Homeless Lives in American Cities

Interrogating Myth and Locating Community

P. Webb

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349476893, 9781137374226
• eBook ISBN: 9781137405647
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Homeless Lives in American Cities explores how the American discourse on homelessness arose from Victorian social and political anxieties about the impacts of immigration and urbanization on the middle class family. It demonstrates how contemporary social work and policy emerge from Victorian cultural attitudes.

Part I

Formation of Homelessness

In Part I, we look at the emergence of the American industrial metropolis and the social displacements that both gave rise to the city and resulted from it. Primarily focusing on the New York City of the long fin-de-siècle period, this part analyzes responses to urbanization and its migrations, including overcrowding, inadequate infrastructure and housing, and cultural mélange. These historical changes were the object of much contemporaneous commentary as well as policy and institutional responses. I argue that this urban commentary brought a semantic order to the chaos of late Victorian New York by, on the one hand, legitimating the bourgeois, middle class family and its Christian home ideal as the proper foundation for social order and, on the other hand, othering the spaces, individuals, and social practices that failed to conform to these norms. These responses to urban changes by writers and scholars, service providers and politicians began a process of semantically ordering the city—which precipitated spatial, political, and institutional processes of ordering—from which arose the incipient rhetoric of homelessness.

This initial rhetorical response to the city furnished representations of urban life that first brought order to the city and then later to those residents whose locations, family structure, and living arrangements did not conform to the Christian home ideal. Early social activists and journalists, whose rhetorical efforts usually intertwined with their activism, began this process of ordering urban life by developing terms and categories for representing new conditions. It was only later, when some basic assumptions of what was meant by homelessness were established, that the term homeless began to appear in the work of social scientists. In its early usage, the term only represented vague connections between discrete categories of displacement, for example, hobos, tramps, and bums. The commentary by journalists and social activists began a semantic process of ordering—that is, developing terms and images (often mythic tropes) to represent the city and its residents; these representations both grew from Victorian cultural assumptions about the family and the city and subsequently codified these as social scientists took up categories and terms from the activist commentary.

In Part I, I contend that fin-de-siècle journalists and activists responded with alarm to social changes; they described urban problems as being a form of homelessness and invoked mythic tropes to represent homeless figures. I first look at how homelessness emerged. Here I argue that the term first applies to the city as a whole because it is the perceived threat to the bourgeois family and the Gemeinschaft ideal of small-town life. I then turn to some of the early rhetorical efforts and tropes deployed in this process of semantically ordering the city. Activists and journalists who began this discourse turned to old practices of othering found in anti-Semitic traditions. In this section, I argue that anti-Semitic tropes provide symbols for and structures of representing homelessness. Finally, I argue that the anti-Semitic tropes invoked by these urban commentators function as myth. The tropes serve a cultural and not a theological purpose and emerge in locations beyond the sphere of religion. By falling back onto myth, the language of homelessness enables the rhetoric to become a carrier of family anxieties.

Part I does not fully bring us to the sociological literature on homelessness; we shall find that after a consolidation in thinking about social displacement, which is coextensive with the rise of American urban sociology. In Part II, we discuss that consolidation. Rather, here, we analyze the early responses to metropolitan displacements by activists and journalists who turn to myth to develop ways to explain and articulate urban life. In these early responses, many of the basic traits that sociological literature later attributes to homeless individuals begin to emerge through the mythic tropes: separation from family, wandering moral and/or pathological failings, and so on. The tropes provided an argument about the characteristics of these homeless figures—valuations connected with Cain, Ishmael, or the Wandering Jew became associated with those people described as homeless. Mythic tropes were an early means for ordering a discourse that was subsequently professionalized and codified by social scientists; the sociologist’s descriptions of the homeless man began to take on the characteristics of a Cain or Ishmael.

Chapter 1

The Fin-de-Siècle Homeless City

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, New York was thought to be a homeless city populated by unmoored (domestic and international) migrants. Anxious commentators thought the city to have overturned life as they knew it. For them, a Babelian cacophony arose from the streets, decades before towers glowered down on the mutually incomprehensible sounds. Five-story tenement walk-ups enclosed in darkness, staleness—holding light and air at bay. Journalists wrote of these throngs as spilling out from the stale, dank air of their semiprivate enclosures. Though kitchens—with roughhewn tables and stoves for warming coffee, food, and people—provided a small locus for gathering, domestic life was thought to spill forth from tenements to flow into fire escapes, streaming onto sidewalks to join among the cart peddlers and surging into the streets. These middle-class commentators’ discomfort with these overcrowded cities led many to hope for Haussmann-like1 reconstruction to run roughshod over poverty to rationalize the tenement quarters of the modern city.

Industrializing forces necessitated rational processes for production, distribution, and exchange, but in the minds of many middle-class observers, those newcomers responding to industrial demands for laborers generated anarchic urban conditions.2 For these writers, the city’s structure divided into parallel worlds of an ordered “clean, handsome, respectable quarter of the town”3 for fashionable plutocrats and a tumult in the tenement districts thought to house three-quarters of the population in 1890.4 The premier man of letters in this day, William Dean Howells describes the bustle and crowding of a tenement streetscape:

The fire-escapes, with their light iron balconies and ladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts; the roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed with children; women’s heads seemed to show at every window. In the basements, over which flights of high stone steps led to the tenements, were green-grocers’ shops abounding in cabbages, and provision stores running chiefly to bacon and sausages, and cobblers’ and tinners’ shops, and the like, in proportion to the small needs of a poor neighborhood. Ash barrels lined the sidewalks and garbage heaps filled with gutters; teams of all trades stood idly about; a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through the street, and mixes his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of the children and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women; the burly blue bulk of a policeman defined itself at the corner; a drunkard zigzagged down the sidewalk toward him. It was not the abode of the extremest poverty, but of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world, transmitting itself from generation to generation, and establishing conditions of permanency to which human life adjusts itself as it does to those of some incurable disease, like leprosy.5

This bifurcation between plutocratic respectability and chaotic tenements was a line through the city. The line not only divided people into segregated districts of the city; this split of urban geography also divided popular images of people by class, culture, ethnicity, and language.

In the parlance of the day, it created two numerically imbalanced “halves.” The everyday lives of the poor—their living quarters, work practices, social habits, and spatial arrangements—became other for middle-class commentators. Rather famously, the New York poor—their everyday lives and their urban locations in slums—were studied in Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives. In a gnostic turn against the everyday life of the poor, bourgeois commentators and reformers rejected this other and its life not merely as an unworthy banality but as an evil. For them, the other half must be redeemed or rejected. These journalists and activists dismissed the modern urban life (of the metropolitan majority), calling for a transcendence from the muck of the modern city in the hopes of a return to a nostalgic past, or at least the importation of some Gemeinschaft-ideal elements into the city. The critique of those unable to escape the underside of the city was simultaneously a disparagement and a call for greater urban order to minimize urban problems.

The slums—their squalor and poverty—came to be considered homeless and New York (the American city with the greatest profusion of slums) a homeless city; the city and its poverty threatened hearth and home. In these discursive arguments against mundanity, the quotidian existences of the poor were homeless; the utopic locus of home, thus, must transcend the immediacy of environs. In a bourgeois discourse on homelessness, I argue, home—in particular the “Christian home”—was a this-worldly transcendence. Home was an ideal for family that pulls this social institution out of the banalities of daily life and legitimates it. Home was not merely a social category; it had explicitly religious connotations.

This particularly Protestant articulation of home became the locus for the formation of moral citizens and pious Christians;6 it was a sacred space forming a bulwark to insulate the Victorian family from modernizing ravages and proletarian immigrants. In the sermons, pamphlets, and popular writings extolling the virtues of the Christian home, home life not only furnished patriotic and ethical training but also “provided a means of blessing middle-class values and norms. Domestic Protestantism was not merely an individualized form of popular piety. The ideology promoted by secular and clerical writers helped to justify middle-class notions of gender, economics and taste by presenting the Victorian home as eternal and God-given.”7 With this God-given ideal for social life as the norm, commentators had a clear measuring stick against which to assess urban populations. New York Presbyterian minister and president of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, John Hall was commissioned by the Philadelphia-based American Sunday School Union8 to write a book on the Christian home. Hall explicitly juxtaposes the family and its Christian home to the perils of urban life.9 The discourse of the other half developed in juxtaposition with the Christian home ideal.

As tensions increased between the populations of these halves—the plutocrats and the urban slum dwellers—fears grew among the wealthy. The New York riots of the 1860s and 1870s10 left the urban middle and elite classes wary of the urban poor. New York’s population explosion in the final two decades of the century filled the city with an ever-increasing, teeming mass of multilingual hordes. The labor overaccumulations and subsequent housing shortages led to usurious rents, ramshackle tenements, and an overly dense population. Commentators soon began to document urban life in a call for social reforms to avert possible explosions of class antagonisms.

In 1890, this assessment of urban life (especially that of New York) took a broader outline than before—fiction looked beyond the urban elite into tenement neighborhoods, and journalism systematically documented each community of slums.11 In this year, three famous sketches of New York appeared—Stephen Crane’s Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, William Dean Howell’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives. The latter two in particular emanate from a bourgeois gaze into the slums. While generally evoking sympathy, these two texts are foundational for the discourse on homelessness because they mark the starting point of establishing the modern city itself as homeless.

The concerns with the city were not mere fictive backdrops for a good story. They represented an incipient turn to bourgeois reform in the face of modernization. Activists eventually began to acknowledge that bucolic small-town life and the sense of community that was supposedly lost with its waning could never overtake the city—too many forces of capital, migration, rationalization, and technological innovation made such a return impossible.

The Christian home ideal, which fostered the family as the last remnant of a collapsed Gemeinschaft, would remain the measuring rod for society and that by which the city would be critiqued. Elements of the pastoral and communitarian—thought to best promote the family—would be introduced into the slums to restore order and assimilate the poor laborers overflowing in the slums. The search for order in its legal, spatial, and linguistic senses all sped forward in an often haphazard rush for reforming rationalization. The loss of community and small-town life was considered by bourgeois reformers like Jacob Riis to be a problem of homelessness; the ideal location for the family was lost to the homelessness of the city.

In this chapter, I lay out the urban problems of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city and how commentators talked about these urban crises. I argue that the problems of overcrowding, cultural heterogeneity, insufficient privacy for the family, lack of green space, and general urban dirtiness were all considered aspects of homelessness. Journalists and activists considered the city to be the locus of homelessness because it brought these attributes together and because the processes of urbanization undermined older social structures of the small town, which were thought to foster the family.

I divide my analyses of the fin-de-siècle homeless city into three sections. First, I look at the emergence of the term homeless. I demonstrate that it was a term with no analytical meaning but a way to talk about urban problems; it arose in journalistic and activist responses to the urban boom. The term was first used to describe the city itself. The city was homeless because it embodied all that was other to the idea of the Christian home, which was itself the ideal locus for the bourgeois family. This family was ostensibly the last remnant of the Gemeinschaft, the rest of which the city had destroyed. After demonstrating that the concept of homelessness emerged to describe the city, I then outline how this concept of homelessness was deployed to represent threats to and the absence of order. Rural life and the Christian home—which was thought to be most easily cultivated without urban distractions—were the dual models of order, and homeless became an adjective juxtaposed to these ideals. Then finally, I conclude this chapter by looking at some of the processes of rationalizing the city to redress its homelessness. The family and its locus in the home provided the solution to the problems of slums. The ordering processes were not just semantic—there were institutional, spatial, and political processes as well. The discourse on homelessness was part of the semantic restructuring of the city. In the third part of the chapter, we shall see that the processes of rationalizing the city first divided the city into a series of binaries and then, as we shall see in the next chapter, turned to myth to provide the means for othering the “other half.” These efforts of ordering the city emanated from bourgeois reformers who sought to avert the urban explosions that had plagued New York City and Chicago in the form of riots and had plagued Paris in revolutionary uprisings.

The fin-de-siècle homeless city bequeathed homeless individuals who were later constituted as a homeless subject. Thus I now turn to look at how this city came to be called homeless, what changes were thought to need redressing, and how the bourgeois reform efforts try to bring order.

The Emerging Concept of Homelessness

The year 1890 was pivotal in the formation of the discourse on homelessness. Several texts appeared that described the urban grit and grime with a new commitment to realist detail; two very important ones—Howells’s New York novel A Hazard of New Fortunes and Riis’s How the Other Half Lives—call the city homeless. Howells establishes the connection between the homeless city and the Christian home; Riis popularizes the term homeless and its connection with urban poverty. A character of Howells thinks the newness of the city demands that small vignettes should be written about the different neighborhoods, workers, and lives of the urban population; Riis’s journalistic book actually does such a survey of the city. The discourse on homelessness dates to this moment when anxieties about urban social change and problems attained a new prominence. At this time, top novelists and journalists took on the city with a new urgency because they feared the potentially revolutionary unrest lurking within the city’s slums.

The Christian Home and the Homeless City

In A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells undertakes this new city—the postwar boom of po...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Formation of Homelessness
• Part II. Consolidating Homelessness
• Part III. Fragmenting Homelessness
• Part IV. Transforming Homelessness
• Notes
• Bibliography