Reformers versus Residents in Five Points: A Role Play In this activity you learn about the religious, class, and ethnic tensions between reformers and residents in the working-class Irish immigrant neighborhood of Five Points. You will research roles of a Protestant reformer and two Irish women debating whether the reformer should send Irish children to live with upper-class parents. Objectives  You will be able to describe different contemporary perspectives, reformer and resident, on life in Five Points during the 1850s.  You will choose evidence from different primary and secondary sources to support your interpretation of reformer and resident roles. Instructions 1. Step 1: You will be writing and performing a script of a scene between reformers and residents in the Five Points neighborhood. To gather evidence to build your characters, you will first watch a film, and then read some primary and secondary documents. You will divide into three groups and each group will have an identity: Reverend Pease, Catherine, or Mary Mulvahill. a. Please locate the worksheet "Reformers versus Residents in Five Points" and quickly gloss over the scene and cast of characters. 2. Step 2: We will view  a. Chapter 2 (Rev. Louis Pease: Reforming the Five Points) (0:25-4:40), b. Chapter 3 (Mary Mulvahill: Surviving in a New Land) (4:40-8:30), c. Chapter 4 (The Manly Art of Politics) (8:30-12:30), d. WE WILL SKIP CH 5 e. Chapter 6 (Matthew Mulvahill: Boyhood in the Streets) (15:55-18:05), f. And Chapter 7 (Workingman’s Life) (18:05-22:24) of the Five Points DVD. f.i. As you watch, you should think about the events described from the perspective of your character in the role play. 3. Step 3: Gather in your groups to read through the various primary and secondary sources. You should read the documents and use the Character Research Sheet to develop your character's talking points for the scene. 4. Step 4: Now make new groups of three, with one student from each character group, to work together to create a script of the encounter between Reverend Pease, Catherine, and Mary Mulvahill. The scene should begin with Rev. Pease's arrival at Mary Mulvahill's house, where the meeting will occur. Each script should incorporate the characters' talking points, and address the “issues/conflicts” and the "Questions to Consider" on the worksheet. 5. Step 5: Perform scenes. a. As students perform, the other students should use the rubric to assess how well each script uses evidence. Use student evaluations for follow-up discussion. 6. Step 6: GTS discussion:  How did you see the issues surrounding child adoption (class, religion, family, etc.) differently, and why?  How did different characters interpret the historical evidence?

Historical Context During the 1840s and 1850s, there were no state or federal agencies available to help people with all the problems created by slums; religious groups generally took up that role. Protestant reformers such as Reverend Pease were horrified by the growth of the city's first major slum, Five Points, and saw it as their responsibility to improve poor people's lives. The upper and middle classes, most of whom were native-born Protestants, prided themselves on being different from the poor, and were very critical of Irish Catholics, whose faith was seen as proof of their backward ways. These reformers believed that poverty was caused by a person's immorality and lack of self-control and wanted to save immigrant children from poverty and abusive parents. Reformers vs. Residents in the Five Points

The Scene The Reverend Lewis M. Pease plans to send Irish children from the Five Points to be adopted by Protestant families, in order to “loosen the young from the grip of their parents’ wretchedness.” The Mulvahill’s neighbor Catherine is a widow with two young children—she is struggling to support her family and is considering letting Pease find a new home for her young son. Mary Mulvahill is disturbed by this idea and agrees to be with Catherine when Pease arrives to discuss the adoption.

The Cast of Characters Reverend Lewis M. Pease: A Protestant reformer Catherine: an Irish immigrant widow with two young children Mary Mulvahill: Catherine’s neighbor, also an Irish immigrant

The Task  Write a script of the encounter between Catherine, Mary and the Reverend Pease. The script should incorporate information and quotes from the following sources: o Five Points: New York’s Irish Working Class in the 1850s (film) o “Seeing is Believing?” (page 12 from Five Points viewing guide) o “Uptown, Downtown” (page 5 from Five Points viewing guide) o A Five Points “Orphan” Is Taken in by Reverend Pease and the Five Points House of Industry (book excerpt) o A Member of the Ladies’ Home Missionary Society Visits a Five Points Family (book excerpt) o Map of the Five Points Neighborhood, 1855-67

 The script should also address conflicts of the time and place: The Five Points neighborhood in the 1840s and 1850s. o Religious conflict: Protestant vs. Catholic o Class conflict: Upper classes vs. lower classes o Immigration: Native-born vs. immigrant

The script begins with Rev. Pease’s arrival at Mary Mulvahill’s house, where the meeting will occur.

Questions to Consider  What criticisms does Rev. Pease have of the residents of the Five Points? What can he offer Catherine and her son?  How might Mary convince Catherine to keep her children? (Religion, pride, family, labor)  What factors does Catherine need to consider? What decision does she make? Character Research Sheet

Character Name: ______

Character Description (religious, ethnic/national, class background):

KEY POINTS YOUR CHARACTER WILL MAKE SOURCE OF KEY POINTS SCENE ASSESSMENT RUBRIC: REFORMERS VS. RESIDENTS IN THE FIVE POINTS

As each group performs its script, answer the questions below to assess the work:

1. What evidence did each character use to support his/her argument?

Catherine______

Mary Mulvahill______

Rev. Pease______

2. What sources did the group use evidence and/or quotes from?  A Member of the Ladies' Home Missionary  Five Points DVD Society…  Five Points Viewer’s Guide  A Five Points "Orphan" Is Taken In by Rev. Pease…  Map of the Five Points  Other ______Neighborhood, 1855-67

3. What examples of conflict were present in the script? How? Religion (Protestant vs. Catholic) Example ______

Class (Upper vs. Lower) Example ______

Immigration (Native-born vs. immigrant) Example ______

4. How did the script reflect the historical setting of the Five Points in the 1850s?

Name ______A Five Points "Orphan" Is Taken In by Reverend Pease and the Five Points House of Industry

The Five Points House of Industry was organized by the Methodist minister Lewis M. Pease and headquartered in a notorious former slum building known as the Old Brewery. It was the first missionary effort in the neighborhood to offer vocational training and employment for adults and free meals and schooling for children, in addition to the more traditional Bible classes, temperance meetings, and religious services. More controversial, at least to the largely Catholic residents of the neighborhood, were efforts by Pease and other Protestant missionaries to adopt impoverished children like "Wild Maggie," the subject of an 1853 news story. Perhaps a majority of the so-called "orphans" put up for adoption in the Five Points had at least one living parent, which furthered tensions between residents and missionaries. Historian Tyler Anbinder describes the "Wild Maggie" case below.

. . . the majority of children put up for adoption by the Five Points charities were not actual orphans; at least 60 percent put up by the mission had living parents. Anecdotal evidence from the Monthly Record of the Five Points House of Industry suggests that most of the children it sent to adoptive homes also had at least one living parent. A variety of circumstances prompted parents to give their children up for adoption. Alcohol abuse frequently played a role. . . .

The most famous adoption case from the two Five Points institutions also involved alcoholic parents. In 1853, the Tribune published a story by Solon Robinson titled “‘Wild Maggie,’ of the Five Points.” Pease had apparently bestowed this nickname on a disheveled little girl named Margaret Reagan who lived in a basement on Centre Street near Anthony. Maggie came to Pease’s attention because of the way she relentlessly taunted and berated him. In a typical tirade, Maggie called Pease an “old Protestant thief. . . . I heard Father Phelan tell what you want to do with the poor folks at the Points; you want to turn them out of house and home, . . . and make them all go to hear you preach your lies.” After many attempts to lure Maggie into the House of Industry, Pease finally succeeded by offering to let her lay out the sewing work for the women he trained, a task she agreed to undertake only if he left the door open so he could not steal her and send her to “the Island.” She asked for more tasks of this sort and the apparently neglected girl soon began living at the House of Industry. They eventually consented to her adoption by a farming family living near Katonah in Westchester County. Her story touched New Yorkers deeply.

The vast majority of non-orphans given up for adoption had lived not with alcoholics but with widowed mothers who simply could not earn enough to support their children.

Most adoptees were given up voluntarily by desperate parents. But when charity workers found children’s treatment or living conditions abhorrent, they sometimes took the youngsters forcibly. Pease usually tried to cajole these parents into parting with their offspring by describing the fresh air and material comforts their children would have in new homes. In one such case, Pease went to a tenement to determine why three sisters had stopped attending his day school. He discovered that their widowed mother had sent them out begging. The minister convinced the mother to let her two eldest daughters, Eliza and Maggie, live at the House of Industry, but she would not part with little Jane. “We felt that we could not give her up to a life of beggary and shame,” reported a House of Industry publication; so when a man came to the House of Industry a few weeks later looking to adopt a girl Jane’s age, Pease returned to see her. He found Jane eager to go, and because her mother that day was in the “state of inebriation characterized by good nature,” she granted her permission, swayed in part because the adopting father gave her “a bonus” which “kept her in good humor.” Pease saw no harm in brokering such deals if they removed youngsters from such miserable circumstances. On other occasions, Pease withheld assistance from desperate women and their children to force reluctant mothers to part with their offspring. His newsletter described one such mother whose husband had abandoned her “for the companions of the grog shop.” After selling all of her possessions to sustain herself and three children, she was evicted from her apartment, at which point she appeared at the House of Industry seeking shelter. She was told she could stay only if she would allow Pease to put her children up for adoption. At first she agreed, but as the day of their departure approached she changed her mind and took them away, insisting “she would sooner beg, or even starve with them, than be parted from her innocent babes.” Pease had once taken in and trained such women. By 1857, however, he had apparently concluded that the prospects for unmarried women with young children were so dismal that adoption was the best solution for both generations.

SOURCE | Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 258-261. CREATOR | Tyler Anbinder ITEM TYPE | Book (excerpt) A Member of the Ladies' Home Missionary Society Visits a Five Points Family The Five Points Mission grew out of several Protestant missionary organizations that aimed to improve conditions in the Five Points. At first they attempted to convert residents from Catholicism; later the Mission obtained pledges from Five Pointers to abstain from alcohol and other vices. Among the organizations vying for the souls of Five Pointers was the New York-Ladies' Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, whose goals and methodology are summarized below. The Society consisted of married middle- and upper-class women, like the author of the passage below, who visited residents in their homes, reading passages from the Bible and handing out religious tracts. Sometimes Society members offered to adopt poverty-stricken children like the little girl in the story.

The work of this Society is... to renovate the Five Points. Their design is to visit the sick, to relieve the poor, to clothe the naked, to educate the children, to warn sinners to flee the wrath to come, to lead the penitent to an atoning Saviour, and never to consider their work complete until renewing grace has transformed these degraded outcasts into obedient children of the living God.

Passing up Cross-street [name later changed to Park Street] one bleak winter’s morning, I observed a little girl, whose appearance was so forlorn and sad, that I felt anxious to know where she lived, and what caused her intense expression of sorrow. I therefore asked her name and where she lived, and desired her to take me to see her mother. “I have no mother,” she replied, “but my father lives in the attic of No. — Cross-street, and you may go up and see him.” I followed her to the third floor, up a narrow, dirty stair-case. Knocking at the door, we were met by a man who seemed both surprised and pleased to see me in his wretched, miserable home—for home it was, although destitute of chair or table. In the middle of the room, which was about nine feet square, stood a small cylinder-stove, the pipe passing through a pane of the window. Beside the stove was a basket, containing a small supply of shavings. Upon a few dirty rags, which covered some shavings, lay a sick boy, about five years old. Upon the stove some miserable food was cooking, the fumes of which, mingling with the smoke of pine shavings, filled the room, causing the little sufferer to cough constantly.

The father appearing to be perfectly sober, I asked him what had brought upon him this extreme destitution. He replied, “Want of work and poverty,” adding that he had always got on well until his good wife died, about four years before, and then misfortune took hold of him. He had nearly lost the sight of one eye, and during the stages of its inflammation and subsequent loss, had been obliged to spend all he had earned or saved. The loss of his eye preventing him from carrying his hod [tool to carry masonry], he had no other means left for his support than visiting the markets and carrying baskets for the purchasers at the stalls, his little girl going out daily to beg the food she would prepare (young as she was) for his return. Sometimes he made but 25 cents a day. I asked him if he had signed the pledge: “Yes, indeed madam,” was the reply, “more than twelve years ago, when I married my wife, I took the pledge, and have never broken it. I asked him if it would not be well to let us get good places for the children, and then he could support himself more comfortably, for I had learned in the course of conversation, that he paid a dollar a week for his wretched room, and that was often left without a cent when the rent was paid. But he said nothing in the world could induce him to part with his children for he had promised his dying wife not to part with them, under any circumstances.

SOURCE | Five Points Mission, The Old Brewery and the New Mission House at the Five Points (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1854) 147, 303. CREATOR | Five Points Mission ITEM TYPE | Book (excerpt) Map of the Five Points Neighborhood, 1855- 67 In 1854 the names of the original streets, Cross, Anthony, Orange, and Little Water, which had formed the Five Points intersection (marked with a star) from which the neighborhood derived its name were changed to Park, Worth, Baxter and Mission Place, respectively. The map also shows the locations of several key landmarks of the mid-nineteenth century Five Points, including the city's first tenement building at 65 Mott Street, the Bowery Theater on Bowery between Canal and Bayard, and the Five Points House of Industry, previously the Old Brewery slum building, on Worth Street. SOURCE | Tyler Andbinder, Five Points (New York: The Free Press, 2001). CREATOR | Maryland Mapping & Graphics Inc. ITEM TYPE | Map Map of New York City's Sixth Ward and Surrounding Areas, 1899 This 1899 map of lower Manhattan includes the intersection of Worth, Baxter, and Park Streets, known as Five Points. Block 160 is marked and shaded. "Section of lower Manhattan in 1899"

SOURCE | "Section of lower Manhattan in 1899," map from Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives, (New York: Dover Books, 1971), 230. Modified by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning. CREATOR | American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning ITEM TYPE | Map