By Anne M. Filiaci, Ph.D.
To respond to the Panic of 1893, Josephine Shaw Lowell created yet another group, the East Side Relief Work Committee (ESRWC). Formed in the summer of 1893, the group was headquartered not at the United Charities Building, but at the College Settlement in the Lower East Side, where Lillian Wald had just moved and was starting her work.
By October of 1893 the ESRWC had formulated a plan to provide jobs to as many of the unemployed as possible during the coming winter months. The group raised money from newspapers and from the Citizens’ Relief Committee. Working with the city’s street cleaning commissioner, by the end of November 1893 the ESRWC had raised enough money to begin offering men jobs to work one hour per day sweeping streets. To hire the jobless for this work, the ESRWC gave “work tickets” to charities, unions, settlements, and churches. These agencies in turn distributed the tickets to local heads of families in need.
The work ticket program was a huge success—people who wanted tickets far exceeded the number available. By late December, the committee had “managed to employ about 150 men in cleaning streets,” had “opened a tailor shop,” and expected to “open another tailor’s shop in a few days, where fifty more men will be employed.”
In January of 1894, the committee ramped up its efforts, hiring 491 men to whitewash tenement buildings. In early February of 1894, in the name of the ESRWC, Shaw Lowell issued a fundraising appeal, asking the public to contribute to the Emergency Fund which, she stated, “last week gave employment to nearly 1,500 persons (mainly heads of families) at street sweeping, sewing, nursing, scrubbing and whitewashing.” The Emergency Fund to Give Relief By Work, Shaw Lowell asserted, would “not hold out very long at the present rate of expenditure,” even as the “opportunity to give useful work” was “indefinitely extended by the plan to whitewash the tenement-house cellars, alleyways, airshafts, and living rooms.”
At the end of February, Shaw Lowell again appealed to the public for funding, this time through a letter to the editor published in the New York Times. By now, according to Lowell, the committee was “employing more than 1,200 heads of families and thus maintaining “more than 5,000 men, women and children….” The tenement whitewashing project was especially successful, and especially in need of funds—“We have seventy-five men at work now,” she wrote, “but we must cut down our force” without more funding. To make matters worse, “scores of men are turned away for lack of funds. We have on file applications from over 100 painters, waiting till we get money.” They had the ability to place these people, with “800 days work arranged for the future.” All they needed were the funds to pay for it.
In addition to providing funds for laundry workers, street cleaners and tenement painters, Shaw Lowell also sought ways to employ those who could not leave their homes—“Let us send out work to the women and girls who cannot go to the factory,” she pleaded. To help unemployed garment workers, both male and female, the committee formed a program to put people to work sewing clothes for the “poor Negroes of the Sea Islands.” By the time the ESRWC disbanded in April of 1894, the committee had spent $120,000, hiring 3,000 men and women.
Almost from the beginning, Wald had relied on Shaw Lowell’s emergency charity organizations to help the people for whom she cared. In a letter to Schiff and Loeb written on March 4, 1894, Wald noted that because of the misery and suffering among her patients, “Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell has increased our tailor shop privileges, so that now twelve men per week are from our patients’ families—these and eight on the street and the workers at the Delancey Street sewing rooms and an occasional ‘lift’ besides from other sources bring us the most desirable means of relieving the households we enter.”
Copyright Anne M. Filiaci 2016