The Desperate Plea of a Hungry Man
A homeless worker chooses jail over starvation after failing to find employment in Seattle.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
James Dolan, a kitchen man who has been out of work for some time, smashed the plate glass window of the Filkins Banking Company, in the Butler block, at the corner of James and Second streets, yesterday morning with a hickory cane. He made no attempt to escape, and when arraigned in the municipal court on the charge of willfully destroying property, spoke to Judge Glasgow in the following terse language: 'I was out of money, could get no work and had nothing to eat. I am no man to beg; I would not steal; I had to do something. I have been hungry three days. I am guilty of breaking the window.' Dolan was taken back to the city jail and the judge has his case under consideration.
“I am no man to beg; I would not steal; I had to do something. I have been hungry three days.”
Economic precarity often led to 'crimes of survival' in 1890s Seattle, where men would purposefully commit minor offenses to secure a cell and a meal in the county jail. While the institutions have shifted, the invisibility of hunger and the criminalization of poverty remain an uncomfortable constant in the city's civic life.
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