Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [496]
What Hartley advocated instead was “scientific philanthropy,” by which he meant not only rationalizing the distribution of relief citywide but also using it as an incentive to better behavior. The AICP would visit the poor in their homes to “inspire them with self-reliance and self-respect; to inculcate habits of economy, industry and temperance; and whenever it shall be absolutely necessary, to provide such relief as shall be suited to their wants.” Under Hartley’s leadership, the AICP divided Manhattan into several hundred sections with approximately sixty poor families apiece. Each section was assigned a visitor who would regularly canvass his charges and assess their condition and character. To discourage the poor from shopping around for handouts, Hartley had AICP visitors file their reports with a central registry; he also warned residents not to give money to panhandlers, advising them instead to disburse tickets bearing the address of the nearest AIGP visitor.
The point of establishing this moral credit-rating agency was to sort out the poor, deciding who was truly needy and who was idle or depraved; it would act, Hartley said, as “a vast sieve” to separate “the precious and the vile.” If the visited were victims of temporary illness or adversity, the visitor would get them medical help and dispense relief, judiciously, until health and employment returned; if they suffered from drink or other vices, the visitor could hold out the promise of assistance as an incentive to reform. Persons deemed unable to support themselves because of age, chronic illness, or physical handicap would be dispatched to the appropriate municipal institutions. Ever wary of creating temptations to fraud, Hartley warned that people confined inside such places should never live better than the laboring poor outside; inmates who gained weight, he said, should have their daily rations cut back. “Paupers” and “vagrants”—the idle and dissolute poor—should be put to hard labor in a workhouse until ready to become productive members of society. For the hopelessly “debased” and “depraved,” there was no choice except a sentence to the penitentiary, where they must suffer “exemplary punishments as a warning to the community.”
THE POLITICS OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE
The decline of civic volunteerism and the curtailment by evangelicals of “indiscriminate almsgiving” left the primary burden of aiding depression casualties to the city itself. New York would indeed succor many of the poor, but with ill grace and limited funds, its reluctance a function of penury, ideology, and a transformed political system.
Hard times reshaped the electoral landscape. Since the 1820s New York had been a Democratic town. The Whig Party, born during the Bank War, had lapsed into somnolence at its conclusion. After the crisis of 1837, Whiggery was born again, and over the next few years its candidates rode the depression first into Gty Hall, then into the governor’s mansion, and finally into the White House itself.
The parties had different core constituencies and policies. The Democrats, who cast their Whig opponents as aristocrats, drew upon new immigrants, antibank radicals, merchants trading with the South, workers tied to the port economy, and, thanks to Tammany’s long command of municipal patronage, a small army of grateful contractors, thankful work crews, and appreciative officeholders. Democrats opposed high tariffs, a smart strategy in a city with five times as much capital invested in trade as in manufactures; they also aimed to divorce government from banking, curb speculation, and reduce government expenses.
Whigs could usually count on evangelical and Episcopalian merchants, bankers, and businessmen, master craftsmen and the middling classes, and working-class voters hard hit by the depression. Whig planks backed governmental underwriting of internal improvements and stronger oversight of banking while defending the credit system. The party promoted itself as a bastion of “order, morals and religion” and portrayed Democrats as agrarians,