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250 REHABILITATING THE UNSIGHTLY with Europe.” This beggar’s grapevine “works by sign and symbol,” they alleged , keeping “the unfortunates apprised of conditions—where the field is open and where it is closed”; but more than that, the strange union was said to maintain a “clearinghouse” in Los Angeles for that purpose, a kind of information headquarters for the syndicate. On the other hand, the Municipal Charities commissioners reduced the politics of the blind newspaper vendor and those he represented to two simple dynamics: pathos and pest control. By the end of the Times article, the sinister beggars’ clearinghouse is replaced by another: The office of the Associated Charities, where these strange creatures come to tell their troubles, is a clearinghouse of grief. The attitude taken by the Municipal Charities Commission is that those unfortunates are a public menace; that cripples, epileptics and others who are permitted to roam the streets under city license have a deleterious effect upon humanity in general . It is believed that the streets must be ridded of these creatures, who are defiant and audacious under legal recognition. In the semantic “clearinghouse,” the word itself, conflicting meanings negotiate . The clearinghouse, a bankers’ institution for the adjustment of mutual claims, takes parodic form when “cripples, epileptics and others” claim begging (as a right, a share, a stake, a demand, an interest), in ways not unrelated to Simi Linton’s use of the term in Claiming Disability. Against the possibility of a beggar’s or an other’s institution deciding how claims get settled, the Charity Organization Society asserts its legitimacy. In fact, one of the illustrative sentences for the word clearinghouse in the Oxford English Dictionary directly invokes it: “The Charity Organization Society is a central exchange or clearing-house for all the single relief associations.”21 The COS as definitive clearinghouse adjusts the claims of various relief associations , but it also, as the immediately following definition in the OED suggests, gives or withholds clearance for poor people: “What is wanted is first a human clearing house, or, in other words, compulsory examination of all immigrants.”22 In the COS clearinghouse of grief, grief is not so much vented as tested. Unsightly beggars, “defiant and audacious under legal recognition ,” are either cleared or—more likely—cleared out. In 1913, Los Angeles unfortunates were cleared either for institutionalization or, under the influence of the growing rehabilitationist approach, for employment. According to the Times, “as soon as the anti-begging ordinance went into effect, the walking delegate of this strange craft advised REHABILITATING THE UNSIGHTLY 251 all his followers to apply for positions with the Associated Charities. Nearly fifty applications were filed. Each application stated what kind of work the applicant desired.” Alfred Leroy, the motorcyclist/gum-seller, is said to have applied for a job as “bank president” (“Strangest Union”). We know very little about what the disabled people who approached the Municipal Charities Commission as an organized group made of these attempts at job placement, because the extant records, with the important exception of the autobiography by Arthur Fuller that I discuss in the next chapter, are written only by the authorities. We do not even know the name of the group’s president, who seems to have made a genuine effort to facilitate job-seeking by its members; in its place we get only the name of the outrageous rebel, the flamboyant Alfred Leroy. By COS accounts, the plan to place the “unfortunates” in “legitimate employment ” failed: “few of them want it.” We do not know what jobs they were offered, under what conditions. Testimony from one man placed in the position of “unsightly beggar” suggests some of the problems in this kind of exchange. Arthur Franklin Fuller was at one point approached with an offer to be “well cared for” by being set up in the newsstand business, just as the litigating “legless newsboy of Times Square” had been by James Forbes. But Fuller, a practiced salesman, represents himself as dubious and protective of his mobility—“I have since observed others who were thus cared for. They are usually given a stand on some place already overworked, or a back street where few people pass”—and the plan fizzled (Fifty Thousand Miles, 171). Fuller’s explanation cannot simply be taken at face value, without other corroboration. But we do know, in the case of the situation in 1913 Los Angeles, that whatever civic solution disabled beggars or peddlers faced—institutionalization, employment, or ugly law—the...

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