Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [819]
The AICP was partly mollified when, after 1876, the city’s Board of Estimate and Apportionment began giving large sums of municipal money directly to a few private charities—the AICP chief among them—on the grounds that they would provide home relief (as they already did institutional relief) more efficiently. The AICP had resisted the idea at first, but when its expenses almost doubled in the depression’s first year as its income from contributions dropped, it decided (in December 1876) to accept the new policy of public subsidies with private controls, then through careful scrutiny managed to disqualify the majority of the approximately sixty thousand who were stripped of public aid.
But reformers believed that more concerted and coordinated action was needed to bring down vagrancy and beggary, and the State Charities Aid Association (SCAA), established in 1872 by Louisa Lee Schuyler, pillar of the wartime Sanitary Commission, took the lead in generating fresh thinking. The SCAA, another private organization with public responsibilities, had accepted the task of visiting and inspecting all charitable institutions receiving state aid. Now, in 1877, it summoned a grand assemblage of charity reformers at the fashionable Saratoga Springs resort.
Almost all those present agreed that tramps were socially defective beings. One person did suggest there might be a connection between the depression and homelessness, but the idea that tramps couldn’t find work was generally decried as absurd. Some, notably eugenicist Richard T. Dugdale of the New York Prison Association, argued that vagrancy and pauperism were hereditary traits, and one conference participant drew the obvious conclusion: “I don’t think a pauper has any right to marry nor do I think the State has a right to allow him.” There was also interest in Charles Loring Brace’s proposal of a pass system (like one used in England) that would require tramps to carry papers certifying they were genuinely unemployed and looking for work.
In the end, the preferred (if not so fresh) solution was the one advanced by the SCAA’s Committee on Abie-Bodied Paupers, set up the previous year to investigate the tramp problem, under the chairmanship of Josephine Shaw Lowell, whose prominence at the gathering was itself remarkable. In 1855 Josephine Shaw had moved with her family from Boston to Bard Avenue, near West New Brighton, on Staten Island. The wealthy and patrician Shaws, despite their Fourierist and abolitionist convictions, moved easily into New York’s genteel society, and Josephine’s older sister soon married George William Curtis, editor of Harper’s Weekly. The Civil War tore her comfortable existence to pieces. An ardent Unionist, she joined a branch of the Sanitary Commission and threw herself into war work. Her brother, Robert Gould Shaw, was soon cut down while leading the first African-American regiment in action in South Carolina; and the following year, her husband, Charles Russell Lowell, died in battle. Widowed at twenty, Josephine Shaw Lowell would wear black (and keep her hair tightly coiled) for the rest of her days.
After working in Virginia with the Freedmen’s Relief Association, Lowell was invited by Louisa Lee Schuyler to join a committee visiting Bellevue and other hospitals. She then helped found the SCAA and made the investigation of able-bodied paupers her specialty. She came to public attention in 1876 after an infant died at the breast of Julia Deems, a young woman who had been nursing her baby on the freezing city streets while asking alms from Christmas crowds. When the Tribune suggested this was a shocking demonstration of social indifference, Lowell wrote a spirited letter insisting that the real fault lay with the errant Mr. Deems, with lax enforcement of the beggary laws by the police department, and with New Yorkers who opted for “indiscriminate almsgiving” over providing appropriate shelter.
In the same year, and in a similar vein, Lowell completed her