From the Bottom Up Part 12

One Sunday evening after service, I dressed in the clothes of a labourer, took several men with me and went through the parish. The first place we entered was the East River Hotel, a few blocks from my church. We purchased whiskey at the bar. I did not drink the whiskey, for under oath I could not tell whether it was whiskey or not; but my companions were not so hampered. After paying for the liquor, we were invited upstairs, and there we saw one of the ghastliest, most inhuman sights that can be found anywhere on earth outside of Port Said. We counted forty women on the first floor. We saw them and their stalls, surroundings and companions, and we beat a hasty retreat. A cry of alarm was raised, and the barkeeper jumped to the door. It was secured by two heavy chains. No explanation was made, but a straight demand that he open the door, which was done, and we pa.s.sed out.

The grand jury, which at that time was hearing report and counter-report on the condition of the neighbourhood, had for a foreman a Tammany man who owned several saloons. We went into these saloons one after another, purchased liquor in bottles, and next morning appeared before the grand jury armed with affidavits, and the liquor. Dr. Parkhurst stood at the door of the jury room as I went in, and whispered to me as I pa.s.sed him: "This thing cannot last forever."

The first few minutes of my testimony I was unconsciously a.s.suming the position of a criminal myself, and apologizing for interfering with these gentlemen. The a.s.sistant district attorney, instead of representing the people and standing for the Law, was inquiring into my reasons for doing such an unusual thing. I objected to the foreman sitting on his own case.

"This man," I said, "is an habitual violator of the Law. I am here to testify to that; so are my companions. We have the evidence of his law-breaking here," and I pointed to the bottles that we had placed on the table.

They did not move, however, and I think they rather considered the whole thing a joke. We proceeded to describe the East River Hotel and similar resorts that a few days previously had been described as immaculately clean by the captain of the precinct. The result of all this was the sustaining of the testimony of Dr. Parkhurst's detectives. The petty graft among the organ-grinders and the push-cart men went right on. Complaints were jokes and were treated as such.

The change of seasons brought little change in the activities of a church centre like that. In the winter it was the provision of coal and clothes. In the summer it was fresh-air parties and doctors.

I made the discovery one day in a tenement in talking to a little child of five, that she had never seen a green field or a tree. This led me to ask the missionaries a.s.sisting the church to make a search for a few weeks and collect as many such children as possible. We got together seventeen, ranging from three to seven years of age, not any of whom had ever seen a single aspect of the outdoor world, save the world of stone and brick and wood.

Some friends in Montclair, N.J., arranged a lawn party for these little ones, and we proceeded. Nothing extraordinary happened. There was no open-eyed wonder, few exclamations as we intently watched the emotions of these children as they gazed for the first time on lawns, flower gardens and trees. Two-thirds of them were seasick on the train and the one regret of the journey was that we had not taken along half a dozen wet nurses.

The one unique thing of the day was the luncheon. The children were arranged around an extemporized table where sandwiches, lemonade and milk were abundantly provided. At a signal from the hostess, I said, "Now, children, everything is ready! Have your luncheon." But there was no commotion. Two-thirds of them sat motionless, looking at each other.

The sandwiches were made of ham. If I had not seen this with my own eyes, I would scarcely have credited the telling of it by anybody else. Two-thirds of the children were of Jewish parents and had been taught at least one thing thoroughly. The hostess did the best she could under the circ.u.mstances and provided other kinds of meat, cake and fruit, and the festal occasion had a happy ending.

A certain amount of care has always to be exercised in new enterprises, in departures from the ordinary routine, especially if they involve expense; or, as I have said before, interfere with political or economic progress. Pulpit preaching is the smallest item in the entire programme of a preacher, especially in such a neighbourhood and in such a church. If a preacher wants an audience, all he has to do is to step outside his church door, stand on a box, and the audience is ready-made. It is miscellaneous and cosmopolitan; it is respectful and mult.i.tudinous. When I discovered this, I proceeded to act on my convictions, and copy, to the extent of getting an audience, at least, the Socialist propagandist; and I proceeded to work _with_ the people around me instead of _for_ them. There were no lines of demarkation to my activity. I touched the life of the community at every angle, sometimes entering as a fool where an angel would fear to tread.

I was called upon to visit a poor couple who lived in a rear tenement.

They were of the unattached; had no ecclesiastical connections whatever. I saw that the old man, who lay on a couch, was dying. He was scarcely able to speak, but managed to express a desire that I sing to him; so, as there was no one present but his wife and myself to hear it, I sang. This inspired the old man to sing himself. He coughed violently, tried to clear his throat, pulled himself together, and sang after me a line of "Jesus, Lover of my Soul." This was very touching, but the solemnity was severely jarred by following that line by the first line of: "Little Brown Jug, don't I love you!" So between the Little Brown Jug and the sacred poetry of the church he wound up, dying with his head on my knee.

There was an insurance of thirty dollars on his life. I informed the undertaker, and did what I could to comfort the old woman who was now entirely alone in the world. One of the missionaries of the church came next day and helped to make arrangements for the funeral which was to take place in the afternoon. They had not been long in that alley and knew n.o.body in it, and when I arrived to conduct the funeral service at three o'clock in the afternoon, there was a little crowd of people around the door, and from the inside came agonized yells from the old woman.

I opened the door and marched in. I found the undertaker in the act of taking the body out of the casket and laying it on the lounge in the corner. The old woman was on her knees, wringing her hands and begging him in the name of G.o.d not to do it. I asked for an explanation and, rather reluctantly, the undertaker told me, proceeding with his programme as he explained that there was a "kink" in the insurance.

"Well," I said, "we can fix that up all right."

"Yes," he said, "you can fix it up with cash; but we are not in the undertaking business for our health, you know."

"Well, stop for a moment," I pleaded, "and let us talk it over!"

"Have you got the dough?" he asked.

"Not here," I replied, "but I am the pastor of that church up there on the corner, and surely we are good enough for the small expense of this funeral."

By this time he had the lid on the casket and was proceeding to carry it out. The old woman was now on her feet and almost in hysterics. I was mightily moved by the situation, and asked the man to wait; but he jabbed the end of the casket under my arm--perhaps accidentally--pushing me to one side on his way to the door. I was there ahead of him however; locked the door and put the key in my pocket.

"Now, will you wait for one moment till we talk it over?"

His answer was a volley of oaths. I waited until he subsided, and then I said:

"I will be responsible for this financially. You are wringing the heart's blood out of this poor old woman, and I don't propose to stand by and allow it." I raised my voice and continued--"I will give you two minutes to put that corpse back in the casket and arrange it for burial, and if you don't do it, there may be two to bury instead of one."

I began to time him, making absolutely no answer to anything he said.

I quieted the old woman, stood very close to her and put my hand on her head. I said, "It's all right, Mary. Everything is all right. You are not friendless. You are not alone."

The two minutes were up. I took off my coat, rolled up my shirt sleeves and advanced toward him.

"Are you going to do the decent thing?"

There was one long look between us. Then he put the body back in the casket, arranged it for burial, and I opened the door and the crowd came in, not, however, before I had put my coat on again. I read the service and preached the sermon, and the undertaker did the rest.

Some months afterward, I was at work in my study in the tower of the old church, when I heard a loud knocking at the church door--a most unusual thing. I came down and found that undertaker and a gentleman and lady, well dressed, evidently of the well-to-do cla.s.s, standing at the door.

"Here is a couple that want to get married, Mr. Irvine," the undertaker said.

They came into the study and were married, and I shook hands with the three, and they went off. Next day I went to the undertaker--indeed, he was an undertaker's helper. I went up to his desk and laid down a five-dollar bill, one-fourth of the marriage fee. Without being invited, I pulled a chair up and sat down beside him.

"Now, tell me, brother," I said confidentially. "Why did you bring them to me?"

A smile overspread his features.

"Well," he said, "it was like this. You remember that funeral business?"

"Yes."

"Well, I figured it out like this: that one of the two of us was puttin' up a d.a.m.ned big bluff; but I hadn't the heart to call it.

Shake!"

CHAPTER XII

WORKING WAY DOWN

After some years' experience in missions and mission churches, I would find it very hard if I were a workingman living in a tenement not to be antagonistic to them; for, in large measure, such work is done on the a.s.sumption that people are poor and degraded through laxity in morals. The scheme of salvation is a salvation for the individual; social salvation is out of the question. Social conditions cannot be touched, because in all rotten social conditions, there is a thin red line which always leads to the rich man or woman who is responsible for them.

Coming in contact with these ugly social facts continuously, led me to this belief. It came very slowly as did also the opinion that the missionary himself or the pastor, be he as wise as Solomon, as eloquent as Demosthenes, as virtuous as St. Francis, has no social standing whatever among the people whose alms support the inst.i.tutions, religious and philanthropic, of which these men are the executive heads. The fellowship of the saints is a pure fiction, has absolutely no foundation in fact in a city like New York except as the poor saints have it by themselves.

Tim Grogan jolted me into a new political economy; the crowded streets of the East Side on a summer night gave me a new theology. I stood one night in August on the tower of the old church and looked down upon the sweltering ma.s.s that covered the roofs, fire escapes and sidewalks. The roofs were littered with naked and half-naked children panting for breath. Down on the crowded streets thousands of little children darted in and out like sparrows, escaping as if by miracle the vehicles of all sorts and descriptions. Crowded baby-carriages lined the sidewalks. The stoops, too, were crowded. What a ma.s.s of humans! What a ganglia of living wires! As I looked on this vast mult.i.tude, I questioned the orthodox theology that held me in its grip. Most of these people belonged to another race. And I stood at that moment firmly rooted in the belief that this mult.i.tude was inevitably doomed! Let me put it frankly, even though it seems brutal: doomed to h.e.l.l!

I am unable to a.n.a.lyze the quick currents of thought that went through my mind at that instant. I cannot explain how the change came. I know that there came to me a bigger thought than any I had ever known, and that thought so thrilled me with human feeling, with love for men, that I said to my soul: "Soul, if this mult.i.tude is doomed to h.e.l.l, be brave; gird up your loins and go with them!"

In that tenement district people were being murdered by the tens of thousands by tuberculosis, by defective plumbing, by new diseases born of the herding of men and women like cattle. I made some feeble attempt to investigate, to ascertain, to acquaint myself with the facts, and my investigation led me to this result--a result that the lapse of years has not altered; that the private ownership of tenements--the private profits in housing--was not only the mother of the great white plague, but of most of the plagues down there that endanger health. It led me to the belief also that the struggle for bodily health, the struggle to survive, was so fierce as to leave little time for soul health or mental health! It was a source of continual wonder to me that people so helpless and so neglected were as good as they were, or as healthy as they were. It did not seem reasonable to lay the blame at the doors of the owners of the tenements. Many of them had a tenement only as a source of income--and to acquire the tenement had taken long years of savings, earnings and sacrifices. It was part of the great game of business, the game of "live I, die you!"

The churches and synagogues are of little vital importance there, because they ignore social conditions, or largely ignore them. And there is a reason for this also, and the reason is that they are supported by the people--the very people who perpetuate the evils against which prophet, priest and pastor ought to cry out continually. The protest against such conditions is a negligible quant.i.ty.

There is a protest, an outcry, but it is related neither to the church nor to the synagogue. The East Side has a soul, but it is not an ecclesiastical soul! It is a soul that is alive--so much alive to the interest of the people that many times I felt ashamed of myself when I listened to the socialistic orators on the street corners and in the East Side halls. They were stirring up the minds of the people. They were not merely making them discontented with conditions, but they were offering a programme of reconstruction--a programme that included a trowel as well as a sword.

The soul of the East Side expressed itself in the Yiddish press, daily, weekly, and monthly, and in Yiddish literature, and in the spoken word of the propagandist whose ideal, though limited in literary expression, made him a flame of living fire. It was this soul of the East Side that drove me against my will to study the relation of politics to the condition of the people. One of the first things that I discovered was the grip that Tammany had on the people. Every saloon keeper was a power in the community. Men, of any force of character whatever, who were willing to hold their hands behind their backs for Tammany graft, were singled out by the organization for some moiety of honour. Small merchants found it to their advantage to keep on the right side of the saloon keepers and the Tammany leaders. I remember trying to express this thought in an uptown church to a wealthy congregation; and I remember distinctly, also, that I was rebuked by one of the leading lights of the missionary society of which I was a part. I was informed that my business was to "save souls," and in my public addresses to tell how I saved them; that political conditions must be left to the politicians--and it was done.

To the old church at the corner of Market and Henry streets came Dowling. He followed me as a matter of fellowship--we loved each other. And came also Dave Ranney, the "puddler from Pittsburg."

On the first anniversary of Dave's conversion, I gathered a hundred wastrels of the Bowery together and gave them a dinner at the church.