LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Reading edition
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.
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.
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.[Back to Contents]