Americans experienced the most severe depression of the nineteenth century during the 1890's. Nebraskans had been shaken by the effects of the drought of 1890, but that was a mere tremor compared to the economic earthquake following upon the Panic of 1893; made worse in Nebraska by drought in 1893 and 1894. These conditions placed a severe strain upon public and private resources for aiding the distressed.
Public attitudes in that era distinguished between the deserving and undeserving poor. The latter were believed to live in poverty as the result of personal failings. The poor person was thought to be lazy, intemperate and extravagant. The deserving poor, worthy subjects for charity were the young, aged, ill and handicapped. The able-bodied unemployed person, no matter the reason for his situation or the hardpressed farmer, was not. It was assumed that these individuals had set aside some money for rainy days or, failing that, could turn to their kin for support.
When given, charity was provided by local governments and private sources, but whatever its origin, aid was seen as a burden on the frugal and industrious in society and was to be given only on a temporary basis. It was recognized that even worthy recipients might become too attached to charity. Thus, Josephine Shaw Lowell could write that "relief should be surrounded by circumstances that shall ... repel everyone not in extremity from accepting it." As urbanization and industrialization increased in the nineteenth century, the number of able-bodied unemployed in times of economic distress was such that Americans were obliged to reassess their views of who was worthy of aid and how that aid was to be administered.
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Over the years several methods had been developed for dealing with the poor. The first responsibility for the needy rested with the family. Beyond that, aid was a local responsibility, whether it be of a private or public nature. The community cared for its own. Local governments provided both indoor -- the almshouse or poor farm -- and outdoor relief. Outdoor relief entailed paying someone to care for needy individuals, oftentimes by accepting bids and awarding the contract to the lowest bidder. The Buffalo County Commissioners in 1877 advertised for sealed bids "for boarding and sheltering the poor of the county." The successful bidder was required to give bond "to furnish the poor sufficient plain and wholesome food and comfortable shelter and lodging." Outdoor relief was more often subject to corruption, but either mode frequently presented conditions so harsh that only the most desperate would resort to them.
Public responsibility for the poor in Nebraska in the 1890's rested with the county. The county commissioners controlled a poor fund, modest in size, and had the authority to establish a poor farm. Overseers of the poor in the townships usually identified the needy and administered allotments from the poor fund. Private charity, individual and group, supplemented public aid.
Buffalo County, up to 1889, had taken care of its poor by "farming them out" to the lowest bidder. In 1889, the Board of Supervisors acquired and opened a county poor farm near Kearney. A poor committee was formed from the Board with authority over the poor farm and the disbursement of the moneys from the poor fund. Some forty-nine persons would live at the farm for varying periods between 1889 and December of 1892. Not only the poor lived on poor farms. The aged, the mentally retarded, and the insane were kept there when other institutions could not take them.
The poor are always with us, one Kearneyite exclaimed, and so they were. In most years there was something of a norm in claims made upon the poor fund and not a great demand at that. Hard times upset the pattern. Kearney's own boom had collapsed by 1893, its mainstay, the cotton mill, lay idle. Still, in the fall of 1893, with signs of economic stagnation everywhere about them, Kearneyites hoped for the best. In these articles I shall review the events of the first winter of discontent, that of 1893-1894 and how the people of the community perceived their problems and sought to deal with them.
M.A. Brown, editor of the Kearney Daily Hub, commented upon the sudden general economic decline and concluded that continued prosperity was "no more possible than a daily round of happiness and enjoyment." Some of the ills of society can be cured, he said, but all can be endured. For now, he advised:
the person who has saved a little, or enough from good times
to provide for a 'rainy day'...can afford to be thankful ... while
hoping for the best in the better and brighter days to come.
Make the most of adversity, he said, "be self-reliant and be helpful. Be a man. Be a woman.There are no statistics that reveal the gravity of the economic situation in Buffalo County or Kearney, nor how many persons were compelled to seek help. Many preferred to deny there was a crisis. James O'Kane, councilman from the first ward, set off a controversy over this point when he printed and distributed a circular addressed "To The Public" in November. O'Kane noted at one point; "There is no work for our people and men, women and children are suffering and DYING for the necessaries of life and proper treatment and nursing." This was too much for the editor of the Hub to accept. There was poverty in Kearney, he said, times were hard and jobs were scarce with winter at hand. Too, many were in want and a limited few suffering, but he could not credit that anyone was dying. Whatever the case, he said, the county would supply food, clothing and medicine to the needy.
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Mrs. Nancy Hull. W.C.T.U. leader and one of
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Kearney, through public and private means, would care for its ill or destitute, thus there was no need to publish "from the housetops the appalling statement that men, women and children are suffering and DYING for the necessaries of life." A month later the Buffalo County Journal aroused the Hub's ire. The Journal declared:Every reader of this article knows that Kearney is at present as still as the grave. Business men are their own customers, and all branches of business are as sluggish and as stagnant as they would be in a town of 300 people with no factories or industries to stimulate life. They have reached that point where they feel that it is useless to say or do anything that savors of life and enterprise. We have, in fact, reached that point where the interests of the city are turning backward ... a condition that presages failures and added stagnation.M.A. Brown called the statement "a libel upon the city" and untrue.The town is quiet only as other towns are quiet. Business has stood the stress of hard times better than various towns in the state... The fact is that the business interests of the city are doing all that general conditions warrant, that no interests are turning backward ... and that they have not reached a condition that presages failure or stagnation. All interests give indication of an early upward turn, and at no time in the past three years has the outlook been so very encouraging as it is now.The Journal, he grumbled, was "befouling its own nest."To people long accustomed to exaggerating Kearney's potential in booster literature intended to interest settlers and the investors of capital, it was disloyal to suggest things were not going well - or soon would be. During the grasshopper and drought years of the 1870's, attempts had been made from the Governor on down to conceal and play down the real conditions within Nebraska. Similarly, it was believed in 1893, that, if investment and growth in Kearney were to continue, it was not reasonable to stress the dark side of the local economy.
It is not clear just what was being done to provide relief to those in want in the county at this time. 'The Hub repudiated a story in a Denver paper that people in Kearney were starving:The poor and needy in this city have been fully and
systematically looked after and there have been no cases of
starving to death... There is suffering and want and
privation ... but Kearney is no worse off than any other city her
size in this state ... and the poor committee in connection with
the W.C.T.U. have so organized the work that all deserving
ones have been relieved."In early December, the chairman of the county poor committee optimistically reported that the worst was over and the suffering of a few weeks before was greatly reduced by the organization of relief efforts.
| Mentor A. Brown.
Editor of the Hub and ardent partisan. |
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These relief efforts were not yet coordinated. Characteristically, private and public groups acted independently of each other. It is probable that in the county the several churches and such organizations as the Masons, Oddfellows and the G.A.R., as well as the W.C.T.U. were providing different forms of relief to their own members and, in some cases, to others. The W.C.T.U. in Kearney was surely gathering and distributing food, fuel and clothing and may have been operating a soup kitchen one day of the week. A dry goods store made November 15th W. C.T. U. day, turning over one-eighth of its cash receipts that day to the W.C.T.U. to buy food and fuel for the "helpless victims of hard times." There was $72.96 raised in that fashion and another store followed suit. Later in November the Kearney city council asked the G.A.R. posts to put on the boards the play "The Comrade's Luck" to create a "fund for help of the Poor of the City." The G.A.R. agreed to present the play, but asked to be "relieved of any other labor," and the city council and the Electric Light company appear to have underwritten other costs. The play would bring in, after expenses, the sum of $65.30 which was used to buy six tons of coal, 2,000 lbs. of flour and a quantity of beans, coffee and meat. Fifty-nine families were to share in this bounty. Too, many families were surely able to receive help from relatives living elsewhere.
By the fall of 1893 traditional attitudes toward relief for the poor were being challenged by the number of able-bodied persons in need of help. Private charity was an inadequate response to their situation. Able-bodied persons in town or country often preferred to shun charity at great costs to themselves. As early as the 1870s it had been proposed that public works programs be developed to employ the able-bodied. In Kearney, a scheme to pave some city streets, perhaps originating with the Buffalo County Journal, was circulating in mid-November. The Hub presented arguments for and against the proposal. The major objection to the idea was that the procedures required would take too long to put into effect. A city ordinance would have to be prepared and passed, an election held upon the issue and then the city bonds would have to be marketed. M. A. Brown thought strong public support would have to be shown for the paving project before the city council would consider it. Clearly, he argued, the plan would take too long to realize to be of help this winter. The editor of the Journal disagreed, accusing the Hub of taking a stand that would force laboring men to become objects of charity, whereas "if public spirit were shown at this time ... every laboring man in Kearney would have sufficient employment to support his family over the winter months."
It is probable that conditions were worse in the City of Kearney in 1893 than elsewhere in the county. Many farm families were no doubt obliged to "make do" with less and to husband feed and fuel because of the partial crop failure. The bread winner in town who joined the ranks of the unemployed had little to fall back upon except, perhaps, the charity of relatives and neighbors. These city folks were most in need of help and most anxious to find work to make them self-supporting and to save their dignity.
Proofed read 10-03
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