Conditions in the Late Nineteenth Century.
In the great cities of the nineteenth century slum dwellers crowded into foul-smelling tenements , worked in sweatshop industries, and were victims of such working and living conditions as seemed beyond any power to remedy or change. The tenements, four to six stories high, crowded along alleys, which served as air-shafts. Only a few of the rooms faced the alley; the majority of the rooms had access to neither light nor air. There was little or no inside plumbing, and frequently there was but a single sink with running water for an entire tenement. There were no playgrounds, no parks, and few schoolhouses in such areas. There were saloons ; there was plenty of vice and crime; and there was disease.
On New Yorks East Side, the death rate for children in 1888 was 140 per 1000. Today it is about 7 per 1000. Contagious diseases such as typhoid fever, smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis took a frightful toll every year. In the 1890s, Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant, began writing stories about the conditions among the poor who lived in Murderers Alley, Hells Kitchen, Poverty Gap, the Lung Blocks, and the Bowery. His book, How the Other Half Lives, stirred the conscience of the nation. People on other parts of the country began to see that the conditions in New York which he so vividly described might also exist in the cities where they lived.
In rural districts the poor found life equally hard. Hamlin Garland, novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote graphically of the hardships of life on the Middle Border. He described the hard work on the farm. There was no romance in getting up at five oclock in the morning with the temperature thirty degrees below zero. It required military discipline to get us out of bed in a chamber warmed only by the stovepipe, to draw on icy socks and frosty boots and go to milking cows.
The Salvation Army.
In times of distress poor people were chiefly dependent upon private charities, political clubs, and religious organizations for charity.
The Salvation Army, which had its beginning in England, was also organized in America in 1879. It was more than a religious organization concerned with the spreading of Christian faith among the poor and the outcasts of society. Its workers went into the slums and worked among the poor and destitute. Long before the twentieth century this organization had set up employment agencies, lodging houses for the homeless, soup kitchens for the hungry, and was carrying on a whole program of social service for those in need. Its little chapels and houses of refuge were to be found in every city.