However, my first visits to the tenement-house districts in question made me feel that, whatever the theories might be, as a matter of practical common sense I could not conscientiously vote for the continuance of the conditions which I saw. These conditions rendered it impossible for the families of the tenement-house workers to live so that the children might grow up fitted for the exacting duties of American citizenship. I visited the tenement-houses once with my colleagues of the committee, once with some of the labor union representatives, and once or twice by myself. In a few of the tenement-houses there were suites of rooms ample in number where the work on the tobacco was done in rooms not occupied for cooking or sleeping or living. In the overwhelming majority of cases, however, there were one, two, or three room apartments, and the work of manufacturing the tobacco by men, women, and children went on day and night in the eating, living, and sleeping rooms—sometimes in one room. I have always remembered one room in which two families were living. On my inquiry as to who the third adult male was I was told that he was a boarder with one of the families. There were several children, three men, and two women in this room. The tobacco was stowed about everywhere, alongside the foul bedding, and in a corner where there were scraps of food. The men, women, and children in this room worked by day and far on into the evening, and they slept and ate there. They were Bohemians, unable to speak English, except that one of the children knew enough to act as interpreter.
Instead of opposing the bill I ardently championed it. It was a poorly drawn measure, and the Governor, Grover Cleveland, was at first doubtful about signing it. The Cigar-makers' Union then asked me to appear before the Governor and argue for it. I accordingly did so, acting as spokesman for the battered, undersized foreigners who represented the Union and the workers. The Governor signed the bill. Afterwards this tenement-house cigar legislation was declared invalid by the Court of Appeals in the Jacobs decision. Jacobs was one of the rare tenement-house manufacturers of cigars who occupied quite a suite of rooms, so that in his case the living conditions were altogether exceptional. What the reason was which influenced those bringing the suit to select the exceptional instead of the average worker I do not know; of course such action was precisely the action which those most interested in having the law broken down were anxious to see taken. The Court of Appeals declared the law unconstitutional, and in their decision the judges reprobated the law as an assault upon the "hallowed" influences of "home." It was this case which first waked me to a dim and partial understanding of the fact that the courts were not necessarily the best judges of what should be done to better social and industrial conditions. The judges who rendered this decision were well-meaning men. They knew nothing whatever of tenement-house conditions; they knew nothing whatever of the needs, or of the life and labor, of three-fourths of their fellow-citizens in great cities. They knew legalism, but not life. Their choice of the words "hallowed" and "home," as applicable to the revolting conditions attending the manufacture of cigars in tenement-houses, showed that they had no idea what it was that they were deciding. Imagine the "hallowed" associations of a "home" consisting of one room where two families, one of them with a boarder, live, eat, and work! This decision completely blocked tenement-house reform legislation in New York for a score of years, and hampers it to this day. It was one of the most serious setbacks which the cause of industrial and social progress and reform ever received.
I had been brought up to hold the courts in especial reverence. The people with whom I was most intimate were apt to praise the courts for just such decisions as this, and to speak of them as bulwarks against disorder and barriers against demagogic legislation. These were the same people with whom the judges who rendered these decisions were apt to foregather at social clubs, or dinners, or in private life. Very naturally they all tended to look at things from the same standpoint. Of course it took more than one experience such as this Tenement Cigar Case to shake me out of the attitude in which I was brought up. But various decisions, not only of the New York court but of certain other State courts and even of the United States Supreme Court, during the quarter of a century following the passage of this tenement-house legislation, did at last thoroughly wake me to the actual fact. I grew to realize that all that Abraham Lincoln had said about the Dred Scott decision could be said with equal truth and justice about the numerous decisions which in our own day were erected as bars across the path of social reform, and which brought to naught so much of the effort to secure justice and fair dealing for workingmen and workingwomen, and for plain citizens generally.
Some of the wickedness and inefficiency in public life was then displayed in simpler fashion than would probably now be the case. Once or twice I was a member of committees which looked into gross and widely ramifying governmental abuses. On the whole, the most important part I played was in the third Legislature in which I served, when I acted as chairman of a committee which investigated various phases of New York City official life.
The most important of the reform measures our committee recommended was the bill taking away from the Aldermen their power of confirmation over the Mayor's appointments. We found that it was possible to get citizens interested in the character and capacity of the head of the city, so that they would exercise some intelligent interest in his conduct and qualifications. But we found that as a matter of fact it was impossible to get them interested in the Aldermen and other subordinate officers. In actual practice the Aldermen were merely the creatures of the local ward bosses or of the big municipal bosses, and where they controlled the appointments the citizens at large had no chance whatever to make their will felt. Accordingly we fought for the principle, which I believe to be of universal application, that what is needed in our popular government is to give plenty of power to a few officials, and to make these few officials genuinely and readily responsible to the people for the exercise of that power. Taking away the confirming power of the Board of Aldermen did not give the citizens of New York good government. We knew that if they chose to elect the wrong kind of Mayor they would have bad government, no matter what the form of the law was. But we did secure to them the chance to get good government if they desired, and this was impossible as long as the old system remained. The change was fought in the way in which all similar changes always are fought. The corrupt and interested politicians were against it, and the battle-cries they used, which rallied to them most of the unthinking conservatives, were that we were changing the old constitutional system, that we were defacing the monuments of the wisdom of the founders of the government, that we were destroying that distinction between legislative and executive power which was the bulwark of our liberties, and that we were violent and unscrupulous radicals with no reverence for the past.
Of course the investigations, disclosures, and proceedings of the investigating committee of which I was chairman brought me into bitter personal conflict with very powerful financiers, very powerful politicians, and with certain newspapers which these financiers and politicians controlled. A number of able and unscrupulous men were fighting, some for their financial lives, and others to keep out of unpleasantly close neighborhood to State's prison. This meant that there were blows to be taken as well as given. In such political struggles, those who went in for the kind of thing that I did speedily excited animosities among strong and cunning men who would stop at little to gratify their animosity. Any man engaged in this particular type of militant and practical reform movement was soon made to feel that he had better not undertake to push matters home unless his own character was unassailable. On one of the investigating committees on which I served there was a countryman, a very able man, who, when he reached New York City, felt as certain Americans do when they go to Paris—that the moral restraints of his native place no longer applied. With all his ability, he was not shrewd enough to realize that the Police Department was having him as well as the rest of us carefully shadowed. He was caught red-handed by a plain-clothes