Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [817]
The termination of assistance to the poor in their own homes did not increase the almshouse population, as the commissioner of Charities and Correction took steps to ensure that indoor relief remained an unenticing alternative. “Care has been taken,” he noted, “not to diminish the terrors of this last resort of poverty, because it has been deemed better that a few should test the minimum rate at which existence can be preserved, than that the many should find the poor-house so comfortable a home that they would brave the shame of pauperism to gain admission to it.” Spending on almshouse inmates actually dropped, to a per capita twelve cents a day.
Brooklyn too tightened its municipal belt, insofar as the poor were concerned. When relief rolls began to climb after 1874, the city slashed its per capita expenditures so that actual outlays stayed relatively steady, despite the growing number of recipients. Handouts took the form of either food (flour, potatoes, rice, tea, sugar) or coal, never both in the same week, and never in amounts exceeding a dollar per week per family of four. Critics attacked the inclusion of tea and sugar as profligate and debated deleting coal, which though cheaper to give out was often sold by recipients for cash to buy other commodities. Soon, not to be outdone by their neighbors across the river, Brooklyn reformers began demanding the total abolition of outdoor relief. Not only was it a symbol of wasteful public spending, but corruption had been uncovered in the (Democratic) Department of Charity, which the (Republican) County Board of Supervisors was determined to end.
Leading the crusade was Seth Low, the youthful and independently wealthy Republican whose grandfather had founded Brooklyn’s Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP). Low and his allies urged that, as an experiment, outdoor relief be phased out over a two-year period, disbursing only coal in 1876-77, then nothing the following year. In the winter of 1876-77, however, the charity commissioners protested, noting that starving people were congregating at warehouses where food was stored, begging they be opened. When the commissioners took it upon themselves in mid-January to vote an emergency appropriation and give out flour and potatoes, enraged reformers denounced them in editorials. The Board of Supervisors subtracted the appropriation from the commissioners’ salaries; in 1878, it succeeded in shutting down the program altogether.
Low acclaimed welfare reform as a great success—and it did launch his political career—on the grounds that money had been saved, and corruption curtailed, without any increase in suffering of the poor. It was true that some with other sources of income, who had been fraudulently obtaining relief, carried on much as before. It was also true that there was no great increase in the poorhouse population (jammed as it already was) and that some of the poor who borrowed, pawned, and lived on credit from landlords, grocers, or kin managed to get by for a year or two. But it was true as well that hunger and cold sent many to the city’s hospitals or police station basements; that many impoverished parents sent their children to asylums, where they cost the county forty dollars a month rather than one or two dollars in home relief payments; and that while women sought jobs as live-in servants, many men took to the streets seeking charity or work—and triggering a new round of complaints by reformers.
OF BEGGARS AND TRAMPS
In May 1874 the American Social Science Association organized a conference of charitable organizations, at which participants denounced the increase in street begging and petty crime, clucked about “imposter paupers” on the charity rolls, and deplored