After reading this story from 1892, I couldn't help but investigate:
Visitors to the Westchester County Almshouse have probably had pointed out to them an Italian named Nichol Lapano [sic], who is eyeless and armless. While employed by the Mount Vernon Water Company, several years ago, in Yonkers, nitro-glycerine exploded, maiming the unfortunate man for life. His life was despaired of for several months, but his great vitality brought him through. He was subsequently sent to the County Almshouse at East View. His counsel sued the company for damages, and obtained a judgment of $7500 in the courts. An appeal was taken to the Court of Appeals, and last week that body affirmed the judgment. Westchester News 25 December 1891
Nicholas Lapano, an Italian, while in the employ of the Mount Vernon Water Company attempted to thaw out some dynamite cartridges, when they exploded and he lost both eyes and both hands. He sued the company in the circuit court and got a verdict for $7,500. The company took the case to the court of appeals, which has just affirmed the decision of the court below. Lapano is now an inmate of the Westchester County Almshouse. The Eastern State Journal 26 December 1891
However, my searches for Nichol(as) Lapano turned up nothing. I searched every variation of the name I could find. Finally I decided to search for "Mount Vernon Water Company" and "dynamite" and came up with this - the details of a lawsuit brought by
Nicola Lofrano against the New York and Mount Vernon Water Company.
The complaint alleged that the plaintiff was employed by the defendant as a day laborer to dig out a reservoir, and aid in the construction of a dam at or near Pelhamville, in the county of Westchester; that the defendant negligently provided and used frozen dynamite cartridges and unsafe and improper means for softening the same; that the plaintiff was ordered and directed by the defendant to place said frozen dynamite cartridges before the fire in the open air, and warm one side first and then to turn them around and warm the other side, and that in doing so without any negligence or carelessness on his part, the cartridges exploded, to the serious injury of the plaintiff.
Unfortunately, that's all I've been able to find on him via the internet.
The first thing that surprised me was that legal action was taken successfully against the company. We tend to think that health and safety concerns are a relatively modern concept, and that in Victorian times the injuries such as Nicola received would have been regarded as an occupational hazard.
ReplyDeleteAnd then I wondered, as I always do when somebody is as badly injured as that, whether Nicola would have been glad to have survived. Imagine the number of things you can no longer do when you’re suddenly deprived of arms and eyesight. How much quality of life was left him? No doubt people said: ‘He’s lucky to be alive,’ but was he? It strikes me that this is the predictable response for two reasons: first, because we tend to value longevity above quality, and second because it saves the loved ones suffering the ultimate loss. So who are the lucky ones? It’s debatable, and obviously varies from case to case.
And it was interesting to read that the newspaper was published on Christmas Day.
By the way, have you noticed that your clock seems to be set to Pacific time?
ReplyDeleteAnother thing occurs to me: what happened to his award? I've just been doing a bit of research on translating old values to modern ones. It's complicated, but it seems that - in terms of economic status - Nicola would have become the equivalent of a modern day millionaire. Could he not have afforded to live independently and paid someone to take care of him? Presumably, going into an almshouse would have meant that the institution would have taken all the money he had left after lawyers' fees.
ReplyDeleteThe company did, in fact, try to argue that Nicola's injuries were an occupational hazard, and that he should have known better. Thankfully reason prevailed, possibly because his injuries were so extensive and the company's negligence was so egregious.
ReplyDeleteI think the value of longevity over quality of life is something very specific to our time and culture. Victorians had a different relationship to death than we do. In a time when child mortality was high, a lot of people nurtured the belief that children's deaths were an act of mercy that spared children from suffering and from being polluted by the evils of the world.
Additionally, in my thesis, I write a bit about people's belief that death was preferable to life in an almshouse. One woman was said to have sobbed that she would rather die than live a pauper as she was conveyed to the almshouse, and subsequently "fell dead" at the threshold. This was recounted in a newspaper article, so doubtlessly there's a degree of journalistic flourish at work, but the sentiment was definitely one that was held by many people. In fact there's evidence that the administrators of almshouses purposefully cultivated the reputation of the institutions as shameful and intolerable places to live in order to discourage the poor from seeking their refuge (thereby reducing the cost of poor relief).
So to answer your question, I think many of his contemporaries would have chosen death over life in Nicola's situation, not only because of his injuries but because they forced him to live as a pauper.
Your second question is one that had also occurred to me, but I haven't been able to answer it. Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps the money went to the maintenance of his family, which had lost their main breadwinner. The $7500, while certainly a substantial amount of money, may not have been enough to support, for instance, a wife and children AND a severely disabled person. Of course, this is pure speculation since I don't know if Nicola did have a family. In fact, I don't even know how old he was. But assuming he was in his prime working years, there might have been a wife and young children - and maybe parents who were past working age. To add to that, Nicola might have had unpaid medical bills.
Also, I should add that there are numerous references in the almshouse records to inmates whose families were not impoverished but chose to place their relatives in the almshouse. Many people at the time would have seen this as a callous act (in fact a fictional story ran in the Mount Kisco Recorder in the 1880s about a woman who rejects her fiance when she finds out he put his mother in an almshouse) but I suspect that it was a necessity for many people. This was a time before nursing homes, rehabilitation centers, home health aids, and many of the conveniences that we use to take care of disabled people today (machines to lift people, high-tech wheelchairs, etc.). The first visiting nurse association in Westchester (which was the first of its kind in the US) didn't begin until the late 1890s. The responsibility and cost of taking care of a disabled person fell completely on the family. So it was a choice between in-home care - which would have been prohibitively expensive even for middle class people, as well as emotionally and physically exhausting - and the almshouse. Given these options, it's not surprising that many people - from all classes, backgrounds, and circumstances - chose the almshouse. Or "chose" as the case may be, as it might not have been much of a choice.
This is a very long-winded way of answering your question - the result of having had these issues on my mind for a very long time.
A simple question, then:
ReplyDeleteYou would assume that the founding of almshouses would stem from a benevolent (i.e. altruistic) desire to help the poor, but that doesn’t quite seem to fit with the administrators’ wish to trash their reputations in order to reduce the cost of poor relief. (Or am I being unduly cynical and viewing it through eyes modern and jaundiced?) The question is: why were these institutions founded? Were they required by state or federal decree? Or a desire to keep the streets clear of destitute people? Or a response to Victorian-era attitudes to the moral aspect of social responsibility? Or a nod to religious sensibilities? Or something else?
The answer is ... yes.
ReplyDeleteIt was all the above. The Westchester County Almshouse was run by the county government. Poor laws in the US differed by state. In New York and New England, prior to the creation of institutions (or "indoor relief") individual municipalities were responsible for providing "outdoor relief" to their poor. That is, they paid certain residents of the town to accommodate and feed poor people in their own houses. Thus, poor people were given shelter but were allowed to remain part of society, retain their social networks, and attend the same churches as their neighbors.
This changed in the early 19th century due to a combination of factors: 1) increased populations and immigration; 2) the rise of wage labor and the creation of a large class of itinerant laborers who were victim to the vagaries of the new wage labor system; 3) urbanization and changes in the organization of towns and their social fabric; 4) the rise of the middle class and its particular ideals of respectability, order, and morality.
With these changes came a new attitude toward the poor. Whereas in colonial times the poor had been seen as a part of the natural social order who were worthy of pity, in the modern era the poor were considered deviant and their presence a social problem that had to be corrected through moral management. The rise of capitalism brought with it a new individualistic ideology that correlated wealth to social worth and dissolved the communal obligations people had previously felt towards each other as neighbors.
The people who founded poorhouses undoubtedly thought that they were acting morally and honorably. Poorhouses were considered more cost efficient as well as more humane, modern, and "scientific" than outdoor relief. They offered a solution to the "problem" of poverty. That "problem" was not the structure of society or the economy, but individuals' moral failings. Trashing the reputation of the poorhouse was part of the system of moral management used in institutions. Poorhouses SHOULD be loathsome places in order to convince lazy homeless people that they should be working. If you ever hear conservative politicians today grumbling about how welfare gives people a license to be lazy - that's the same kind of rhetoric that was used in the 19th century. If I may quote a fellow Brunonian, Etan Newman, "the individualistic mythology of neo-liberal capitalism today traces many of its origins to the period during which economic liberalism became enshrined in American society."
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, the administrators of the poorhouse thought that such institutions WERE humane (or at least as humane as the poor deserved). In the county manuals of the 19th century, they continuously pat themselves on the back for how well they treat the poor ("We allow them two meals a day now!"). David Wagner calls this "repressive benevolence" - a kind of false consciousness whereby people who think they are helping oppressed people actually end up perpetuating systems of oppression. To me the ultimate depiction of repressive benevolence is Nurse Ratched in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." She commits acts of pure evil, but her intentions are pure. There's no doubt (in my mind anyway) that she thinks she's doing what's best for her patients.
I could go on and on about this, but the best source (if you'd like to read 300 pages about it) is David Rothman's "The Discovery of the Asylum," which was the first serious academic critique of total institutions. Rothman writes that institutions originate from "a profound uneasiness about the fragility of the social order." By containing the poor and eliminating them from polite society, the poorhouse helped to reassure the middle class that their vision of the world was correct and the boundary that separated them from the poor was clearly defined and stable (when it really wasn't). Rothman's interpretation is known as the "social control theory" of institutions. The middle class fear disorder, represented not just by the poor themselves but by the specter of poverty that hangs over everyone; accordingly, they create institutions to enforce order and reassure themselves about their own social roles.
You're a gem, Mad. You wouldn't happen to have some spare energy you could send over by FedEx, would you?
ReplyDeleteSeriously, though, this goes some way to vindicating my intolerance of Mr and Mrs Middle England who yelp and cheer when they hear Tory politicians say 'We must reduce welfare payments so that the claimants will be persuaded to stop being lazy and go back to work,' conveniently forgetting that the system itself creates unemployment. They can't see that the victims of a competitive system are being demonised while the 'winners' are being unfairly rewarded, nor can they see that in a competitive system it's impossible for everybody to be a winner. I somehow doubt, though, that the intentions of the politicians are pure.
I stumbled upon this blog last week and have really enjoyed reading about all of your finds. Are y'all done with the field days? I know you stopped a couple of years ago but I was curious if you are going back?
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for your comment! We are no longer actively digging the St. George's site, but have processing/analysis planned for next month, at which point I will be updating this blog again. I am also conducting some fieldwork abroad this summer, so there will be posts on that too.
ReplyDeleteExciting! Thanks for letting me know. Look forward to the new posts.
ReplyDeleteOh and will you be linking to the new blog for the summer or will it be on this blog?
ReplyDelete