The Salvation Army's Plan to End Urban Poverty
A proposal to move impoverished tenement dwellers from congested cities onto government-allotted public lands in the West.
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.
Three millions of poor people, according to Commander Booth Tucker, are rotting and festering in the tenements of our great cities. They constitute our Israel in Egypt. Their numbers increase with a rapidity that threatens to make the disease of pauperism as chronic and severe in our land as in the oldest civilization of the eastern world. The only real help to a man is that which helps him to help himself. Senator Hoar’s bill, recently introduced in the senate, proposes that the public lands of the West shall no longer be given away in great tracts to rich corporations, but that they shall be colonized by the poor; that the government shall loan money to poor families to enable them to get to the land, to improve it and to stock it. It is no visionary, untried scheme; its real author is Commander Booth Tucker, of the Salvation Army, and he has demonstrated its successful application in colonies in California and Colorado and Ohio.
“The only real help to a man is that which helps him to help himself.”
This 1904 editorial highlights the perennial tension between urban poverty and the ideal of agrarian self-sufficiency. Today, as Tacoma faces extreme housing insecurity and a dwindling supply of affordable land, the debate remains: should the government act as a developer for the public good, or rely on market forces?
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