The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America

7 Charity Begins at Home

chapter seven Charity Begins at Home home: An institution providing refuge or rest for the destitute, the afflicted, the infirm, etc., or for those who either have no home of their own, or are obliged by their vocation to live at a distance from the home of their family. Oxford English Dictionary Homes dominated the nineteenth-century American landscape. Most secure in meriting this nomenclature were the single-family, increasingly suburban , domiciles of the new middle classes. Residents of tenements, boardinghouses , and modest cottages might also invoke the term, but, as many cultural arbiters saw it, their claims—if not entirely invalid—rested on the shakiest of foundations. Curiously, in light of this proprietary definition, benevolent institutions appropriated the language of bourgeois domesticity, styling themselves as homes. Their choice was anything but arbitrary. Statesponsored institutions such as mental hospitals, poorhouses, and orphan asylums typically adopted familial models, but Home usually signified a private endeavor—the result of private benevolence—not a publicly funded house of refuge, almshouse, or poorhouse. If the supporters of Homes insisted on distinguishing them from statesponsored houses, they also expended considerable energy distinguishing them from boardinghouses—in some cases deliberately advertising their creations as alternatives to boardinghouses. That early nineteenth-century prisons and almshouses dubbed their inmates boarders partly explains this denial. But as boarding came more and more to mean the “private” act of paying for room, meals, and housekeeping services, the founders and managers of Homes— with varying degrees of success—sought to distance themselves from the transience , immorality, and marketplace calculations that boardinghouses seemingly embodied. Only properly managed Homes, they maintained, could pro- vide religious and moral guidance. Only Homes could suitably shelter the deserving poor. Only Homes could produce permanent ties of affection instead of fleeting associations, protect newcomers from the evils of the city, and transform motley assemblages of strangers into “families.”1 The stories of four benevolent institutions—each of which catered to ageand sex-specific clienteles—reveal a common set of values and a landscape of semantic confusion. Their originators grappled with many of the same problems that bedeviled nineteenth-century Americans in general—defining the meaning of home, establishing the proper scope of the market, drawing the boundaries between public and private, determining the obligations family members owed each other. If it proved difficult to differentiate boardinghouses from “private” homes, it proved even more difficult to distinguish benevolent Homes from boardinghouses—or, for that matter, from “public” institutions. Ironically, the typical boardinghouse bore a much closer resemblance to home than did the typical Home. Indeed, the history of Homes shows just how insistently the home versus boardinghouse distinction resonated throughout American culture and ultimately how elastic and meaningless that distinction could become. More to the point, by the mid-nineteenth century, Homes had become places to which many people did not want to go. A Home for the “Tempest-Tost” Sailors’ boardinghouses were an especially notorious variant of an oftennotorious institution. Located along urban waterfronts, they served as first and last resorts for mariners who came ashore. They offered food, lodging, and drink in abundance. They provided women as well, situating themselves in close proximity to houses of prostitution or doubling as brothels. They were, one reformer declared, “dens of infamy . . . among the sons of daughters of shame.” Their keepers, in rare cases “honest men,” more often turned out to be “land sharks” who fleeced their hapless customers. They charged seamen inflated prices for liquor and board, kept them continually inebriated, and stole from them as they lay in drunken stupors, leaving them unable to pay what they owed. In league with unscrupulous captains, they created a system akin to peonage, requiring mariners to work off their debts by signing on to a particular vessel, robbing sailors of their “manhood.” The vicious cycle of drunkenness and debt only repeated itself at the next port. Temperance advocate John Gough grimly noted the unintentional accuracy of the sign that graced a New York boardinghouse: “Sailors taken in, and done for.”2 Charity Begins at Home  The Boston Seaman’s Friend Society, founded in 1827, was one of many similar associations that materialized along the eastern seaboard in the early nineteenth century. An outgrowth of the Boston Society for the Religious and Moral Instruction of the Poor, it affiliated with the American Seaman’s Friend Society, a national organization established in New...