"Broke," The Man Without the Dime

by Edwin A. Brown

In every State of the Union, the Legislature should pass a bill giving cities the right, under home rule, to erect and maintain a Municipal Emergency Home. Every city ought to pass an ordinance for the creation and maintenance of such Municipal Emergency Homes, and the budget of the city should contain an appropriation for its maintenance, based on the same reasons on which the appropriation is granted for running the Health Department, Police Department, or any other Department of the Municipal Government.

The ordinance to be passed by the city council ought to create and develop a system that will give protection and opportunity to every honest wandering citizen while sojourning, in search of work, in the community.

In the cities of New York and Boston, an appropriation is made from the public treasury for the care and maintenance of their Municipal Emergency Homes. In Chicago a special budget is created and added to the appropriation of the Police Department. It should properly have been added to the Health Department.

THINGS TO AVOID.

A Municipal Emergency Home should not be designed to be a money-making institution, but merely to provide shelter and food for men and women who appear temporarily destitute. If it should appear that those demanding shelter in the Municipal Emergency Home should be afflicted with any physical illness, it should be the duty of its superintendent to transfer such individuals to a hospital ward, which may be a part of the Municipal Emergency Home, or to the city or county hospital where each man or woman may be thoroughly cured of any illness which has put them into destitute circumstances or is unfitting them to perform any kind of labor to make existence possible. The mind of the community is being educated to see that the adjustment of individuals to a suitable environment must be quickly but scientifically attempted. If unfit they must, if possible, be made fit. The idea seems to be dawning that permanent unfitness must be met with permanent adjustment.

A PROTECTION TO SOCIETY.

For the present, the Municipal Emergency Home stands, or rather should stand, on the one hand as a link in the chain of governmental institutions, not only as a public policy and agency which supports the individual who either fails in life or is compelled to be one in the ranks of destitute men because of economic conditions, but as an institution wherein one may receive temporary relief under the rights of citizenship. On the other hand, it should stand for the protection of society from the degradations, annoyances and misdemeanors of the individual who would thus be a burden upon his fellows and upon society as a whole. In other words, the Municipal Emergency Home should be one maintained and conducted strictly by the municipality as a governmental institution. It should be the tiding-over place for the man or the woman without a job, a refuge to satisfy immediate needs, a hospital in certain cases of sickness, an asylum in case of destitution.

ESSENTIALS TO SUCCESS.

The author believes that there are two factors essential to the success of a Municipal Emergency Home; first, the co-operation of all public departments in the city government, and second, the cooperation of the public itself. When because of politics it has been found difficult to introduce improvements and progressive ideas in a municipality for relieving the temporarily distressed, it has become the custom to recommend religious or private charities for the management of relief-granting institutions. But no one can question the success and the need of a Municipal Emergency Home who is willing to investigate the wonderful success of the New York Municipal Lodging House and the Buffalo Municipal Lodging House. These are conducted strictly under city and County supervision and management. As such results as have been obtained in New York and Buffalo, and which may come into existence in any large city, under public management, why should other cities question the popularity and success of a Municipal Emergency Home under such management or doubt its advantages over those mismanaged by religious and private charity, the latter not infrequently run for profit?