If I had my way I would tear down every Charity Institution in the country to-day
and build on their ruins the Temple of Justice.
My plea was for Justice not Charity.
-Mother Jones
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Wednesday February 3, 1915
From The Masses: Poor Mothers Supporting Children and Private Charity Corporations
This month's edition of
The Masses relates a disturbing story of the conduct of Charity Corporations, their meddling in the New York State legislative program in Albany, and their role in "safeguarding" the morals of the most impoverished mothers of New York City.
A heartbreaking story is told of a washerwoman struggling to hold her family of four children together after their father had deserted them. Advised to seek a mother's pension offered by a private charity corporation, she soon found herself reported to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. She was deemed immoral due to the boarders she kept in order to make the ends meet where her small wages could not. The children were taken away and sent away up the Hudson. Mary now struggles to earn enough money to cover the cost of visiting her little ones once in awhile.
The Masses points out that, what is hearbreaking for this mother and her children, is profitable for the private charity corporation:
Sometimes you hear stories of scandal in Private Charity's way of grabbing kiddies for institutions. It is described as a sort of kidnapping game. The institutions, you know, get fees from the public treasury for the kids they capture-that is, obtain, through court commitment on the recommendation of the private charities. And as the Widowed Mothers' Compensatior Commission sunk in its probe, there were many who cried that this "commitment" evil was one of the big inside scandals of the Private Charity game.
From The Masses of February 1915:
VESTED RIGHTS IN CHARITY
The grand orgy of hymn singing which broke out at Chicago to the first Bull Moose tune of Down With Poverty, having resounded through the land for many months, it came up at last in a Legislative Program. And in New York State the legislative program took the form of a bill, duly brought before the legislators, to let widows keep their babies at home, as wards of The People.
The idea called for doing away with the farming out of half orphaned babies to institutions, where they mostly live through a blighted youth, and a percentage dies that is appalling.
But the bill did not ride a smooth course towards the Governor's signature. No, indeed. The first thing heard about it was that Private Charity Organizations were conducting a secret lobby to kill the bill. The name of the lobby's gumshoer even got noised abroad.
I wish he would write to us telling us all about his activities in Albany against the bill to compensate widows. And will he kindly add just how much his work at Albany against the bill to let mothers keep their half orphaned babies in their own homes cost his backers? And just who these backers were, and how much he got out of this kind of work for Private Charity?
A popular mass meeting was held in Cooper Union to demand that Private Charity take its cold hands off the neck of this rather warm-hearted little measure. And shortly after that the bill died in Albany.
Instead of passing it they appointed a commission, and by and by this commission brought before it some of the folks who back private charity. Not the charity workers who look upward for money with which they can afterwards look down upon the poor, but the rich men who give to Charity with one hand, while with the other hand they do things it would not be polite to mention on a Charitable afternoon.
You might say these men who appeared as witnesses are the Bruce Ismays of the Titanic journey on which Private Charity is now embarked. They overlord the skippers of the expedition. Perhaps they will bring it to grief.
When you hear about Charity in the public prints you usually hear about the Relief it gives. We here pause to offer it a new designation:
Well, Otto T. Bannard came forward as a witness before the Commission on Widowed Mothers' Relief. And this is what he said:
Widowed Mothers Pensions present the strongest sentimental appeal and the very best case for this entering wedge towards state Socialism. The battle cry is not alms, but their right to share. The subsequent steps are old age pensions, free food, clothing and coal, to the unemployed and the RIGHT to be given work. It breeds candidates for alms, multiplies upon itself, represses the desire for self help, self respect and independence and inflicts upon its beneficiaries what is termed in England the Government stroke of paralysis. It is not American; it is not virile. The necessities of life, so far as my limited observation goes, are provided for through private charities.
Bannard is honest. It is important to keep this in mind.
Absolutely honest. That is what makes his testimony so illuminating to our problem. If he were a hypocrite, as well as a pharisee, he would have said that pensions for widows are a good thing, and then would have fed out cash for legislators to choke them off. But he tells us just where he is at.
There are stories that legislators, while they were killing the widowed mothers' bill received telegrams from Bannard telling them to vote against the bill. We never saw such a telegram. But we say it to his credit, we believe Bannard would have fought that way-directly out in the open, if he had fought at all against the bill.
Let us turn to the view of compensation for widows of another Big Giver of the charity overlords. There came to the stand the man whose name floats around in references to that great body of wealth known as The Russell Sage Foundation,-the body of wealth that is supposed to devote itself with a heart hunger that is something fierce, to the plight of widows who have kiddies they would scrub for if they had to, on the floor even of a District Charity Office.
Robert W. De Forest, king-pin of the Charity world, to the witness-chair, and here's his testimony:
If the duty of helping their less fortunate neighbors were taken off the shoulders of those who are able to help by having the city or state assume the burden, much of the neighborly intercourse between the poorer and the richer would cease. Public outdoor relief [the technical Charity term for help given outside of the an institution to which kiddies have been committed] makes for class separation and the enmity of classes. Private charity makes for brotherhood of men.
"Private charity makes for the brotherhood of man." Well, after all this fuss about it, it occurred to The Association For Improving the Condition of the Poor to do some pensioning of widows. It had never occurred to this Association before to do much pensioning. Rather it had been making printed records in which you could read of widows "saved" by being put to work as cleaners in the District Charity offices. But under this threat of state pensions it suddenly became advisable, and financially possible, for the Association to do a little private pensioning. And we knew Mary, a washerwoman. Mary had washed in homes we knew about with a glad heart,-because her toil was going to keep her four kiddies in food after a father had deserted them. We suggested to Mary that it would be a fine thing for her to get an A. I. C. P. pension.
We thought that if ever there was a deserving case it was Mary's, because to restore such a woman to her home and let her boss it as it ought to be bossed, with all her time and energy, would make a great thing out of Mary's motherly life.
So she went on the trail of a pension-and came back with a broken heart and an outraged sense of motherhood. The case had got round on reference to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and this Society made the awful discovery that Mary-a weazened up old woman who had bent over wash tubs daily for five years, to my certain knowledge-was immoral, shockingly immoral.
There were boarders in her humble flat, it seemed, and not enough doors or curtains, or something, to make sure that all slept with due regard for morals. Of course there were boarders. To keep her kiddies together Mary hired out as janitor in a flat house, and janitored night and morning, after taking a turn at the neighborhood's wash tubs. And because all this still left her below the margin of a living wage, she had the usual "lift" of exploited folks of that sort from boarders who paid a little for their keep.
The Immoral Mary lost her babies. They were kidnapped for an institution. And broken hearted she still works on, hoping each week to have money enough for a visit up the Hudson to the place where they are held.
Sometimes you hear stories of scandal in Private Charity's way of grabbing kiddies for institutions. It is described as a sort of kidnapping game. The institutions, you know, get fees from the public treasury for the kids they capture-that is, obtain, through court commitment on the recommendation of the private charities. And as the Widowed Mothers' Compensatior Commission sunk in its probe, there were many who cried that this "commitment" evil was one of the big inside scandals of the Private Charity game.
Re-read at this point Otto T. Bannard's testimony. Get his spirit towards the poor and what they deserve. Get the fact that he is honest. Then remember that he is just as honest as the Vanderbilt who said, "The Public Be Damned," and Divine Right Baer who spoke right out in meeting in thanks of the way God had chosen certain rich men to rule this world and its affairs.
What shall we call him?-"Just You Leave the Poor to the Rich Bannard."
Bannard and DeForest are not the bosses of the S. P. C. C. They are not even interested in it directly, we suspect. We merely have to thank them for a wholly honest and frank statement about an attitude that runs through private charity everywhere you touch it. Is it any wonder then that the time has come for private charity to go to the hell box?
CHRIS MORTON.
[photograph of badge added]
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SOURCE
The Masses
(New York, New York)
-February 1915
http://dlib.nyu.edu/...
IMAGES
Tenement, Lower East Side New York City about 1900
http://immigrants1900.weebly.com/...
Private Charity Corporation Safeguards Morals of Mothers
& Text re: Charity's Lobbying
http://dlib.nyu.edu/...
Badge, New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
http://www.policeguide.com/...
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Mill Mother's Lament - Pete Seeger and Margaret Smith
It is for our little children,
That seems to us so dear,
But for us nor them, dear workers,
The bosses do not care.
-Ella Mae Wiggins
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WE NEVER FORGET
Ella Mae Wiggins
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1:04 PM PT: Report of the New York State Commission On Relief for Widowed Mothers
https://archive.org/...