A Decade of Retrogression

Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky

[Reprinted from The Arena, Vol. 4, No. 21, August 1891]

During the ten years which ended with 1889, the great metropolis of the western continent added to the assessed valuation of its taxable property almost half a billion dollars.

In all other essential respects save one, the decade was a period of retrogression for New York City. Crime, pauperism, insanity, and suicide increased; repression by brute force personified in an armed police was fostered, while the education of the children of the masses ebbed lower and lower. The standing army of the homeless swelled to twelve thousand nightly lodgers in a single precinct, and forty thousand children were forced to toil for scanty bread.

Prostitution, legalized in the purchase of besmirched foreign titles and forced upon the attention of youth in the corrupting annals of the daily press, was flaunted publicly as never before. Scientists competed for the infamous distinction of inventing appliances for murder by electricity, while in the domain of politics the sale of votes in the closing years of the decade was more notorious than at any period of the city's history. In a society in which all things are commodities to be had for money, the labor power of stalwart men and tiny children, the innocence of delicately cherished girlhood, the marriage tie, the virtue of the servant, and the manhood of the statesman, it is eminently fitting that the record of progress should be kept officially in dollars and cents.

This is done in all our communities in the report of the disbursing officer who is known in New York City under the title of the Comptroller. His report shows what money the city spends, the sources from which it is derived, and the purposes for which it is used. The following data taken from statement "G" of his report for '89, may be readily verified, and will prove, upon examination of the original, to be but few among many conspicuous indications of retrogression.

Expressed in dollars and cents, then, the growth of pauperism and crime was such in the decade which began with 1880, that we now spend more than a million each year in excess of the sum spent then for the same purposes. If we have grown in population so rapidly that the percentages remain unchanged, the fact cannot be ascertained for want of data. Nor is it important. The weighty fact is this, that pauperism and crime have gained upon us. Riches are greater and poverty is greater.

The moral and social retrogression indicated in this item of the Comptroller's report is thrown into bold relief by another item, the expenditures for schools. While the paupers and criminals have grown upon us by an annual expenditure of more than a million in excess of the sum needed in 1879, the school children's share of the public funds has grown by less than a million in excess of the requirements of 1879.

More shameful still is this retrogression when the item of police expenditure is considered, for this exceeds outright the appropriation for the Department of Education, and has grown more rapidly than the expenditure for schools. It appears that, under existing conditions, when property appreciates half a billion in value, it is necessary to have four and one half millions' worth of police to watch over and protect the half-billions' increase in assessed value from the ravages of our paupers and criminals.

It seems also that in 1879 our police cost less than our schools, while they now cost more. The problem assumes a still greater aspect when the expenditure for paupers, criminals, and police are taken together, for it then appears that they cost nearly twice as much as the schools.

Thus the community is clearly moving in the direction of more demoralized masses of population kept in check by the brute force of an armed police, since each year the excess grows which is spent for paupers, criminals, and police over the expenditure for education.

One retrogressive influence fails to find positive official expression, and is, therefore, the more worthy of notice. This is the collusion among officials to reduce primary school attendance. The Board of Estimate and Apportionment never approves the full appropriation made for the schools. The Board of Education strives to live well within the sum allowed it, and crowds the greatest possible number of children upon each teacher, the regular enrolment being seventy primary pupils per teacher. Then to parry the charge of over-filling schoolrooms, it becomes the duty of the principal to reduce the enrolment per schoolhouse to the lowest point. Therefore, when a zealous Sunday-school teacher finds that one of her little charges has gone to work under age, the offices of the city's solitary factory inspector being out of the question, she hunts up a truant officer, who takes the child before a magistrate, who, in view of the want of school accommodations, promptly discharges the truant. Behind our local municipal administration lies our whole system of capitalistic production, calling for cheap hands and profit, not humane culture. And the school authorities do but seek to supply the demand of that system for lads who can read the papers enough to vote with the machine, and write and cipher enough to be available as clerks.

Everything beyond this being unprofitable, the great mass of our city children are turned out of school at the ages of ten, eleven, and twelve years, to furnish "cheap" hands for industrial purposes.

The Comptroller's report is substantiated, moreover, by the concurrent testimony of the State Superintendent of Education, who laments that:--

"There is a large, uneducated class in the State, and our statistics show that it is growing larger. The attendance upon the schools has not kept pace with the advance of population. Recent legislation forbids the employment of children under thirteen years of age in any manufacturing establishment, but no adequate provision is made for gathering them into schools, and the number in the streets grows more rapidly than the number in the schools. Indeed, nothing practical has ever been done in this State by way of compelling attendance upon the schools. The result is sadly apparent and the premonitions are full of warning." [Report State Superintendent of Education. Report 1888, p. 12.]

In 1889 (p. 13) the same official, Mr. Andrew S. Draper, says:-- "The total attendance upon the schools, when compared with the whole number of school age, has grown less and less with strange uniformity." [Report State Superintendent of Education. Report 1889, p. 13.]

The factory inspectors in their report for 1886, say, p. 15:--

"The ignorance is something alarming. Thousands of children _born in this country, or who came here in early childhood_, are unable to write; almost as many are unable to read, and still other thousands can do little more than write their own name. Possibly one third of the affidavits of the parents examined by us in the factory towns were signed with a crossmark, and it seemed to us that when the children who now require these affidavits grow up and have children of their own about whom to make affidavit, the proportion of crossmarks to the papers will not be decreased."

"Children born in Europe, and who lately came to this country, are much better informed than the children born and reared in our own State, and this condition of affairs has also been remarked by the factory inspectors of other States. Very few American-born children could tell the year of their birth, State they lived in, or spell the name of their native town."

In the midst of his gloom, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics courageously endeavors to show that wages have increased for men in the labor organizations. But in so doing, he merely whistles to keep up his courage, for he dare not investigate now, as he did in 1883 and 1884, the employment of women and children, lest he show how much worse their condition has become during the intervening years, and thereby forfeit forever his position of laureate to the powers that be.

The omission of a State census in 1885 was a breach of the Constitution for which no previous decade affords a precedent, and the absence of a school census becomes, year by year, a graver sin of omission as the pressure of economic conditions makes child labor more widespread and more injurious.

In default of the State census and of adequate information from the State Bureau of Labor Statistics, and of efficient factory inspection, an eager welcome awaited the statement touching New York City, published in Mr. Carroll D. Wright's report of the National Department of Labor upon the working women in twenty cities, whereof the following speaks for itself.

Mr. Carroll D. Wright's report for 1889:--

"As respects ventilation, a properly regulated workshop is the exception. The average room is either stuffy and close, or hot and close, and even where windows abound they are seldom opened. Toilet facilities are generally scant and inadequate, a hundred workers being dependent sometimes on a single closet or sink, and that, too often, out of order."

"Actual ill-treatment by employers seems to be infrequent; _kindness, justice, and cordial relations are the rule_."

It would be interesting to discover the idea entertained at the department as to what constitutes ill-treatment.

"Out of 18,000 women investigated, the largest number, 2,647 earn $200 and under $250 per annum, 2,377 earn from $250 to $300. The concentration, it will be seen by consulting the tables, comes on earnings ranging from $150 per year to $350 per year."

"_It is quite clear from the various investigations that have been made, that there is little, if any, improvement in the amount of earnings which a woman can secure by working in the industries open to her; her earnings are not only ridiculously low, but dangerously so._"

"The summary by cities, tables xxx, pp. 530 to 531, would seem to indicate that _the majority are now in receipt of fair wages when the whole body of working women is considered_."

When such self-contradictory "information" is placed before the public as the fruit of investigation, the question arises whether the Department of Labor is not one more link in that chain of appliances for confusing the voter which embraces a dozen State bureaus of irrelevant reformation created chiefly within the last decade. Certainly in comparison with the first report of Mr. Wright's Massachusetts incumbency, the present one indicates a retrogression as marked as it is injurious.

Defective as it is, however, this information is the latest that we have, and it indicates terrible poverty among the better situated manual workers.

The average wages of the employed during employment being decidedly less than a dollar a day, it is not strange that homelessness grows and the police department reports:--

"As will be seen, the enormous number of 4,649,660 cheap lodgings were furnished during the year, to which should be added the 150,812 lodgings furnished in the station-houses, making a total of 4,800,472. If tenement-house life leads to immorality and vice, certainly the fifty-eight lodging-houses in the Eleventh Precinct, furnishing 1,243,200 lodgings in one year, must have the same or a worse tendency. Reflection upon the figures contained in the above will lead to the conclusion that we have a large population of impecunious people (all males) which ought to be regarded with some concern. It is shown above that an average of 13,152 persons, without homes and the influence of family, lodged nightly in the station-houses, and in these poorly provided dormitories, an army of idlers willing or forced. It is respectfully submitted that social reformers would here find a field for speculation, if not for considerable activity."

Into whose hands can our half a billion of added wealth have wandered, that it leaves more than twelve thousand human beings homeless throughout the year? And is the growth of such poverty, not retrogression?

It is urged from time to time that New York is no typical study for American conditions because of the immigration that forever flows through it, and the abnormally large proportion of the "_un_fittest" left as our residuum. But in comparison with the armies of the unfit systematically produced by our industrial system, the stratum of residuum deposited in the metropolis by the flood of immigration rolling westward, is too trivial to disturb the equanimity of candid observers. Only the perverted vision which leads New York's most famous charitable institutions to imprison beggars and kidnap the children of the very poor in the name of philanthropy, can so confuse cause and effect. If we were civilized, if we were doing the nation's work in an orderly manner, every recruit would be so much clear gain. It is the disorganization of our moribund industrial system which leaves no welcome for the immigrants save as the tenement-house agent may bleed them, and the sweating contractor "grind their bones to make his bread." It is this disorganization which turns the source of our finest reinforcement into a means of demoralization and temporary retrogression.

We have seen that in accumulated wealth, the city of New York increased by nearly half a billion dollars in the past ten years. A fair share of this material wealth was doubtless derived from the application of electricity to human uses, for that was pre-eminently the decade of electricity.

Yet, even in this respect the metropolis failed to hold its own. For, while the substitution of electricity for horse power has gone rapidly forward in the small cities of the West and South, New York has suffered an extension of its slow, filthy, and pest-breeding horse-car transportation. There can be little doubt that the unspeakable state of the streets contributed largely to the deadliness of the epidemic which raged at the close of 1889.

Nor was the electric lighting of New York more successfully developed than the use of electricity for transportation. The last night of the ten years found the city buried in stygian gloom, because the duty of lighting its streets is still a matter of private profit; and the insolent corporation which fattens upon this franchise surrendered the privilege of murdering its linemen unpunished, only when its poles were cut and its wires torn down. A more classic application of the Vanderbilt motto in action it would be hard to find, or a more thorough demonstration of the inadequacy of capitalism to rule the genii itself has summoned. Characteristic of the low plane of humane feeling in State and city is the substitution of the electrician for the hangman in judicial murder, at a time when the effort is general upon the Eastern Continent to abolish capital punishment.

As the application of electricity rose pre-eminently characteristic of the past decade among the uses of science, so architecture towered above all other arts. Yet, for one problem solved after the magnificent fashion of the Brooklyn bridge and the Dacotahs, hundreds of plans were devised with delicate ingenuity for filling up with bricks and mortar the small remaining air space in the rear of tenement blocks. And this noblest and most humane of all the arts was degraded in the service of millionnaire land-owners and sub-letting agents until the problem of to-day is, how to kennel the greatest mass of human beings upon the least area with smallest allowance of air, and light, and water, without infringing the building laws. One of the simplest solutions is superimposing floor upon floor, so compelling tired women and puny children to mount narrow, dark, and gloomy stairs, and increasing to its maximum the danger of fire. The Egyptian pyramids and the catacombs of Rome centuries ago were not poorer in healthful light and air than were these homes of our fellow-citizens in our own decade of retrogression.

But does this mean that our civilization is a failure, and the prime of life past for the Republic? Far from it. It means, I take it, that capitalism has done its work, and has become a hindrance, that the old industrial and social forms are inadequate to the new requirements and must be remodelled, and that promptly. It is now nearly half a century since Karl Marx wrote the following words, but they apply to the New York of to-day, as though he were among us and suffering with us:--

"It is the sad side which produces the movement that makes history by engendering struggle.... From day to day it becomes more clear that the conditions of production under which the capitalist class exists, are not of a homogeneous and simple character, but are two-sided, duplex; and that in the same proportion in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the same proportion in which there is development of the productive forces, there is also developed a force that begets repression; that these conditions only generate middle class wealth by continuously destroying the wealth of individual members of that class, and by producing an ever-growing proletariat."