Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [944]
Not to be outdone, the Herald, in December, announced a Free Clothing Fund, and on New Year’s Day the Tribune, the city’s highest-priced and most conservative paper, established a Coal and Food Fund. Tribune editor Whitelaw Reid did assure his wealthy readers that his fund, unlike its profligate competitors, would work closely with existing charities and carefully investigate all recipients to be sure they were sober, devout, and thoroughly destitute (had pawned all their available household effects).
Mrs. Lowell, dismayed by the efforts of businessmen, was incensed at the philanthropy of the press (the Tribune’s effort excepted). Handing out “something for nothing” was bad enough, but far worse was the papers’ calculated commercialism, the way “a desire to help those in distress was blended with the advertising indulged in at their expense.” Lowell denounced the publicizing of recipients’ names as “a further degradation, a moral stripping naked of the suffering of the poor, which was cruel in the extreme.” The World, in rebuttal, chided the COS for its niggardly inhumaneness and bureaucratic pettifoggery and claimed the Bread Fund was the “most direct, simple, and useful of charities.”
While philanthropists squabbled, politicians heeded the demands of the distressed and established a program of public works—though with considerable reluctance and considerable debate. Democrats, longtime supporters of laissez-faire, backed away from the issue. Despite Mayor Gilroy’s call for a government jobs program, his administration did no more than solicit funds from municipal employees and saloonkeepers for distribution to traditional charities. During the first depression winter, Big Tim Sullivan—appointed District Leader of the Bowery area by Boss Croker in 1892—began a tradition of feeding thousands of poor people a free Christmas dinner (turkey, ham, stuffing, potatoes, bread, beer, pie, and coffee). As many as five thousand, mostly single men from neighborhood lodging houses, were feted at his Comanche Clubhouse headquarters, while local vaudeville singers offered entertainment.
At the state level, however, Democratic Governor Roswell P. Flower, a Wall Street banker in civilian life, flat-out rejected demands for public works. “It is not the province of the government to support the people,” he declared. That way lay “corruption, socialism, and anarchy.” In Washington, the Democratic Congress similarly ignored calls by Gompers’s AFL to hire the unemployed to construct a canal across Nicaragua, improve the Mississippi, and irrigate arid western lands. Democratic President Grover Cleveland concurred with Governor Flower that “while the people should support their Government its functions do not include the support of the people.”
But Flower came under tremendous pressure from the Central Labor Union and from social gospel reformers; twenty thousand attended a Madison Square Garden conference at which Felix Adler, William Rainsford, and Sam Gompers, among others, called for public works projects. Finally, facing looming electoral disaster—Republicans had capitalized on depression distress to capture the legislature in 1893—Governor Flower grudgingly signed a bill in February 1894 that authorized New York City’s Parks Department to spend up to one million dollars on public improvements. Soon hundreds of men were at work along Cathedral Parkway, in Morningside and Riverside parks, and at Manhattan Square, though the CLU complained that work tickets had been cornered by Tammany politicians