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Vol. 110

June, 1925

No. 2

F

The Professor Goes Slumming

Notes on the Idiosyncrasies of the Charitable

BY STANLEY WALKER

OR years I had joined with the majority in pitying New York's lower East Side. That muchdissected district has long been held up by uplifters as a forlorn and effective object lesson; it has been the joy of the sociologist and the paradise of the statistician. It was, and is, regarded by those unfamiliar with it as the world's worst place to live. And I believed that was true, despite my rather close association with it and its people.

I think it was the professor who first showed me the truth. He was an old friend, and he arrived at the Pennsylvania Terminal late on a winter afternoon for his first visit to New York. For three days, surveying the United States from a Pullman window, he had traveled from the Rio Grande to the Hudson, the first time in more than fifteen years that he had set foot out of Mexico.

Remembering something of the professor's proclivities, I arranged for him to have three cocktails, after which we went to a café for dinner. He was born and reared a Frenchman; his long sojourn in Mexico and the fact that he

had taken Mexican citizenship had failed to alter his nature appreciably. He was still the accomplished, discriminating gourmet. How he enjoyed that dinner! He nearly broke down with emotion by the time he reached the dessert, and it was with feeling that he said:

"How wonderful to eat once more! Not since Porfirio Diaz invited me to dine in his palace have I had such a feast. Think, for fifteen years I have lived in a country where they eat only beans, peppers, and a cooked paste which they call bread. No wonder the Mexicans cannot rise. By their food shall ye know them."

The professor, obviously, was sentimental. He had put too much of himself, too much of his soul, into the task of raising the educational level of the people of Mexico. He had gone the whole route, married a Mexican woman and had two children. He wished they were there to eat with him. I asked him how he wished to pass the evening. He said:

"I want to see the slums. I have heard so much of your congested East Side, its suffering and all, where the

Copyright, 1925, by Taв CENTURY Co. All rights reserved.

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people are so poor and dirty. I should games-don't tell me they are in dislike to see it."

Of all the entertainments offered by priceless old Manhattan, slumming seems to me the least charming. Nevertheless, the professor was my guest; I must obey. So we set out for the famous East Side, known the world over for its squalor.

We walked through the most densely populated sections; we elbowed our way through gesticulating, alien crowds; we heard and saw the pushcart peddlers; we noted the mothers sitting on the front steps and leaning from the windows of tenements, watching their offspring swarming, playing, and fighting in the streets; we sniffed the strange and pungent odors that came from restaurants and basement kitchens; we marveled at the garbage, heaped in tall cans along the sidewalks in such quantities that it seemed all the trucks in New York could not carry it away.

tress. All were in good physical trim and, what is more, they were happy. You could hear their laughter for blocks. Food prices, as you can see from the sidewalk markets, are not high.

"I dare say every one of those people who are foreign-born are living in circumstances ten times better than in the countries they left. Else why did they come, and why do they remain? You yourself tell me that their restaurants are excellent and cheap. And you say they still make their wines despite prohibition. What more can they ask? And as for ignorance, didn't we pass schools and book-stores and see many people reading?

"No, these are not the slums. Here life is full and crowded and happy. You have not only disappointed me; you have done a grave injustice to these joyous folk."

The professor, it was apparent, had stated the case correctly. The East Side is thriving, and has been thriving for years. It has free-milk stations, free advice on medical and other matters, cheap food, and low rents; that is, compared with the rest of the city.

So we went for hours. I pointed out the various colonies, Jews, Italians, Russians, Turks, Armenians, Czechs, Rumanians. Offering the best of my knowledge and hearsay, I told him of differences in customs and modes of living. I supposed he was tremendously impressed, but at midnight the professor turned to me with a puzzled face and said: "Yes, this is all very well, but where uplifters of various sorts ply their are the slums?"

"What have we just seen?" I asked him. "If those are not slums, what are they?"

"No," he said, "they cannot be slums. Crowded, yes, but there is no such misery as comes with real poverty. Those mothers we saw, were n't they all well fed, fat, happy? The children we saw roller-skating and playing their

Yet the East Side continues as the more or less indifferent guinea-pig upon which social workers, Americanization experts, and the vast army of

trade. The tradition that the East Side is a region of slums simply will not down. Much has been made of the alleged practice of certain mothers there of sewing their children into garments in the fall and leaving them on until spring; medical authorities are constantly pointing to the danger of pestilence. Yet there has been no pestilence. The death-rate, indeed, is

astonishingly low, lower than in other regions which, to all appearances, are much more sanitary. One explanation is that the East-Side mother rears her own children, feeds them from her own breast and keeps them near her as much as possible.

It is seldom that a case of genuine distress comes to light in the East Side; there is no place where it is so difficult to starve. When an unfortunate case is found, the newspapers regard it as a sensation, with the result that social agencies and scores of kindhearted persons rush to the rescue. Such a case never fails to find ready sympathy, and the papers run editorials saying that once more New York has disproved the theory that it is hard-boiled. Rent is paid for months in advance, jobs are obtained, and New York tells the world that it has done right by its East Side. Yet the tradition of the slums lives on.

Indeed, so far as the outpouring of aid is concerned, there is only one other region comparable with the East Side, and that is the mountainous districts of Kentucky and Tennessee. The chief need of the hill people appears to be schools and doctors, and settlement workers for the last generation have been attending to that. Admitting their lamentable lack of culture, the mountain people are scarcely in dire straits. Only shiftlessness prevents them from having enough food; the air they breathe is unexcelled anywhere; they can gaze upon splendid scenery if they so desire; it is generally conceded that prohibition has not greatly upset their industry of making moonshine for their invigoration; they have feuds and camp-meetings as ample dramatic and emotional outlets. And as for clothing, it is a well

known fact that the women of the hills wear more petticoats than any other women on earth. Yet the people there, like those of the East Side, sit eternally under the lachrymose eye of charity.

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Soon after I had resolved to waste no more tears on the people of the East Side, I made a trip to a city in Texas, a home of cattle and oil millionaires. It is not a city of slums, though, to be sure, it has its ratty edges. And, as in nearly every other town in this country at present, the general atmosphere is one of prosperity.

On my first day I passed a hat-store and saw in the window an enormous sombrero-a larger hat than any selfrespecting motion-picture cow-boy or candidate would think of wearing. It was of a particularly violent, offensive, brick-red color. I asked the proprietor to give me a straight answer-did he really expect to sell it?

"Oh, yes," he said. "I may sell it to-day. I have a customer in sight."

Later that day the hat was missing, and a moment later its new owner emerged from the shop. He was a youth of probably eighteen, and he looked like an unbelievably overdrawn caricature of a comic hick. Coat and trousers were far too short; his shoes were rough and dusty; his face wore an expression of utter blankness. Yet pressed tightly on his sorrel top was the fifty-dollar red sombrero. The young man, apparently, was trying to capture for himself some of the romance of a long-departed period when men, according to reliable historical documents, were men.

"He's one of a family of fifteen," the storekeeper told me. “They live just outside of town-tenants on a cot

ton farm. None of 'em any good. This kid has been saving for six months to buy that hat. His parents and his brothers and sisters are starving, and he probably has n't had lunch to-day. But all the same he had to have the hat. I sell most of my big hats to kids like him."

Next I stopped at a bridge on a road that leads westward from the cotton farming belt of east Texas. There, through the long, scorching afternoon, I watched the procession of moverstenant farmers, broke' and hit by the drought, who were going farther west in the hope of getting a new start. And a forlorn hope it was. There was the steady line of wagons, drawn by skinny, overworked mules and horses.

These people had pitiful stories. For the most part they were ignorant, underfed, bowed and worn by too much labor, and with the fire of ambition gone out of their eyes. They would camp every night by the roadside, eating salt pork and beans. However, little sympathy was wasted on them. The local papers carried brief accounts of the crop failures and the general hard times, but the situation was too common to attract much attention. Surely, I thought, there is room here for some magnificent slumming.

Again, in a small farming community, I attended a political meeting at which one of the State's most celebrated spellbinders held forth. The meeting was held outdoors under a broiling sun. Four or five of the more well-to-do local citizens were on the platform. Two of them were sockless. Perhaps two thirds of those in the crowd were men; the rest were women, a score or more with blistered babies at their breasts. The mothers, scent

ing the first excitement of the year, stood patiently in dust up to their ankles. The children coughed, cried, and squirmed, but the speaker held the attention of the crowd for more than an hour. It was a scene of misery; there was something lean and hungry and hopeless about that assembly which was pathetic. They applauded the speaker, a former governor running for reëlection, I believe, when he pointed out that in his previous administration rainfall rainfall had been more abundant. He did n't promise, but strongly intimated, that they might expect more rain next year if they voted for him.

The native whites are problem enough for those who like to worry about such things. The negro settlements on the cotton farms and in the towns furnish a problem that is even more serious, provided, of course, that the person who does the worrying believes that negroes are human and ought to be helped. Generally the negro districts are left strictly alone; no one bothers much about them. But the poverty, coupled with dangerously dirty living conditions, is there for any one who looks.

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