Part 17 (1/2)
Here follows a ma.s.s of nauseating details which for the sake of not overshocking the reader we shall omit. The report continued:
The halls and stairways are usually filthy and dark, and the walls and banisters foul and damp, while the floors were not infrequently used ... [for purposes of nature] ... for lack of other provisions. The dwelling rooms are usually very inadequate in size for the accommodation of their occupants, and many of the sleeping rooms are simply closets, without light or ventilation save by means of a single door.... Such is the character of a vast number of tenement houses, especially in the lower part of the city and along the eastern and western border. Disease especially in the form of fevers of a typhoid character are constantly present in these dwellings and every now and then become an epidemic.[155]
”Some of the tenements,” added the report, ”are owned by persons of the highest character, but they fail to appreciate the responsibility resting on them.” This sentence makes it clear that landlords could own, and enormously profit from, pig-sty human habitations which killed off a large number of the unfortunate tenants, and yet these landlords could retain, in nowise diminished, the l.u.s.tre of being men ”of the highest character.” Fully one-third of the deaths in New York and Brooklyn resulted from zymotic diseases contracted in these tenements, yet not even a whisper was heard, not the remotest suggestion that the men of wealth who thus deliberately profited from disease and death, were criminally culpable, although faint and timorous opinions were advanced that they might be morally responsible.
HUMANITY OF NO CONSEQUENCE.
Human life was nothing; the supremacy of the property idea dominated all thought and all laws, not because mankind was callous to suffering, wretchedness and legalized murder, but because thought and law represented what the propertied interests demanded. If the proletarian white population had been legal slaves, as the negroes in the South had been, much consideration would have been bestowed upon their gullets and domiciles, for then they would have been property; and who ever knew the owner of property to destroy the article which represented money? But being ”free” men and women and children, the proletarians were simply so many bundles of flesh whose sickness and death meant pecuniary loss to no property-holder. Therefore casualities to them were a matter of no great concern to a society that was taught to venerate the sacredness of property as embodied in brick and stone walls, clothes, machines, and furniture, which same, if inert, had the all-important virile quality of having a cash value, which the worker had not.
But these landlords ”of the highest character” not only owned, and regularly collected rents from, tenement houses which filled the cemeteries, but they also resorted to the profitable business of leasing certain tenements to middlemen who guaranteed them by lease a definite and never-failing annual rental. Once having done this, the landlords did not care what the middlemen did--how much rent they exacted, or in what condition they allowed the tenements. ”The middlemen,” further reported the Metropolitan Board of Health,
are frequently of the most heartless and unscrupulous character and make large profits by sub-letting. They leave no s.p.a.ce unoccupied: they rent sheds, bas.e.m.e.nts and even cellars to families and lodgers; they divide rooms by part.i.tions, and then place a whole family in a single room, to be used for living, cooking, and sleeping purposes. In the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, and Fourteenth Wards may be found large, old fas.h.i.+oned dwellings originally constructed for one family, subdivided and sublet to such an extent that even the former sub-cellars are occupied by two or more families. There is a cellar population of not less than 20,000 in New York City.
Here, again, s.h.i.+nes forth with blinding brightness that superior morality of the propertied cla.s.ses. There is no record of a single landlord who refused to pocket the great gains from the owners.h.i.+p of tenement houses. Great, in fact, excessive gains they were, for the landowning cla.s.s considered tenements ”magnificent investments” (how edifying a phrase!) and all except one held on to them. That one was William Waldorf Astor of the present generation, who, we are told, ”sold a million dollars worth of unpromising tenement house property in 1890.”[156] What fantasy of action was it that caused William Waldorf Astor to so depart from the accepted formulas of his cla.s.s as to give up these ”magnificent investments?” Was it an abhorrence of tenements, or a growing fastidiousness as to the methods? It is to be observed that up to that time he and his family had tenaciously kept the revenues from their tenements; evidently then, the source of the money was not a troubling factor. And in selling those tenements he must have known that his profits on the transaction would be charged by the buyers against the future tenants and that even more overcrowding would result. What, then, was the reason?
About the year 1887 there developed an agitation in New York City against the horrible conditions in tenement houses, and laws were popularly demanded which would put a stop to them, or at least bring some mitigation. The whole landlord cla.s.s virulently combated this agitation and these proposed laws. What happened next? Significantly enough a munic.i.p.al committee was appointed by the mayor to make an inquiry into tenement conditions; and this committee was composed of property owners. William Waldorf Astor was a conspicuous member of the committee. The mockery of a man whose family owned miles of tenements being chosen for a committee, the province of which was to find ways of improving tenement conditions, was not lost on the public, and shouts of derision went up. The working population was skeptical, and with reason, of the good faith of this committee. Every act, beginning with the mild and ineffective one of 1867, designed to remedy the appalling conditions in tenement houses, had been stubbornly opposed by the landlords; and even after these puerile measures had finally been pa.s.sed, the landlords had resisted their enforcement. Whether it was because of the bitter criticisms levelled at him, or because he saw that it would be a good time to dispose of his tenements as a money-making matter before further laws were pa.s.sed, is not clearly known. At any rate William Waldorf Astor sold large batches of tenements.
AN EXALTED CAPITALIST.
To return, however, to William B. Astor. He was the owner, it was reckoned in 1875, of more than seven hundred buildings and houses, not to mention the many tracts of unimproved land that he held. His income from these properties and from his many varied lines of investments was stupendous. Every one knew that he, along with other landlords, derived great revenues from indescribably malodorous tenements, unfit for human habitation. Yet little can be discerned in the organs of public opinion, or in the sermons or speeches of the day, which showed other than the greatest deference for him and his kind. He was looked up to as a foremost and highly exalted capitalist; no church disdained his gifts;[157] far from it, these were eagerly solicited, and accepted gratefully, and even with servility. None questioned the sources of his wealth, certainly not one of those of his own cla.s.s, all of whom more or less used the same means and who extolled them as proper, both traditionally and legally, and as in accordance with the ”natural laws”
of society. No condemnation was visited on Astor or his fellow-landlords for profiting from such ghastly harvests of disease and death. When William B. Astor died in 1875, at the age of eighty-three, in his sombre brownstone mansion at Thirty-fifth street and Fifth avenue, his funeral was an event among the local aristocracy; the newspapers published the most extravagant panegyrics and the estimated $100,000,000 which he left was held up to all the country as an illuminating and imperishable example of the fortune that thrift, enterprise, perseverance, and ability would bring.
FOOTNOTES:
[143] Matthew Hale Smith in ”Suns.h.i.+ne and Shadow in New York,” 186-187.
[144] See Part III of this work, ”The Great Railroad Fortunes”.
[145] See Part III, Chapters iv, v, vi, etc.
[146] Proceedings of the [New York City] Commissioners of the Sinking Fund, 1844-1865:213.
[147] Doc. No. 46, Doc.u.ments of the [New York City] Board of Aldermen, xxi, Part II.
[148] Proceedings of the [New York City] Commissioners of the Sinking Fund, 1844-1865:734.
[149] Ibid:865.
[150] Proceedings of the [New York City] Sinking Fund Commission, 1882:2020-2023.
[151] Doc.u.ments of the [New York City] Board of Aldermen, 1877, Part II.
No. 8.
[152] New York Senate Journal, 1871:482-83.