"Broke," The Man Without the Dime

CHAPTER XV
In Portland

“To live honestly by one’s own toil, what a favor of Heaven!”—Hugo.

“Dell me, vhere I find me a lawyer?” In broken accents, these words came to me from a German laborer who stepped up to me out of five hundred unemployed men who thronged Second Street in the vicinity of the labor bureaus.

“I am a lawyer,” I responded; “what is the trouble?”

With an amused expression, eyeing closely my blue jeans, he said, “You vas not a lawyer.”

“No,” I answered, “I am not a lawyer, but tell me your name, and what is your trouble, and perhaps I can find you one.”

“My name is Steve Goebel. Vell, I dell you, I go there,” pointing to the employment office near at hand, “seven days ago, und I pay two tollars for a job at lumber camp Rainier, fifty, maybe seventy, mile avay. I pay my fare out there. I vork six days und six hours for vun seventy-five a day, ten hour a day, den dey dell me dey no vant me no more. I work so hard in rain und vet, und I vear mein clothes out, und I pay five tollars a veek board. Vhen dey dell me dey no vant me no more dey offer me dhree tollars for my six days und six hours’ work. I owe the commis, vhat you call it, fifteen cents for leedle tobac. Den dey take from me vun tollar hospital fee und dhree tollar poll tax, they say, or road tax, und offer me dhree tollar. I not take dot dhree tollar,—somevun dey rob me. I hafe leedle money. I come back part vay on boat, as far as my leedle money bring me, den I valk back here. I dell the office how I get treated und dey says nefer mind, ve get you anoder job, but I say I valk all night, I am hungry, den dey give me den cents for breakfast.”

I took this man to the office of the City Attorney and left him there to tell his story. I afterwards repeated the story to one of the leading newspaper writers of the city. He looked at me very earnestly, and said, “Do you think there will be a thing done about it?” I looked at him without reply, and he continued, “There won’t be a thing done. There is no law for the poor man here.”

The man had been robbed in as low and cowardly a manner as only a most depraved degenerate could be guilty of. Portland had helped to make that man destitute, and now he is forced to beg, steal or starve, until he finds another job, or perhaps, through desperation takes his life. Similar experiences in Portland have forced a great many to do that very thing. Several men have been found dead in a pretty green square in the heart of Portland’s breathing spot, called the Plaza, and postmortem examinations have revealed nothing in their stomachs. And these tragedies have taken place almost within a stone’s throw of the Associated Charities.

A great pile of water and pitch-soaked blocks of kindling wood was piled in front of No. 10 North Second Street, a Jap restaurant. Some of the blocks were so heavy it was with difficulty they could be carried even singly. The wood belonged to the Japs. An old man, an American, some sixty odd years of age, was carrying it in. I asked him if he did not want a helper. He said, “I would like a helper but there is so little in it and there is not enough for two. I am carrying this all in for thirty cents and it will take me, I think, three hours.”

This old man had a good, kind face, and his clothes, though worn, were clean. He continued, “I have been playing in a little hard luck of late and must get all out of my work possible.” I then asked him if he had breakfasted. He had not. I said, “I have a little money, come and have some breakfast and carry in the wood afterward.” He said, “No, I won’t take your money, I will soon be through here and get my pay.”

I was seated in Tragedy Square (the Plaza), near a neat, well-dressed young man, and while sitting there two young girls about sixteen or seventeen years of age came out of a door across the street, and passed through the Square. The young man remarked:

“Do you see those two young women? They have just come out of the Woman’s Department of the Free Labor Office. You can tell from their appearance they are honest girls, but they would sell all that is dear to them, even their purity, for something to eat and a place to sleep. I may be wrong but from their appearance I feel it is true.”

Stunned as by a blow, at the words from the lips of this stranger, with noticeable feeling I said, “That can’t be possible. In this city of wealth, whose citizens boast of their refinement, their reasonableness, and their kindliness!”

“I know whereof I speak,” he answered, “for I have a girl friend whom I have been helping for over a year. Just recently she confessed to me why she forgot the teachings of her childhood and mother, why she forgot her dream of being honorably married and becoming all that her mother was. She said, it was because she was hungry and had no place to sleep. She could not ask for charity or beg. ‘I didn’t know where or how to beg,’ she said, ‘but then I met you and you were kind to me.’ I did not know this when I met that girl. I thought she was what she was from choice and not from necessity.”

As he got up to leave he said, “I am going to marry her and she shall be all that God intended her to be. I am going to help her, but there are many, very many girls who come to Portland, and who, through lack of life’s necessities, are forced to forget.”

And this instance could be multiplied a thousand times, and in a thousand ways, in a thousand cities.

In the afternoon, I began to look for work. I found that no privileges existed for labor; that the destitute working man, the man who was “broke,” was forced to seek shelter where the homeless dog and rat seeks shelter. Men here, as in other cities, were forced to the fermenting refuse thrown from stables because it held warmth! Often men slept out in the open air behind billboards and in a hundred other deplorable places, where they could get a little rest unless discovered by the police and thrown into jail.

In my search for work, I went to the offices of the Portland Light, Power and Electric Railway Company. I asked the clerk what show there was to get work as motorman or conductor. He answered, “pretty slim.” Nevertheless, he asked how old I was. When I told him, he said there was no work for me, that there was a brotherhood of the railway employees which was an adjunct to the company and one of its rules was not to hire a man over forty. I said, “It is true, I am fifty, but I am just as strong and well, able-bodied and competent as I was at twenty-five.” But that made no difference. I then asked, "If I were of an eligible age and you should give me work, what do you pay?" He said, “You are expected to work the first ten days for nothing. Then you receive twenty-four cents an hour for five years, then thirty cents as long as you live and work.” I said, “I am broke, and even though I were of an age to be chosen, I would be giving my time to you during those ten days, and a man will starve to death in nine.”

A man who looks for work does not lose his worthiness, but the man who is forced to ask alms, to ask something for nothing, does.

I then took the part of a cringing, disgraced, dependent with nothing to lose and nothing to gain, except to try and keep God’s gift, the spark of life, until in my own opinion, at least, I could place myself in a position to be honorable. I knew that I would be looked upon suspiciously by the police, possibly thrown into jail; that in all of the places where I would ask for aid, they would look upon me as mean, base, low,—mental defective perhaps, or a victim of some awful habit. My poverty would be, of course, all my fault, as “there is no need of any one’s being poor.”

I first looked for the Associated Charities. I scanned the papers closely, not knowing but that they might advertise to give a destitute man or woman, boy or girl, a lift. Finding no notice, I found the place at last, after a good deal of difficulty. Reaching there at about five minutes after five, I saw a sign on the door which told me they kept the usual “banking” hours, 9 A. M. to 5 P. M. I wondered whether, possibly, some one might not need a little help between 5 P. M. and 9 A. M.

The Y. M. C. A. here, also, had nothing to give an indigent man, any more than in the other cities where I had been.

Strolling down Burnside Street I came to an establishment with a sign, “People’s Institute,” over the door. I entered and asked for help. They had nothing to give away but religion. Yes, they had a reading-room, where a number of men sat reading in profound silence. Here I saw several other signs: “No Smoking,” “Do your reading here, your talking on the outside, but not at the door.”

I inquired where a man was supposed to talk, and was told that it was “in the park or a block down the street.”

I wandered down to the river. Glancing across to the other side I saw a huge sign, which read: “Salvation Army. Industrial Home.” I crossed the river and on reaching this work-house of faith and worship I saw that the lower floors were locked and dark. Climbing a stairway leading to the second story, I found myself in a rambling barrack. Hearing a noise in one of the rooms I made my way there and found a man preparing supper. I told him of my hard luck, and that I was willing to work for it if I could get a lodging for the night and supper and breakfast. He went right on pealing his onions and potatoes, telling me decidedly that the meals were for the officers of the Army and he was not allowed to give anything away. The Industrial part of the “Salvation Army Industrial Home” seemed to have ceased to be at the finishing of that great sign. The Captain told me later, however, that if I had asked the right man I would have been helped, but that I had asked the cook.

For several hours I drifted around. In some of the “beer depots,” as they call the saloons there, I found as many as two and three hundred men at one time. A policeman, whom I saw fulfilling his duty by driving a boy whom he suspected of being under age, from one of these resorts, directed me to two missions,—The Holy Rollers and the Portland Commons. Should I be denied shelter there, he told me to go to the jail, but added that I should not go there unless I was obliged to.

The Commons had a name which indicated that it was meant to serve all. I climbed the stairs to an office. The only man available about the place told me if I had been there and attended the service they might have done something for me. When I asked him if I could receive supper, bath, bed and breakfast by doing some service in return, he stared at me and asked me what kind of a place I thought they were running!

This is a simple statement of what a homeless man meets in Portland. If I had seen Staff Captain Bradley of the Salvation Army he would probably have given me a bed; or, had I come in contact with Mr. W. G. MacLaren of the Portland Commons, I would have been taken care of. I did not meet Captain Bradley after my investigation, but I did meet W. G. MacLaren, and found him a sincere Christian gentleman, doing a great deal to help those in need. I discovered, for the first time in my experience, a life-line running from the city jail to a mission, and the mission was Portland Commons. The night captain of the jail, Captain Slover, who ought to be chief of police of that city, was at one end of the line and W. G. MacLaren at the other.

Many discouraged, unfortunate workers have, through the efforts of these two men, become honored citizens. Both Captain Slover and Mr. MacLaren know that private and individual effort is a failure; that it is as one trying to dip the ocean dry; that under our national, municipal, social and political systems, their work is useless. These men believe in municipal ownership as far as taking care of those in need is concerned. They are strong advocates of a Municipal Emergency Home.

In Portland I found a boy who had been dragged at two o’clock in the morning from a delivery wagon where he was trying to sleep, and put in jail. Captain Slover sent him to the mission. On the street I saw another boy whom I had met in San Francisco a month before and who now was on his way to Tacoma, to which place his brother had written him to come, as he had a steady job for him with good pay. He had been pulled out of a freight car at three o’clock that morning and taken to jail. He told his story and they believed him. Afterward, while visiting that jail (the only Portland Municipal Lodging House) I found it such a filthy, disease- and crime-breeding institution that I wondered that the police themselves did not succumb. I found Russians thrown in there who were never in jail until they came to America. I saw the “drunk tanks” into which unfortunates were crowded and where, I was told, they were often found dead from suffocation.

On Sunday morning I attended the First Congregational Church. It was not the regular service but a sort of joint meeting with the Foreign Missionary Commission. The minister preached thirty minutes about how much he pitied the poor little dwarfed soul. I heard not a single word about trying to save the soul (and the body) of the hundreds of shelterless and hungry men in the city of Portland who were searching for the possibility of carving out an existence for themselves and those dependent upon them. In its neglect to care for these, the church seemed an accessory to death rather than to the uplift of unfortunate men and women.

During my entire work, I have been honored only once by being called upon by a minister and asked to speak in his church. “The Every Day Church,” it is called, situated far out, almost in the suburbs, on the east side of Portland. Its pastor, Rev. James Diamond Corby, will surely be heard from in the near future. He is one of the men of the hour in that city. The Oregonian, the leading newspaper of Portland, which has been the bell sheep of Oregon for a great many years, and which thinks the jails and prisons of our country are too attractive and should be made less so, did advocate the establishment of a Municipal Emergency Home when I first went to Portland. On Easter Sunday morning, however, they crucified my idea and cartooned the Municipal Emergency Home, as the hairy hand of socialism tearing down the American flag!

Shortly after leaving Portland I received the following letter which speaks for itself. Do not fail to read the postscript.

CHAPTER XVI
Tacoma

“The greatest bravery is theirs who humbly dare, and know no praise.”

I stood one day on the curbing of the principal street in Tacoma watching the construction of a sky-scraper. Near me stood a man of thirty-five, also watching. In reply to a question of mine concerning the wages of these builders who were taking such fearful risks, he said:

“They receive four dollars and a half a day, but one does not have to float in the open air on a steel beam fifteen stories high, only, in order to hold his life in the balance. I am working for the lumber trust for two dollars a day down in the Sound. I work on slippery logs under which is a current so swift and treacherous that a misstep would be absolutely fatal. But I was glad even to get that job for I was broke when I reached here and slept three nights sitting up in a chair in a saloon. The police thought I was a worthless old bum, I guess, for every little while they would come along and rap me awake. Out of my two dollars, I am saving a little, though, and I have a promise of a better job. If I get that I will soon be able to send for the wife and little ones,” and as he left me the thought touched his face with gladness.

It was a rainy day, the Puget Sound country being filled with rain and cloud during the winter months. I walked up to the City Hall, the Associated Charities, the Free Labor Bureau and City Jail, which are all near together. I counted twenty-five men standing out in the rain waiting for work. They were a pitiable lot. Stepping inside, I discovered why they were forced to remain in the storm. The office space for applying for work was about large enough to accommodate six men comfortably, and there, also, was a very noticeable sign which read, “No Loafing in Here.”

Tacoma offered no privileges for the destitute out-of-work man. Here he will find no free bath but the Sound, no free bed but a chair in an all-night saloon or the jail, no free meal without begging or snatching from the free lunch counter. I counted just one hundred men sitting up all night in chairs in the various saloons of the city, and once more I appeal to Tacoma, and to every other city, not to take the saloon from the needy until it can give something in its place.

What a conflict of opinions troop in at the suggestion of the word saloon! The saloon is a livid, malignant tumor, a virulent festering ulcer discharging corruption, abhorrent, odious. It breathes disease from neglected cheap lodgings, bull-pens and prisons. It is a destroyer of the City, State and Country; a murderer of reputation, character and society, a slayer of faith, love, hope and belief in God. Yet I have found it (who can deny it?) a Christian institution, saving the lives of men. It is doing what the church does not, or will not do. It stands a haven to the man who is desperate. It offers shelter and food to the homeless and destitute without demanding that he become a mendicant. It is true it may be only a chair, but it is under a roof and provides him shelter from the night. The food may be snatched from a fly-infested free lunch, but whether he drinks or not there are no questions asked.

To all cities I want to say, “keep your saloons until you have something else to take their place.”

While I was making my investigations in Tacoma, I stepped into the Penal Mission. There was quite a large company praising God and testifying what God had done for them. After seeing what I had seen, and knowing what I knew, I could not refrain from telling them that I thought since God had done so much for them they surely ought to begin to do something for God. So I began by telling them a little of the suffering as it had been revealed to me in Seattle and Tacoma. I was abruptly interrupted by the leader who asked me if I were a Christian, and gave me to understand that this was a testimony meeting. That was just what I thought I was doing—testifying for Christ—and though I was remonstrated with by several men, semi-believers, for leaving, I silently stole away.

While in Tacoma I met Archdeacon Grimes, an old, tried and true friend. He introduced me to the Tacoma Woman’s Club, which I found to be one of the most active Women’s Clubs in this country. The labor councils also were deeply interested. Tacoma may have been thoughtless, perhaps in the past, but Tacoma is so no longer. The city has awakened to her needs and is going to see that these needs are filled.

CHAPTER XVII
In Seattle

“There are no bad herbs or bad men; there are only bad cultivators”—Hugo.

I shall never forget my first visit to Seattle several years ago. I came from Tacoma by boat. As we rounded the point in the bay the magic city burst into view. It seemed like the work of genii, this mighty commercial gateway to the land of the Alaskan,—a wonderful, beautiful city, solidly, grandly built and in so short a time. It is a miracle of American industry and enterprise. Its citizens have force and power and determined character. Yet here in this beautiful spot, I found, as in other cities, the starving, homeless, and destitute.

“Will you give me enough to get something to eat?” asked an eighteen-year-old young man as he stopped me on one of the principal, prosperous streets of Seattle. He was such an object of pity that I hesitated and regarded him closely before I replied. So soiled and wretched was he that I stood apart lest he might touch me. Not alone did his clothing speak of his misery, but his face seemed burned with sin and neglect.

“Go to the Charity Society,” I said.

“Will they help me?” he eagerly asked.

I looked at a clock nearby and saw that it was then fifteen minutes after five.

“It will be useless for you to go there now as they close at five, but,” I said, “although I’m about broke, too, I will buy you a beer.”

His lip trembled and tears actually filled his eyes as he said, “I can find a lot of fellows who will buy me a beer, but I can’t find anyone who will buy me something to eat.”

The next day I looked for work and to see what privileges were accorded for the out-of-work, destitute man in Seattle. First, after a jungle hunt, I found the Charity Society. After waiting a half-hour far up in a very high building in a dark room with a lot of rubbish, I was seen and put through a humiliating lot of questions. I was not asked if I were sick, or hungry, or whether I had comfortable clothing or needed medicine. I was asked if I were a church member, if I supported my wife, and many other such questions. Then I was offered a ticket for two twenty-cent meals at a restaurant and a bed at a Mission Lodging House. I took the names and addresses of these places and making some trivial excuse for not taking the tickets (although I could have given hundreds of them away that night) I left. I found the restaurant in a slum, and while I stood in its doorway I counted eight saloons. The lodging house I found in the heart of the worst tenderloin ever created. The sleeping quarters were in a basement. Its immediate surroundings were Chinese and Japanese who come to this country bringing all of their own vices and who then promptly adopt all of ours. Three doors from the entrance to the lodgings is a brothel of the lowest character. It harbors seventy-five scarlet women of the worst type, and it is only one of the many near at hand. These places, which, with all the other corrupting influences for sin, make up Seattle’s worst hell, cannot be described. Yet it is here that the heads of the greatest of all the virtues send their homeless to rest. I rejoiced to understand that Seattle abolished this frightful tenderloin at the end of the administration which was in control of the city at the time of my visit.

While loafing late in the evening in one of the big beer joints, a strong, healthy fellow with whom I had been talking (and in our talk we discovered we were both broke) said, “If I had thought for one moment I would not have been at work by this time, I would not have sent so much of my money home.” Then he continued, “Where are you going to sleep to-night?”

With a quick thought, I replied, “Oh, I am fixed for something to-night. I have two places and you can surely have one of them if you want it. One is at the Salvation Army. I was up there not long ago and the attendant told me they couldn’t think of giving me supper, bath and breakfast, but if I would come and help him clean up between eleven and twelve o’clock at night he would give me a place to lie down, and you may have it. Do you want it?”

“You bet I do,” he answered. Then I said, “It is nearly eleven o’clock now. Let us go there.”

As we approached the place I said, “I’ll not go in and you will stand a better show.”

He went in with an uncertain manner. He was not used to begging. Presently he returned and said, “I don’t see anyone.”

“He is back in there somewhere,” I said, “hunt him up.”

Trying again, I saw him come out with a broom. Looking through the window he saw me, smiled and shook his hand as he began sweeping. He had got his job and covering.

The next day I met two brothers, one of whom was pale and trembling and staggered as he walked. I said to the elder boy (for they were only boys), “What is the matter with the kid?”

“Sick. They let him stay in the hospital until he could walk. I guess he is still sick.”

These boys, one a tradesman and the other out of work, had no home, no money, were obliged to beg, and were sleeping under the most horrible conditions. I think that if the search light could be thrown on every man destitute of a home, and into the places he is forced by circumstances to seek rest in Seattle, the humanitarians and the people of that city who really care would walk their streets and know no peace until a remedy had been found.

As I looked up the street I saw a large stone building and asked a citizen where the city jail was. He pointed to the great stone building and said, “That is the City Hall. On the top floor is the City Jail.” I remarked, “That is wonderful. That is the first jail I have ever found located as that one seems to be. It must be very bright and light and sanitary, compared to most of the prisons, which are under or almost under the ground.”

“Yes,” he replied, “it is, but it makes me shudder when I think of the awful den we had for years before that was built.”

I then strolled up and paid a visit of inspection to the jail. Reluctantly I was given an order by the police captain, directing the turnkey to grant me the privilege of looking about. The place impressed me with its cleanliness, its light and its good ventilation. He showed me first its bull-pen, one huge cell of concrete and steel, absolutely bare, where the inmates could only stand, lie down, or sit down on its concrete floor, and I remarked, “You must have as many as twenty-five in there at a time.”

“Yes, seventy-five,” he replied, and I saw again before me the vision (though it was midday), of the midnight scene of that midnight hell. Then I asked, “Where is the lodgers’ cell?”

He looked at me a little quizzically for a moment, and then showed me another cell about half as large as the bull-pen. “This is it,” he said.

It contained, as I remember, six young men or boys, I judged in their teens, and at that time of day I could not understand why they should be locked in there if they were only lodgers. So I said, “Lodgers are often forced into the bull-pen, too, are they not?” and he said, “Yes.” This lodgers’ cell, as he called it, was also absolutely bare, a stone floor the only rest for the man who must work or look for work on the morrow. But there was the Associated Charities, and if the three hundred shelterless in Seattle could have found it between nine and five o’clock, they would have been given a bed no doubt. At least a bed was offered me there.

Then my turnkey tapped slightly on a solid steel door of a solid steel cell. The only possible means for the ingress and egress of air to this dungeon was a small opening about half as large as an envelope. If I am not mistaken there was a slide door on that opening which could be closed, too, a device which is on all other similar torture chambers I have seen. He lightly tapped on the door, in a subdued way, with an expression as though he ought not to speak but must, and with an assumed, non-consequential smile, he said scarcely above a whisper, “There is a man in there.”

“What is he in there for?” I asked.

“They are trying to make him tell something they think he knows.”

Then he pointed to another one and said, “There is a man in that one also.”

“And what is he in there for?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long are they kept in there?”

“Ten days, sometimes.”

I knew the rest. The people of Seattle know the rest, or if they do not, they can learn it from the other stories of this book. There may be laws governing these torture hells and other prison abuses, but any government that allows them to exist is a government that will ignore the existence of these laws. I found in Seattle, also, six boys held for the Juvenile Court, locked in a cell in the county jail. I thought of Denver and her beautiful Detention Home for such as these.

Sunday evening came. I had heard frequently of a certain clergyman since coming to Seattle, and believing a change of thought and scene would rest my tired heart and brain, I climbed the hill. I passed one Romanist Church on the very crown of the hill so large and elaborate that I fancied it must have cost a million. At last I reached the object of my search. This church, too, looked down on Seattle’s best and worst. I entered. It was a large church. I think perhaps three thousand people were in attendance. The minister, in surplice, was giving out his notices. One was that the Prison Association wanted more clothing. (I afterward read that this same minister recommended more and harsher discipline in our jails, especially commending the whipping-post.) As the service continued, however, I found that I could not intelligently receive a word. Between the sentences I could plainly hear: “They are trying to make him tell something they think he knows!”

CHAPTER XVIII
Spokane

“Justifiæ partes sunt non violare homines; verecundiæ non offendere.”—Cicero.
“Justice consists in doing no injury to men,—decency in giving them no offence.”

“He passed the prison. At the door hung an iron chain attached to a bell. He rang. The door opened. ‘Turnkey,’ he said, politely removing his cap, ‘will you have the kindness to admit me and give me lodging for the night?’ A voice replied, ‘The prison is not an inn. Get yourself arrested and you will be admitted.’” These words were spoken to Jean Val Jean at the prison door in the village of D—— in France, in 1815. All who have read the Victor Hugo masterpiece know the wonderful story.

In April, 1910, nearly one hundred years afterward, in the city of Spokane, I stepped up to a police officer whom I met on the streets and asked where I could get a free bed, having no money, nor friends, nor home in the city. He answered, “You can’t find anything like a free bed in this town.” Then I asked if I could sleep in the city jail. He replied, “No, you cannot. We have received instructions to send no one to the jail.” Then he added, “Get yourself run in and you can lodge there.”

Here was a condition of things I had met with nowhere else. Even the shelter of the prison was denied a penniless wayfarer. Nothing daunted, I resolved to try to the fullest what Spokane might offer one like me. I was told that one of the missions had a lodging house. They perhaps would take me in for charity. I determined to try. I met a man on the street and asked him where it was. He said he believed they once had such an institution. He thought it was closed, but he was uncertain. “Ask a cop,” he said. “You will find one on the next block.”

I went as directed and soon saw an officer of the Spokane police force. Stepping up to him, I asked for the mission lodging house. Instead of replying, he said, “What do you want to know for?”

It was, or ought to have been, his duty to answer my simple civil question. What right had he to question what I wanted to know for? What business was it of his why I wanted to know? But he was of the Spokane police force and was endowed with authority. I replied, “I am without money and I am looking for a place to sleep. I thought perhaps they might give me a bed.” I turned and started to leave him, but catching me roughly by the arm, he said, “Hold on here. Don’t you leave me.” I saw before me those horrible nights I had endured in other prisons, and my first impulse was to run. But I remembered the eighteen-year-old boy in Denver who was shot to death for running from a policeman.

Then the Spokane officer said to me, “Who are you, anyway?” I answered, as I had in Pittsburg, “I am an honest working man.”

“And what do you do?”

“I do anything I can to earn a living.” He pulled me around and looked at my face on both sides, then said. “Let me see your hands.” He regarded them closely, remarking, “They are pretty soft and white for a workingman’s.”

“There are thousands of workingmen who have soft hands,” I replied. “There are waiters, barbers, bookkeepers and clerks, and hundreds of positions which keep men’s hands soft and white.”

“Yes, but your hands do not correspond with your clothes.”

“I wear gloves when I work. There are a great many of us fellows who do the hardest manual labor and wear blue jeans who wear gloves at our work. There is a lot of work that will lacerate the most hardy hands.”

His answer was, “Come with me. I am going to take you down anyway.”

We were not far from the jail. He did not ring up a big team of horses, a wagon and two or three men, or an automobile, to rush me to the jail as they do in other cities, although they do this in Spokane, also. We walked, and while we walked, he assured me twice that he would take the softness out of my hands by thirty days on the rock pile. He had absolutely and completely taken the law into his own hands before we ever reached the jail. This policeman knew what could and would be done to me, simply because I was apparently poor and helpless, and if their system in Spokane was as it is in other cities, I could be so nicely used for graft.

Fathers and mothers throughout America, what if it had been your boy in Spokane that night, without money and without a home? Think of the awful result! Put him in my place—about to receive the first stigma of a jail, to be thrust for thirty days among hardened criminals, made such by this same social system, to receive wanton insults and abuse, his health probably ruined for life,—possibly murdered! A man was dying at that very time in the city of Spokane, from abuse in that same city jail. Spokane began, from the first moment of my arrest, legally to plunder me, soul and body.

As I walked, I tried to incorporate into my being, the suffering and the feelings of such a man or boy. They would not have accepted his statements as to his identity, no matter how hard he tried, as I knew they would be obliged to receive mine, and there would have begun the destruction of another American citizen.

On reaching the jail the officer stopped me in a dark entrance. Pulling out his search-light he threw it over me, at the same time feeling me all over. Why he did this I could not understand, unless he may have thought I had a bomb to drop when I reached the Captain’s office.

Intending only to make a quiet investigation of Spokane, I did not leave my credentials at my hotel but had them in an inner pocket of my vest. These included several letters recently received from prominent and well-known people of the Coast. My proof was sufficient and I was promptly released. They seemed to be surprised that I was sober, and said, “Brown, how can you associate with these men and not drink?” “That is not necessary,” I replied. “There are thousands of homeless, starving men in our nation to-day who never drink.”

While I was telling my story to the force, a reporter for the leading paper of the city came in, and that paper the next morning carried a story which stirred the town. As a result Spokane is going to have its Free Municipal Emergency Home. It is true that I found a desperate condition of things in Spokane for the man without the dime. But Spokane is no longer a country town, hid in the pine woods of Washington. She is a city—a city of stupendous natural resources, a city of a great awakening. She has begun a wonderful physical adornment and is combining with it those benevolent adornments to conserve her citizens. Spokane believes in the abolition of all influences that destroy. She is a force in the world to-day.

CHAPTER XIX
Minneapolis

“I never wear hand-made laces because they remind me of the eyes made blind in the weaving.”—Marie Corelli.

The morning of April 19, 1910, found me in Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis, resting on the green moss below the “laughing waters” of Minnehaha Falls. This wonderful spot of nature took possession of my imagination until I was in one of God’s factories, where a thousand creations were coming into life and beauty. The sparkling translucent falls, touched with a silver light, became a marvelous lace-weaving loom. I caught, white and shining, the actual resemblance to the hand-made Irish, the Duchess and Rose-point. Over all this great workshop of the Diety was joy, peace and happiness. For the first time real lace to me was beautiful, for it was of God’s creation. The vision of eyes made sightless, the stooped shoulders of the aged, the little, starving children overworked for the mere pittance to exist, these were not in the weaving. To the thoughtful, any adornment, the price of which is paid by the blood of human lives, is no longer beautiful. Here I saw that every bird and bee, all insect life, even the smallest and most abject about me, either were building or had built homes.

I then remembered my mission to Minneapolis. “Surely,” I said to myself, “with this temple of worship to which the good folks of Minneapolis may come, thoughtlessness and selfishness will not be found here.”

Yet I wondered if I should find it. I had come to continue my battle for my homeless brothers. The approach of late afternoon and night found me wandering about the streets a jobless, moneyless man looking for work and shelter. I found Minneapolis not in advance of other cities, and much behind many in its care for its homeless toilers.

I first went to a private employment office. There seemed plenty of work to do, work for everybody, but I could find no private office where they would give me work and trust me until pay day.

I visited the city free employment bureau where I counted fifty men looking for work. There were chairs for fourteen. The rest seemed quite willing to stand as long as their feet held out, in the hope of securing something. As I scanned their faces I thought a large percentage of them seemed of the type driven to such a condition by lack of opportunity to make an honest living. Later I learned that many of these men came day after day, hungry and cold, after having spent the night huddled up somewhere in the open air.

Next I became a beggar. I began looking for a public institution which would give me a bed, since I was unable to pay for one. I first tried the Associated Charities. The attendant took me into a little side room where as in other places, all sorts of rubbish was stored, and asked me the usual list of humiliating questions. Finally he told me they could do nothing for me, as it was too near their closing time.

Doubtless this institution does many worthy things, but providing shelter for the homeless man without money is not among them.

Directed by the attendant at the Associated Charities (who at least had gotten rid of me), I went to the Union City Mission. The attendant here, after making me repeat my questions regarding the possibility of a penniless man getting a supper and bed, turned on his heel without answering me and began to turn on the lights—for evening prayers! At the Salvation Army lodging house the attendant simply said: “We ain’t got nothin’ to give away.” At the Y. M. C. A., “the beds were all full.” The attendant didn’t know whether or not he could allow me to take a bath,—simply a polite refusal.

Next I appealed to the police. Asking the first officer I met where a man without money could get a bath, I was directed to the river. He then recalled the advice however, saying it was too early in the season for the public baths to be open. Another policeman referred me to the old city lockup (Central Station) for lodging, saying, “Go there. They will give you a cell.”

I did not go to the extreme of enduring the hardships forced upon the indigent, honest workers of Minneapolis. It was not necessary. I knew the pitiful condition only too well.

Just as I finish this story there is laid on my study table a letter, which reads:

“In the latter part of the year 1910 the Board, realizing the necessity of providing some lodging place for the transient class unable to pay for accommodations, decided to install a Municipal Emergency Home on the second floor of the old city lockup (Central Station). The work of installing this home was accomplished at an expense of $3,426.28. It was opened on the tenth of January, 1911, prepared to accommodate fifty applicants. The first three months of its operation demonstrated the fact that in order to care for all demands it would be necessary to increase the space.

“We have now a Municipal Emergency Home that will accommodate a hundred and forty. The house is just as sanitary as it is possible to make an emergency home. It has all modern improvements, separate beds, baths, medical attendance, and fumigation. Lodgers are furnished with clean night-robes and socks and given a good wholesome breakfast. Of course this is entirely free. If a man has money we turn him away. The home is supported by public taxation.”

CHAPTER XX
In the Great City of New York

“The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale. Yet he is saturated with the laws of the world.”—Emerson.

When my investigations on the Pacific coast were over I felt that the strenuous part of my work,—that is the work of coming down to the personal level of destitute men,—was over. But from the South came such an appeal that I was prompted to continue my study at first hand for another year. So late in the summer of 1910, I found myself, a penniless man again, drifting along the docks on the west side of New York, seeking work as a longshoreman.

I was unsuccessful until about 10 A. M. Then a flag was run up at pier forty-three indicating that a fruit ship from the south was docked. Just then a young man hurrying along asked, as he passed me, “Are you looking for work?” I answered in the affirmative.

“Hurry along then and we will get in on the job.”

Running breathlessly we reached the dock. There were two hundred ahead of us. After an hour of jostling, pushing, crowding and clashing with upraised hands we succeeded in getting near enough to the distributor to arrest his attention long enough to receive a work-check which entitled us to work at the wage scale of twenty-five cents an hour.

I noticed among the workers as we continually passed and re-passed one another, a pale, slim young man. He had a hectic flush on his cheeks and wore colored eye-glasses. The work was extremely laborious, so much so that, after working approximately an hour and being unaccustomed to such work, I began to tremble and to have frequent sensations of dizziness. I realized that I must desist, so cashed in, receiving twenty-five cents for my work. Just ahead of me, cashing in also, was the pale young man, whose whole frame seemed to shake involuntarily, while the flush on his cheeks had turned purple. It was evident that he also had no strength left to continue the work. As we left the pier and strolled down West Street to Battery Park, he told me his story:

“I need money bad, but I couldn’t do that work. I am a Swiss, a watchmaker by trade, but because of my failing eyesight a specialist declared I must absolutely change my occupation or go blind. What can I do? I am fitted for nothing but my trade. While struggling for a comfortable existence for myself and young wife my health failed. I feel that the only hope of regaining it is an absolute change of climate. I have a friend in Texas who writes me of the opportunity offered to the truck gardener there, but it takes money to go and it takes money to establish yourself when you reach there. You see I have no money. I believe, even here in New York State, if I could have an out-door, country life, I would speedily get well. I am living with my sister in Brooklyn. She is poor, also, but it is a home. I suppose I might start out and work for enough to eat on my way, and steal my passage to some health-giving climate. I may eventually be forced to do this. But even if the railroads had not created State laws making it a criminal offense in all States to travel that way, I could not go now.”