The Real Story of the Slums
A young playwright captures the grim reality of life in city tenements, challenging the comfortable assumptions of the press.
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.
A boy, fresh from college, has scooped us all—by us is meant the newspaper fraternity. The youngster's name is Shelden. He is just out of Harvard and six months after being graduated he had written the play which Mrs. Fiske is using this year. The play is called 'Salvation Nell.' Ever since there were newspapers and police courts there have been police reporters. It was tradition to see comedy in rags and humor in whisky-fuddled humanity. It was tradition to believe a man guilty until proven innocent. Shelden, fresh from college, had every reason to see the slums through the eye of tradition. But he did not. Tradition says the people of the slums are tough or they wouldn't live there. Shelden says the people of the slums are hard because they were born there or have been driven there. He shows us how environment and lack of opportunity stunt the little human plants. They are sicklied over with the unhealthy pallor of vice before they ever reach an age where they can choose the right or wrong. The Salvation Army is merely the incarnation of the duty that lies in us all—police reporters and all the rest of us—to see that more men drink because they are miserable than are miserable because they drink. To judge the conduct of others not by our standards and our environment, but by theirs.
“We should be able to understand the cry of the submerged as voiced by Salvation Nell when she says: 'For God's sake, Jim, let's be straight and give our kid a chance, fer me an' you never had no chanct—we never knowed different until it wuz too late!'”
This 1909 critique of how newspapers dehumanized the impoverished remains a vital meditation on class. Today, as Tacoma faces extreme inequality and homelessness, the demand to understand systemic 'misery' rather than moral failure is as relevant as ever.
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