(First published in The Washington Monthly)
Killing the Poormaster, the new book by Holly Metz, brings vividly to life 1930s Hoboken, New Jersey, making it easy to envision classic brownstones with street vendors, milk trucks, and boys in knickers in the same neighborhoods now filled with stockbrokers and hipsters. The book’s great achievement, however, is to take us inside the walls of those houses, to place us among suffering people, mostly ignored in their time and all but invisible to us today, and to disturb us about their condition.
The Hoboken of the 1930s is as lost to us as the nineteenth-century whaling villages of Nantucket. (This is illustrated by the book’s title, which demonstrates that we are visiting a time before the invention of euphemisms.) Today, people with very low incomes are in general entitled to receive a variety of government benefits, from food stamps to housing vouchers to Medicaid. But in the early twentieth century, in Hoboken, the indigent received funds, intermittently and begrudgingly, from the city’s poormaster, a title that implicitly suggests a master-slave or master-servant relationship. In 1938, as Roosevelt’s premature budget cutting refueled the Depression, Hoboken’s poormaster was seventy-four-year-old Harry Barck, who managed his office’s $3,000-a-month budget with a tight fist and a surly temperament. A big, bluff, irascible organization man, Barck—with his dismayingly apt Dickensian name—had held that office for forty-two years, through five political bosses and eight mayors. Barck was unchallenged in his administration of the funds, as his decisions about who got welfare and how much they received knew no appeal. For decades, the work performed by poormasters in New Jersey was administered at the state level. But with the Depression straining the state budget, power had devolved back to the cities, and Barck grabbed the opportunity. Armed with sharp disdain for “chiselers” and with statements like “I’m in favor of giving the old American pioneer spirit a chance to assert itself,” he zealously guarded the city’s coffers. At a time when Union City, a comparably sized town in the very same county (58,659 residents to Hoboken’s 59,261), was spending $6.34 per capita on relief, Hoboken was spending 90 cents.
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