Quinn has it right on the homeless

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Christine Quinn is the Speaker of the City Council in New York, and if she gets her way, in two years she'll become the city's first Irish-American mayor since Bill O'Dwyer, the cop turned Tammany man who left office amid a cloud in 1950.

Of course, O'Dwyer's old allies in Tammany probably wouldn't know what to make of Quinn. She entered politics as a reformer, which would have raised more than a little suspicion.

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What's more, she's a woman and Tammany wasn't exactly a bastion of female empowerment. And she's gay. You get the feeling that Tammany might not have embraced Quinn's candidacy.

But, in a very profound way, Christine Quinn recently showed that she might well have fit in with the boyos after all.

Her political mentor, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, recently announced that single adults who are homeless will have to prove that they have nowhere else to go before they are allowed to into city shelters. The mayor's aides argue that some, and perhaps many, single adults have alternative arrangements that they could take advantage of rather than rely on the city's very expensive shelter system.

Anyone in charge of municipal budgets these days is looking for creative ways to save a few bucks here and there. The Bloomberg administration's plan (and perhaps other, similar plans in other large cities) no doubt is driven by the high cost of providing shelter to anyone who asks for it. New York City is obliged by law to provide such shelter.

Quinn, who is the city's second-highest elected official, has raised passionate objections to Bloomberg's plan, and in fact has filed a lawsuit against it. In many ways, the positions she and the mayor have taken reflect old battles over government assistance dating back to the early 20th century.

Reformers who worked with the poor and homeless a century ago were obsessed with distinguishing between the worthy poor, who were deserving of aid, and the unworthy poor, who would only waste any assistance government and charities offered.

Tammany Hall, on the other hand, worked with groups like the Sisters of Charity which saw no difference between worthy and unworthy poor people. All they saw was poverty. In the words of the famed politician from the Bowery, Tim Sullivan, they provided food to the poor not because they were worthy, but because they were hungry.

This practical, non-judgmental approach to government assistance has its roots in the Famine and in the reform efforts of Anglo-Protestant bureaucrats who were convinced that Irish poverty was a reflection not of discrimination, systemic failures, or bad luck, but of character flaws. It was the infamous George Trevelyan, remember, who said during the Famine that the true evil in Ireland was not starvation, but the character of the people.

When the Irish won power in the United States, they remembered how reformers both in Ireland and in the United States associated their poverty with character flaws - flaws which reformers associated with Catholicism. Tammany figures handed out assistance because people needed it. They did not presume to judge whether people deserved it.

Frances Perkins, who would go on to become the nation's first woman cabinet member (Secretary of Labor under FDR) recalled that when she was a young, eager reformer in Manhattan, she came across a case involving a young lad who got in trouble with the law. He had no father, and so his mother and his sister depended on his income. Local charity workers were called in, but they decided, Perkins recalled,that the mother was not worthy of assistance.

Perkins visited the local Tammany ward-heeler, Thomas McManus, whose political club still exists on Manhattan's West Side. McManus didn't know Perkins or the lad in question, but he looked into the case. Some time later, Perkins learned that the case was resolved and the lad was back in his home. She admitted that something "irregular" had taken place, but she was pleased. She felt justice had been done.

In a way, Mayor Bloomberg's policy on single homeless adults harks back to the days when private charities insisted on helping only those deemed worthy of help. But Christine Quinn called such a policy "cruel and punitive" and rightly noted that nobody really wants to live in a homeless shelter. They're not particularly nice places, she noted.

Is it possible that some people try to take advantage of the city's shelter system? Maybe, although there has to be a better way to find a place to sleep.

But when government agencies start to test citizen worthiness before offering very basic assistance, any Irish person with a sense of history should recoil in horror. That's how reformers treated the Irish, in Ireland as well as the U.S., in the 19th and early 20th Century.

Yes, Christine Quinn and the Irish pols of yore certainly would have had a lot in common. And that's not a bad thing. Not a bad thing at all.

 

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