The City Mission Responds to Claims of Idleness
After an article suggested the city's 'charity recipients' were avoiding work, a mission leader defends the dignity of the unemployed.
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.
I notice in the morning paper an item casting a severe reflection on the 'recipients of charity' in the city as 'preferring to be unemployed.' Now, the truth of the matter is this: No authorized agent of the Oregon Improvement Company has at any time this winter asked any officer of the City Mission for men to work on the road. When the Lake Shore Eastern called at the Mission for twenty-five men to go out at 5 o'clock in the morning, out of the fifty-three that were sleeping on the hall floor, forty were on their feet ready to go immediately, and at least twenty-five went out without asking any question as to pay. Although there are an abundance of dead beats, professional beggars and hobos in the city, I assure you that all are not to be included. I have had a number of good men come to me today who saw that article and wished to be sent out to the work to fill the place of the delinquents.
“Out of the fifty-three that were sleeping on the hall floor, forty were on their feet ready to go immediately.”
The tension between public characterizations of the poor as 'idlers' or 'hobos' versus the reality of desperate people seeking any labor echoes the way Seattle’s ongoing struggles with housing and unemployment are often framed by local media and public discourse.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.