A SOCIAL CENTER BECOMES POLITICAL.
The half-grown boys are coarse-looking, use profane and coarse language unknowingly in their ordinary conversation on the street. Their attitude toward girls is brutal. The girls of this section are free in their manners, slangy and coarse in their conversation. They earn the lowest wages paid to women in the factories and lofts that abound in the region. The schoolhouses are old and dark; the streets are neglected and dirty. The smoky, grimy mission-room disappeared long ago. Not one influence is at work to raise the general moral tone of this community, the voting power of which outnumbers four to one regions where every influence in and out of the homes tends to develop moral standards and political intelligence in the same political unit.
The region is a social plague spot, neglected and allowed to spread. It does not present as a special feature to arouse activity the evils of the "Red Light" district, but only the blasting influence of a region sunk in the apathy of deadened moral natures, killed by the hopelessness of changing the environment of their homes until it represents all they ask of life. The poverty of the people makes well-nourished bodies impossible, and lack of physical power makes moral resistance impossible.
Recently in one of the most crowded of the tenement-house sections of New York, where the grip of poverty holds degradation, where the people live as remote from American civilization as when in their own land, the writer viewed the parade in the evening of the voters of the district, who had been the guests of the district leader, a State Senator, at an outing. These outings are the annual "round-ups" of the voters. The expenses of these outings run into the five figures, it is said, in this district. Boats and a grove are hired. Chowder, coffee, sandwiches and beer are provided free. Games of chance, to which, it is whispered, the district leaders are not disinterested observers, and athletics are the features of the outings. The return at night is an occasion for fireworks and a parade. Caps and canes are provided for the voters often; sometimes only a ribbon badge. The expenses are met by the sale of tickets, which sometimes sell as high as five dollars. These tickets the liquor dealers, in fact, the tradesmen of all kinds in the district, men holding office under the city government who are affiliated with the leader and the men who hope to secure rights or privileges, legal or illegal, through the leader's influence, know it is wise to purchase. To the mass of the men of the district it means perhaps the one day of freedom in the year, when they have the pleasure of enjoying drinks and food wholly at the cost of another.
In this particular parade were five thousand men, not one thousand of whom bore the slightest outward evidence of American citizenship, but the right to vote, as their presence in the column indicated. It scarcely seemed possible that the scene was in America. Swarthy women and children crowded gayly decorated fire-escapes, crowded the windows, and made movement impossible on the streets. Arches of lights, lanterns swinging from fire-escapes and on ropes from sidewalks to roofs, were in the colors of the land from which these people came. The flags and bunting displayed presented colors of a foreign land, with here and there the flag of the country whose political destiny their votes controlled to a large degree. The next day the white caps worn by the men in this parade appeared on the heads of schoolboys and working boys by the hundred, the wearers proud to wear the colors of the man who, so far as their knowledge or experience, or that of their parents, went, was the greatest man, the man of the widest range of authority, in the United States. What do they care who is at the head of the city government? The men do not need to ask who is the district leader; he finds them through his unpaid workers and the coalition is accomplished. Soon the immigrant, turned citizen, understands the principle. He gets work and votes for the leader. It is simple and direct. When the extent of one's knowledge enables him to handle a broom or to sell peanuts or bananas in the new country, and that under the supervision of a blue-coated tyrant who levies on the voter's cart, if not his pocket, when and where he pleases, moral arguments in a foreign tongue are not convincing to that voter. He would rather not submit to the supervision and its attendant tax; he would rather not have his work intermittent; but he learns that protest increases his evils, and he submits. The blue-coated tyrant is a friend of the "boss" who helped get his license, and it must be right. Whatever comes to him, he must not antagonize the "boss." That is the first lesson he learns in American citizenship, at the point where it is most effective, his wage-earning privileges.
A DOORWAY ON THE EAST SIDE.