV. The Band begins to play 385

XV. "Neighbor" the Password 396

XVI. Reform by Humane Touch 413

XVII. The Unnecessary Story of Mrs. Ben Wah and Her Parrot 441

Index 451

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Theodore Roosevelt _Frontispiece_

PAGE

One of the Five Points Fifty Years Ago 12

The "Old Church" Tenement 15

An Old Wooster Street Court 17

A Fourth Ward Colony in the Bad Old Days 18

Dens of Death 21

Gotham Court 24

Green Dragon Yard, London 26

A Flagged Hallway in the "Big Flat" 28

Jersey Street Rookeries 32

The Survival of the Unfittest 33

The Rear Tenement grows up 38

Professor Felix Adler 39

A Cellar Dive in the Bend 41

It costs a Dollar a Month to sleep in these Sheds 46

Mulberry Street Police Station. Waiting for the Lodging to open 49

Night in Gotham Court 52

A Mulberry Bend Alley 55

"In the hallway I ran across two children, little tots, who were
inquiring their way to the 'Commissioner'" 58

"With his whole hungry little soul in his eyes" 78

One Family's Outlook on the Air Shaft. The Mother said, "Our
daughter does not care to come home to sleep" 93

The only Bath-tub in the Block. It hangs in the Air Shaft 103

The Old Style of Tenements, with Yards 106

As a Solid Block of Double-deckers, lawful until now, would
appear 106

Richard Watson Gilder 117

The Mott Street Barracks 122

R. Fulton Cutting 128

Alfred Corning Clark Buildings 131

The Riverside Tenements in Brooklyn 141

A Typical East Side Block 146

Robert W. de Forest 147

Plan of a Typical Floor of the Competition in the C. O. S.
Plans of Model Tenements 150

Plans of Tenements 151

A Seven-cent Lodging House in the Bowery 155

They had a Mind to see how it looked 157

Doorway of the Mills House, No. 1 159

Evening in One of the Courts in the Mills House, No. 1 163

Lodging Room in the Leonard Street Police Station 168

Women's Lodging Room in Eldridge Street Police Station 169

A "Scrub" and her Bed--the Plank 171

What a Search of the Lodgers brought forth 173

Bedroom in the New City Lodging Houses 177

"Are we not young enough to work for him?" 179

The Play School. Dressing Dolls for a Lesson 189

Label of Consumers' League 197

Josephine Shaw Lowell 198

One Door that has been opened: St. John's Park in Hudson
Street, once a Graveyard 203

Dr. Jane Elizabeth Robbins 205

One Way of bringing the Children into Camp: Basket-weaving in
Vacation School 210

The Children's Christmas Tree 219

Jacob Beresheim 229

Heading off the Gang. Vacation Playground near Old Frog Hollow 237

Craps 242

Children's Playground. Good Citizenship at the Bottom of this
Barrel 245

The Gang fell in with Joyous Shouts 253

"Oh, mother! you were gone so long" 261

Keep off the Grass 266

Colonel George E. Waring, Jr. 269

A Tammany-swept East Side Street before Colonel Waring's Day 272

The Same Street when Colonel Waring wielded the Broom 273

The Mulberry Bend 277

Bone Alley 280

Mulberry Bend Park 289

Roof Playground on a Public School 291

Kindergarten on the Recreation Pier at the Foot of East 24th
Street 297

The East River Park 301

The Seward Park 303

The Seward Park on Opening Day 305

In the Roof Garden of the Hebrew Educational Alliance 306

Bottle Alley, Whyó Gang's Headquarters 308

The First Christmas Tree in Gotham Court 312

The Mouth of the Alley 317

The Wrecking of Cat Alley 327

Trilby 331

Old Barney 334

The Old and the New 343

Public School No. 177, Manhattan 347

Letter H Plan of Public School No. 165 352

Public School No. 153, The Bronx 356

Girls' Playground on the Roof 360

The New Idea: a Stairway of Public School No. 170 363

Truck Farming on the Site of Stryker's Lane 367

Doorway of Public School No. 165 370

Main Entrance of Public School No. 153 375

Superintendent C. B. J. Snyder 381

"The fellows and papa and mamma shall be invited in yet" 392

The "Slide" that was the Children's only Playground once 394

A Cooking Lesson in Vacation School 401

"Such a ball-room!" 408

Teaching the Girls to swim 411

Athletic Meets in Crotona Park 415

Flag Drill in the King's Garden 437

Mrs. Ben Wah 444

THE BATTLE WITH THE SLUM

WHAT THE FIGHT IS ABOUT

The slum is as old as civilization. Civilization implies a race to get ahead. In a race there are usually some who for one cause or another cannot keep up, or are thrust out from among their fellows. They fall behind, and when they have been left far in the rear they lose hope and ambition, and give up. Thenceforward, if left to their own resources, they are the victims, not the masters, of their environment; and it is a bad master. They drag one another always farther down. The bad environment becomes the heredity of the next generation. Then, given the crowd, you have the slum ready-made.

The battle with the slum began the day civilization recognized in it her enemy. It was a losing fight until conscience joined forces with fear and self-interest against it. When common sense and the golden rule obtain among men as a rule of practice, it will be over. The two have not always been classed together, but here they are plainly seen to belong together. Justice to the individual is accepted in theory as the only safe groundwork of the commonwealth. When it is practised in dealing with the slum, there will shortly be no slum. We need not wait for the millennium, to get rid of it. We can do it now. All that is required is that it shall not be left to itself. That is justice to it and to us, since its grievous ailment is that it cannot help itself. When a man is drowning, the thing to do is to pull him out of the water; afterward there will be time for talking it over. We got at it the other way in dealing with our social problems. The wise men had their day, and they decided to let bad enough alone; that it was unsafe to interfere with "causes that operate sociologically," as one survivor of these unfittest put it to me. It was a piece of scientific humbug that cost the age which listened to it dear. "Causes that operate sociologically" are the opportunity of the political and every other kind of scamp who trades upon the depravity and helplessness of the slum, and the refuge of the pessimist who is useless in the fight against them. We have not done yet paying the bills he ran up for us. Some time since we turned to, to pull the drowning man out, and it was time. A little while longer, and we should hardly have escaped being dragged down with him.

The slum complaint had been chronic in all ages, but the great changes which the nineteenth century saw, the new industry, political freedom, brought on an acute attack which put that very freedom in jeopardy. Too many of us had supposed that, built as our commonwealth was on universal suffrage, it would be proof against the complaints that harassed older states; but in fact it turned out that there was extra hazard in that. Having solemnly resolved that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we shut our eyes and waited for the formula to work. It was as if a man with a cold should take the doctor's prescription to bed with him, expecting it to cure him. The formula was all right, but merely repeating it worked no cure. When, after a hundred years, we opened our eyes, it was upon sixty cents a day as the living wage of the working-woman in our cities; upon "knee pants" at forty cents a dozen for the making; upon the Potter's Field taking tithe of our city life, ten per cent each year for the trench, truly the Lost Tenth of the slum. Our country had grown great and rich; through our ports was poured food for the millions of Europe. But in the back streets multitudes huddled in ignorance and want. The foreign oppressor had been vanquished, the fetters stricken from the black man at home; but his white brother, in his bitter plight, sent up a cry of distress that had in it a distinct note of menace. Political freedom we had won; but the problem of helpless poverty, grown vast with the added offscourings of the Old World, mocked us, unsolved. Liberty at sixty cents a day set presently its stamp upon the government of our cities, and it became the scandal and the peril of our political system.

So the battle began. Three times since the war that absorbed the nation's energies and attention had the slum confronted us in New York with its challenge. In the darkest days of the great struggle it was the treacherous mob;[1] later on, the threat of the cholera, which found swine foraging in the streets as the only scavengers, and a swarming host, but little above the hog in its appetites and in the quality of the shelter afforded it, peopling the back alleys. Still later, the mob, caught looting the city's treasury with its idol, the thief Tweed, at its head, drunk with power and plunder, had insolently defied the outraged community to do its worst. There were meetings and protests. The rascals were turned out for a season; the arch-chief died in jail. I see him now, going through the gloomy portals of the Tombs, whither, as a newspaper reporter, I had gone with him, his stubborn head held high as ever. I asked myself more than once, at the time when the vile prison was torn down, whether the comic clamor to have the ugly old gates preserved and set up in Central Park had anything to do with the memory of the "martyred" thief, or whether it was in joyful celebration of the fact that others had escaped. His name is even now one to conjure with in the Sixth Ward. He never "squealed," and he was "so good to the poor"--evidence that the slum is not laid by the heels by merely destroying Five Points and the Mulberry Bend. There are other fights to be fought in that war, other victories to be won, and it is slow work. It was nearly ten years after the Great Robbery before decency got a good upper grip. That was when the civic conscience awoke in 1879.

[Footnote 1: The draft riots of 1863.]

And after all that, the Lexow disclosures of inconceivable rottenness of a Tammany police; the woe unto you! of Christian priests calling vainly upon the chief of the city "to save its children from a living hell," and the contemptuous reply on the witness-stand of the head of the party of organized robbery, at the door of which it was all laid, that he was "in politics, working for his own pocket all the time, same as you and everybody else!"

Slow work, yes! but be it ever so slow, the battle has got to be fought, and fought out. For it is one thing or the other: either we wipe out the slum, or it wipes out us. Let there be no mistake about this. It cannot be shirked. Shirking means surrender, and surrender means the end of government by the people.

If any one believes this to be needless alarm, let him think a moment. Government by the people must ever rest upon the people's ability to govern themselves, upon their intelligence and public spirit. The slum stands for ignorance, want, unfitness, for mob-rule in the day of wrath. This at one end. At the other, hard-heartedness, indifference, self-seeking, greed. It is human nature. We are brothers whether we own it or not, and when the brotherhood is denied in Mulberry Street we shall look vainly for the virtue of good citizenship on Fifth Avenue. When the slum flourishes unchallenged in the cities, their wharves may, indeed, be busy, their treasure-houses filled,--wealth and want go so together,--but patriotism among their people is dead.

As long ago as the very beginning of our republic, its founders saw that the cities were danger-spots in their plan. In them was the peril of democratic government. At that time, scarce one in twenty-five of the people in the United States lived in a city. Now it is one in three. And to the selfishness of the trader has been added the threat of the slum. Ask yourself then how long before it would make an end of us, if let alone.

Put it this way: you cannot let men live like pigs when you need their votes as freemen; it is not safe.[2] You cannot rob a child of its childhood, of its home, its play, its freedom from toil and care, and expect to appeal to the grown-up voter's manhood. The children are our to-morrow, and as we mould them to-day so will they deal with us then. Therefore that is not safe. Unsafest of all is any thing or deed that strikes at the home, for from the people's home proceeds citizen virtue, and nowhere else does it live. The slum is the enemy of the home. Because of it the chief city of our land came long ago to be called "The Homeless City." When this people comes to be truly called a nation without homes there will no longer be any nation.

[Footnote 2: "The experiment has been long tried on a large scale,
with a dreadful success, affording the demonstration that if, from
early infancy, you allow human beings to _live_ like brutes, you can
degrade them down to their level, leaving them scarcely more
intellect, and no feelings and affections proper to human
hearts."--_Report on the Health of British Towns._]

Hence, I say, in the battle with the slum we win or we perish. There is no middle way. We shall win, for we are not letting things be the way our fathers did. But it will be a running fight, and it is not going to be won in two years, or in ten, or in twenty. For all that, we must keep on fighting, content if in our time we avert the punishment that waits upon the third and the fourth generation of those who forget the brotherhood. As a man does in dealing with his brother so it is the way of God that his children shall reap, that through toil and tears we may make out the lesson which sums up all the commandments and alone can make the earth fit for the kingdom that is to come.