Poverty

by Robert Hunter

Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VI THE IMMIGRANT In the poorest quarters of many great American cities and industrial communities one is struck by a most peculiar fact -- the poor are almost entirely foreign born. Great colonies, foreign in language, customs, habits, and institutions, are separated from each other and from the distinctly American groups on national or racial lines. By Grossing the Bowery one leaves behind him the great Jewish colony made up of Russians, Poles, and Roumanians and passes into Italy; to the northeast lies a little Germany; to the southwest a colony of Syrians; to the west lies an Irish community, a settlement of negroes, and a remnant of the old native American stock; to the south lie a Chinese and a Greek colony. On Manhattan alone, either on the extreme west side or the extreme east side, there are other colonies of the Irish, the Jews, and the Italians, and, in addition, there is a large colony of Bohemians.1 In Chicago there are the same foreign poor. To my own knowledge there are four Italian colonies, two Polish, a 261 Bohemian, an Irish, a Jewish, a German, a negro, a Chinese, a Greek, a Scandinavian, and other colonies.1 So it is also in Boston and many other cities. In New York alone there are more persons of German descent than persons of native descent, and the German element is larger than in any city of Germany except Berlin. There are nearly twice as many Irish as in Dublin, about as many Jews as in Warsaw, and more Italians than in Naples or Venice.2 No other great nation has a widespread poverty which is foreign to its own native people except in so far as it exists in distant colonies in foreign lands. Our foreign colonies are to an important extent in the cities of our own country. On a small scale we have...

382 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1904

About the author

Librarian note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.

Robert Hunter (né Wiles Robert Hunter) was an American sociologist, progressive author, and golf course architect.

Reviews

[Russell Bittner · Rating 5 out of 5]

What Robert Hunter wrote (and published in 1904) about our methods and means – or lack thereof – in dealing with people dying of tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases is probably just as true today about the living conditions for the vast majority not only of Americans, but of people on the planet.


On pp. 62 – 63, in fact, we find the following: “(m)any people give as a reason for this apathy of the fortunate classes that poverty is irremedial. Did not the Lord say, ‘The poor always ye have with you’? But those who say this fail to distinguish between the poor, who are poor because of their own folly and vice, and the poor who are poor as a result of social wrongs…. The poor of this latter class are, it seems to me, the mass of the poor; they are bred of miserable and unjust social conditions, which punish the good and the pure, the faithful and industrious, the slothful and vicious, all alike.” If there is a crux to Hunter’s entire treatise, this is it.


And speaking further of “the Great White Plague” on pp. 176-177, Hunter writes “(i)t will be stamped out … 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.”


I believe it was in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives that I found the first and – to date – only mention of Robert Hunter and Poverty, and I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Hunter cites Riis quite liberally throughout this work – to wit, on p. 186 with “‘You can kill a man with a tenement as easily as you can kill a man with an axe.’” And yet, if this is a blatant example of reciprocal back-scratching, we should thankful for the abuse of that action by these two noble scholars!


When it comes to children – and most particularly, to the children of immigrants – Hunter’s observations find what I believe is an uncanny, almost ghoulish forecast of today’s children of the Internet. On p. 199, we find “(t)urned out of the small tenement rooms into the street, the child learns the street. Nothing escapes his sharp eyes, and, almost in the briefest conceivable time, he is an American ready to make his way by every known means, good and bad. To the child everything American is good and right. There comes a time when the parents cannot guide him or instruct him; he knows more than they; he looks upon their advice as of no value.”


And if you live in NYC (or in any large metropolis for that matter), consider how aptly John Ruskin once described then-burgeoning cities in his On the Old Road, Vol. I (as cited on p. 204 of Hunter’s book): “mere crowded masses of store and warehouse and counter, and therefore to the rest of the world what the larder and cellar are to a private house; cities in which the object of men is not life, but labor; and which all chief magnitude of edifice is to enclose machinery; cities in which the streets are not the avenues for the passing and procession of a happy people, but the drains for the discharge of a tormented mob, in which the only object in reaching any spot is to be transferred to another; in which existence becomes mere transition, and every creature is only one atom in a drift of human dust and current of interchanging particles, circulating here by tunnels underground, and there by tubes in the air.”


In no wise does Hunter underestimate the role of public schools to the lives of children growing up in a metropolis. And yet, on p. 220, we find the following: “(j)ustice or injustice, patience or impatience, kindness or cruelty, generosity or meanness, humility or vanity, courtesy or brutality, selfishness or unselfishness, good or ill temper, sincerity or insincerity, – these roots of character and of the soul of man are first grown in the play of childhood. Put learning beside character, and how unimportant, in comparison, it becomes. But the roots of character, the foundations of society, are neglected by society, while for learning, millions are spent. The provision we have made for the lesser thing is a great American institution, – the school; for the infinitely greater thing, – the street, the gutter, and the garbage box.”


On pp. 228 – 229, Hunter almost outdoes himself with this description: “(a) vagrant whom I once knew had for five years – from the day he was eleven until the day he was sixteen – made two movements of his hands each second, or 23,760,000 mechanical movements each year, and was, at the time I knew him, at the age of thirty-five, broken down, drunken, and diseased; but he still remembered this period of slavery sufficiently well to tell me that he had ‘paid up’ for all the sins he had ever committed ‘by those five years of hell.’ But there is yet one thing which must be added to the picture. Give the child a tenement for a home in the filthy and muddy streets of an ordinary factory town, with open spaces covered with tin cans, bottles, old shoes, garbage, and other waste, the gutters running sewers, and the air foul with odors and black with factory smoke, and the picture is fairly complete. It is a dark picture, but hardly so dark as the reality, and if one were to describe ‘back of the yards’ in Chicago, or certain mill towns or mining districts, the picture would be even darker than the one given.”


Three more citations should suffice to show how Hunter’s observations, made over one hundred years ago, are as valid today as they were then. On pp. 262-263, we have “(i)n certain large cities in this country almost everything separates ‘the classes and the masses’ except the feeling which inheres on the word ‘humanity.’ The rich and well-to-do are mostly Americans; the poor are mostly foreign, drawn from among the miserable of every nation. The citizen and the slave of Greece were scarcely more effectually separated.’


In concluding this sentiment, Hunter write the following on p. 264: “(l)anguage, institutions, customs, and even religion separate the native and the foreigner. It is this separation which makes the problem of poverty in America more difficult of solution than that of any other nation.”


Please forgive the length of the following and final citation from pp. 148-149 (chapter heading: “The Sick”), but I think this particular quote sums up rather well the intent, content and tone of Robert Hunter’s entire treatise. At the same time, I believe it may be one of the most moving pieces of prose – fiction or non-fiction – I’ve ever read: “I have often tried to forget the story of one case of illness and death which came under my observation several years ago. The little girl and a ‘neighbor-woman’ told it to me when they came in to apply for enough money to bury the mother and the baby child. The mother, a recent widow, had finished a hard day of labor; she came home tired and ill. The little girl, used, even at her early age, to household cares, prepared the supper for herself and mother. During the night a baby child arrived. The little girl helped her mother as best she could, but hers was not the skill required. The mother and baby died. During the previous week they had been evicted from their former house, and the little girl knew no one in the new neighborhood. In fear and despair, she locked the door and sat with the dead mother and sister all that day. Again and again she kissed the mother’s face, but, as the child told me, ‘she would not wake up.’ On the following day she went out, locked the door, and walked several miles to their former house and found there the neighbor-woman who brought the child to me. When we talked of burying the mother, the miserable little girl, who had, up to that time, seemed almost heartless, broke into sobs. For a long time she refused to give up the key to the rooms, and all the time she besought us not to take her mother away. It would not be possible to describe the misery and wretchedness which I have seen in the homes of the poor, and none is more painful to remember than the sickness of women.”

RRB
09/13/15
Brooklyn, NY

[Amy Sawyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Setting aside the chapter on immigration, which is very nativist, the book is rather interesting as the author points to what he believes are the causes of poverty. Since Hunter wrote this book over a hundred years ago, his observations are not shocking to a modern reader with any knowledge of American history; however, many of the reforms he hints at in the book have since been enacted. Despite this, we are still dealing with poverty today.

Hunter makes some keen points throughout, but the reader is left contemplating how, despite programs enacted since Hunter's time to address some of his observations to aid the poor, poverty can ever be eliminated or whether it is even possible.