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 space unoccupied : they rent sheds, basements and even cellars to families and lodgers ; they divide rooms by partitions, 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 fashioned dwellings originally constructed for one family, subdivided and sublet to such an extent that even the former sub-cellars are occupied by two are more families. There is a cellar population of not less than 20,000 in New York City. Here, again, shines forth with blinding brightness that superior morality of the propertied classes. There is no record of a single landlord who refused to pocket the great gains from the ownership of tenement houses. Great, in fact, excessive gains they were, for the landowning class 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.”14 What fantasy of action was it that caused William Waldorf Astor to so depart from the accepted formulas of his class 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 class virulently combated this agitation and these proposed laws. What happened next ? Significantly enough a municipal 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 passed, 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 passed, is not clearly known. At any rate William Waldorf Astor sold large batches of tenements.
Posted on: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 19:49:14 +0000
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