INDUSTRIAL DISTRESS IN NEW YORK AND INDIANAPOLIS, WINTER OF 1893-1894 Elsewhere in this volume industrial displacement has been discussed as a cause of distress under ordinary eco nomic conditions. The hard times accompanying and succeeding periods of commercial and industrial depres sion not infrequently present an emergency relief problem comparable to those experienced after disasters of fire and flood. There are, of course, certain particulars in which distress due to hard times resembles ordinary dependence, due to illness or personal misfortune, rather than that which results from extraordinary disasters. It can be predicted with reasonable certainty that within the life history of the individual more than one economic cycle is likely to be completed with its recurrence of prosperity, inflation crisis, depression, and slow recovery. But, inas much as such a degree of foresight is not always found even among business men, it is not surprising that industrial depression does, in fact, find the mass of the working people quite unprepared. Those who are thrown out of employment and have no adequate reserve savings are in very much the position of such as have suddenly lost their homes and their employment as a result of hurri cane, flood, or fire. The chief manufacturing centres of the United States passed through such a period of excep tional distress in the winter of 1893-94.
As typical of the most effective methods of dealing with such situations we may consider the East Side Relief Work Committee of New York City and the Commercial Club Relief Committee of Indianapolis. The former worked in the heart of the tenement-house population of the most populous city, the latter in a representative Western 412 city of moderate size. One expended $118,000, the other $18,000. Both were fortunate in the executive capacity of their organizers and in having early reached a position of substantial control of the situation. In both instances there is available a carefully prepared statement of the essential features of the relief measures undertaken by the committee, the former having been contributed to the Charities Review for May, 1894, by Mrs. Charles Russell
Lowell, and the latter having been embodied in a report of the committee, of which H. H. Hanna was chairman.
The East Side Relief Work Committee was organized as a temporary body to relieve temporary physical distress, but its members were, with few exceptions, representatives of permanent bodies organized to do permanent moral and spiritual work in the same locality, and in this fact Mrs. Lowell finds the special value of the committee as a relief The committee included two churches, two chapels, two settlements, two educational agencies, a con ference of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and a district committee of the Charity Organization Society. All but two of these were situated between East Broadway and Eighth Street, east of the Bowery. Residents from other parts of the city later joined the committee, but the organ ization continued local. A contribution of $1000 from Hon. Seth Low, President of Columbia College, enabled the committee to make all its preliminary arrangements before publishing any appeal for funds, and on December 21 a meeting was called at which three committees were appointed to assume the financial burden.
The East Side Relief Work Committee was to be left free to carry out its plans without being trammelled by considerations of ways and means. Even as the work progressed further the committee refrained from advertis ing its plans, but supplied work tickets to trade-unions, churches, etc., who were requested to give them to persons known to them to be heads of families in need of relief. By this means the attracting of unmanageable crowds and the raising of false hopes were largely obviated. No food 1 Charities Review, Volume III, p. 323. The subsequent statement is condensed from Mrs. Lowell's account.