Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [919]
COS tightened standards. “Gratuitous charity,” Lowell said, “works evil rather than good.” Authorizing assistance for a widow with infants might make her life easier, but then the mother might, “by being relieved of anxiety for them, lose her love for the children.” Giving a handout to an unemployed man might get him through tough times but also teach “the dreadful lesson that it is easy to get a day’s living without working for it.” COS, accordingly, was quite selective in its help (far more stringent than the Department of Charities and Correction had been), and it turned down the majority of applicants after probing investigations revealed that character flaws underlay their poverty. Paupers, Lowell argued, should be discouraged from reproducing themselves: while “every person born into a civilized community has the right to live,” the community had the right to see that “incompetent and dangerous persons shall not, so far as can be helped, be born to acquire this right to live upon others.”
Lowell relied on volunteers, believing the AICP had lost touch with the poor after it switched to using salaried visitors in 1879. COS promoters believed the urban poor had degenerated morally in large part because they had been cut off from the elevating influence of their moral betters. The job of reknitting the urban fabric could best be undertaken (one charity expert argued) not by hired professionals but by “noble-hearted women of the wealthier class,” who would bring the poor under “the firm though loving government of heroic women.”
The volunteers—“friendly visitors”—who were urged to help their assigned charges depart the “ranks of idlers” by setting a personal example, by diffusing strength of character across class lines, by making the recipient more like the visitor: honest, thrifty, sober. “If we do not furnish the poor with elevating influences,” the COS argued, “they will rule us by degrading ones.” The proto-caseworkers were urged to avoid soft-heartedness. “All charity must tend to raise and elevate the moral nature,” Lowell reminded her troops, “even if the process be as painful as plucking out an eye or cutting off a limb.”
The return of hard times in the mid 1880s brought renewed demands for aid to the unemployed, presenting the COS with its first major challenge. It succeeded in keeping charitable relief to a bare minimum, though Lowell’s efforts in 1883 to convince the Board of Apportionment “that they can safely cut off the City coal and trust to private charity to make up any necessary claims” were blocked in part due to objections by Tammany-connected coal merchants. It did establish a wood yard on East 24th Street in 1884, but the organization made clear this was not done “with any idea of providing work at fair prices for the unemployed, but purely as a means by which to test the good faith of those seeking relief under the plea of inability to procure work.” Tickets were printed up and sold to charitable persons, who in turn could give them to street beggars in lieu of cash. Each entitled a man to a “day’s work” cutting wood. When finished he would be given fifty cents or, if homeless, two meals and a night’s lodging.
To ensure the poor did not escape its stern concern by panhandling, COS established a Committee on Mendicancy, which hired “Special Agents” who were empowered by the city to arrest beggars. In 1885 they hauled seven hundred before the police justices,