Helen D. Marston Beardsley and Progressive Activism - San Diego ...

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H ELEN D. MARSTON B EARDSLEY The title page of Edith Shatto King and Frederick A. King’s Pathfinder Survey of San Diego (1914). University of California, San Diego. an Associated Charities. Even though he was sick at the time, Fred King accepted the challenge, and became the first secretary of the San Diego Associated Charities. 43 For Edith, the move to San Diego represented a return to her childhood home. One of her first assignments as a social worker came in 1907 when she worked on an investigation of women and child labor in the cotton mills of the South and New England. 44 She then assisted in collecting data for a national study of the living and working conditions of young department store clerks. 45 So in selecting the Kings, the CWC chose a highly professional and dedicated couple that had a long track record of social welfare experience. The CWC membership helped gather evidence and arrange interviews with the social worker community, making it possible for the report research to be conducted within three weeks. Their findings, published in 1914 as The Pathfinder Social Survey of San Diego, documented the grimy side of San Diego life, and according to its authors represented the first document produced by the social work community in San 109
THE JOURNAL OF SAN DIEGO HISTORY Diego. 46 The Kings’ investigations fell into eight categories: public health and sanitation; public education; recreation; delinquency; industrial conditions—foreign population; betterment agencies; civic improvement; and taxation and public finance. Lack of any coordinated oversight in the city was a central theme that ran through the document; a secondary concern emphasized that some groups, like Mexican families, continued to be overlooked by existing agencies. 47 Through their research, the Kings found that housing conditions in San Diego did not mirror those of the urban squalor in eastern cities and factory towns; however, they urged civic leaders to pay closer attention to certain districts. Out of five hundred places inspected in 1912-13 by the Department of Public Health, officials ordered two hundred closed to residential living, with the following description typical of neighborhoods containing condemned dwellings: There are distinctly slum conditions in San Diego in shacks along the waterfront and among the Mexicans, negroes and whites in the tenement houses and cottages of the district south of F Street, and west of Sixteenth Street to the waterfront. One instance was given of a tenement which housed twenty-three persons in four rooms…They were living in such places, not from choice, but from the fact that these places offered cheap rates…It is difficult for poor Mexicans to secure cheap rents in San Diego, consequently they crowd themselves and several families into some old house or unsanitary shack. Some of these latter are presented to the view of the tourist on arriving. 48 The Kings likely recognized that these kinds of descriptions would fuel the worries among civic leaders, especially those who promoted the community as a healthy alternative to industrial cities in the East and Midwest. Five years earlier in 1909, authorities had launched a clean-up campaign of the notorious “Stingaree District,” located from the waterfront through the downtown. Infested with saloons, opium dens, and prostitute cribs, the Stingaree had been an open sore on an otherwise healthy looking city. In preparation for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, leaders authorized Walter Bellon, the plumbing inspector for the City Health Department, to survey the district. He found dilapidated buildings with open privies, rat colonies, and standing sewage. 49 Unfortunately, the most destitute of San Diego’s poor lived in these dwellings, and demolishing the dwellings only served to push these people onto the streets. Despite these actions, little had changed by the time the Kings surveyed the area. Businessmen feared that too much talk of “unsanitary shacks” would no longer attract stable investors or health conscious and wealthy tourists. To be sure, by 1916, the Annual Report of the Department of Public Health admitted, “It is now a well established fact that San Diego offers little to the tubercular, in fact such cases frequently do poorly here.” 50 High infant mortality rates also posed special concern for San Diego reformers. While in relation to that of other cities, mortality from childhood diseases remained low, it still posed a problem, especially among families segregated from finding adequate medical attention. This was not a new revelation to reformers. In a report to the Associated Charities on November 18, 1910, City Physician Francis Mead had concluded that infant mortality among “Americans” was low, but “high among Mexicans who are hopelessly ignorant.” 51 Mead’s report was silent on the status of other minority groups left to fend for themselves such as the Chinese, African 110
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