support of housing reform and child labor laws, his aid to strikers rendered
hungry by their strikes, and even his gift of a public fountain in the heart of
the ghetto—an attempt to lighten the oppressiveness of the tenements—
bore her imprint. Wald did not convert the conservative banker into a Pro-
gressive, but she deepened his sympathy for the have-nots and for govern-
ment intervention on their behalf. At the celebration marking the
twentieth anniversary of the settlement house he spoke like a true re-
former: “The time is long past when the proposition that that Government
was the best which governed least.”^33
Money alone did not solve all ghetto problems. Delinquency and prostitu-
tion, for example, usually required cooperation with the authorities. The
stewards, however, could not afford to ignore those matters, since the
image of the entire Jewish community was on the line. Schiff never agreed
with his friend, Mayer Sulzberger, who said that Jews had as much right to
their share of criminals as any other group, and he was horrified by Jewish
crime and by the widespread existence of prostitution in the Jewish quar-
ter. “Prostitution in our city, one almost can say, has become Semitic,” he
wrote to leaders of the ICA in 1901. “We Jews, who have hitherto boasted
of the moral purity of our people, must hang our heads when the question
is raised.” The American Hebrewspoke for Schiff and other leaders when it
wrote that “the vile traffickers in this awful trade are mainly persons of
Jewish parents, who have used Jewish young men as their debased agents to
debauch Jewish girls.” Our “paramount duty,” the paper insisted, was to
“hound” these “contemptible wretches” who polluted “the virtuous Jewish
home” out of the community.^34
Exposés of Tammany-protected prostitutes and pimps led to a munici-
pal crusade against vice at the turn of the century. To the chagrin of Jewish
leaders, the Lower East Side had earned the dubious distinction of being a
flourishing red-light district. In an effort to combat the evil a non-partisan
committee of fifteen prominent citizens, including Schiff, investigated the
increase of prostitution in the city and considered appropriate legislation
(1900–1901). Although Jewish leaders would have preferred to deal with
the matter privately—to clean house before non-Jews learned how filthy
the house was—it had become a full-blown public issue by the time of the
mayoral election of 1901.
The campaign pitched a reform ticket headed by Fusionist candidate
Seth Low against the Tammany machine. Taking their cue from the Jewish
stewards, the reformers stressed the issue of prostitution in their appeals to
downtown Jews. One campaign leaflet in Yiddish, which included endorse-
ments of Low by Schiff and several others of his circle, was typical. Entitled
Hilul Ha-Shem (literally, “desecration of God’s name”), it painted in lurid
The New Immigrants 95