"Broke," The Man Without the Dime

Presently I came to Twelfth Street, dark and gloomy, but there was no sign as in Chicago to guide the homeless man or woman, boy or girl, to the door of the free home. It was with difficulty I found it. There was a three-cornered box over the door, intended for a light, but it was not illuminated. Through smoke-dimmed windows there came a feeble light by which I could just discern the words, “Municipal Lodging House,” and on the door the inscription, “To the Office.”

Before entering I stepped back into the street and looked up at the building. It was an old three-story brick building, with no sign of a fire escape. I entered and found myself in a low and very narrow passageway. I applied to the “office” through a small window-door for my bed. There was an honest-faced, comfortably dressed young man just ahead of me, who gave his occupation as machinist, received his bed check, and passed on.

When I stepped to the window and asked for a bed, I received no word of welcome from a woman seated at her desk, her demeanor being decidedly unwelcome. Abruptly a man’s voice asked from within, “Are you willing to work for it?” I replied earnestly that I was. The woman then snatched up a pen and asked, “Were you ever here before? Where were you born? Where do you live? What is your business?”

My answers apparently being satisfactory, she thrust me a bed check, and said something about a light and something else which I did not understand, and slammed the door in my face. I stepped along and found myself in the woodyard among piles of wood, saws, sawbucks, and sawdust. I tried several doors, and finally found one that admitted me. A narrow flight of stairs let me to a bathroom, where a number of men were already trying to get a bath. There were two attendants, one who was working for his bed and breakfast, and the other, I judged a paid attendant. I was told to go into a closet and strip, and to hang on a hook all of my clothes except my shoes and stockings and hat. Having done this, I stepped out into the bathroom. It was heated by a stove, which emitted no heat, however, as the fire was almost dead. There were two bathtubs, and six of us were standing nude in that cold room waiting each for his turn. The boy working for his bed made a pretense with a mop of cleaning the tubs after each bather, but left them nasty and unsanitary. I got into about six inches of water, and hurriedly took my bath, because of the others waiting. I did not want to wash my head, so omitted that, but just as I got out of the tub the Superintendent came in and said, “You haven’t washed your head yet; get back in there and wash your head.” I immediately and meekly complied.

Shivering with the cold, I got out, was given a towel to dry myself, and then a little old cotton nightshirt with no buttons on it. Several of us being ready, we were led by the Superintendent up another flight of narrow stairs, through another long hall, and up two more series of steps to a small dormitory. I would have suffered with the cold if I had not seized an extra blanket from an unoccupied bed, and I slept very little. I was afraid to go to sleep, for if the building had taken fire not one man could have escaped. So I lay and took mental notes and soul thoughts of my companions and surroundings, and of all I had seen and heard since I left Denver.

I heard one boy say to another, “I tell you, I’m hungry. I could eat a mule and chase the rider up hill. Did you have any supper to-night?” And the other boy replied, “A policeman gave me a dime. What do you think of that? And I got two scoops of beer and the biggest free lunch you ever saw, and I feel fine.”

I heard a man say to the one next to him, “Do you think this place will be pulled to-night?” and the other answered, “Why, no; what makes you think so?” The first one said, “They pulled the Union Mission one night for vags, but I don’t think they will pull this place, because it’s a city lodging house.” Comforted by that thought, they both fell asleep.

During the night a frail boy, with no clothing except the thin nightshirt, went to the toilet, down the long cold halls and stairways, into the still more cold woodyard. When he returned he had a chill, and as he lay down I heard him groan. I said, “What is the matter, boy?” and he replied, “I have such a pain in my side.”

Just at daylight we were called, went down into a cheerless room, and were given our clothes, then on down to the cramped dining-room, with scarcely any fire, where we were huddled together, thirty of us, whites and blacks. Here we waited one hour for breakfast, and then we were driven out into the woodyard for some reason we could not find out, and waited another half-hour until breakfast was called. During that long wait almost the entire conversation was about work and where it could be found.

We went in to breakfast and sat down to a stew of turnips and carrots, in which there was a little meat. In mine there were three pieces of meat about as big as the end of one’s thumb. There was some colored sweetened water called “coffee,” and some bread. I did not care for mine, but the other men and boys ate ravenously. When the boy on my right had finished his, I said, “Ask for some more.” He replied, “It wouldn’t do no good; they only allow one dish.” Then a hollow-eyed, thin-handed man on my left said, “Are you going to eat yours?” I said, “No,” and he eagerly asked if he could have it. I said, “You most certainly can,” and then he asked me if I was not well. It was the first word of kindness I had received. He took the dish and emptied it all into his, but glancing up I caught the appealing look of the boy opposite. He took the boy’s empty dish, putting part of it into his dish, and the boy ate as though he had had nothing before.

Having finished breakfast, and while we were waiting to be assigned to our work, the door between our room and the inner room was left open for a moment, and we saw the Superintendent seated at a well-appointed table with flowers upon it, a colored man waiting upon him. One of the boys looking in said, “Oh, gee, look at the beefsteak,” and then another boy looked at me, and said, “You see how Washington treats the out-of-work, and this place is self-supporting, or more than half-supporting.” And then a boy who had come early and worked his two hours for that bed and that breakfast, gave us a cheerful good-bye and started off to walk seven miles to begin work on a farm, a place he had secured the day before.

We waited to be assigned to our work. I wanted to saw wood, the wood looked so clean and inviting, and, too, I had sawed wood when I was a boy on the farm, and knew how; but I was not allowed to do so, and was given the task of making the beds. It was rather repellant to me at first, but I thought of those far down through the years of the past, a great deal more worthy than I, who had done things much more humble for humanity’s sake. I can assure the honest man and boy who slept beneath those coverings that night that I had tried my best to make them comfortable, although the linen was not changed, nor the blankets aired.

Some of the men scrubbed, and some swept the floors and stairs; some worked about the dining-room; others sawed wood.

While waiting in the woodyard for breakfast, I jokingly said, as we looked at the wood, “What’s the matter of getting out of here? Then we won’t have to work.” And one replied, “We can’t, we are locked in.” To prove if this was true I stepped to the door and found it as he said. We were locked in and could not have escaped in case of fire or accident if we had tried.

There is a sign, sometimes seen to-day in the dance halls of our Western camps, “Don’t shoot the pianist, he is doing the best he can,” and so with the Superintendent of Washington’s Municipal Lodging House, under the conditions he may be doing the best he can. Work is always a grand thing. The floors and stairs were clean, also our food and dishes. He impressed me as being the right man in the right kind of a place. But the Washington Federal Lodging House is only a suggestion of such an institution. As the house now stands it is the lodger, the workless man and boy, who keeps the floors and stairs and windows clean. They do it willingly, but they should be treated fairly for their labor. Not one should be allowed to go to bed hungry. He should be given a clean, warm bed to sleep in, and a good wholesome breakfast, and all he can eat. He should be given a pleasant welcome, an encouraging word, and a cheerful farewell,—it means so much, and costs nothing.

I did not stay to see the inauguration. Somehow Washington had lost its brightness, and the grand men and beautiful women their interest. I had read almost every week for a number of years of “T. R.,” and of his democratic way of walking on Sunday morning to church, and then I fell to wondering why he never walked to a few other places in Washington, which were only a stone’s throw from his home. But one with great cares cannot be blamed for thoughtlessness in “little things.” I did not go to church as I intended. I spent the morning asking the press to appeal to the city of Washington, where Lincoln and Washington lived, thought, and acted, the city of love, charity and freedom, not to let another day pass until they had started a movement and sent a delegation to inspect and to copy the Municipal Lodging House of New York, that they, too, might build one, to be the example of our country.

CHAPTER VI
The Little Pittsburg of the West and Its Great Wrong

“Even the night shall be light about me.”—Psalms 139:11.

In Pueblo, Colorado, I discovered they were finding men dead in an ash-dump of a railroad company. Pueblo, called “The Little Pittsburg of the West,” is distinctly an industrial city. It naturally attracts thousands of workingmen during the course of the year, and when the demand for labor is supplied, it follows that many men will congregate there, willing to work but often unable to find employment immediately.

The great ash-dump, about a fourth of a mile in length, afforded warmth to the destitute homeless man, who had his choice between this exigency and the city jail. Men would lie down on the warm cinders, and while they slumbered, the poisonous gases would asphyxiate them. The death of their brother workers had made men cautious and when I was there they no longer crawled out upon the ashes, but lay down on the edge of the dump, where the ground held a certain degree of warmth.

I joined the miserable group one night, and as I lay there, and the night grew cold and dark and still, I could see, like serpents, the tongues of blue poisonous fumes leap from crack and cranny. I stood the exposure to the limits of endurance, and then crept away to that other humane expression of Pueblo—its only “Municipal Emergency Home,” the “Bull-pen” in its old bastile.

It was midnight as I entered, and a man hearing me in the hall came out of an office and looked at me inquiringly. Finally he asked:

“What do you want?”

“I would like a place to sleep.”

“Come this way and go through yonder,” he said, pointing the way to the jailer’s office.

I went as directed. As I entered, the jailer, who was asleep in a large reclining chair, awoke and greeted me pleasantly enough.

“Good-evening. What can I do for you?”

“Can you show a fellow where he can lie down?”

He immediately got up, and picking up his bunch of keys, said, “Follow me.”

I followed him through two huge iron-grated doors, to another door which opened into a great dungeon cell,—Pueblo’s first open portal in creating the criminal and crime. Huge chains with great iron balls attached were lying in the passageway leading to the cell.

As the jailer swung back the monstrous iron door, he said:

“I think you will find a place there. If the hammocks are all taken, you can lie on the floor.”

The great key was turned, and I was in Pueblo’s “Municipal Emergency Home.”

With the first dreadful feeling of suffocation and nausea caused by the foul air and the odor of unwashed bodies and open drains, and the awful fear of fire as I realized the impossibility of escape from behind so many iron-bound doors in the old rookery of a building, I would have begged to be released, but neither the jailer nor anyone else appeared until six o’clock the next morning. I therefore had to endure, and after I had finally adjusted myself to the frightful conditions around me, I was able to make my observations.

There were twenty canvas hammocks, all of unspeakable filthiness, hung one above the other, on iron frames. There was no pretense of bedding. The occupants covered themselves with their old ragged overcoats, if they happened to have any, and those who were not so fortunate, simply shivered in their rags.

The cots were all taken and an old man some seventy-five years of age lay on the concrete floor, which was covered with tobacco juice and the expectorations of diseased men. Vermin were running over the floor and on the tin dishes left there from the last night’s supper.

Water from the toilet of the women’s department above had run down the wall, and under this old man now sound asleep, and on into the waste basin.

I walked back and forth in my horror for some time, passing in front of the hammock beds and finally a man raised his head and, evidently thinking I was walking for warmth, said:

“Friend, you will find it warmer over there by the steam pipes.”

I wonder why he called me “friend”? A spirit of kindness from one man to another, in a place like that! Think of it!

I spent the entire night walking the floor or sitting on an old battered, inverted tin pail, studying the wretched inmates of the dirty, desolate cell.

I saw a man get up, and with outstretched hands, feel his way to the drinking place. I went over and helped him. He was totally blind. He told me he had once been kept in that place seventeen days. A one-legged man who had gotten up, hobbling without his crutch, helped him back to bed.

Never was sound sweeter to my ears than the rattle of the jailer’s keys when he came to let me out. He kindly asked me to stay to breakfast, but I did not accept. I was only too glad to escape to my hotel, to wash out the material evidence of contact with the foulness gathered on that most miserable night.

Mayor Fugard, who had been in office only two weeks, had already made an appeal for a new City Hall and City Jail, and I felt it was a courtesy due him to call upon him before going to the press with my story. When I told him I had paid a visit to Pueblo’s two city lodging places, and had spent a night in the “Bull-pen,” he threw up his hands and exclaimed:

“Good heavens! You have more courage than I have. I am glad you have come to our city and I am glad you have investigated conditions just as you did. I want you to take your report to every paper in the city, for I desire everyone to know the conditions of these places, just as they are.”

When I left Pueblo, I called on him to say goodbye, and he took me by the hand and said:

“You may quote me to the public, through the press, as saying that, as soon as possible, Pueblo will abolish the ‘Bull-pen’ and will yet have a Free Municipal Emergency Home that she will not be ashamed to own.”

CHAPTER VII
“Latter-day Saints” Who Sin Against Society

When I lie down I say when shall the night be gone, and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day.—Job 7:4.

As Elizabeth Barrett Browning sang of Florence, so one may sing of Salt Lake City. “Like a water lily resting on the bosom of a lake,” so rests the lovely Zion, reposing in a valley of green fields, trees and flowers and fruits, with placid lakes and flowing crystal streams; surrounded by soft gray mountains, rugged, clear cut, grand, their peaks covered with perpetual snow beneath whose surface lie untold millions of precious metals.

Besides precious metals, Salt Lake City has coal, oil, and salt, and an unsurpassed valley in agricultural fertility. Looking down upon the metropolis of Utah, one might almost fancy it a great sleeping town among its green trees, but I can assure you it is not so. Enter its gate and you will find it a veritable beehive of commercial industry, a city of a hundred thousand people, fast expanding, and becoming one of the great railway centers of the Western empire,—a city calling for the workers and many of them, for it is just the “hewers and drawers” that Salt Lake needs and must have.

In Boston, I once stopped in Scolly Square and listened to a number of Mormon missionaries expounding their doctrine. They were not, as many might imagine, old men with long gray beards, but were young men of perfect physical manliness, with the clear-cut eyes of those who lead temperate lives. They talked of Moses and the prophets, and in the midst of the talk, a well-dressed young man standing next to me interrupted by crying out, “Don’t talk to us of the Blessed in Heaven, and those canonized by the church! Give us a little practical religion. Tell us what privileges Salt Lake City offers to the man who is poor because he must work with his hands. Has Salt Lake City abolished any of the social evils that pauperize her people? Has she driven out the corrupt political machine? Has she established a municipal building to offer to temporarily homeless people shelter and food as a safeguard against the jail? Has she created a public bath, an emergency hospital, a free employment bureau? Tell us of a Christianity such as this, and we will listen.” The Mormon Elders seemed stunned into silence, and as the young man turned to leave, he addressed me, saying: “My God! How I suffered in that city! I am a printer by trade. I became destitute looking for work while there and suffered not only from hunger and exposure, but I was arrested and thrown into jail as a vagrant, simply because I was homeless, helpless, and penniless!”

It was during the first week in November that I left for Zion. On my journey I was obliged to stop over at a station called Green River, about one hundred and fifty miles east of the city. The weather was cold and raw, there was no fire in the station, and I felt extremely uncomfortable.

In the distance a dim light was visible, and I started to find out what it might offer of comfort, and possibly breakfast. On my way, I encountered six young fellows just crawling out of a warehouse in which was stored baled hay, on top of which they had been trying to rest. They were all thinly clad; their teeth chattered with the cold, and they shivered until their bones seemed to fairly rattle. They, too, went with me to the light which revealed a cheap restaurant. It was only a board shack but there was a stove in there touched with a deep, ruddy glow, and hot coffee and rolls was to be had for ten cents, and much more if one had the price.

“I thought I had a place for the winter. A ranchman said he would keep me at good wages, and I felt I was fixed, but the fellow who lived with him last winter returned and he took him back. Us fellows are on our way to Salt Lake City, but I am told just now that the harvest having closed, the town is full of idle men looking for work, and I thought if I could strike a job here I would stay.”

“If you have been working steadily for six weeks in the fruit belt, I presume you have plenty of money to tide you over, and you will soon be in some place where you are needed?”

“No, we haven’t, that is the trouble, and we must walk or beat our way to Salt Lake, although we have been working every day possible. We were paid two dollars a day. It cost us a dollar a day to live. We lost a great many days by stormy weather. Peaches could be picked only at a certain degree of ripeness, and often on pleasant days we would be obliged to wait for the fruit to reach that state, to be accepted by the packers. So we haven’t much money left. Our clothes are worn out, and must be replaced. You can easily see how necessary it is for us to save the little left of our earnings.”

I knew every word this boy was telling was true, for the Fall before, I had picked fruit for two weeks near Grand Junction to satisfy myself what it meant to toil in an orchard,—to see what it meant to the orchard owner, and what it meant to the railroad in transporting that fruit. Thus, I knew, from personal experience, that the worker who garnered the harvest for the people, filled just as important a place as the orchard owner or the railroad company.

“Last night,” the boy continued, “I tell you we were tired and hungry when we reached here. We walked twenty-five miles yesterday and each of us fellows chipped in fifteen cents, and we bought three loaves of bread, a piece of meat, some vegetables and coffee. We went down by the railroad track just below town and made one of the finest ‘Mulligans’ you ever saw. Didn’t it smell good, that cooking ‘Mulligan’ and hot coffee! And it was almost done when a fly cop of the railroad company came along and shot our cans all full of holes and drove us away, declaring we were camped on ‘private property,’ the right-of-way of the railroad company. We were robbed with all the pitilessness that would be shown a hardened criminal!” His face took on a look of fierce, piercing hatred.

Those boys had been creating dividends for that railroad, and they knew it; and every one of them should have received free transportation to Denver, Salt Lake, or to some source of labor, instead of abuse and persecution.

I looked out of the window and saw my train coming into the town, and I ran to catch it, and left my little company of toilers waiting and watching for an opportunity to beat their way on a freight to the “City of Saints.”

After reaching Salt Lake, I looked down, from the window of a fashionable and exclusive hotel, in the heart of the beautiful city, upon Salt Lake’s shame,—down upon dens of vice and iniquity that would put to shame many cities who boast of no moral standing whatever.

I found the boy’s report was true. The city was filled with men idle after the summer and autumn work, which the early coming winter and sudden cold weather had closed down. I drifted around among these idle men and talked to a great many. I found a vast number temporarily homeless, and out of money, suffering. Why was it? Industry seemed to be at its height, a great deal of building was going on; in fact, there seemed to be work of every sort for everyone. The reason was very evident. Employment could not be obtained at any of the employment offices without money. It was the universal statement among the homeless penniless men that not one employer would stake a man to live until pay day.

In the evening I put on my worker’s outfit, and set out to look for a free bath and bed. I asked the first officer I met where the public bath house was, as I was “broke.” He looked at me in astonishment, and then replied, “I’ll tell you, Salt Lake is a little shy on free baths just now. You might go down to the Jordan River, but it’s pretty cold this time of the year.”

Then I began to look for a bed, and asked another policeman where the City Lodging House was, as I was in need of shelter. He raised his hand and pointed through the alley to a bright light, the City Jail. And so in this city, amidst the “Latter-Day Saints,” men are compelled to lose their self-respect, and seek shelter in a vermin-infested city jail, or else become a common “Moocher.”

I did become a mendicant and went to the Y. M. C. A., but they could do nothing for me. I was about to enter the Salvation Army, when the lights went out and the place closed for the night.

I then joined a group of young fellows (who, by the way, had also come from the Grand Junction fruit district), and I asked them, “Boys, if you are busted, where are you going to sleep?” They answered, “In a ‘side-door Pullman’ in the railroad yards.” Inviting myself, I said, “I am with you.”

These young men were all strong, healthy fellows, except one who was slight and delicate, whose large eyes seemed to hold a strange, intense light. There was the red glow of fever in his cheeks and when he coughed I caught a glimpse of a crimson stain. One of his pals was thoughtful of him that night. He had a little money and he slipped it to the boy, who was sheltered from the first penetrating cold of the early winter for one night at least, and had a warm supper, bed, and breakfast.

Reaching the dark and gloomy railroad yard, we stealthily threaded our way among the cars, fearful of arrest from the yard watchman, looking for a car which possibly might contain some straw. Finally we found one. The odor was that of a car in which hogs had recently been shipped. Soon the half-starved, body-wearied boys were sound asleep, but for me, sleep was impossible,—I was perishing with the cold. It was a marvel how they could sleep at all. It was obvious that they were suffering and only getting fitful snatches of sleep, which their restlessness plainly showed. The only reason they really kept from freezing was because they were huddled closely together. In a short time I realized that my experience would be dangerous to health if I remained longer, and I slipped out and away.

As I walked up that great long broad street of the city, I thought a great deal about Salt Lake and its people. I wondered if there was any deep moral, humanely reasoning love there. I wondered if its citizens’ love for their brothers in this great republic would much longer allow those conditions to prevail. I wondered how they could be made to see that they needed these itinerant workers for the upbuilding of their city and the State, and if Salt Lake and Utah could be induced to do their share toward offering these men a decent welcome and a refuge until they could be placed at honest work.

CHAPTER VIII
Kansas City and Its Heavy Laden

“All religions are beautiful which make us good people.”—Auerbach.

Just before the opening of the great harvests of Kansas, I reached Kansas City. Ten thousand men had congregated there in anticipation of work. The season was late and the harvest would not begin for a week or ten days. The men must be right at hand. While all of them could be classed as homeless, migratory wage-earners, they were not all penniless by any means. Only a small percentage of them were without actual means of subsistence, although there were probably a thousand of really penniless men in Kansas City when I reached there, men who must beg, or steal, to make existence possible.

By actual experience I soon found that immediate work was unobtainable. On the eve of my first night in the city I sat with a number of unfortunates on the projection of the foundation of the Salvation Army Hotel. Beside me was a stout young man of good manner and with a pleasant, open face. Turning to him in a casual way, I said, “Where can a fellow find work?”

“I don’t know, unless you get a job down on the railroad,” he replied. “I live in Indianapolis. I’m out here to work in the Kansas harvests, but I’m sorry I started so soon for I’m here about two weeks in advance of the work. It has been such a cold, late Spring.”

Just then a police officer came down the street—it is remarkable how unpleasant a drink or two will make a policeman,—and rapped us up with the ingratiating command to “Move on!”

After the officer had passed, I again took a seat, but the boy remarked, “You had better not sit down again. He may return any moment, and he’ll club you. He clubbed me yesterday and I haven’t gotten over it yet.”

So we got up and walked toward the Employment Office to investigate the work he had spoken of, and as we walked I noticed that my companion limped,—the result of the “clubbing” he had received from the policeman.

I could not help thinking of his needs and his situation. Seeking to draw him out, I asked as if I sought to have him treat, “Have you the price of a beer?”

“No,” he replied, “if I had I would buy something to eat.”

“Are you hungry?”

With a forced laugh he replied, “Yes, I spent my last dime last night for a meal. I held it in my hand so long it had grown rusty but I had to let it go at last.”

Putting my hand in my pocket and pulling out a silver dollar, I laughingly remarked, “Well, I’m not broke, but I will be when this little lump of sugar is gone. I’ll tell you, Jack, I’m a believer in combines, the kind of combine that a hundred cents make, and we’ll go shares on this one.”

I wish all Kansas City could have seen the expression of hope that lit up that starving lad’s face. My sharing with him was something more substantial than the sermon or inexpensive advice usually handed to the starving man.

“Well,” I said, “we’re partners now, and we may as well be broke as to have only this, so let’s go and eat it.”

I led him away from the neighborhood of the City Hall and the City Jail, and the Board of Health and the Helping Hand Mission, and out of all that black and heartless region, to where we could get a clean meal without being poisoned by some cheap slum eating house. We talked as we went along, and I asked him where he had spent the previous night.

“Down in the yards in a freight car, and it rained nearly all night. The car leaked, and at about two or three o’clock in the morning it grew very cold. I suffered a lot. I was afraid of being arrested, for we’re not allowed to sleep in the yards. But the watchman was decent and let me stay until daylight.”

I had heard of the “Helping Hand” Mission Lodging House, known to those who are forced into it as the “House of Blazes,” and I asked him why he had not gone there.

“There was no room,” he replied.

Coming from the chop-house we went to an employment office, where we read upon the blackboard:

“Wanted—Fifty men in Oklahoma, $1.35 a day, free shipment.”

We stepped inside for further information and found that board would be three dollars and a half a week. The boy studied for a moment and then said:

“Let’s go.”

“You go,” I replied, “you are strong enough for the work, but I’m not. I may meet you down that way when the harvest opens.”

“I think I will go,” he replied. “It’s hard work, ten hours a day, and if I lose two days out of the week by bad weather or sickness or a hundred other reasons, or buy a few things I’ve got to have, I will be in debt to the company at the end of the week. But it’s better than to stay here and beg or starve. Some fellows can ‘mooch’ but that’s one thing I’ve never got low enough to do, and I hope I never will. It’s only a bare existence there, but as you say, the harvest will soon be open. I’ll go.”

Suiting the action to the word, he went in, obtained his transportation, and on coming out, shook my hand with both his own while he earnestly said good-bye and begged of me to be sure to meet him again if possible. He started off, and as he reached the first corner on his way to the depot, he stooped down and rubbed his knee as if in pain, but cheerfully, and with a final wave of farewell, he straightened up and disappeared.

But he could not disappear from my thoughts, this starving and shelterless boy, down and out, ill-used, yet ever ready at the first suggestion of hope to rush again into life’s battle. And so I have related this incident of meeting him at length, although it was nothing in comparison with some of the terrible things I learned that afternoon. In fact, rarely in any city, have I seen so much human misery publicly exposed, and in so small a space, as I did there, around the block bounded by Main and Delaware, and Fourth and Fifth Streets.

I saw men driven like animals, eight at a time, into the bull pen of the city jail. When night fell and the streets were ablaze with light I was still walking about and observing. I felt in my pockets. The last cent of my dollar was gone. The chop-house had left me broke. So I began to inquire where the homeless and penniless could find shelter.

In the main, I found that conditions were the same as in Denver, except that Kansas City had the “Helping Hand” institution, to which I have referred,—an ostensibly “religious” institution, backed up in its operations by the co-operation of the city authorities.

Recalling what I thought I knew about this institution, it required some courage to trust myself to its tender mercies, but I determined to try it and learn about the actual conditions existing there.

I went first to their religious service, where I heard an exceptionally able address on the features of Christ’s humanitarianism, and on the wonderful merit which there was in the application of the “square deal” principle between man and man, individually and collectively.

The house was filled with a large number of men whose broken appearance told only too plainly that the world was not dealing kindly and “squarely” with them. When the speaker had ended his address the men were asked to come forward and thereby signify that they had accepted the teachings of Christ as they were interpreted by the preacher. Not a man stepped forward.

That night, as a destitute workingman, at this same place I asked for a bed. I was told I could have one but was expected to do two hours’ work for it.

“I am perfectly willing to do so,” I replied.

The office was caged in by a heavy iron wire as though to be protected from thieves. The man at the desk said:

“Well, leave me your hat, and when you have done your work in the morning you will get it.”

I humbly handed him my hat, and numbering it he threw it on a pile of many others. He was obviously holding my hat as a ransom, fearing to trust my honor.

I was given a bed check corresponding to the number of my hat, and told to go upstairs. A man sat at a desk on which an old, smoky kerosene lamp was burning. He showed me into a room in which one hundred and sixteen men were sleeping. He did not turn up the light, even for a moment, so that I might see the kind of a bed I was getting into. He explained this by saying he feared to awaken the dead-tired, half-starved individuals on the bunks. As a result I was afraid to get into my bed at all, but laid down on the outside of the covering and stayed there all night. Not a word had been said about supper or a bath.

The odor of the hundred unwashed bodies was nauseating. There was the usual consumptive and asthmatic coughing, and the expectoration upon the floor; there were no cuspidors, and the air was stifling.

Not far from me I heard a young man moaning, and every few moments he would exclaim, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” I went to him and asked:

“What is the matter?”

“Oh, I am suffering from inflammatory rheumatism,” he groaned.

I felt of his arms and hands, and found them burning hot and swollen hard from his elbows to his finger-tips.

“Can’t I go out and get something for you?” I anxiously asked.

“I don’t know what to tell you to get. I need a doctor.”

I called an attendant. The sufferer asked if he could get a doctor from the city hall across the street.

“No, not until nine o’clock to-morrow morning,” was the answer.

The man had two rags about twelve inches long and three inches wide. All night long, at intervals of every twenty or thirty minutes, he went to the water faucet, wet these rags, and bound them upon his arms.

I thought by contrast of New York City’s wonderful Municipal Emergency Home, and of the kind medical treatment given at any hour of the night to its inmates.

On arising in the morning we went down-stairs and waited an hour for our breakfasts. We could see our hats piled up behind the iron bars.

When the long wait was over, we were given a breakfast consisting of dry bread, stewed prunes, and some liquid stuff called coffee, without milk or sugar. What a hungry man would eat at that table, if he had been able to stomach it, wouldn’t amount to a value of over three cents a meal. While we ate we were supposed to refresh ourselves spiritually by reading the religious mottoes on the wall. “Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” “Blessed are the Merciful,” “He came to preach deliverance to the captives,” and “When did you write Mother last?”

After that so-called breakfast I was sent to work in the long, poorly ventilated room, in which the hundred and sixteen men, unwashed, diseased, and foul, had slept the previous night. I worked two long hours making beds and cleaning floors, in payment of the three-cent meal I could not eat, and the bed I dared not get into. The Mission people valued our meal at ten cents, and our beds at ten cents, and we were paying for it at labor at ten cents an hour, while at every other place in the city employers and the municipality were paying twenty and twenty-five cents an hour for common labor.

The boys who had paid their ten cents for a bed sat out in the office, and stood a chance of getting a job at twenty or twenty-five cents an hour at the labor bureau, but the boys whose hats were held as a ransom had no such opportunity.

It was not a “square deal.” And right there I saw one instance of its demoralizing tendency. In the room where I was at work a young boy was dressing himself. He looked up at a coat and hat which hung by the door, and asked me, with an innocent look:

“Whose hat is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think it’s a tramp’s?”

“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t take it if I were you.”

After a moment’s thought he said:

“I’ve got a job this morning if I can get there, but I can’t stay here for two hours and get it.”

In a few minutes I noticed that the boy and hat were both gone. I suppose he thought it a fair exchange since he had been compelled to leave his own in the office, and who will say it was not?

The floors were filthy, the beds rotten. The blankets were stiff and the sheets ragged; they were both contaminated with all the filth of diseased and unwashed men. I don’t believe the blankets had been changed for years or the sheets for weeks.

It seemed to be the custom of the superintendent of this place to keep up a show of cleanliness by making the men and boys do the scrubbing for nothing. When a bed is to be looked at by a “charitably inclined” visitor, clean pillow slips and sheets are put on, but they are for exhibition purposes only. As for the beds that are actually in use, they are well worth the immediate attention of the Kansas City health authorities.

Only the real inmates, and not the casual visitors, can know the “Helping Hand” for what it is in practice. Morally, it is a breeder of crime, and not an aid in any way to the recovery of self-respect. The only commendable feature about it is the Labor Bureau run in connection,—an adjunct that every Municipal Emergency Home should have.

Such a Bureau is proof that the cry of men not wanting to work is a false cry. I wish those who pay heed to it could have seen the object lesson that morning when those hundreds of middle aged men, young men and boys, almost tumbled over one another in their eagerness to reach the window and get the jobs of carpet-sweeping, dish-washing, store-clerking, stenography, and other kinds of work that were being given out.

Can such a rich city as Kansas City afford with impunity to neglect its duty to its “hewers of wood and drawers of water?”

CHAPTER IX
The New England “Conscience”

“See to it only that thyself is here,— and art and nature, hope and dread, friends, angels and the Supreme Being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”—Emerson.

Studying in Boston—as is said of Paris—is being born in Boston.

When a boy in my teens I spent four years there, and those four years awakened in me the brightest dreams and brightest hopes for a successful future.

After thirty years, I am again in this renowned center of intellectual culture as a student, but this time as a social student in pursuit of knowledge of how our “Modern Athens” cares for the honest, out-of-work, penniless, homeless worker.

At half-past ten at night, in search of a free bed, I made my way down to a building, at least seventy or more years old, looking for Boston’s Municipal Lodging House, “The Wayfarers Lodge,” better known as “The Hawkins Street Woodyard.” (Boston is rather given to pretty names. They have a Deer Island also.)

My reception was not at all encouraging for a destitute man. I was not even asked if I was hungry, but was shown at once into a bath-room, located down in the cellar, which was dark and uninviting.

After my bath I put on a nightshirt taken from a basket, and carrying my hat, shoes, and stockings in my hand, I climbed two flights of stairs to the dormitories, leaving the rest of my clothes to be fumigated, as I supposed, but I doubt very much if that was done, as they had none of the purified odor of thoroughly disinfected clothing I had noticed in New York.

There was no sign of medical inspection, nor any attempt at separation of the sick from the well. I should judge one hundred men to have been in the two dormitories that night. There were boys not more than fifteen years old sleeping by the side of men of seventy. The beds were shoved absolutely tight together, which gave the appearance of all sleeping in one bed. When it became necessary for any one of them to get up during the night he was forced to crawl over the next men or over the head or foot of the bed.

As there were no cuspidors, the men expectorated into space without thought or care of where it fell.

Two men came in and took beds next to mine. The one on my right was an intelligent workingman, the one on my left was a drunkard with a horribly offensive breath from disease and rum.

The beds had no mattresses,—a blanket was simply thrown over the woven wires,—and as I sank down on one, it became a string beneath me. A blanket was our only covering, and the pillows, filled with excelsior, were as hard as boards.

I said to the man on my right:

“Did you have any supper to-night?”

“No, I didn’t, and I feel pretty weak and hungry. I spent my last thirty cents this morning for a breakfast, and what do you think I got for it? I got a piece of beefsteak four inches square so tough I could scarcely eat it, and some potatoes fried in rancid lard.”

I made no reply and the exhausted and half-starved man fell asleep.

“I wish I had a couple of drinks of whiskey,” said the man on my left.

“Oh,” I replied, “you don’t want much; one drink would do me.”

“Yes, but I’ve got beyond that,” he said; “it takes a good many drinks to do me, and they can’t come too fast, either.” Then, with a sigh, he added, “My dear old Daddy, God bless him, I have one thing to blame him for. He taught me to drink, and here I am in this charity business—a drunkard.”

And he, too, turned over and fell asleep. But I could not sleep; asthmatics and consumptives were coughing constantly, and the wreckage around me was too much for my sympathies.

The coming of the daylight through the windows was a welcome sight. I got up and went to the drinking place, and asked a burly looking attendant if it was time to get up.

“Naw, taint!” he snapped, with a wicked scowl.

When I went back to bed I saw this man lock the two doors leading from our dormitory to the outside toilet rooms, and for half an hour the men were obliged to use the basin at the drinking place for sanitary convenience!

When the doors were finally unlocked, supposing it to be the signal for us to get up, I went with hat and shoes in my hands and sat down in a chair by the door. When the attendant to whom I had spoken earlier, came up the stairs and saw me there, without a moment’s warning he seized me by the wrists, jerked me to my feet, and giving me a shove thrust me in a most brutal manner through the door, exclaiming:

“Now, will you stay in there until you are told to come out?”

I shuddered to think what would have happened if I had been a half-starved boy, and had resented that man’s insult. Doubtless I would have been beaten into insensibility.

Finally, after another half hour, he yelled from the doorway:

“Hey, there, you fellers, get up and get out of here!”

Quickly we obeyed and were driven down into the cellar. From there we were driven to the woodyard, where we were made to saw wood for two hours. The strong men sawed their stint in much less time than the weak ones. For the latter it must have meant two long hours indeed, weakened as many of them were by a chronic hunger and disease, and having gone supperless to bed and being as yet without breakfast.

When I had finished paying for my “entertainment,” I was again driven into a place to put my saw and saw-buck away, and then I was allowed to go to breakfast into a cheerless, overcrowded room; even at this stage of the game I was driven to three different places before I was allowed to be seated.

They brought me some bean soup with beans swimming in it, so bitter with salt I could not eat it; a water cracker so hard I could not bite it, and a dirty slice of bread, that one of the indigent, but willing workers, carried in his soiled hands and dropped by my plate.

A very hungry looking young man who sat beside me tasted his soup and exclaimed:

“I’m hungry, but I’ll beg or steal before I’ll eat this stuff.”

We both got up and left the “Hawkins Street Woodyard” in disgust; he going down the street for breakfast, and I in another direction to my hotel.

During this, my social study, I have received many letters from the itinerant worker.[B]

I may add that I did not investigate Boston’s Associated Charities, but I did catch a suggestion or two that as far as helping the temporarily out-of-work and destitute toiler, both man and woman, they were inadequate and their good qualities did not exceed the “Hawkins Street Woodyard.”

Dressed in my garb of a worker, which encourages confidence because it excites sympathy, on another day, on the Boston Common, I was attracted by two idle men sitting on a nearby seat, one an Irishman and the other a Swede. They seemed to be feeling about as good as cheap Boston beer could make them, and the Irishman in an earnest yet jovial way was trying to convince the Swede that the world was flat instead of round. I dropped down on the seat beside them, and just then the Swede saw a man he thought he knew, and abruptly left us.

I turned and said to the Irishman in a tentative way, “Where can a fellow find a job?”

He replied, “Do what I’m doing. I’m an actor, and I’m playing the drunkard’s part in ‘The Price of a Man’s Soul,’ every night, over at Hell’s Corner on Tremont Street.”

This answer naturally surprised me; but without a trace of astonishment, and with seeming indifference, I said,

“I am with you, friend, for that is a part in which I sparkle; but on the square, what do you do for a living?”

“Well, I’m a barber, and as fine a barber as ever held a razor. I owned a big shop once, and I hired twenty men, but it went when I went. I am so low down now, no one wants me. Oh, occasionally I’ll get a job in one of the cheap places. I worked two hours last night in Cambridge, and two the night before in Chelsea.”

Then with sudden digression, I said, “Where can a fellow get a bed and something to eat if he’s broke?”

“You can go down to the Hawkins Street Woodyard. But don’t go there unless you have to!” And he described its wretchedness, which I knew from my own experience. The man was truthful on that point, and I believed in him.

I laughingly said, “What’s the matter with going down to the ‘Island’?”

“Well, I can tell you all about those places. I have done time in all of them. One day in Charles St. Jail, one week at Tewksbury, and forty days at Deer Island.”

“Can a man with no crime but poverty go there and get work, and be paid for it?”

He laughed sardonically. “You can get work all right, but your pay is tough board and abuse. They’ll probably set you to digging graves at Tewksbury. They die over there like sheep with a plague.”

“But what of Deer Island?”

“Well, I’m a barber, you know, and they put me in the barber department. One day two of the prisoners, also doing my kind of work (all men who come there have to be shaved), were two minutes late coming in from the yard to work. That made the attending officer mad, and he said, ‘I’ll fix ’em!’ and he forced those men for hours to stand with their faces to the wall with their hands over their heads. It was a question of obey or be thrown into a dungeon perhaps for days. I saw that punishment inflicted many times, and I saw men fall from exhaustion and pain and be dragged out. Where they were taken, I don’t know, and many of them were old men, too.

“One day I was sent over to the hospital to trim, as I was told, a young woman’s hair. I took only my shears and comb. On arriving there I found a young woman with a head of hair that shone like silk, and fell three feet down her back. She was in tears and begging that it might be spared. She was only there for thirty days and it meant leaving the place doubly disgraced. But the Matron declared she had seen a louse in her hair, and her word went. When I came in she asked me if I had brought the clippers. I said, ‘No.’ She ordered me to go and get them. Feeling sorry for the girl I told her it wasn’t necessary to cut the hair. I could clean her head perfectly without cutting off a single hair. At this the Matron said, ‘Are you an officer or a prisoner here? Get your clippers and do as you are told, and quickly!’ I knew what it meant to be disobedient. I saw before me the dungeon-inferno. I left the girl crushed and sobbing, and that wealth of hair almost worth its weight in gold upon the floor.

“There was a mutiny among a few of the men, demanding a change in their food. They were working all day for nothing but that food, but because of their demand, they were thrown into the dark dungeon, fed on bread and water for ten days, and I saw some of those men, as they came out from the darkness into the light, faint on the prison floor. One of them was an old man with a long, snow-white flowing beard, and you know how proud an old man is of a beautiful beard. Well, I was ordered to cut it off and he pleaded as the young woman did for her hair, but in vain. He said to me, ‘This is my first time on the Island. My wife knows I am here, but my children don’t. Wife has forgiven me, and I am to leave in a few days, and I had looked forward to such a happy home coming, but they won’t recognize me now, and this puts upon me a double infamy. All of my friends know I am here. I did not mean to be uncivil, I meant to do right, but I was drawn into the revolt, not realizing I was doing wrong which would put us in the dungeon. I feel so weary and broken. I wish now more than ever that my prayer in the dark dungeon had been answered, for I prayed many times in there, that when the light came to me again it would be the light from that land of Him who said, “I was sick and in prison and ye visited me.”’”

I looked in wonder at the man speaking to me, scarcely believing him. He noticed my expression and said, “Those were his words, his very words. I remember them for they impressed me.”

“Is this true?” I asked. “Is there a law in Massachusetts allowing a man to be condemned and thrust into a dungeon for ten days for a petty offense like this?”

“I have not told to you one hundredth part of the suffering I saw at Deer Island. The cells there are absolutely dark. There is a small slide in the door where the doctor peeps in to see if a man is dead, or gone mad.”

“If he is dead, what then?”

“Well, if he has no friends, he is put into a box and carried just over the hill to the burying plot called ‘The Haven.’”

I was so touched by this man’s story, I could listen no longer. I got up and took him by the arm and said, “Let’s cut out our fault.”

He replied, “I’ll have to, I guess, for its cutting me out.”

I strolled on up the Common, and thought of all it meant, “The Haven” over the hill. This man told me he had been a citizen of Boston all his life. Who would believe this story of a destitute old floatsam cast up from the wreckage of America’s temple of Elegance? Had he told me the truth or a lie? I have many reasons to believe every word he told me was true, but there is no man who can verify this story, except the man who has done forty days at Deer Island.

In a conventional visit to the Island, I looked into the men’s prison just far enough to see tier upon tier of small cells in which all the prisoners are locked for twelve hours of every day. The dungeons I did not see as they are never open to visitors.

It was a clear beautiful day. Blue sky and blue sea, all around, white ships sailing by, the men working in the fields, the women busy in the sewing rooms, all inspired me to think that Deer Island could be made a place of hope and cheer. But that vision was far from the reality. The prisoners kept a funeral silence, happiness or hope was not for them. Even their work was stolen from them.

I said to one intelligent looking man who was working in the garden, “It helps a fellow to come down here, doesn’t it?”

He answered, “Yes, if we are not made physical wrecks by the treatment we receive, it does help us. But then, when our time is up, we are disgraced and thrown back helpless into the same old slums of the city, just as before.”

The Penal Commissioner of Boston told me that he could use thirty beds a night in a Municipal Emergency Home, just to accommodate the men and women who were daily discharged destitute from Deer Island.

While Boston has done much for its poor, its sick, and its children, there still remains the problem of the utterly down and out, the shelterless and moneyless, but honest, workers.

Can Boston allow New York to excel it in caring for it shelterless workers? I hear the cry, “Where can we get the money?” When you ask that question you are putting a price on a man’s soul. I wish some goddess of gentleness would touch the hearts of those “munificent” and “public spirited” citizens who founded the Boston Public Library, that they might also build a Municipal Emergency Home, and ornament its frieze with a perpetual beauty of words, “Dedicated to the advancement of the Commonwealth and Humanity.”

I am not without historical sentiment. I love local antiquities, if they can be mine to enjoy without oppression. Boston has old burying grounds and churches worth millions and millions of dollars. The dead have rested there a long time. Why not build for the living who have nowhere to lay their heads, a Municipal Emergency Home that would be a living force for the upbuilding of the morals and economic security of the commonwealth?

CHAPTER X
Philadelphia’s “Brotherly Love”

“Hast thou Virtue? Acquire also the graces and beauties of Virtue.”—Franklin.

I had read that Philadelphia’s hospitality was her great virtue, and that it was characteristic of her people to bestow upon the stranger and the homeless—who are and who come within her gates—a blessing of care and kindness nowhere else known,—to make them feel that at last they have found a haven.

The first Philadelphia police officer I met I asked several questions about the city. His manner toward me was a surprise. He seemed very willing to talk with an apparently homeless man. We spoke of a number of things, among them the Philadelphia Coat of Arms which ornamented his hat, representing the shield of honor and the scales of Justice. I said, “It is beautiful and stands for a high ideal.” He replied doubtfully, “Yes, if it is carried out.”

I then strolled down to the corner of Eleventh and Race Streets, and seeing another policeman I approached him with the question:

“Where can a fellow get a free bed?”

He looked at me in surprise.

“I don’t know. You might go down to the station house on the next corner. They may give you a bunk.”

I walked slowly down to the station house. Was it possible that in that great city of “Brotherly Love,” its police could not direct a destitute man or woman, boy or girl, to a place of rest, to a home of shelter,—to be fed and given comfort and good cheer,—except to a jail and behind iron bars?

I entered the station where there were a number of men around the desk. I asked the Captain where a penniless man could get a free bed. He asked,

“Haven’t you the price of a bed?”

“No, I have not a penny in my pocket.”

“Well, I’ll give you a cell,” he said, and opened a register to write my name. I asked,

“Is there not a place in the city where a man can work for his supper, bed, and breakfast?”

“None that I know of,” was the answer. Then an officer said,

“You can go down to the Galilee Mission.”

I asked where it was, and they directed me. Just as I turned to go the policeman nearest to me handed me a dime.