The leaven in a great city

by Lillian William Betts

A clever, hard-working Irish woman was once telling the writer the story of her life and that of her children. At the time she was deeply interested in the future of four nephews, who were the motherless sons of her brother. Out of her experience with sons-in-law she enunciated her conclusions: "I tell me brother, don't let them b'ys learn politics; it's a mighty poor thrade. Sure, when Tammany's in they're all right; but when Tammany's out, where are they? Sure, it's a mighty poor thrade, as I learnt to me sorrer. Betther have them blacksmiths, sez I, like their grandfather at home. I do hope he be's listening to me, for they're foine b'ys." It will be easier for the four "b'ys" to learn politics than any other "thrade," for it is an open union making one demand, obedience to the "boss."

To this woman Tammany was an employer good to the poor man—a doctrine that is taught to the smallest boy. He breathes it in the air; he nurses it in the milk that nourishes him. As he gets older he adds a new article to his faith. The Tammany system is the protector of his liberties. It does not restrict him in his right of private judgment. As one studies the race sections, the discovery is made that hundreds of votes are cast for Tammany candidates in the belief that obnoxious restrictions on the sale of liquor on Sundays will be removed, or that the laws will not be enforced. The hope of raising the moral tone of the voters is futile while any portion of them justify the casting of a ballot for the sole reason that it will make it possible for the voter to break the law with impunity. The most demoralizing legislation is that which makes a man a sneak as well as a law-breaker. May the day be hastened when no man who stands in moral rectitude in the presence of man and God will be forced to maintain what he believes his rights in defiance of the law. We are a cosmopolitan country, owing power and greatness to the sons and daughters of many lands. The Puritan conception of government is out of place to-day. The larger conception of man not controlled by the law, but the master in himself of the restraints it would place upon him, is the American conception of manhood, and toward this the best legislative action must trend. Thinking men and women who have studied the social conditions of New York know that no more calamitous influence is set in motion in New York than a sense of injustice that protects and justifies to the people the breaking of a law. When this goes farther, and any considerable number of the citizens combine for the purpose of overcoming it by defying or by ignoring it, the foundations of the government are threatened. It is time for fanaticism to feel the pressure of broad-minded balanced public opinion. A law administered at the demand and according to the conscience of people unaffected by its administration, used by them against an equally intelligent class who feel that personal liberty has been curtailed at the expense of their right of judgment, is class legislation. No greater evil influence has been active in New York than the creating of a sentiment that endorsed the breaking of the liquor laws. It has been a prolific source of blackmail; it has enabled politicians, who live at the public expense, to pose to men whose personal right of judgment had been curtailed as the apostles of freedom. The short-sighted friends of temperance have by their misdirected activities created political capital for the men who in official life have made New York's problems.

Legislation enacted without the will of the people governed is provocative of two things: contempt and defiance of the law; unrest that makes for antagonism to government. The lower in the scale of reason the voter is, the less able he is to get any point of view but his own. His comprehension of the rights of others depends on the comprehension of his rights expressed in the law designed for his regeneration. He certainly never goes higher in the scale of reason while he defies the law in satisfying his sense of justice and freedom; he cannot rise in the scale of living while he stoops to acts he would avoid if his sense of justice were not outraged. He justifies his act because of his sense of oppression. He cannot respond to any effort looking to the general good of the city while he smarts under a sense of liberties curtailed by the very people who ask for his help.

When President Roosevelt was Police Commissioner he enforced the law governing the sale of liquor on Sunday. The city was torn asunder for weeks. The discussion filled the columns of the daily press. The fact, after weeks of discussion with one group of tenement-house women—all the wives of skilled workers—was finally made clear that the law was at fault, if fault there was, not the Commissioner. The law, if bad, must be repealed; but as long as it was the law it must be enforced. During this discussion much light was obtained. One woman told how cleverly the law was evaded by the liquor dealer two doors from her house. He hired the back room on the top floor of the house next door, keeping the liquor in a closet. The men in the secret entered the house two doors distant, went up to the roof and down the scuttle to the room where the liquor was to be had. Some of the group listened to her description with flashing eyes. When she finished she was given to understand that she had played the part of traitor. It was all right for her to do it. She was safe. Her husband was in a good, independent position; it made no difference to him how much trouble came because of her "telling tales." To others it was a disgrace that men who had only a few cents to spend for a little pleasure with their friends should have to sneak like thieves, as one of the women expressed it. All condemned having the liquor in their own homes in quantities, as they condemned the illegal selling. "When a man sneaks in like that he stays longer and spends more than when he can walk in openly and walk out again as he does other days. When he has it in the house he never stops treating and drinking until it's gone." The "free lunch" was deplored; but every one of the forty-five women decided that it was the only meal fit to eat that hundreds of laboring men ever had; that men were forced to eat at lunch counters in barrooms and buy liquor who would never go there if their mothers and wives knew how to cook. They claimed that the women would cook for their families if they knew how. They did not know how. They were forced to go to work in factories as soon as they left school, and never had a chance to learn anything about housekeeping; their mothers never knew how to keep house. Could a stronger argument for domestic science teaching in our public schools be advanced?

When the High License bill was before the Legislature at Albany several years ago, the writer was asked to speak at a mothers' meeting in one of the poorest sections of what was then the city of Brooklyn. On her way to the mission she counted nineteen liquor saloons on three blocks; in every case they were on the lower floor of a tenement house. The hall was over a pork and provision store; a loft without any attempt at more than broom cleanliness, walls bare, grimy, and seeming to ooze grease. The atmosphere of smoked meat was sickening. Nothing in the way of a shelter could have been more barren and repellent, yet it was a mission maintained by a church.

About one hundred women—the wives of day laborers and longshoremen—were present. Some were bareheaded: several with babies in their arms. The subject chosen was the High License bill. It was a discussion. At least ten of the women spoke. The scene will never be forgotten. One woman, about thirty, after listening intently, rose with a baby on her arm, and turning passionately to those in the hall, said: "Why don't yer talk honest? Every one of us drink. Some of us, not many, drink because we love it. Most of us drink because we're discouraged and don't know what else to do. We're fools; it don't help us; it makes it worse. Some of us would never touch it if it were not brought to us. We know that anything that would take away the drink from our doors would save us. Drive them out!" She turned to the platform appealingly. "Drive them out, so that we, yes, and the men, would have to walk four or five blocks to them, and we'll be different. It is easy sending the children now. Make it harder! Make it harder!"

"Shall we close them?"

"You couldn't do it," she said. "You couldn't do that. Make it cost more to start them, and there won't be so many. They'll be farther apart, and they won't try so hard to make us drink. Many a woman has learned to drink because she had to pass the holes to get to her home. Tell the truth like me, or say whether I'm telling the truth!" was her appeal to the audience.

The flood-gates were opened. Every woman agreed with the first speaker that the saloon could never be abolished; it could be regulated. Beer, they thought, to most women was a greater temptation than strong liquors. The number of saloons near their homes they thought the heaviest burden the poor man's family had to bear. They understood perfectly that the brewers paid for the licenses, and that the saloons were the meeting places where votes were controlled. They thought the saloons ought to be open at least Sunday afternoon, but they would have them close earlier Saturday night. They thought that any law that made a man a sneak to get a drink was an evil. They saw that such a law enabled the politician to say which man could sell liquor and which could not. One of them, who could neither read nor write, had discovered that the saloons selling a certain brewer's beer had more freedom than any of the saloons selling other beers; they thought the saloon-keepers paid either in money or drinks for the votes of the men who frequented their places in the interest of the politicians who owned the saloons or protected them. There was not the slightest evidence that one woman there saw any dishonesty in the system. There were no principles in politics, only men. Things remained with them the same no matter who was elected. It was a district which was under the control of one party, having an unquestioned majority, which steadily increased through the efforts of a shrewd leader who had no visible means of support.

The section in which this group of women lived was a long, narrow strip bordering on the East River. The residences of a population each occupying its own house at this time held the reeking tenements in check on the east. Within ten years this has been wholly changed. The handsome old residences have become tenement houses, overcrowded, uncared for, occupied by people now at the level of former despised neighbors. The better class of the laborers' families have left the houses bordering on the river, and these have been given over to the poorest and most hopeless of the day laborers. There is a thoroughfare which has stores brilliantly lighted for five blocks. Every want of the people can be supplied in them. The people, old and young, settle placidly in the region. It is their world. The language of the little children on the streets, from early morning until late at night, is appalling. A kindergarten was started, but the people who started it did not have money enough to secure the right kind of a room, nor to make the room attractive, nor to keep it so clean that that would in itself make it more attractive than the homes of the children. It was finally given up, because even the small amount expended was not forthcoming at the end of the third year. It could have had four times the number of children the room would accommodate at one time, but no one cared enough to support it.