I will tell the president that the prosperity he boasts of
is the prosperity of the rich wrung from the poor and the helpless.
-Mother Jones
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Tuesday January 17, 1905
From the International Socialist Review: A. M. Simons on Poverty by Robert Hunter
A. M. Simons
In the most recent issue of the
International Socialist Review, A. M. Simons offers a review of the recently published study of poverty, "Poverty" by Robert Hunter. Simons has high praise for the Hunter's work on the subject:
MR. ROBERT HUNTER, of New York, has just produced a work which I have no hesitation in pronouncing the greatest contribution to sociological literature that has appeared during the past year, and this year has been a year fruitful of works in this field....
Mr. Hunter's work is a study of those who in a land of plenty must live below the standard of animal comfort. In order to arrive at the number of those who constitute the subject matter of his work, he approaches the subject from various points of view. The number of evictions, of cases of tuberculosis, of pauper burials, of dispensary patients, of accidents to workers, are used as checks against estimates founded on more direct studies of poverty.
On the subject of Hunter's work as it relates to Socialism, Simons offers this reminder:
While the work in no place sums up for socialism, yet no one can read it without realizing that the writer recognizes the fact of there being no other escape. With or without the label, this is a work which will always stand as a part of the great literature of socialism.
From the International Socialist Review of January 1905:
"Poverty." — A Review.*
Robert Hunter
MR. ROBERT HUNTER, of New York, has just produced a work which I have no hesitation in pronouncing the greatest contribution to sociological literature that has appeared during the past year, and this year has been a year fruitful of works in this field. Many reviewers attempt to compare it with such works as that of Charles Booth in London. In reality, its field is so utterly different as to afford no ground for a fair comparison. Booth's work is that of the patient investigator, this, of the thinker who correlates facts in order to show their effects and relations. To be sure this book contains the results of much direct investigation, and Booth's contains valuable generalizations. Yet the line between the two classes of work is fairly distinct.
Mr. Hunter's work is a study of those who in a land of plenty must live below the standard of animal comfort. In order to arrive at the number of those who constitute the subject matter of his work, he approaches the subject from various points of view. The number of evictions, of cases of tuberculosis, of pauper burials, of dispensary patients, of accidents to workers, are used as checks against estimates founded on more direct studies of poverty. And he finally comes to the conclusion, which is certainly extremely conservative when considered in connection with the facts that he presents, that at least ten million people are to be considered as living in chronic poverty. Those who are distinctly paupers and in whom the desire to escape from that condition has been crushed, are differentiated from the workman who lives and works and produces wealth in constant poverty.
Still the line between the two is a never shifting one. The unemployed working man must sooner or later become a pauper unless he possesses unusual strength of character. His comments on the unemployed are well worth quoting at length:—
It reflects very grievously upon the justice of our social system that so many men, willing to work, should be unable to find work to do. The history of the world has perhaps never shown more abject victims of chance than the modern propertyless workman. A man possessing his own tools or land may always employ himself, and, although it may at times be necessary for him to sell his products for a very low price, he need not, except in extraordinary times, become dependent upon others for relief. The tools of the modern workman are the machine; both it and the land are owned by others. He cannot work on the land or at the machine except by permission of another. If the owner does not find it profitable to employ him, the workman must remain idle.
At certain seasons of the year this idleness is compulsory to workmen by the tens of thousands, and at times of business depression by the hundreds of thousands. Without savings adequate to supply his needs, and with his income wholly dependent upon an intermittent demand for his labor, circumstances are apt to arise sooner or later that will force him either to commit crime against property or to depend upon public relief for sustenance. If the state of dependence continues long, habitual pauperism or vagrancy is quite likely to result. In other words, these outcasts from industry have before them the choice of three evils—starvation, crime or relief by charity.
It is useless, as he points out, to advise the workman to save against the coming of the inevitable rainy day, since he can only do this at the expense of present suffering for himself and family. This is especially true in America, where the tremendous pressure of modern industry compels that the human machine be well fed if it is to be run at all.
In the chapter on "The Vagrant" he is not satisfied with any of the superficial reasonings of the Wyckoff's, Riis' and the charity organization workers. He sees plainly that "even if these vagrants could be forced back into the working class they would only augment the distress in the mass which makes up the reserve of labor."
One of the great causes of poverty is sickness. But sickness is both a cause and an effect of poverty. It is always with the poor, and the pictures which he draws of sickness in the tenements have a literary power in vivid painting of facts that should stir the soul of every reader to an endeavor to abolish the social conditions which make such things necessary. Yet the poor are compelled to live in tenements with death rates two and three times as great as exist in more favorable localities. We are ordinarily inclined to boast of the superiority of American conditions in these respects. Yet Mr. Hunter says:
I dare say that no other nation has so many needless deaths or so many cases of illness wholly due to preventable industrial causes as the United States of America....
There was once a Great Black Plague. It was the consternation of the people of the time when it grew and flourished. Those who were able to do so fled from the cities which it ravaged. It lived a year and caused the death of two or three million people. It was probably the result of filthy, undrained streets and vile tenements.
"The Great White Plague" has lived for centuries and centuries; it was known before the time of Christ. It has caused the death of millions and millions of people; it will this year cause the death of over one million more. One hundred and fifty thousand people in the United States alone will this year die of the disease. Within the next twelve months not less than fifteen thousand of the people of New York City, some of whom will be our neighbors, friends, and even perhaps our relatives, will bow down before the Great White Plague.
It is a needless plague, a preventable plague. It is one of the results of our inhuman tenements; it follows in the train of our inhuman sweatshops; it fastens itself upon children and young people because we forget that they need playgrounds and because we are selfish and niggardly in providing breathing spaces; it comes where the hours of labor are long and the wages small; it afflicts [the children who are sent to labor when they should yet be in] school; the plague goes to meet them. It is a brother to the anguish of poverty, and wherever food is scant and bodies half clothed and rooms dark this hard and relentless brother of poverty finds a victim.
The children of the poor "who are sent to labor when they should yet be in school."
It is more kind to the old, who have every reason for dying, than it is to the young, who have no reason for dying. It takes, as it were, an especial delight in mowing down the bread-winners of wage-earning families at the sweetest and most treasured period of their lives—at the time when they are having the first joys of married life and bringing into the world their little ones.
More than one-third of all deaths that occur between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five are due to the Great White Plague. It is a waste of youth prepared for life and labor, cut off by needless death as life and labor begin, for it is a wholly needless and preventable cause of death and of inestimable mourning and anguish among the widows and the fatherless.
The extent of the White Plague is one of the best tests of a high or low state of society; in, many ways it is the truest and most accurate of social tests. The number of its victims will indicate the districts in which sweatshops flourish, and the streets in which the double-decker tenement, the scourge of New York, is most often found. Where the death rate from the Plague is greatest there ignorance prevails; drunkenness is rife; poverty, hunger, and cold are the common misfortune.
Yet all of this suffering is unnecessary.
The following measures, if carried out in every part of this country, would stamp out the Plague in twenty years.
First, the disease should be declared in all states and in all cities "infectious."
Second, there should be compulsory notification of all cases of tuberculosis.
Third, the advanced cases should be given care in institutions suited to their need.
Fourth, the establishment and maintenance of sufficient sanatoria and dispensaries for the treatment in the earlier stages of every case of consumption.
Fifth, careful and complete disinfection of all houses and rooms in which consumptives have died and from which consumptives have been removed.
Sixth, the construction of decent tenements, and the destruction, or satisfactory renovation, of every house known to be a source of infection, the demolition of "Lung Blocks" and the establishment of breathing spaces in the poorer districts of the cities.
Seventh, a crusade of hygienic education among all people and the punishment of promiscuous spitting.
"The Great White Plague" is the result of our weakness, our ignorance, our selfishness, and our vices; there is no more need of its existence on the earth than of the existence of the Great Black Plague, the plague of typhus fever, the plague of dysentery, the plague of Asiatic cholera, the plague of leprosy, or the plague of smallpox...
It will be stamped out when the humane work of the Tenement House Department and the Health Department of this city, is victorious over opponents; when there is established in the mind of every one that vital principle of an advanced civilization, namely, that the profits of individuals are second in importance to the life, welfare and prosperity of the great masses of people.....
The entire matter sums itself up very easily. In the first place, we put property before human life; we unconsciously estimate it more highly and foster it more tenderly; we do it as individuals and we do it collectively.
The chapter on "The Child" is one over which it is difficult not to grow enthusiastic. In its analysis of social, fundamentals, in its literary make-up, in its logical massing of facts and conclusions, I know of but few pieces of work in the whole realm of sociological literature that are entitled to rank with it.
Poverty degrades all men who struggle under its yoke, but the poverty which oppresses childhood is a monstrous and unnatural thing, for it denies the child growth, development, strength; it robs the child of the present and curses the man of the future...
It seems to me sometimes that all children from the tenements, and even from many apartment houses, should be classed in poverty, not because they are underfed, underclothed, or badly housed, for the majority are not, but because they have been forgotten, their play-space has been taken up, and no excuse made, nor has any substitute been supplied. When the city came to be the abode of men, the child was given the common to replace the fields; as the city grew in size the child was pushed from the common into the small yard, and from the yard he has been turned into the street....
By far the largest part, 80 per cent at least, of crimes against property and against the person are perpetrated by individuals who have either lost connection with home life, or never had anv. Or whose homes have ceased to be sufficiently separate, decent and desirable to afford what was regarded as ordinary wholesome influences of home and family.
But it is almost impossible to quote, or rather to choose what not to quote. The study of the effect of industrial evolution on the child is so good that it should be given entire, but space forbids. After showing how, two or three generations ago in the old days of home industry, the family worked, lived, grew and developed with their work,—learning, playing and producing at the same time,—he goes on to show the terrible effect of the introduction of capitalism on this condition.
When this industrial revolution brought into the world the large cities and a new industrial life, it at the same time destroyed what has been described as the home. In our large cities this home no longer exists, the economic development of the last hundred years has destroyed it and left in its stead a mere shadow of what has been the source of all influences essential to the world.
Our systems of education too have reflected the industrialism under which they have grown until they have lost all pliability and are completely out of touch with real social problems.
There are probably no other people in the country, of equal importance to the country, who as a class need to be brought back to the people so much as do the teachers.
But it is not simply that negatively society has taken away from the child his playground and his home, it has brought in the new and terrible evil of child labor.
I do not mean, of course, that children never worked before the factory made child labor an evil. Children have always worked; but their labor was not an evil, but rather it was a good thing, in the earlier days. When the race was young and the battle of life was directly with nature; when the world was poor and the securing of even the most meager livelihood meant constant struggle; when there was no other method of doing the world's work but by hand and with the aid of the simplest instruments,—inexorable necessity forced man, woman, and child to labor in order that life might be maintained. There was then need for child labor, a valid excuse for its existence.
And even more than that,—for even extreme want would not have excused the child labor of that time if it had meant the ruin of the child,—the labor of the children in the days of the craftsman and artisan was educative, and the processes of learning how to weave, spin, and brew, to do the work in the fields or home, were not such as to overburden and break down the little workers. With the advent of the machine this period of harmless child labor passed away.
And now in this day of steam and electrical power, when the mere force of one's hands is the most insignificant part of production, and when numberless machines are able to turn out a hundred and thousand fold more than it was possible for men to do when aided only by the simple hand-tools, child labor has become an evil—superfluous and wicked—a shame to our civilization and an inexpiable crime against humanity.
Both on the side of play and on the side of work then capitalism has brought only evil to the child.
To think of this problem in part is to fall into error. When one has only in mind the working child, one's first thought is—he should be at play; when one has only the playing child in mind, the first thought is—he should have some occupation. But the dilemma is only a present one. We are in a transitional period in which the old individualistic ideas are still strong and the social ones are yet vague and groping
The chapter on "The Immigrant" presents in new and stronger form much that has often been said before together, with considerably new material. He shows how the immigrant has been brought to this country by those who are interested, in the cheapest possible labor power and how those brought have simply contributed to their own misery and to that of those that have gone before as well as the native born. Neither does this mean that the population of America has been increased above what it would normally have been if there had never been any immigrants. The coming of those who were willing to live on a lower economic plane has simply reduced the birth rate among those who felt the pressure growing greater. The population has actually grown the slowest in just those years in which immigration was greatest.
While the work in no place sums up for socialism, yet no one can read it without realizing that the writer recognizes the fact of there being no other escape. With or without the label, this is a work which will always stand as a part of the great literature of socialism.
A. M. Simons.
*Poverty. Robert Hunter. The Macmillan Company. Cloth. 382 pp. $1.50 net.
[photographs and paragraph breaks added]
SOURCE
The International Socialist Review, Volume 5
ed by Algie Martin Simons, Charles H. Kerr
Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1905
(search: poverty robert hunter, & choose p.393)
http://books.google.com/...
See also:
Poverty
-by Robert Hunter
NY, 1905
https://archive.org/...
IMAGES
Algie Martin Simons
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Robert Hunter
http://en.wikipedia.org/..._(author)
Children who work while they should yet be in school.
http://www.socialwelfarehistory.com/...
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Hungry Ragged Blues - Aunt Molly Jackson
Although written for the coal miners and their families, this song fits every worker every where who labors for poverty wages.
I'm sad and weary, I've got the hungry, ragged blues.
Not one penny in the pocket to buy one thing I need to use.
I woke up this morning, with the worst blues I ever had in my life;
Not a bite to eat for breakfast, a poor coal miner's wife!
When my husband works in the coalmines, he loads a carload every trip;
Then he goes to the office at the evening to get denied of scrip.
Just because they took all he made that day to pay his mine expense,
A man that will work for just coal oil and carbide, he ain't got a stack of sense.
All the women in the coal camps are sitting with bowed down heads,
Ragged and bare-footed, and the children cryin' for bread.
No food, no clothes for our children, I'm sure this head don't lie;
If we can't get more for our labor we'll starve to death and die!
Don't go under the mountain, with a slate hangin' o'er your head;
And work for just coal oil and carbide, and your children cryin' for bread.
This mining town I live in is a sad and lonely place
Where pity and starvation is pictured on every face!
Some coal operators might tell you the hungry blues are not there.
They're the worst kind of blues this poor woman ever had.
-Aunt Molly Jackson
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