Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [618]
Every year, indeed, brought shocking new testimony—from physicians, health inspectors, hospitals and medical dispensaries, orphanages, courts, police officials, and legislative commissions—that confirmed a horrifying expansion of poverty and disease and crime in the metropolis. Yet concerned elites were no longer certain what they could or should do about it. Many held fast to traditional moralizing while others found the pressure of circumstances (and working-class radicalism) forcing them to reconsider some cherished assumptions about the causes of poverty and the role of government in responding to it.
“PENITENTIAL TEARS”
The merchants and industrialists who ran the Tract Society and Bible Society continued trying to convert tenement dwellers, particularly Catholic ones, to Protestant piety and bourgeois social virtues, though increasingly they shifted from relying on volunteers (who found the immigrant localities “very repulsive”) to using full-time salaried workers. To churn out bulk shipments of Holy Writ for Sunday schools, poorhouses, prisons, orphanages, and immigrant depots—and to manage what was increasingly a worldwide crusade—the American Bible Society erected a grand new Bible House that took up the entire block between Third and Fourth avenues and 8th and 9th streets.
The Home Missionary Society similarly kept on spreading gospel civilization to heathen savages from the African veldt to the American West and working for the Christian redemption of New York City. They were joined in this by Episcopalians (who revived their Missionary Society) and Congregationalists (Beecher’s Plymouth Church opened several waterfront missions), but the boldest initiative came from the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society (LHMS) of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
In 1850, backed by wealthy contributors like Daniel Drew and Anson G. Phelps, the LHMS opened a Five Points Mission in a rented room diagonally across from the infamous “Old Brewery.” There, under the leadership of the Rev. Louis M. Pease, the ladies ran prayer meetings and Bible study classes, opened a charity day school, sponsored temperance speakers, and went out to comfort the sick. Closely attuned to the virtues of publicity, they issued regular accounts of their work—filled with stories of miraculous conversions and deathbed repentances—and on Thanksgiving Day paraded hundreds of scrubbed Sunday school students before benefactors. Then the ladies fed their charges turkey dinners, inaugurating a ritual that would lead, a decade later, to Thanksgiving’s establishment as an official (and feminized) holiday.
In 1852, drawing again on the ample resources of Phelps and Drew and on a thousand-dollar contribution from the Common Council, the LHMS purchased the Old Brewery itself and announced that the notorious “pest-house of sin” would be replaced with a proper “school of virtue.” To dramatize its demolition, the LHMS ran candle-lit tours of the rookery’s fetid interior, “where miserable men, women, and children . . . moodily submitted to the gaze of the strangers in that community of degraded outcasts.” The residents were then evicted and the building razed; in its place rose the new Five Points Mission, complete with chapel, schoolrooms, baths, and twenty apartments for the homeless—a bow to the poor’s material needs.
Some missionaries learned unexpected things in the working-class quarters. One day, the Rev. Pease was preaching to a group of “profligate” women—“respectably, some even genteelly dressed,” he remembered, “yet their character was readily perceived.” Suddenly they turned on him. “Don’t talk to us of death and retribution and perdition before us; we want no preacher to tell us all that,” they cried. “Give us work and wages!” These “sotted wretches,” Pease discovered, could not afford to