Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [943]
The COS also chartered a Provident Loan Society, which made loans to the needy (when secured by personal property) at i percent a month, better terms than were available from pawn shops or moneylenders. And its Wayfarer’s Lodge on West 28th Street allowed the homeless to stay in facilities superior to Bowery flophouses for up to a week, in exchange for a stint of woodchopping.
Yet for all these new departures, Lowell and her COS colleagues were not prepared to abandon their opposition to public works or soup kitchen handouts. Such policies would only foster dependency in the recipients—“their souls must not be sacrificed in the efforts to save their bodies”—and the charity establishment feared attracting “an army of vagrants” to the city. There was, in fact, no sign of New York’s becoming a mendicant Mecca. Quite the opposite: as in most depressions, word spread swiftly in Europe that America and its leading metropolis were poor job prospects. Immigration plummeted from sixty-five thousand in 1892 to twenty-five thousand in 1893 to thirteen thousand in 1897—and among some groups more people left than arrived.
The Charity Organization Society’s stringent policy of giving direct aid only after rigorous investigation had weeded out “indolent vagrants” from worthy unemployed generated tremendous public animosity. One woman, enraged at the treatment given her mother, wrote asking, “When you get to the gates of Heaven how will you feel when God will say go down to hell for a week until the committee meets to see if you . . . are worthy enough to enter Heaven.” St. Vincent de Paul and the United Hebrew Charities rejected strict scrutiny of disaster-overwhelmed applicants as mean-spirited and gave relief on what the COS considered an indiscriminate basis. Indeed New Yorkers of various stripes, from a variety of motives, raised and distributed over three million dollars’ worth of “irresponsible relief,” making the metropolis the most generous of all U.S. cities in responding to the harsh depression.
Many businessmen gave unstintingly during the crisis—out of decency, Christian or Jewish conviction, a sense of richesse oblige, or a prudent desire to prevent a potentially explosive situation from deteriorating further. J. P. Morgan was particularly active. He served as treasurer of the forthrightly named Committee of Prominent and Wealthy Citizens and joined with others in forming a Business Men’s Relief Committee.
Nathan Straus, co-owner of Macy’s with his brother Isidor, was also partner with Abraham Abraham in Abraham and Straus, the largest dry-goods store in the city. The German-Jewish philanthropist established several depots where fuel and foodstuffs were bagged in bundles and sold, below cost, at five cents each. He also opened three apartment buildings that provided accommodations at five cents a night and established restaurants that offered five-cent meals.
The “breadline” at Fleischmann’s Model Vienna Bakery, Broadway at 9th Street, from E. Idell Zeisloft, The New Metropolis (1899). (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
Yeast manufacturer Louis Fleischmann sold sweet rolls and coffee (by day) at his Model Vienna Bakery next to Grace Church on Broadway. At midnight, Fleischmann’s distributed a third of a loaf of bread to all comers—giving popular currency to the term “breadline.” Stephen Crane spent a night on the breadline during a blizzard in preparation for writing his classic story “Men in the Storm,” which Arena published in October 1894.
Businessmen’s generosity was spurred in part by the emergence of a new and competitive source of charity: the popular press, self-proclaimed tribunes of the people. In August 1893 Joseph Pulitzer’s World declared a well-publicized war on hunger. It established a Free Bread Fund, which sent wagons—emblazoned with the paper’s logo—rumbling through the tenement streets. These gave away free loaves (one and a quarter million by winter’s end) to long lines of the hungry, which formed each day—handing