The leaven in a great city

by Lillian William Betts

CHAPTER X.

WHERE LIES THE RESPONSIBILITY?

It took years for the evils of political machines to make life unbearable in New York. Not until the tremendous evils it imposed on child-life were given emphasis did the public sentiment of the city find intelligent expression—voice the moral conscience of the whole people. That dishonest administration of the city government imposed burdens on the home of the poor man no intelligent person disputed; but few knew how heavy the burdens or how far-reaching the effects on character. The people who suffered most were, in the very nature of things, the ones who could not see these influences, or estimate truly the degrading effect on character. The people who resented the conditions that made life harder in the tenements; who resented the environment which made the bringing up of children in innocence, integrity, and decency often impossible, were those who were in the minority. Hopelessness of overcoming the evils made some voters the forgers of their own chains.

Newspapers gave columns to the exposure of the evils of the political methods which made individuals rich at the cost of the homes of the city, especially the homes of the poor. But the phase of this influence that was most degrading could only be learned by living in the regions, one of the people, suffering with them the burdens dishonesty imposed.

When college-trained men and women established their homes in the regions of the tenements, making friends with the people, associating freely with them, especially with the young people and the children, they discovered that the worst evil with which the people were contending was the constant lowering of the moral standards due to the influence of the political organization that seemed to regulate even the right of the people to earn a living. It was but a step from fear to favor; but a little time before the man out-weighed the principle; Justice became the hand-maid of "pull," and the people living wholly under the environment corrupt political power created, knew no government but that of the "leader" and the man who represented him. To trade votes was no disgrace, for it meant a share in the perquisites that political power held. These men and women of trained intelligence saw that the corrupting of the moral standards of the people was a far greater evil—an evil that was of far greater moment to the whole people than the maladministrations that affected their physical being, though it led to death.

It was the revelations the Settlement workers were able to make to a half-informed community of wealth and trained intelligence that led to the redeeming of the city. It made the active combination of wealth and poverty that brought into the political arena the dormant consciences that created in 1901 the Apotheosis, New York redeemed, that is the justification of democracy to the world.

The iniquity, ignorance and indifference that create and maintain a system of municipal administration based on the theory that politics is a profession, and each promoter the architect of his own fortune, to be built at the expense of the citizens, is the reflection of the character of the citizens. The system is never the product of one man's brains, nor does its growth ever begin at the top. It begins always in the smallest political unit, where the man who wishes the office in the gift of that unit stands closest to the people. The bargaining for votes begins there. The number of exchanges of votes for favors and places successfully accomplished makes the "boss," the man who represents law and order; who is judge, and jury, and keeper of the jail to those who do his bidding. As the political units develop their bosses—"leaders," in voters' parlance—the system grows until the chain is complete, and each political henchman, in the order of his importance, takes his share of the people's money. The perquisites reach millions before the thousands are distributed that enables the leader to pose as the all-pervading friend to the district in time of need.

The political units where this system of government in the interest of the "boss" have their strongest hold are the best evidences of the moral degeneracy that follows. Here the liquor saloons flourish, the headquarters of the "leader" and his cohorts, used in the order of rank in the system, from the gayly lighted, silver-bedecked, mirror-lined bar-room to the smoky, dirty, vilely kept den where those gather who have no use in life but to vote according to orders and work for the political leader's entrenchment. These saloons represent the primary school and the university of the voters of the district. They represent all the educational and recreative opportunity of most of the adults. They establish the habits of thinking for the majority of the people, for they are the lyceum where all questions are discussed that interest the people. The most interesting is how to get wages, as it is the most important. The common struggle creates common bonds of sympathy. All principles go down before the concrete, understandable fact that if the "boss" is beaten, work will cease for neighbor, friend, and friend's friend. Each man learns through every course in this training school of citizens that the paramount duty of each voter is to keep the "boss" in power. It means wages, or the hope of wages, under the least strenuous of employers, the city. Men work hard for the system, not because the moral nature of many of them is not in revolt against the system, but because the keeping of a home for wife and children is at stake. Often the voter's necessities, his ignorance often, his rebellion against wealth often, his unrest, undermine his moral nature, blind his intelligence, and he forges the chains that bind him in slavery to a system that will cast him aside, and refuse him a reason when there is no use for him. The voter may work during an election campaign half knowing that to secure another worker in the interests of the political system the place he holds has been promised to another after election. This fear and this hope enters the homes; women and children are educated under the moral degradation that enslaves husbands, sons, brothers, friends, lovers. The standards of morals are established even in childhood by the working of the systems of political machines. There is one measure of morals, success. What succeeds is right.