Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [942]
As early as August 1893, angry socialists and unionists (especially cigarmakers, carpenters, typographical workers, and the United Hebrew Trades) began collecting food, establishing soup kitchens, and organizing “hunger demonstrations” on the East Side and in Union Square. In addition, the Socialist Labor Party, the Central Labor Union, Gompers’s American Federation of Labor (AFL), and Barondess’s cloakmakers all petitioned the state and city to provide direct emergency relief and set up public works projects. “When the private employer cannot or will not give work, the municipality, state, or nation must,” the AFL declared.
Anarchists favored more direct action. During one August demonstration, Emma Goldman told a crowd of thousands that rather than tamely petitioning the authorities, they should march by the homes of the wealthy and demand relief. On another occasion she addressed a jobless audience (in German) at the Golden Rule Hall. According to one witness she told them: “If you are hungry and need bread, go and get it. The shops are plentiful and the doors are open.”
Meal lime at the Female Almshouse on Blackwell’s Island, c. 1897. (© Museum of the City of New York)
Such militancy provoked hysteria among the respectable. The New York Times, which preferred to leave depression relief to traditional charities, was terrified by the effect “the appalling nonsense of creatures like Goldman” had on the “hatchet-faced, pimply, sallow-cheeked, rat-eyed young men of the Russian-Jew colony.” The paper called for an immediate suspension of immigration (which they failed to get) and the immediate incarceration of Emma Goldman (which followed hard upon their demand). As usual, muzzling created a martyr. While in the Tombs awaiting trial, Goldman gave an interview to Nellie Bly of Pulitzer’s World. The anarchist leader’s sincerity and conviction enchanted Bly, who presented her to readers as a “little Joan of Arc.” This didn’t help Goldman at her October trial—she was found guilty of inciting a riot, which all agreed hadn’t happened—but after ten months in Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary, she was welcomed back to the Lower East Side by a crowd of thousands, besieged by reporters, and swamped with nationwide invitations to lecture.
The city, as per reigning policy, did next to nothing. The Department of Charities and Correction gave aid to the blind and free coal to the poor but ceased doling out food and clothing as the result of pressure from groups like the Charity Organization Society. The COS and the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor were, however, shocked by the magnitude of the crisis, and admitted what they had denied in previous downturns: that the unemployed were not shiftless louts but simply unable to support themselves. Josephine Shaw Lowell now agreed that the plight of the poor was “not due usually to moral or intellectual defects on their own part, but to economic causes over which they could have had no control, and which were as much beyond their power to avert as if they had been natural calamities of fire, flood or storm.”
Lowell, aided by Lillian Wald and Jacob Ms, set up the East Side Relief Committee in cooperation with COS, settlement workers, unions, churches, and the St. Vincent de Paul Society. The committee, headquartered in the College Settlement on Rivington Street, established a “relief-by-work” program. Work tickets were given to trade unions, churches, and charities for distribution to known heads of families.
Under the supervision of trained social workers, recipients were given “continuous, hard and underpaid” work. Men received a dollar for a seven-hour day spent cleaning streets, removing garbage and carcasses from stables, lofts, and yards, and cleaning and whitewashing tenements. Women got seventy cents for eight hours of sewing clothes for the Red Cross. Nevertheless, demand for relief-work from desperate East Siders far exceeded the supply. Seldom were more than a thousand aided at any given time; and by the following spring no more than five thousand men