Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [394]
Not all the elite subscribed to the new sink-or-swim wisdom. Mayor Cadwallader Golden, for one, expressed doubts that the multiplication of New York’s poor was “justly to be imputed to either her public or private charities.” He blamed it, instead, on a wave of unemployment triggered after 1815 by Britain’s “reduction of great naval and military establishments, the abridgment of her commerce, the curtailment of her manufactures, and the astonishing operations of her labor-saving machines.” Almshouse chaplain Stanford was another holdout, arguing that since the poor had helped “multiply the treasures of the rich” through their labor, the rich were “morally obligated to relieve a necessitous person.” These dissenters made no headway against the massed prestige of the SPP, and both municipal and state governments began to implement its recommendations. The Common Council halted contributions to all charitable enterprises except for the Humane Society and the City Dispensary. Governor De Witt Clinton proclaimed his intention to wipe out pauperism “by rendering it a greater evil to live by charity than by industry.” In 1823 the legislature charged Secretary of State John Van Ness Yates to report on the condition of the poor and the administration of relief throughout the state. Echoing the SPP, Yates’s committee attributed pauperism to “vice of all kind”—especially in New York City, which attracted the “idle and dissolute of every description.” Subsequent legislation ended outdoor relief throughout New York State, except (to the SPP’s annoyance) in New York City, where the dramatic fluctuations of the economy made it as yet impracticable and impolitic to do so.
Private benevolence slacked off as well. The ad hoc ward committees that had helped the victims of hard times during the embargo and war years now vanished, nowhere more abruptly than in Brooklyn. In the terrible winter of 1817, when the thermometer plummeted to twenty-six below zero and Buttermilk Channel iced over so thickly that horse-drawn sleighs crossed to Governors Island, the Brooklyn Humane Society had set up a soup house for the distressed poor. But as the new maxims of British political economy made their way across the East River, the society announced that its benevolence had been misguided. Alms-giving, it now realized, had “a direct tendency to beget, among a large portion of their fellow citizens, habits of imprudence, indolence, dissipation and consequent pauperism.” Accordingly, the Humane Society announced that no food or firewood would be forthcoming the following winter, and to hammer the point home, the group disbanded.
The efficacy of charity likewise fell under suspicion among the genteel women who led the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children. As recently as 1815 the ladies had rejected the lazy-poor line and indeed reported that “an attentive observation has thoroughly convinced us that it is an impossibility for a widow, with the labor of her own hands, to support her infant family . . . even if work abound.” Then, however, the men of the SPP denounced the Relief Society’s work on the grounds that giving charity to widows with children incited those without to become pregnant, “which is highly immoral, and ought not be tolerated in a Christian land.” Despite the best of intentions, in other words, the women had been “encouraging population among the poor, and increasing the number of paupers,” a line of reasoning that won converts.
So how did the SPP propose to prevent pauperism in New York, beyond shutting down the flow of ill-advised charity? The answer was to inculcate the undeserving poor with the values that would make them useful and productive members