Four Years in the Underbrush: Adventures as a Working Woman in New York

by Anonymous

This is only one of many, many such instances that come to every social worker. What would have happened to my group of workers had we followed the advice of the committee woman who wanted every man out of a job, or who was working for low wages, sent to Hog Island, it is difficult to imagine.

At every meeting of that committee it was: “Why don’t you send him to Hog Island?” “Isn’t that a case for Hog Island?” or “He should go to Hog Island. I’m reliably informed that they are offering a dollar an hour and can’t get enough men.” I heard so much about Hog Island that I used to be afraid I’d get to grunting.

The majority, if not all, of the men that particular committee member wished shipped to Hog Island were the fathers of large families; several the only surviving parent. Everybody who knows anything about social work in New York City knows, or ought to know, that keeping a tenement father of a numerous family on his job is one of the chiefest problems of all philanthropic workers. He is only too willing to drop out of sight, get a young wife, and leave his old wife and her dozen or so children for the city to support. Ten to one such fathers are of the desirable citizens who come to us via Ellis Island.

What committee members refuse to learn is that “those people” are human beings, with hearts and sensibilities. They can love, and they can also hate, “even as you and I.”

Now to compare a sympathetic gentlewoman, the bearer of a respectable name and the mistress of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars, to a thief, the robber of a poor-box, may seem an exaggeration. If so, it is in favor of the robber of the poor-box. He gets a few pennies, a dime or so, and if caught is sent to prison as the most contemptible of thieves.

She saves two or three or five hundred dollars annually, directs how other persons’ money is to be spent for the needy, and gains the praise and respect of a circle more extensive than her acquaintance. She neglects, forgets—call it what you will—her dues as a committee member.

If she were to do such a thing in any club in New York City she would be dropped from the list of members. She must pay her annual dues or get out. As a member of a committee dispensing the funds of a philanthropy she is pledged to pay a stipulated amount. That is the first condition on which she is selected.

I made a point of cultivating the acquaintance of persons handling the funds of five leading philanthropic organizations in New York City. All five of these persons assured me that if the members of their committees would pay their dues their organization would never have a shortage of funds. One of these women told me that she intended to give up her position because she was sick of working with such persons, devising ways and means of making up the deficit when there should be no deficit.

Yet these persons have the supreme effrontery to sit with a committee and dictate how money contributed by the public for the sick and needy shall be spent. If they possessed unusual experience or a name of value in drawing contributions they might be excused. So far as I could learn not one of this class of human cooties possessed either—just a colossal egoism and a contempt for “those people” by means of whose misfortune they seek to climb to social or professional prominence.

Stealing from the poor of the slums of New York City means in the summer sick men and women and little babies shut in stifling flats, drawing into their system with every breath the stenches of sweltering weather, their suffering and dying for lack of ice and fresh air. In the winter it means the old, the sick, the helpless starving and freezing to death for lack of food and a handful of coals.