The Children of the Poor
by Jacob A. Riis · English · Gutenberg #32609 · 509,070 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Children of the Poor
Author: Jacob A. Riis
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Language: English
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THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR
[Illustration]
THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR
BY
JACOB A. RIIS
AUTHOR OF "HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES"
_ILLUSTRATED_
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1908
COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
PREFACE
To my little ones, who, as I lay down my pen, come rushing in from the
autumn fields, their hands filled with flowers "for the poor children," I
inscribe this book. May the love that shines in their eager eyes never
grow cold within them; then they shall yet grow up to give a helping hand
in working out this problem which so plagues the world to-day. As to their
father's share, it has been a very small and simple one, and now it is
done. Other hands may carry forward the work. My aim has been to gather
the facts for them to build upon. I said it in "How the Other Half Lives,"
and now, in sending this volume to the printer, I can add nothing. The two
books are one. Each supplements the other. Ours is an age of facts. It
wants facts, not theories, and facts I have endeavored to set down in
these pages. The reader may differ with me as to the application of them.
He may be right and I wrong. But we shall not quarrel as to the facts
themselves, I think. A false prophet in our day could do less harm than a
careless reporter. That name I hope I shall not deserve.
To lay aside a work that has been so long a part of one's life, is like
losing a friend. But for the one lost I have gained many. They have been
much to me. The friendship and counsel of Dr. Roger S. Tracy, of the
Bureau of Vital Statistics, have lightened my labors as nothing else
could save the presence and the sympathy of the best and dearest friend of
all, my wife. To Major Willard Bullard, the most efficient chief of the
Sanitary Police; Rabbi Adolph M. Radin; Mr. A. S. Solomons, of the Baron
de Hirsch Relief Committee; Dr. Annie Sturges Daniel; Mr. L. W. Holste, of
the Children's Aid Society; Colonel George T. Balch, of the Board of
Education; Mr. A. S. Fairchild, and to Dr. Max L. Margolis, my thanks are
due and here given. Jew and Gentile, we have sought the truth together.
Our reward must be in the consciousness that we have sought it faithfully
and according to our light.
J. A. R.
RICHMOND HILL, LONG ISLAND,
October 1, 1892.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I. THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN, 1
CHAPTER II. THE ITALIAN SLUM CHILDREN, 10
CHAPTER III. IN THE GREAT EAST SIDE TREADMILL, 35
CHAPTER IV. TONY AND HIS TRIBE, 58
CHAPTER V. THE STORY OF KID MCDUFF'S GIRL, 87
CHAPTER VI. THE LITTLE TOILERS, 92
CHAPTER VII. THE TRUANTS OF OUR STREETS, 118
CHAPTER VIII. WHAT IT IS THAT MAKES BOYS BAD, 129
CHAPTER IX. LITTLE MARY ELLEN'S LEGACY, 142
CHAPTER X. THE STORY OF THE FRESH AIR FUND, 153
CHAPTER XI. THE KINDERGARTENS AND NURSERIES, 174
CHAPTER XII. THE INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS, 187
CHAPTER XIII. THE BOYS' CLUBS, 215
CHAPTER XIV. THE OUTCAST AND THE HOMELESS, 245
CHAPTER XV. PUTTING A PREMIUM ON PAUPERISM, 277
CHAPTER XVI. THE VERDICT OF THE POTTERS FIELD, 286
REGISTER OF CHILDREN'S CHARITIES, 291
LISTS OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Saluting the Flag, _Frontispiece_
PAGE
The Mott Street Barracks, 16
An Italian Home under a Dump, 25
A Child of the Dump, 28
Pietro Learning to Make an Englis' Letter, 32
"Slept in the Cellar Four Years," 41
A Synagogue School in a Hester Street Tenement, 46
The Backstairs to Learning, 48
Class of Melammedim Learning English, 50
"I Scrubs."--Katie who Keeps House in West Forty-ninth Street, 61
Present Tenants of John Ericsson's Old House, now the Beach
Street Industrial School, 73
Their Playground a Truck, 86
Shine, Sir? 100
Little Susie at her Work, 110
Minding the Baby, 114
"Shooting Craps" in the Hall of the Newsboys' Lodging House, 122
Case No. 25,745 on the Society's Blotter, Before and After, 146
Club Used for Beating a Child, 152
Summer Boarders from Mott Street, 158
Making for the "Big Water," 167
Floating Hospital--St. John's Guild, 169
Playing at Housekeeping, 177
Poverty Gappers Playing Coney Island, 183
Poverty Gap Transformed--the Spot where Young Healey was
murdered is now a Playground, 185
The Late Charles Loring Brace, Founder of the Children's
Aid Society, 188
The First Patriotic Election in the Beach Street Industrial
School--Parlor in John Ericsson's Old House, 201
The Board of Election Inspectors in the Beach Street School, 207
The Plumbing Shop in the New York Trade Schools, 212
A Boys' Club Reading room, 222
The Carpenter Shop in the Avenue C Working Boys' Club, 226
Type-setting at the Avenue C Working Boys' Club, 231
A Bout with the Gloves in the Boys' Club of Calvary Parish, 235
Lining up for the Gymnasium, 240
A Snug Corner on a Cold Night, 246
2 A.M. in the Delivery-room in the "Sun" Office, 261
Buffalo, 264
Night School in the West Side Lodging-house.--Edward, the
Little Pedlar, Caught Napping, 265
The "Soup-House Gang," Class in History in the Duane Street
Newsboy's Lodging-house, 269
THE CHILDREN OF THE POOR
CHAPTER I.
THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILDREN
The problem of the children is the problem of the State. As we mould the
children of the toiling masses in our cities, so we shape the destiny of
the State which they will rule in their turn, taking the reins from our
hands. In proportion as we neglect or pass them by, the blame for bad
government to come rests upon us. The cities long since held the balance
of power; their dominion will be absolute soon unless the near future
finds some way of scattering the population which the era of steam-power
and industrial development has crowded together in the great centres of
that energy. At the beginning of the century the urban population of the
United States was 3.97 per cent. of the whole, or not quite one in
twenty-five. To-day it is 29.12 per cent., or nearly one in three. In the
lifetime of those who were babies in arms when the first gun was fired
upon Fort Sumter it has all but doubled. A million and a quarter live
to-day in the tenements of the American metropolis. Clearly, there is
reason for the sharp attention given at last to the life and the doings of
the other half, too long unconsidered. Philanthropy we call it sometimes
with patronizing airs. Better call it self-defence.
In New York there is all the more reason because it is the open door
through which pours in a practically unrestricted immigration, unfamiliar
with and unattuned to our institutions; the dumping-ground where it rids
itself of its burden of helplessness and incapacity, leaving the
procession of the strong and the able free to move on. This sediment forms
the body of our poor, the contingent that lives, always from hand to
mouth, with no provision and no means of providing for the morrow. In the
first generation it pre-empts our slums;[1] in the second, its worst
elements, reinforced by the influences that prevail there, develop the
tough, who confronts society with the claim that the world owes him a
living and that he will collect it in his own way. His plan is a practical
application of the spirit of our free institutions as his opportunities
have enabled him to grasp it.
Thus it comes about that here in New York to seek the children of the poor
one must go among those who, if they did not themselves come over the sea,
can rarely count back another generation born on American soil. Not that
there is far to go. Any tenement district will furnish its own tribe, or
medley of many tribes. Nor is it by any means certain that the children
when found will own their alien descent. Indeed, as a preliminary to
gaining their confidence, to hint at such a thing would be a bad blunder.
The ragged Avenue B boy, whose father at his age had barely heard, in his
corner of the Fatherland, of America as a place where the streets were
paved with nuggets of gold and roast pigeons flew into mouths opening wide
with wonder, would, it is safe to bet, be as prompt to resent the
insinuation that he was a "Dutchman," as would the little "Mick" the
Teuton's sore taunt. Even the son of the immigrant Jew in his virtual
isolation strains impatiently at the fetters of race and faith, while the
Italian takes abuse philosophically only when in the minority and bides
his time until he too shall be able to prove his title by calling those
who came after him names. However, to quarrel with the one or the other on
that ground would be useless. It is the logic of the lad's evolution, the
way of patriotism in the slums. His sincerity need not be questioned.
Many other things about him may be, and justly are, but not that. It is
perfectly transparent. His badness is as spontaneous as his goodness, and
for the moment all there is of the child. Whichever streak happens to
prevail, it is in full possession; if the bad is on top more frequently
than the other, it is his misfortune rather than his design. He is as
ready to give his only cent to a hungrier boy than he if it is settled
that he can "lick" him, and that he is therefore not a rival, as he is to
join him in torturing an unoffending cat for the common cheer. The penny
and the cat, the charity and the cruelty, are both pregnant facts in the
life that surrounds him, and of which he is to be the coming exponent. In
after years, when he is arrested by the officers of the Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for beating his horse, the episode adds
but to his confusion of mind in which a single impression stands out clear
and lasting, viz., that somehow he got the worst of it as usual. But for
the punishment, the whole proceeding must seem ludicrous to him. As it is
he submits without comprehending. _He_ had to take the hard knocks always;
why should not his horse?
In other words, the child is a creature of environment, of opportunity, as
children are everywhere. And the environment here has been bad, as it was
and is in the lands across the sea that sent him to us. Our slums have
fairly rivalled, and in some respects outdone, the older ones after which
they patterned. Still, there is a difference, the difference between the
old slum and the new. The hopelessness, the sullen submission of life in
East London as we have seen it portrayed, has no counterpart here; neither
has the child born in the gutter and predestined by the order of society,
from which there is no appeal, to die there. We have our Lost Tenth to
fill the trench in the Potter's Field; quite as many wrecks at the finish,
perhaps, but the start seems fairer in the promise. Even on the slums the
doctrine of liberty has set its stamp. To be sure, for the want of the
schooling to decipher it properly, they spell it license there, and the
slip makes trouble. The tough and his scheme of levying tribute are the
result. But the police settle that with him, and when it comes to a
choice, the tough is to be preferred to the born pauper any day. The one
has the making of something in him, unpromising as he looks; seen in a
certain light he may even be considered a hopeful symptom. The other is
just so much dead loss. The tough is not born: he is made. The
all-important point is the one at which the manufacture can be stopped.
So rapid and great are the changes in American cities, that no slum has
yet had a chance here to grow old enough to distil its deadliest poison.
New York has been no exception. But we cannot always go at so fast a
pace. There is evidence enough in the crystallization of the varying
elements of the population along certain lines, no longer as uncertain as
they were, that we are slowing up already. Any observer of the poor in
this city is familiar with the appearance among them of that most
distressing and most dangerous symptom, the home-feeling for the slum that
opposes all efforts at betterment with dull indifference. Pauperism seems
to have grown faster of late than even the efforts put forth to check it.
We have witnessed this past winter a dozen times the spectacle of beggars
extorting money by threats or violence without the excuse which a season
of exceptional distress or hardship might have furnished. Further, the
raid in the last Legislature upon the structure of law built up in a
generation to regulate and keep the tenements within safe limits, shows
that fresh danger threatens in the alliance of the slum with politics.
Only the strongest public sentiment, kept always up to the point of prompt
action, avails to ward off this peril. But public sentiment soon wearies
of such watch-duty, as instanced on this occasion, when several bills
radically remodelling the tenement-house law and repealing some of its
most beneficent provisions, had passed both houses and were in the hands
of the Governor before a voice was raised against them, or anyone beside
the politicians and their backers seemed even to have heard of them. And
this hardly five years after a special commission of distinguished
citizens had sat an entire winter under authority of the State considering
the tenement-house problem, and as the result of its labors had secured as
vital the enactment of the very law against which the raid seemed to be
chiefly directed!
The tenement and the saloon, with the street that does not always divide
them, form the environment that is to make or unmake the child. The
influence of each of the three is bad. Together they have power to
overcome the strongest resistance. But the child born under their evil
spell has none such to offer. The testimony of all to whom has fallen the
task of undoing as much of the harm done by them as may be, from the
priest of the parish school to the chaplain of the penitentiary, agrees
upon this point, that even the tough, with all his desperation, is weak
rather than vicious. He promises well, he even means well; he is as
downright sincere in his repentance as he was in his wrong-doing; but it
doesn't prevent him from doing the very same evil deed over again the
minute he is rid of restraint. He would rather be a saint than a sinner;
but somehow he doesn't keep in the _rôle_ of saint, while the police help
perpetuate the memory of his wickedness. After all, he is not so very
different from the rest of us. Perhaps that, with a remorseful review of
the chances he has had, may help to make a fellow-feeling for him in us.
That is what he needs. The facts clearly indicate that from the
environment little improvement in the child is to be expected. There has
been progress in the way of building the tenements of late years, but they
swarm with greater crowds than ever--good reason why they challenge the
pernicious activity of the politician; and the old rookeries disappear
slowly. In the relation of the saloon to the child there has been no
visible improvement, and the street is still his refuge. It is, then, his
opportunities outside that must be improved if relief is to come. We have
the choice of hailing him man and brother or of being slugged and robbed
by him. It ought not to be a hard choice, despite the tatters and the
dirt, for which our past neglect is in great part to blame. Plenty of
evidence will be found in these pages to show that it has been made in the
right spirit already, and that it has proved a wise choice. No investment
gives a better return to-day on the capital put out than work among the
children of the poor.
A single fact will show what is meant by that. Within the lifetime of the
Children's Aid Society, in the thirty years between 1860 and 1890, while
the population of this city was doubled, the commitments of girls and
women for vagrancy fell off from 5,880 to 1,980, while the commitments of
girl thieves fell between 1865 and 1890 from 1 in 743 to 1 in 7,500.[2]
Stealing and vagrancy among boys has decreased too; if not so fast, yet at
a gratifying rate.
Enough has been written and said about the children of the poor and their
sufferings to make many a bigger book than this. From some of it one might
almost be led to believe that one-half of the children are worked like
slaves from toddling infancy, while the other half wander homeless and
helpless about the streets. Their miseries are great enough without
inventing any that do not exist. There is no such host of child outcasts
in New York as that. Thanks to the unwearied efforts of the children's
societies in the last generation, what there is is decreasing, if
anything. As for the little toilers, they will receive attention further
on. There are enough of them, but as a whole they are anything but a
repining lot. They suffer less, to their own knowledge, from their
wretched life than the community suffers for letting them live it, though
it, too, sees the truth but in glimpses. If the question were put to a
vote of the children to-morrow, whether they would take the old life with
its drawbacks, its occasional starvation, and its everyday kicks and hard
knocks; or the good clothes, the plentiful grub, and warm bed, with all
the restraints of civilized society and the "Sunday-school racket" of the
other boy thrown in, I have as little doubt that the street would carry
the day by a practically unanimous vote as I have that there are people
still to be found--too many of them--who would indorse the choice with a
sigh of relief and dismiss the subject, if it could be dismissed that way;
which, happily, it cannot.
The immediate duty which the community has to perform for its own
protection is to school the children first of all into good Americans, and
next into useful citizens. As a community it has not attended to this duty
as it should; but private effort has stepped in and is making up for its
neglect with encouraging success. The outlook that was gloomy from the
point of view of the tenement, brightens when seen from this angle,
however toilsome the road yet ahead. The inpouring of alien races no
longer darkens it. The problems that seemed so perplexing in the light of
freshly-formed prejudices against this or that immigrant, yield to this
simple solution that discovers all alarm to have been groundless.
Yesterday it was the swarthy Italian, to-day the Russian Jew, that excited
our distrust. To-morrow it may be the Arab or the Greek. All alike they
have taken, or are taking, their places in the ranks of our social
phalanx, pushing upward from the bottom with steady effort, as I believe
they will continue to do unless failure to provide them with proper homes
arrests the process. And in the general advance the children, thus firmly
grasped, are seen to be a powerful moving force. The one immigrant who
does not keep step, who, having fallen out of the ranks, has been ordered
to the rear, is the Chinaman, who brought neither wife nor children to
push him ahead. He left them behind that he might not become an American,
and by the standard he himself set up he has been judged.
CHAPTER II.
THE ITALIAN SLUM CHILDREN
Who and where are the slum children of New York to-day? That depends on
what is understood by the term. The moralist might seek them in Hell's
Kitchen, in Battle Row, and in the tenements, east and west, where the
descendants of the poorest Irish immigrants live. They are the ones, as I
have before tried to show, upon whom the tenement and the saloon set their
stamp soonest and deepest. The observer of physical facts merely would
doubtless pick out the Italian ragamuffins first, and from his standpoint
he would be right. Irish poverty is not picturesque in the New World,
whatever it may have been in the Old. Italian poverty is. The worst old
rookeries fall everywhere in this city to the share of the immigrants from
Southern Italy, who are content to occupy them, partly, perhaps, because
they are no worse than the hovels they left behind, but mainly because
they are tricked or bullied into putting up with them by their smarter
countrymen who turn their helplessness and ignorance to good account.
Wherever the invasion of some old home section by the tide of business has
left ramshackle tenements falling into hopeless decay, as in the old
"Africa," in the Bend, and in many other places in the down-town wards,
the Italian sweater landlord is ready with his offer of a lease to bridge
over the interregnum, a lease that takes no account of repairs or of the
improvements the owner sought to avoid. The crowds to make it profitable
to him are never wanting. The bait he holds out is a job at the ash-dump
with which he connects at the other end of the line. The house, the job,
and the man as he comes to them fit in well together, and the
copartnership has given the Italian a character which, I am satisfied from
close observation of him, he does not wholly deserve. At all events, his
wife does not. Dirty as _he_ seems and is in the old rags that harmonize
so well with his surroundings, there is that about her which suggests not
only the capacity for better things, but a willingness to be clean and to
look decent, if cause can be shown. It may be a bright kerchief, a bit of
old-fashioned jewelry, or the neatly smoothed and braided hair of the
wrinkled old hag who presides over the stale bread counter. Even in the
worst dens occupied by these people, provided that they had not occupied
them too long, I have found this trait crop out in the careful scrubbing
of some piece of oil-cloth rescued from the dump and laid as a mat in
front of the family bed; or in a bit of fringe on the sheet or quilt,
ragged and black with age though it was, that showed what a fruitful soil
proper training and decent housing would have found there.
I have in mind one Italian "flat" among many, a half underground hole in a
South Fifth Avenue yard, reached by odd passage-ways through a tumbledown
tenement that was always full of bad smells and scooting rats. Across the
foul and slippery yard, down three steps made of charred timbers from some
worse wreck, was this "flat," where five children slept with their elders.
How many of those there were I never knew. There were three big family
beds, and they nearly filled the room, leaving only patches of the mud
floor visible. The walls were absolutely black with age and smoke. The
plaster had fallen off in patches and there was green mould on the
ceiling. And yet, with it all, with the swarm of squirming youngsters that
were as black as the floor they rolled upon, there was evidence of a
desperate, if hopeless, groping after order, even neatness. The beds were
made up as nicely as they could be with the old quilts and pieces of
carpet that served for covering. In Poverty Gap, where an Italian would be
stoned as likely as not, there would have been a heap of dirty straw
instead of beds, and the artistic arrangement of tallow-dips stuck in the
necks of bottles about the newspaper cut of a saint on the corner shelf
would have been missing altogether, fervent though the personal regard
might be of Poverty Gap for the saint. The bottles would have been the
only part of the exhibition sure to be seen there.
I am satisfied that this instinct inhabits not only the more aristocratic
Genoese, but his fellow countryman from the southern hills as well, little
as they resemble each other or agree in most things. But the Neapolitan
especially does not often get a chance to prove it. He is so altogether
uninviting an object when he presents himself, fresh from the steamer,
that he falls naturally the victim of the slum tenement, which in his keep
becomes, despite the vigilance of the sanitary police, easily enough the
convenient depot and half-way house between the garbage-dump and the
bone-factory. Starting thus below the bottom, as it were, he has an
up-hill journey before him if he is to work out of the slums, and the
promise, to put it mildly, is not good. He does it all the same, or, if
not he, his boy. It is not an Italian sediment that breeds the tough.
Parental authority has a strong enough grip on the lad in Mulberry Street
to make him work, and that is his salvation. "In seventeen years," said
the teacher of the oldest Italian ragged school in the city that, day and
night, takes in quite six hundred, "I have seen my boys work up into
decent mechanics and useful citizens almost to a man, and of my girls only
two I know of have gone astray." I had observed the process often enough
myself to know that she was right. It is to be remembered, furthermore,
that her school is in the very heart of the Five Points district, and
takes in always the worst and the dirtiest crowds of children.
Within a year there has been, through some caprice of immigration, a
distinct descent in the quality of the children, viewed from even the
standard of cleanliness that prevails at the Five Points. Perhaps the
exodus from Italy has worked farther south, where there seems to be an
unusual supply of mud. Perhaps the rivalry of steamship lines has brought
it about. At any rate, the testimony is positive that the children that
came to the schools after last vacation, and have kept coming since, were
the worst seen here since the influx began. I have watched with
satisfaction, since this became apparent, some of the bad old tenements,
which the newcomers always sought in droves, disappear to make room for
great factory buildings. But there are enough left. The cleaning out of a
Mulberry Street block left one lop-sided old rear tenement that had long
since been shut in on three sides by buildings four stories higher than
itself, and forgotten by all the world save the miserable wretches who
burrowed in that dark and dismal pit at the bottom of a narrow alley. Now,
when the fourth structure goes up against its very windows, it will stand
there in the heart of the block, a survival of the unfittest, that, in all
its disheartening dreariness, bears testimony, nevertheless, to the
beneficent activity of the best Board of Health New York has ever had--the
onward sweep of business. It will wipe that last remnant out also, even
if the law lack the power to reach it.
Shoals of Italian children lived in that rookery, and in those the workmen
tore down, in the actual physical atmosphere of the dump. Not a gun-shot
away there is a block of tenements, known as the Mott Street Barracks, in
which still greater shoals are--I was going to say housed, but that would
have been a mistake. Happily they are that very rarely, except when they
are asleep, and not then if they can help it. Out on the street they may
be found tumbling in the dirt, or up on the roof lying stark-naked,
blinking in the sun--content with life as they find it. If they are not a
very cleanly crew, they are at least as clean as the frame they are set
in, though it must be allowed that something has been done of late years
to redeem the buildings from the reproach of a bad past. The combination
of a Jew for a landlord and a saloon-keeper--Italian, of course--for a
lessee, was not propitious; but the buildings happen to be directly under
the windows of the Health Board, and something, I suppose, was due to
appearances. The authorities did all that could be done, short of tearing
down the tenement, but though comparatively clean, and not nearly as
crowded as it was, it is still the old slum. It is an instructive instance
of what can and cannot be done with the tenements into which we invite
these dirty strangers to teach them American ways and the self-respect of
future citizens and voters. There are five buildings--that is, five front
and four rear houses, the latter a story higher than those on the street;
that is because the rear houses were built last, to "accommodate" this
very Italian immigration that could be made to pay for anything. Chiefly
Irish had lived there before, but they moved out then. There were 360
tenants in the Barracks when the police census was taken in 1888, and 40
of them were babies. How many were romping children I do not know. The
"yard" they had to play in is just 5 feet 10 inches wide, and a dozen
steps below the street-level. The closets of all the buildings are in the
cellar of the rear houses and open upon this "yard," where it is always
dark and damp as in a dungeon. Its foul stenches reach even the top floor,
but so also does the sun at mid-day, and that is a luxury that counts as
an extra in the contract with the landlord. The rent is nearly one-half
higher near the top than it is on the street-level. Nine dollars above,
six and a half below, for one room with windows, two without, and with
barely space for a bed in each. But water-pipes have been put in lately,
under orders from the Health Department, and the rents have doubtless been
raised. "No windows" means no ventilation. The rear building backs up
against the tenement on the next street; a space a foot wide separates
them, but an attempt to ventilate the bed-rooms by windows on that was a
failure.
When the health officers got through with the Barracks in time for the
police census of 1891, the 360 tenants had been whittled down to 238, of
whom 47 were babies under five years. Persistent effort had succeeded in
establishing a standard of cleanliness that was a very great improvement
upon the condition prevailing in 1888. But still, as I have said, the slum
remained and will remain as long as that rear tenement stands. In the four
years fifty-one funerals had gone out from the Barracks. The white hearse
alone had made thirty-five trips carrying baby coffins. This was the way
the two standards showed up in the death returns at the Bureau of Vital
Statistics: in 1888 the adult death-rate, in a population of 320 over five
years old, was 15.62 per 1,000; the baby death-rate, 325.00 per 1,000,
or nearly one-third in a total of 40. As a matter of fact 13 of the 40 had
died that year. The adult death-rate for the entire tenement population of
more than a million souls was that year 12.81, and the baby death-rate
88.38. Last year, in 1891, the case stood thus: Total population, 238,
including 47 babies. Adult death-rate per 1,000, 20.94; child death-rate
(under five years) per 1,000, 106.38. General adult death-rate for 1891 in
the tenements, 14.25; general child death-rate for 1891 in the tenements,
86.67. It should be added that the reduced baby death-rate of the
Barracks, high as it was, was probably much lower than it can be
successfully maintained. The year before, in 1890, when practically the
same improved conditions prevailed, it was twice as high. Twice as many
babies died.
[Illustration: THE MOTT STREET BARRACKS.]
I have referred to some of the typical Italian tenements at some length to
illustrate the conditions under which their children grow up and absorb
the impressions that are to shape their lives as men and women. Is it to
be marvelled at, if the first impression of them is sometimes not
favorable? I recall, not without amusement, one of the early experiences
of a committee with which I was trying to relieve some of the child misery
in the East Side tenements by providing an outing for the very poorest of
the little ones, who might otherwise have been overlooked. In our anxiety
to make our little charges as presentable as possible, it seems we had
succeeded so well as to arouse a suspicion in our friends at the other end
of the line that something was wrong, either with us or with the poor of
which the patrician youngsters in new frocks and with clean faces, that
came to them, were representatives. They wrote to us that they were in the
field for the "slum children," and slum children they wanted. It happened
that their letter came just as we had before us two little lads from the
Mulberry Street Bend, ragged, dirty, unkempt, and altogether a sight to
see. Our wardrobe was running low, and we were at our wits' end how to
make these come up to our standard. We sat looking at each other after we
had heard the letter read, all thinking the same thing, until the most
courageous said it: "Send them as they are." Well, we did, and waited
rather breathlessly for the verdict. It came, with the children, in a note
by return train, that said: "Not _that_ kind, please!" And after that we
were allowed to have things our own way.
The two little fellows were Italians. In justice to our frightened
friends, it should be said that it was not their nationality, but their
rags, to which they objected; but not very many seasons have passed since
the crowding of the black-eyed brigade of "guinnies," as they were
contemptuously dubbed, in ever-increasing numbers, into the ragged schools
and the kindergartens, was watched with regret and alarm by the teachers,
as by many others who had no better cause. The event proved that the
children were the real teachers. They had a more valuable lesson to impart
than they came to learn, and it has been a salutary one. To-day they are
gladly welcomed. Their sunny temper, which no hovel is dreary enough, no
hardship has power to cloud, has made them universal favorites, and the
discovery has been made by their teachers that as the crowds pressed
harder their school-rooms have marvellously expanded, until they embrace
within their walls an unsuspected multitude, even many a slum tenement
itself, cellar, "stoop," attic, and all. Every lesson of cleanliness, of
order, and of English taught at the school is reflected into some wretched
home, and rehearsed there as far as the limited opportunities will allow.
No demonstration with soap and water upon a dirty little face but widens
the sphere of these chief promoters of education in the slums. "By 'm by,"
said poor crippled Pietro to me, with a sober look, as he labored away on
his writing lesson, holding down the paper with his maimed hand, "I learn
t' make an Englis' letter; maybe my fadder he learn too." I had my doubts
of the father. He sat watching Pietro with a pride in the achievement that
was clearly proportionate to the struggle it cost, and mirrored in his own
face every grimace and contortion the progress of education caused the
boy. "Si! si!" he nodded, eagerly. "Pietro he good a boy; make Englis',
Englis'!" and he made a flourish with his clay-pipe, as if he too were
making the English letter that was the object of their common veneration.
Perhaps it is as much his growing and well-founded distrust of the
middle-man, whose unresisting victim he has heretofore been, and his need
of some other joint to connect him with the English-speaking world that
surrounds him, as any personal interest in book-learning, that impels the
illiterate Italian to bring his boy to school early and see that he
attends it. Greed has something to do with it too. In their anxiety to lay
hold of the child, the charity schools have fallen into a way of bidding
for him with clothes, shoes, and other bait that is never lost on Mulberry
Street. Even sectarian scruples yield to such an argument, and the
parochial school, where they get nothing but on the contrary are expected
to contribute, gets left.
In a few charity schools where the children are boarded they have
discovered this, and frown upon Italian children unless there is the best
of evidence that the father is really unable to pay for their keep and
not simply unwilling. But whatever his motive, the effect is to
demonstrate in a striking way the truth of the observation that real
reform of poverty and ignorance must begin with the children. In his case,
at all events, the seed thus sown bears some fruit in the present as well
as in the coming generation of toilers. The little ones, with their new
standards and new ambitions, become in a very real sense missionaries of
the slums, whose work of regeneration begins with their parents. They are
continually fetched away from school by the mother or father to act as
interpreters or go-betweens in all the affairs of daily life, to be
conscientiously returned within the hour stipulated by the teacher, who
offers no objection to this sort of interruption, knowing it to be the
best condition of her own success. One cannot help the hope that the
office of trust with which the children are thus invested may, in some
measure, help to mitigate their home-hardships. From their birth they have
little else, though Italian parents are rarely cruel in the sense of
abusing their offspring.
It is the home itself that constitutes their chief hardship. It is only
when his years offer the boy an opportunity of escape to the street, that
a ray of sunlight falls into his life. In his backyard or in his alley it
seldom finds him out. Thenceforward most of his time is spent there, until
the school and the shop claim him, but not in idleness. His mother toiled,
while she bore him at her breast, under burdens heavy enough to break a
man's back. She lets him out of her arms only to share her labor. How well
he does it anyone may see for himself by watching the children that swarm
where an old house is being torn down, lugging upon their heads loads of
kindling wood twice their own size and sometimes larger than that. They
come, as crows scenting carrion, from every side at the first blow of the
axe. Their odd old-mannish or old-womanish appearance, due more to their
grotesque rags than to anything in the children themselves, betrays their
race even without their chatter. Be there ever so many children of other
nationalities nearer by--the wood-gatherers are nearly all Italians. There
are still a lot of girls among them who drag as big loads as their
brothers, but since the sewing machine found its way, with the sweater's
mortgage, into the Italian slums also, little Antonia has been robbed to a
large extent even of this poor freedom, and has taken her place among the
wage-earners when not on the school-bench. Once taken, the place is hers
to keep for good. Sickness, unless it be mortal, is no excuse from the
drudgery of the tenement. When, recently, one little Italian girl, hardly
yet in her teens, stayed away from her class in the Mott Street Industrial
School so long that her teacher went to her home to look her up, she found
the child in a high fever, in bed, sewing on coats, with swollen eyes,
though barely able to sit up.
But neither poverty nor hard knocks has power to discourage the child of
Italy. His nickname he pockets with a grin that has in it no thought of
the dagger and the revenge that come to solace his after years. Only the
prospect of immediate punishment eclipses his spirits for the moment.
While the teacher of the sick little girl was telling me her pitiful story
in the Mott Street school, a characteristic group appeared on the
stairway. Three little Italian culprits in the grasp of Nellie, the tall
and slender Irish girl who was the mentor of her class for the day. They
had been arrested "fur fightin'" she briefly explained as she dragged them
by the collar toward the principal, who just then appeared to inquire the
cause of the rumpus, and thrust them forward to receive sentence. The
three, none of whom was over eight years old, evidently felt that they
were in the power of an enemy from whom no mercy was to be expected, and
made no appeal for any. One scowled defiance. He was evidently the injured
party.
"He hit-a me a clip on de jaw," he said in his defence, in the dialect of
Mott Street with a slight touch of "the Bend." The aggressor, a heavy
browed little ruffian, hung back with a dreary howl, knuckling his eyes
with a pair of fists that were nearly black. The third and youngest was in
a state of bewilderment that was most ludicrous. He only knew that he had
received a kick on the back and had struck out in self-defence, when he
was seized and dragged away a prisoner. He was so dirty--school had only
just begun and there had been no time for the regular inspection--that he
was sentenced on the spot to be taken down and washed, while the other two
were led away to the principal's desk. All three went out howling.
I said that the Italians do not often abuse their children downright. The
padrone has had his day; the last was convicted seven years ago, and an
end has been put to the business of selling children into a slavery that
meant outrage, starvation, and death; but poverty and ignorance are
fearful allies in the homes of the poor against defenceless childhood,
even without the child-beating fiend. Two cases which I encountered in the
East Side tenements, in the summer of 1891, show how the combination works
at its worst. Without a doubt they are typical of very many, though I hope
that few come quite up to their standard. The one was the case of little
Carmen, who last March died in the New York Hospital, where she had lain
five long months, the special care of the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children. One of the summer corps doctors found her in a Mott
Street tenement, within stone-throw of the Health Department office,
suffering from a wasting disease that could only be combated by the most
careful nursing. He put her case into the hands of the King's Daughters'
Committee that followed in the steps of the doctor, and it was then that I
saw her. She lay in a little back room, up two flights and giving upon a
narrow yard where it was always twilight. The room was filthy and close,
and entirely devoid of furniture, with the exception of a rickety stool, a
slop pail, and a rusty old stove, one end of which was propped up with
bricks. Carmen's bed was a board laid across the top of a barrel and a
trunk set on end. I could not describe, if I would, the condition of the
child when she was raised from the mess of straw and rags in which she
lay. The sight unnerved even the nurse, who had seen little else than such
scenes all summer. Loathsome bedsores had attacked the wasted little body,
and in truth Carmen was more dead than alive. But when, shocked and
disgusted, we made preparations for her removal with all speed to the
hospital, the parents objected and refused to let us take her away. They
had to be taken into court and forced to surrender the child under warrant
of law, though it was clearly the little sufferer's only chance for life,
and only the slenderest of chances at that.
Carmen was the victim of the stubborn ignorance that dreads the hospital
and the doctor above the discomfort of the dirt and darkness and suffering
that are its every-day attendants. Her parents were no worse than the
Monroe Street mother who refused to let the health officer vaccinate her
baby, because her crippled boy, with one leg an inch shorter than the
other, had "caught it"--the lame leg, that is to say--from his
vaccination. She knew it was so, and with ignorance of that stamp there is
no other argument than force. But another element entered into the case of
a sick Essex Street baby. The tenement would not let it recover from a bad
attack of scarlet fever, and the parents would not let it be taken to the
country or to the sea-shore, despite all efforts and entreaties. When
their motive came out at last, it proved to be a mercenary one. They were
behind with the rent, and as long as they had a sick child in the house
the landlord could not put them out. Sick, the baby was to them a source
of income, at all events a bar to expense, and in that way so much
capital. Well, or away, it would put them at the mercy of the
rent-collector at once. So they chose to let it suffer. The parents were
Jews, a fact that emphasizes the share borne by desperate poverty in the
transaction, for the family tie is notoriously strong among their people.
No doubt Mott Street echoed with the blare of brass bands when poor little
Carmen was carried from her bed of long suffering to her grave in Calvary.
Scarce a day passes now in these tenements that does not see some little
child, not rarely a new-born babe, carried to the grave in solemn state,
preceded by a band playing mournful dirges and followed by a host with
trailing banners, from some wretched home that barely sheltered it alive.
No suspicion of the ludicrous incongruity of the show disturbs the
paraders. It seems as if, but one remove from the dump, an insane passion
for pomp and display, perhaps a natural reaction from the ash-barrel, lies
in wait for this Italian, to which he falls a helpless victim. Not content
with his own national and religious holidays and those he finds awaiting
him here, he has invented or introduced a system of his own, a sort of
communal celebration of proprietary saints, as it were, that has taken
Mulberry Street by storm. As I understand it, the townsmen of some Italian
village, when there is a sufficient number of them within reach, club
together to celebrate its patron saint, and hire a band and set up a
gorgeous altar in a convenient back yard. The fire-escapes overlooking it
are draped with flags and transformed into reserved-seat galleries with
the taste these people display under the most adverse circumstances.
Crowds come and go, parading at intervals in gorgeous uniforms around the
block. Admission is by the saloon-door, which nearly always holds the key
to the situation, the saloonist who prompts the sudden attack of devotion
being frequently a namesake of the saint and willing to go shares on the
principle that he takes the profit and the saint the glory.
[Illustration: AN ITALIAN HOME UNDER A DUMP.]
The partnership lasts as long as there is any profit in it, sometimes the
better part of the week, during which time all work stops. If the feast
panned out well, the next block is liable to be the scene of a rival
celebration before the first is fairly ended. As the supply of Italian
villages represented in New York is practically as inexhaustible as that
of the saloons, there is no reason why Mulberry Street may not become a
perennial picnic ground long before the scheme to make a park of one end
of it gets under way. From the standpoint of the children there can be no
objection to this, but from that of the police there is. They found
themselves called upon to interfere in such a four days' celebration of
St. Rocco last year, when his votaries strung cannon fire-crackers along
the street the whole length of the block and set them all off at once. It
was at just such a feast, in honor of the same saint, that a dozen
Italians were killed a week later at Newark in the explosion of their
fireworks.
It goes without saying that the children enter into this sort of thing
with all the enthusiasm of their little souls. The politician watches it
attentively, alert for some handle to catch his new allies by and effect
their "organization." If it is a new experience for him to find the saloon
put to such use, he betrays no surprise. It is his vantage ground, and
whether it serve as the political bait for the Irishman, or as the
religious initiative of the Italian, is of less account than that its
patrons, young and old, in the end fall into his trap. Conclusive proof
that the Italian has been led into camp came to me on last St. Patrick's
Day through the assurance of a certain popular clergyman, that he had
observed, on a walk through the city, a number of hand-organs draped in
green, evidently for the occasion.
This dump of which I have spoken as furnishing the background of the
social life of Mulberry Street, has lately challenged attention as a slum
annex to the Bend, with fresh horrors in store for defenceless childhood.
To satisfy myself upon this point I made a personal inspection of the
dumps along both rivers last winter and found the Italian crews at work
there making their home in every instance among the refuse they picked
from the scows. The dumps are wooden bridges raised above the level of the
piers upon which they are built to allow the discharge of the carts
directly into the scows moored under them. Under each bridge a cabin had
been built of old boards, oil-cloth, and the like, that had found its way
down on the carts; an old milk-can had been made into a fireplace without
the ceremony of providing stove-pipe or draught, and here, flanked by
mountains of refuse, slept the crews of from half a dozen to three times
that number of men, secure from the police, who had grown tired of driving
them from dump to dump and had finally let them alone. There were women at
some of them, and at four dumps, three on the North River and one on the
East Side, I found boys who ought to have been at school, picking bones
and sorting rags. They said that they slept there, and as the men did, why
should they not? It was their home. They were children of the dump,
literally. All of them except one were Italians. That one was a little
homeless Jew who had drifted down at first to pick cinders. Now that his
mother was dead and his father in a hospital, he had become a sort of
fixture there, it seemed, having made the acquaintance of the other lads.
[Illustration: A CHILD OF THE DUMP.]
Two boys whom I found at the West Nineteenth Street dumps sorting bones
were as bright lads as I had seen anywhere. One was nine years old and
the other twelve. Filthy and ragged, they fitted well into their
environment--even the pig I had encountered at one of the East River dumps
was much the more respectable, as to appearance, of the lot--but were
entirely undaunted by it. They scarcely remembered anything but the dump.
Neither could read, of course. Further down the river I came upon one
seemingly not over fifteen, who assured me that he was twenty-one. I
thought it possible when I took a closer look at him. The dump had stunted
him. He did not even know what a letter was. He had been there five years,
and garbage limited his mental as well as his physical horizon.
Enough has been said to show that the lot of the poor child of the
Mulberry Street Bend, or of Little Italy, is not a happy one, courageously
and uncomplainingly, even joyously, though it be borne. The stories of two
little lads from the region of Crosby Street always stand to me as typical
of their kind. One I knew all about from personal observation and
acquaintance; the other I give as I have it from his teachers in the Mott
Street Industrial School, where he was a pupil in spells. It was the death
of little Giuseppe that brought me to his home, a dismal den in a rear
tenement down a dark and forbidding alley. I have seldom seen a worse
place. There was no trace there of a striving for better things--the
tenement had stamped that out--nothing but darkness and filth and misery.
From this hole Giuseppe had come to the school a mass of rags, but with
that jovial gleam in his brown eyes that made him an instant favorite with
the teachers as well as with the boys. One of them especially, little
Mike, became attached to him, and a year after his cruel death shed tears
yet, when reminded of it. Giuseppe had not been long at the school when
he was sent to an Elizabeth Street tenement for a little absentee. He
brought her, shivering in even worse rags than his own; it was a cold
winter day.
"This girl is very poor," he said, presenting her to the teacher, with a
pitying look. It was only then that he learned that she had no mother. His
own had often stood between the harsh father and him when he came home
with unsold evening papers. Giuseppe fished his only penny out of his
pocket--his capital for the afternoon's trade. "I would like to give her
that," he said. After that he brought her pennies regularly from his day's
sale, and took many a thrashing for it. He undertook the general
supervision of the child's education, and saw to it that she came to
school every day. Giuseppe was twelve years old.
There came an evening when business had been very bad, so bad that he
thought a bed in the street healthier for him than the Crosby Street
alley. With three other lads in similar straits he crawled into the iron
chute that ventilated the basement of the Post-office on the Mail Street
side and snuggled down on the grating. They were all asleep, when fire
broke out in the cellar. The three climbed out, but Giuseppe, whose feet
were wrapped in a mail-bag, was too late. He was burned to death.
The little girl still goes to the Mott Street school. She is too young to
understand, and marvels why Giuseppe comes no more with his pennies. Mike
cries for his friend. When, some months ago, I found myself in the Crosby
Street alley, and went up to talk to Giuseppe's parents, they would answer
no questions before I had replied to one of theirs. It was thus
interpreted to me by a girl from the basement, who had come in out of
curiosity:
"Are youse goin' to give us any money?" Poor Giuseppe!
My other little friend was Pietro, of whom I spoke before. Perhaps of all
the little life-stories of poor Italian children I have come across in the
course of years--and they are many and sad, most of them--none comes
nearer to the hard every-day fact of those dreary tenements than his,
exceptional as was his own heavy misfortune and its effect upon the boy. I
met him first in the Mulberry Street police-station, where he was
interpreting the defence in a shooting case, having come in with the crowd
from Jersey Street, where the thing had happened at his own door. With his
rags, his dirty bare feet, and his shock of tousled hair, he seemed to fit
in so entirely there of all places, and took so naturally to the ways of
the police-station, that he might have escaped my notice altogether but
for his maimed hand and his oddly grave yet eager face, which no smile
ever crossed despite his thirteen years. Of both, his story, when I
afterward came to know it, gave me full explanation. He was the oldest son
of a laborer, not "borned here" as the rest of his sisters and brothers.
There were four of them, six in the family besides himself, as he put it:
"2 sisters, 2 broders, 1 fader, 1 modder," subsisting on an unsteady
maximum income of $9 a week, the rent taking always the earnings of one
week in four. The home thus dearly paid for was a wretched room with a
dark alcove for a bed-chamber, in one of the vile old barracks that until
very recently preserved to Jersey Street the memory of its former bad
eminence as among the worst of the city's slums. Pietro had gone to the
Sisters' school, blacking boots in a haphazard sort of way in his
off-hours, until the year before, upon his mastering the alphabet, his
education was considered to have sufficiently advanced to warrant his
graduating into the ranks of the family wage-earners, that were sadly in
need of recruiting. A steady job of "shinin'" was found for him in an
Eighth Ward saloon, and that afternoon, just before Christmas, he came
home from school and putting his books away on the shelf for the next in
order to use, ran across Broadway full of joyous anticipation of his new
dignity in an independent job. He did not see the street-car until it was
fairly upon him, and then it was too late. They thought he was killed, but
he was only crippled for life. When, after many months, he came out of the
hospital, where the company had paid his board and posed as doing a
generous thing, his bright smile was gone; his "shining" was at an end,
and with it his career as it had been marked out for him. He must needs
take up something new, and he was bending all his energies, when I met
him, toward learning to make the "Englis' letter" with a degree of
proficiency that would justify the hope of his doing something somewhere
at sometime to make up for what he had lost. It was a far-off possibility
yet. With the same end in view, probably, he was taking nightly
writing-lessons in his mother-tongue from one of the perambulating
schoolmasters who circulate in the Italian colony, peddling education
cheap in lots to suit. In his sober, submissive way he was content with
the prospect. It had its compensations. The boys who used to worry him,
now let him alone. "When they see this," he said, holding up his scarred
and misshapen arm, "they don't strike me no more." Then there was his
fourteen months old baby brother who was beginning to walk, and could
almost "make a letter." Pietro was much concerned about his education,
anxious evidently that he should one day take his place. "I take him to
school sometime," he said, piloting him across the floor and talking
softly to the child in his own melodious Italian. I watched his grave,
unchanging face.
[Illustration: PIETRO LEARNING TO MAKE AN ENGLIS' LETTER.]
"Pietro," I said, with a sudden yearning to know, "did you ever laugh?"
The boy glanced from the baby to me with a wistful look.
"I did wonst," he said, quietly, and went on his way. And I would gladly
have forgotten that I ever asked the question; even as Pietro had
forgotten his laugh.
CHAPTER III.
IN THE GREAT EAST SIDE TREADMILL
If the sightseer finds less to engage his interest in Jewtown than in the
Bend, outside of the clamoring crowds in the Chasir--the Pig-market--he
will discover enough to enlist his sympathies, provided he did not leave
them behind when he crossed the Bowery. The loss is his own then. There is
that in the desolation of child-life in those teeming hives to make the
shrivelled heart ache with compassion for its kind and throb with a new
life of pain, enough to dispel some prejudices that are as old as our
faith, and sometimes, I fear, a good deal stronger. The Russian exile adds
to the offence of being an alien and a disturber of economic balances the
worse one of being a Jew. Let those who cannot forgive this damaging fact
possess their souls in patience. There is some evidence that the welcome
he has received in those East Side tenements has done more than centuries
of persecution could toward making him forget it himself.
The Italian who comes here gravitates naturally to the oldest and most
dilapidated tenements in search of cheap rents, which he doesn't find. The
Jew has another plan, characteristic of the man. He seeks out the biggest
ones and makes the rent come within his means by taking in boarders,
"sweating" his flat to the point of police intervention. That that point
is a long way beyond human decency, let alone comfort, an instance from
Ludlow Street, that came to my notice while writing this, quite clearly
demonstrates. The offender was a tailor, who lived with his wife, two
children, and two boarders in two rooms on the top floor. [It is always
the top floor; in fifteen years of active service as a police reporter I
have had to climb to the top floor five times for every one my business
was further down, irrespective of where the tenement was or what kind of
people lived in it. Crime, suicide, and police business generally seem to
bear the same relation to the stairs in a tenement that they bear to
poverty itself. The more stairs the more trouble. The deepest poverty is
at home in the attic.] But this tailor; with his immediate household,
including the boarders, he occupied the larger of the two rooms. The
other, a bedroom eight feet square, he sublet to a second tailor and his
wife; which couple, following his example as their opportunities allowed,
divided the bedroom in two by hanging a curtain in the middle, took
one-half for themselves and let the other half to still another tailor
with a wife and child. A midnight inspection by the sanitary police was
followed by the arrest of the housekeeper and the original tailor, and
they were fined or warned in the police-court, I forget which. It doesn't
much matter. That the real point was missed was shown by the appearance of
the owner of the house, a woman, at Sanitary Headquarters, on the day
following, with the charge against the policeman that he was robbing her
of her tenants.
The story of inhuman packing of human swarms, of bitter poverty, of
landlord greed, of sweater slavery, of darkness and squalor and misery,
which these tenements have to tell, is equalled, I suppose, nowhere in a
civilized land. Despite the prevalence of the boarder, who is usually a
married man, come over alone the better to be able to prepare the way for
the family, the census[3] shows that fifty-four per cent. of the entire
population of immigrant Jews were children, or under age. Every steamer
has added to their number since, and judging from the sights one sees
daily in the office of the United Hebrew Charities, and from the general
appearance of Ludlow Street, the proportion of children has suffered no
decrease. Let the reader who would know for himself what they are like,
and what their chances are, take that street some evening from Hester
Street down and observe what he sees going on there. Not that it is the
only place where he can find them. The census I spoke of embraced
forty-five streets in the Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth Wards. But at
that end of Ludlow Street the tenements are taller and the crowds always
denser than anywhere else. Let him watch the little pedlars hawking their
shoe-strings, their matches, and their penny paper-pads, with the restless
energy that seems so strangely out of proportion to the reward it reaps;
the half-grown children staggering under heavy bundles of clothes from the
sweater's shop; the ragamuffins at their fretful play, play yet,
discouraged though it be by the nasty surroundings--thank goodness, every
year brings its Passover with the scrubbing brigade to Ludlow Street, and
the dirt is shifted from the houses to the streets once anyhow; if it does
find its way back, something may be lost on the way--the crowding, the
pushing for elbow-room, the wails of bruised babies that keep falling
down-stairs, or rolling off the stoop, and the raids of angry mothers
swooping down upon their offspring and distributing thumps right and left
to pay for the bruises, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Whose
eye, whose tooth, is of less account in Jewtown than that the capital put
out bears lawful interest in kind. What kind of interest may society some
day expect to reap from Ghettos like these, where even the sunny temper of
childhood is soured by want and woe, or smothered in filth? It is a long
time since I have heard a good honest laugh, a child's gleeful shout, in
Ludlow Street. Angry cries, jeers, enough. They are as much part of the
place as the dirty pavements; but joyous, honest laughs, like soap and
water, are at a premium there.
But children laugh because they are happy. They are not happy in Ludlow
Street. Nobody is except the landlord. Why should they be? Born to toil
and trouble, they claim their heritage early and part with it late. There
is even less time than there is room for play in Jewtown, good reason why
the quality of the play is poor. There is work for the weakest hands, a
step for the smallest feet in the vast tread-mill of these East Side
homes. A thing is worth there what it will bring. All other
considerations, ambitions, desires, yield to that. Education pays as an
investment, and therefore the child is sent to school. The moment his
immediate value as a worker overbalances the gain in prospect by keeping
him at his books, he goes to the shop. The testimony of Jewish observers,
who have had quite unusual opportunities for judging, is that the average
age at which these children leave school for good is rather below twelve
than beyond it, by which time their work at home, helping their parents,
has qualified them to earn wages that will more than pay for their keep.
They are certainly on the safe side in their reckoning, if the children
are not. The legal age for shop employment is fourteen. On my visits among
the homes, workshops, and evening schools of Jewtown, I was always struck
by the number of diminutive wage-earners who were invariably "just
fourteen." It was clearly not the child which the tenement had dwarfed in
their case, but the memory or the moral sense of the parents.
If, indeed, the shop were an exchange for the home; if the child quit the
one upon entering the other, there might be little objection to make; but
too often they are two names for the same thing; where they are not, the
shop is probably preferable, bad as that may be. When, in the midnight
hour, the noise of the sewing-machine was stilled at last, I have gone the
rounds of Ludlow and Hester and Essex Streets among the poorest of the
Russian Jews, with the sanitary police, and counted often four, five, and
even six of the little ones in a single bed, sometimes a shake-down on the
hard floor, often a pile of half-finished clothing brought home from the
sweater, in the stuffy rooms of their tenements. In one I visited very
lately, the only bed was occupied by the entire family lying lengthwise
and crosswise, literally in layers, three children at the feet, all except
a boy of ten or twelve, for whom there was no room. He slept with his
clothes on to keep him warm, in a pile of rags just inside the door. It
seemed to me impossible that families of children could be raised at all
in such dens as I had my daily and nightly walks in. And yet the vital
statistics and all close observation agree in allotting to these Jews even
an unusual degree of good health. The records of the Sanitary Bureau show
that while the Italians have the highest death-rate, the mortality in the
lower part of the Tenth Ward, of which Ludlow Street is the heart and
type, is the lowest in the city. Even the baby death-rate is very low. But
for the fact that the ravages of diphtheria, croup, and measles run up the
record in the houses occupied entirely by tailors--in other words, in the
sweater district, where contagion always runs riot[4]--the Tenth Ward
would seem to be the healthiest spot in the city, as well as the dirtiest
and the most crowded. The temperate habits of the Jew and his freedom from
enfeebling vices generally must account for this, along with his
marvellous vitality. I cannot now recall ever having known a Jewish
drunkard. On the other hand, I have never come across a Prohibitionist
among them. The absence of the one renders the other superfluous.
It was only last winter I had occasion to visit repeatedly a double
tenement at the lower end of Ludlow Street, which the police census showed
to contain 297 tenants, 45 of whom were under five years of age, not
counting 3 pedlars who slept in the mouldy cellar, where the water was
ankle deep on the mud floor. The feeblest ray of daylight never found its
way down there, the hatches having been carefully covered with rags and
matting; but freshets often did. Sometimes the water rose to the height of
a foot, and never quite soaked away in the dryest season. It was an awful
place, and by the light of my candle the three, with their unkempt beards
and hair and sallow faces, looked more like hideous ghosts than living
men. Yet they had slept there among and upon decaying fruit and wreckage
of all sorts from the tenement for over three years, according to their
own and the housekeeper's statements. There had been four. One was then in
the hospital, but not because of any ill effect the cellar had had upon
him. He had been run over in the street and was making the most of his
vacation, charging it up to the owner of the wagon, whom he was getting
ready to sue for breaking his leg. Up-stairs, especially in the rear
tenement, I found the scene from the cellar repeated with variations. In
one room a family of seven, including the oldest daughter, a young woman
of eighteen, and her brother, a year older than she, slept in a common bed
made on the floor of the kitchen, and manifested scarcely any concern at
our appearance. A complaint to the Board of Health resulted in an
overhauling that showed the tenement to be unusually bad even for that bad
spot; but when we came to look up its record, from the standpoint of the
vital statistics, we discovered that not only had there not been a single
death in the house during the whole year, but on the third floor lived a
woman over a hundred years old, who had been there a long time. I was
never more surprised in my life, and while we laughed at it, I confess it
came nearer to upsetting my faith in the value of statistics than anything
I had seen till then. And yet I had met with similar experiences, if not
quite so striking, often enough to convince me that poverty and want beget
their own power to resist the evil influences of their worst surroundings.
I was at a loss how to put this plainly to the good people who often asked
wonderingly why the children of the poor one saw in the street seemed
generally such a thriving lot, until a slip of Mrs. Partington's
discriminating tongue did it for me: "Manured to the soil." That is it. In
so far as it does not merely seem so--one does not see the sick and
suffering--that puts it right.
[Illustration: "SLEPT IN THAT CELLAR FOUR YEARS."]
Whatever the effect upon the physical health of the children, it cannot be
otherwise, of course, than that such conditions should corrupt their
morals. I have the authority of a distinguished rabbi, whose field and
daily walk are among the poorest of his people, to support me in the
statement that the moral tone of the young girls is distinctly lower than
it was. The entire absence of privacy in their homes and the foul contact
of the sweaters' shops, where men and women work side by side from morning
till night, scarcely half clad in the hot summer weather, does for the
girls what the street completes in the boy. But for the patriarchal family
life of the Jew that is his strongest virtue, their ruin would long since
have been complete. It is that which pilots him safely through shoals upon
which the Gentile would have been inevitably wrecked. It is that which
keeps the almshouse from casting its shadow over Ludlow Street to add to
its gloom. It is the one quality which redeems, and on the Sabbath eve
when he gathers his household about his board, scant though the fare be,
dignifies the darkest slum of Jewtown.
How strong is this attachment to home and kindred that makes the Jew cling
to the humblest hearth and gather his children and his children's children
about it, though grinding poverty leave them only a bare crust to share, I
saw in the case of little Jette Brodsky, who strayed away from her own
door, looking for her papa. They were strangers and ignorant and poor, so
that weeks went by before they could make their loss known and get a
hearing, and meanwhile Jette, who had been picked up and taken to Police
Headquarters, had been hidden away in an asylum, given another name when
nobody came to claim her, and had been quite forgotten. But in the two
years that passed before she was found at last, her empty chair stood ever
by her father's, at the family board, and no Sabbath eve but heard his
prayer for the restoration of their lost one. It happened once that I
came in on a Friday evening at the breaking of bread, just as the four
candles upon the table had been lit with the Sabbath blessing upon the
home and all it sheltered. Their light fell on little else than empty
plates and anxious faces; but in the patriarchal host who arose and bade
the guest welcome with a dignity a king might have envied I recognized
with difficulty the humble pedlar I had known only from the street and
from the police office, where he hardly ventured beyond the door.
But the tenement that has power to turn purest gold to dross digs a pit
for the Jew even through this virtue that has been his shield against its
power for evil. In its atmosphere it turns too often to a curse by helping
to crowd his lodgings, already overflowing, beyond the point of official
forbearance. Then follow orders to "reduce" the number of tenants that
mean increased rent, which the family cannot pay, or the breaking up of
the home. An appeal to avert such a calamity came to the Board of Health
recently from one of the refugee tenements. The tenant was a man with a
houseful of children, too full for the official scale as applied to the
flat, and his plea was backed by the influence of his only friend in
need--the family undertaker. There was something so cruelly suggestive in
the idea that the laugh it raised died without an echo.
The census of the sweaters' district gave a total of 23,405 children under
six years, and 21,285 between six and fourteen, in a population of
something over a hundred and eleven thousand Russian, Polish, and
Roumanian Jews in the three wards mentioned; 15,567 are set down as
"children over fourteen." According to the record, scarce one-third of the
heads of families had become naturalized citizens, though the average of
their stay in the United States was between nine and ten years. The very
language of our country was to them a strange tongue, understood and
spoken by only 15,837 of the fifty thousand and odd adults enumerated.
Seven thousand of the rest spoke only German, five thousand Russian, and
over twenty-one thousand, could only make themselves understood to each
other, never to the world around them, in the strange jargon that passes
for Hebrew on the East Side, but is really a mixture of a dozen known
dialects and tongues and of some that were never known or heard anywhere
else. In the census it is down as just what it is--jargon, and nothing
else.
Here, then, are conditions as unfavorable to the satisfactory, even safe,
development of child life in the chief American city as could well be
imagined; more unfavorable even than with the Bohemians, who have at least
their faith in common with us, if safety lies in the merging through the
rising generation of the discordant elements into a common harmony. A
community set apart, set sharply against the rest in every clashing
interest, social and industrial; foreign in language, in faith, and in
tradition; repaying dislike with distrust; expanding under the new relief
from oppression in the unpopular qualities of greed and contentiousness
fostered by ages of tyranny unresistingly borne. Clearly, if ever there
was need of moulding any material for the citizenship that awaits it, it
is with this; and if ever trouble might be expected to beset the effort,
it might be looked for here. But it is not so. The record shows that of
the sixty thousand children, including the fifteen thousand young men and
women over fourteen who earn a large share of the money that pays for rent
and food, and the twenty-three thousand toddlers under six years, fully
one-third go to school. Deducting the two extremes, little more than a
thousand children of between six and fourteen years, that is, of school
age, were put down as receiving no instruction at the time the census was
taken; but it is not at all likely that this condition was permanent in
the case of the greater number of these. The poorest Hebrew knows--the
poorer he is, the better he knows it--that knowledge is power, and power
as the means of getting on in the world that has spurned him so long is
what his soul yearns for. He lets no opportunity slip to obtain it. Day
and night schools are crowded by his children, who are everywhere forging
ahead of their Christian school-fellows, taking more than their share of
prizes and promotions. Every synagogue, every second rear tenement or dark
back yard, has its school and its school-master with his scourge to
intercept those who might otherwise escape. In the census there are put
down 251 Jewish teachers as living in these tenements, a large number of
whom conduct such schools, so that, as the children form always more than
one-half of the population in the Jewish quarter, the evidence is after
all that even here, with the tremendous inpour of a destitute, ignorant
people, and with the undoubted employment of child labor on a large scale,
the cause of progress along the safe line is holding its own.
[Illustration: A SYNAGOGUE SCHOOL IN A HESTER STREET TENEMENT.]
[Illustration: THE BACKSTAIRS TO LEARNING. (Entrance to a Talmud School in
Hester Street.)]
It is true that these tenement schools that absorb several thousand
children are not what they might be from a sanitary point of view. It is
also true that heretofore nothing but Hebrew and the Talmud have been
taught there. But to the one evil the health authorities have recently
been aroused; of the other, the wise and patriotic men who are managing
the Baron de Hirsch charity are making a useful handle by gathering the
teachers in and setting them to learn English. Their new knowledge will
soon be reflected in their teaching, and the Hebrew schools become primary
classes in the system of public education. The school in a Hester Street
tenement that is shown in the picture is a fair specimen of its kind--by
no means one of the worst--and so is the back yard behind it, that serves
as the children's play-ground, with its dirty mud-puddles, its
slop-barrels and broken flags, and its foul tenement-house surroundings.
Both fall in well with the home-lives and environment of the unhappy
little wretches whose daily horizon they limit. They get there the first
instruction they receive in the only tongues with which the teachers are
familiar, Hebrew and the Jargon, in the only studies which they are
competent to teach, the Talmud and the Prophets. Until they are six years
old they are under the "Melammed's" rod all day; after that only in the
interval between public school and supper. It is practically the only
religious instruction the poorest Jewish children receive, but it is
claimed by some of their rabbis that they had better have none at all. The
daily transition, they say, from the bright and, by comparison,
æsthetically beautiful public school-room to these dark and inhospitable
dens, with which the faith that has brought so many miseries upon their
race comes to be inseparably associated in the child's mind as he grows
up, tends to reflections that breed indifference, if not infidelity, in
the young. It would not be strange if this were so. If the schools,
through this process, also help pave the way for the acceptance of the
Messiah heretofore rejected, which I greatly doubt, it may be said to be
the only instance in which the East Side tenement has done its tenants a
good Christian turn.
There is no more remarkable class in any school than that of these
Melammedim,[5] that may be seen in session any week day forenoon, save on
Saturday, of course, in the Hebrew Institute in East Broadway. Old bearded
men struggling through the intricacies of the first reader, "a cow, a
cat," and all the rest of childish learning, with a rapt attention and a
concentration of energy as if they were devoting themselves to the most
heroic of tasks, which, indeed, they are, for the good that may come of it
cannot easily be overestimated. As an educational measure it may be said
to be getting down to first principles with a vengeance. When the reader
has been mastered, brief courses in the history of the United States, the
Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution follow. The test of
proficiency in the pupil is his ability to translate the books of the Old
Testament, with which he is familiar, of course, from Hebrew into English,
and _vice versa_. The Melammed is rarely a dull scholar. No one knows
better than he, to whom it has come only in the evening of his hard life,
the value of the boon that is offered him. One of the odd group that was
deep in the lesson of the day had five children at home, whom he had
struggled to bring up on an income of ten dollars a week. The oldest, a
bright boy who had graduated with honor, despite the patch on his
trousers, from the public school, was ambitious to go to college, and the
father had saved and pinched in a thousand ways to gratify his desire.
One of the managers of the Institute who knew how the family were starving
on half rations, had offered the father, a short time before, to get the
boy employment in a store at three dollars a week. It was a tremendous
temptation, for the money was badly needed at home. But the old man put it
resolutely away from him. "No," he said, "I must send him to college. He
shall have the chance that was denied his father." And he was as good as
his word. And so was the lad, a worthy son of a worthy father. When I met
him he had already proved himself a long way the best student in his
class.
[Illustration: CLASS OF MELAMMEDIM LEARNING ENGLISH.]
In other class-rooms in the great building, which is devoted entirely to
the cause of Americanizing the young Russian immigrants, hundreds of
children get daily their first lessons in English and in patriotism in
simultaneous doses. The two are inseparable in the beneficent plan of
their instructors. Their effort is to lay hold of the children of the
new-comers at once; tender years are no barrier. For the toddlers there
are kindergarten classes, with play the street has had no chance to soil.
And while playing they learn to speak the strange new tongue and to love
the pretty flag with the stars that is everywhere in sight. The night
school gathers in as many as can be corralled of those who are big enough,
if not old enough, to work. The ease and rapidity with which they learn is
equalled only by their good behavior and close attention while in school.
There is no whispering and no rioting at these desks, no trial of strength
with the teacher, as in the Italian ragged schools, where the question who
is boss has always to be settled before the business of the school can
proceed. These children come to learn. Even from the Christian schools in
the district that gather in their share comes the same testimony. All the
disturbance they report was made by their elders, outside the school, in
the street. In the Hebrew Institute the average of absence for all causes
was, during the first year, less than eight per cent. of the registered
attendance, and in nearly every case sickness furnished a valid excuse. In
a year and a half the principal had only been called upon three times to
reprove an obstreperous pupil, in a total of 1,500. While I was visiting
one of the day classes a little girl who had come from Moscow only two
months before presented herself with her green vaccination card from the
steamer. She understood already perfectly the questions put to her and was
able to answer most of them in English. Boys of eight and nine years who
had come over as many months before, knowing only the jargon of their
native village, read to me whole pages from the reader with almost perfect
accent, and did sums on the blackboard that would have done credit to the
average boy of twelve in our public schools. Figuring is always their
strong point. They would not be Jews if it was not.
In the evening classes the girls of "fourteen" flourished, as everywhere
in Jewtown. There were many who were much older, and some who were a long
way yet from that safe goal. One sober-faced little girl, who wore a medal
for faithful attendance and who could not have been much over ten, if as
old as that, said that she "went out dressmaking" and so helped her
mother. Another, who was even smaller and had been here just three weeks,
yet understood what was said to her, explained in broken German that she
was learning to work at "Blumen" in a Grand Street shop, and would soon be
able to earn wages that would help support the family of four children, of
whom she was the oldest. The girl who sat in the seat with her was from a
Hester Street tenement. Her clothes showed that she was very poor. She
read very fluently on demand a story about a big dog that tried to run
away, or something, "when he had a chance." When she came to translate
what she had read into German, which many of the Russian children
understand, she got along until she reached the word "chance." There she
stopped, bewildered. It was the one idea of which her brief life had no
embodiment, the thing it had altogether missed.
The Declaration of Independence half the children knew by heart before
they had gone over it twice. To help them along it is printed in the
school-books with a Hebrew translation and another in Jargon, a
"Jewish-German," in parallel columns and the explanatory notes in Hebrew.
The Constitution of the United States is treated in the same manner, but
it is too hard, or too wearisome, for the children. They "hate" it, says
the teacher, while the Declaration of Independence takes their fancy at
sight. They understand it in their own practical way, and the spirit of
the immortal document suffers no loss from the annotations of Ludlow
Street, if its dignity is sometimes slightly rumpled.
"When," said the teacher to one of the pupils, a little working-girl from
an Essex Street sweater's shop, "the Americans could no longer put up with
the abuse of the English who governed the colonies, what occurred then?"
"A strike!" responded the girl, promptly. She had found it here on coming
and evidently thought it a national institution upon which the whole
scheme of our government was founded.
[Illustration: DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
A DECLARATION BY THE REPRESENTATIVES
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, IN
CONGRESS ASSEMBLED.
ENGLISH. HEBREW.
When, in the course of human events,
it becomes necessary for one people
to dissolve the political bands which
have connected them with another,
and to assume, among the powers of the
earth, the separate and equal station
to which the laws of nature and of
nature's God entitle them, a decent
respect to the opinions of mankind
requires that they should declare the
causes which impel them to the
separation.
We hold these truths to be
self-evident--that all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable
rights; that among these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That, to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed; that,
whenever any form of government
becomes destructive of these ends, it
is the right of the]
[Illustration: JEWISH-GERMAN. Notes. HEBREW.]
It was curious to find the low voices of the children, particularly the
girls, an impediment to instruction in this school. They could sometimes
hardly be heard for the noise in the street, when the heat made it
necessary to have the windows open. But shrillness is not characteristic
even of the Pig-market when it is noisiest and most crowded. Some of the
children had sweet singing voices. One especially, a boy with straight red
hair and a freckled face, chanted in a plaintive minor key the One Hundred
and Thirtieth Psalm, "Out of the depths" etc., and the harsh gutturals of
the Hebrew became sweet harmony until the sad strain brought tears to our
eyes.
The dirt of Ludlow Street is all-pervading and the children do not escape
it. Rather, it seems to have a special affinity for them, or they for the
dirt. The duty of imparting the fundamental lesson of cleanliness devolves
upon a special school officer, a matron, who makes the round of the
classes every morning with her alphabet: a cake of soap, a sponge, and a
pitcher of water, and picks out those who need to be washed. One little
fellow expressed his disapproval of this programme in the first English
composition he wrote, as follows:
[Illustration: (Handwriting)
Indians.
Indians do not want to wash because they like not water. I wish I was a
Indian.]
Despite this hint, the lesson is enforced upon the children, but there is
no evidence that it bears fruit in their homes to any noticeable extent,
as is the case with the Italians I spoke of. The homes are too hopeless,
the grind too unceasing. The managers know it and have little hope of the
older immigrants. It is toward getting hold of their children that they
bend every effort, and with a success that shows how easily these children
can be moulded for good or for bad. Nor do they let go their grasp of them
until the job is finished. The United Hebrew Charities maintain
trade-schools for those who show aptness for such work, and a very
creditable showing they make. The public school receives all those who
graduate from what might be called the American primary in East Broadway.
The smoky torches on many hucksters' carts threw their uncertain yellow
light over Hester Street as I watched the children troop homeward from
school one night. Eight little pedlers hawking their wares had stopped
under the lamp on the corner to bargain with each other for want of cash
customers. They were engaged in a desperate but vain attempt to cheat one
of their number who was deaf and dumb. I bought a quire of note-paper of
the mute for a cent and instantly the whole crew beset me in a fierce
rivalry, to which I put a hasty end by buying out the little mute's poor
stock--ten cents covered it all--and after he had counted out the quires,
gave it back to him. At this act of unheard-of generosity the seven, who
had remained to witness the transfer, stood speechless. As I went my way,
with a sudden common impulse they kissed their hands at me, all rivalry
forgotten in their admiration, and kept kissing, bowing, and salaaming
until I was out of sight. "Not bad children," I mused as I went along,
"good stuff in them, whatever their faults." I thought of the poor boy's
stock, of the cheapness of it, and then it occurred to me that he had
charged me just twice as much for the paper I gave him back as for the
penny quire I bought. But when I went back to give him a piece of my mind
the boys were gone.
CHAPTER IV.
TONY AND HIS TRIBE
I have a little friend somewhere in Mott Street whose picture comes up
before me. I wish I could show it to the reader, but to photograph Tony is
one of the unattained ambitions of my life. He is one of the whimsical
birds one sees when he hasn't got a gun, and then never long enough in one
place to give one a chance to get it. A ragged coat three sizes at least
too large for the boy, though it has evidently been cropped to meet his
case, hitched by its one button across a bare brown breast; one sleeve
patched on the under side with a piece of sole-leather that sticks out
straight, refusing to be reconciled; trousers that boasted a seat once,
but probably not while Tony has worn them; two left boots tied on with
packing twine, bare legs in them the color of the leather, heel and toe
showing through; a shock of sunburnt hair struggling through the rent in
the old straw hat; two frank, laughing eyes under its broken brim--that is
Tony.
He stood over the gutter the day I met him, reaching for a handful of mud
with which to "paste" another hoodlum who was shouting defiance from
across the street. He did not see me, and when my hand touched his
shoulder his whole little body shrank with a convulsive shudder, as from
an expected blow. Quick as a flash he dodged, and turning, out of reach,
confronted the unknown enemy, gripping tight his handful of mud. I had a
bunch of white pinks which a young lady had given me half an hour before
for one of my little friends. "They are yours," I said, and held them out
to him, "take them."
Doubt, delight, and utter bewilderment struggled in the boy's face. He
said not one word, but when he had brought his mind to believe that it
really was so, clutched the flowers with one eager, grimy fist, held them
close against his bare breast, and, shielding them with the other, ran as
fast as his legs could carry him down the street. Not far; fifty feet away
he stopped short, looked back, hesitated a moment, then turned on his
track as fast as he had come. He brought up directly in front of me, a
picture a painter would have loved, ragamuffin that he was, with the
flowers held so tightly against his brown skin, scraped out with one foot
and made one of the funniest little bows.
"Thank you," he said. Then he was off. Down the street I saw squads of
children like himself running out to meet him. He darted past and through
them all, never stopping, but pointing back my way, and in a minute there
bore down upon me a crowd of little ones, running breathless with
desperate entreaty: "Oh, mister! give _me_ a flower." Hot tears of grief
and envy--human passions are much the same in rags and in silks--fell when
they saw I had no more. But by that time Tony was safe.
And where did he run so fast? For whom did he shield the "posy" so
eagerly, so faithfully, that ragged little wretch that was all mud and
patches? I found out afterward when I met him giving his sister a ride in
a dismantled tomato-crate, likely enough "hooked" at the grocer's. It was
for his mother. In the dark hovel he called home, to the level of which
all it sheltered had long since sunk through the brutal indifference of a
drunken father, my lady's pinks blossomed, and, long after they were
withered and yellow, still stood in their cracked jar, visible token of
something that had entered Tony's life and tenement with sweetening touch
that day for the first time. Alas! for the last, too, perhaps. I saw Tony
off and on for a while and then he was as suddenly lost as he was found,
with all that belonged to him. Moved away--put out, probably--and, except
the assurance that they were still somewhere in Mott Street, even the
saloon could give me no clue to them.
I gained Tony's confidence, almost, in the time I knew him. There was a
little misunderstanding between us that had still left a trace of
embarrassment when Tony disappeared. It was when I asked him one day,
while we were not yet "solid," if he ever went to school. He said
"sometimes," and backed off. I am afraid Tony lied that time. The evidence
was against him. It was different with little Katie, my nine-year-old
housekeeper of the sober look. Her I met in the Fifty-second Street
Industrial School, where she picked up such crumbs of learning as were for
her in the intervals of her housework. The serious responsibilities of
life had come early to Katie. On the top floor of a tenement in West
Forty-ninth Street she was keeping house for her older sister and two
brothers, all of whom worked in the hammock factory, earning from $4.50 to
$1.50 a week. They had moved together when their mother died and the
father brought home another wife. Their combined income was something like
$9.50 a week, and the simple furniture was bought on instalments. But it
was all clean, if poor. Katie did the cleaning and the cooking of the
plain kind. They did not run much to fancy cooking, I guess. She scrubbed
and swept and went to school, all as a matter of course, and ran the
house generally, with an occasional lift from the neighbors in the
tenement, who were, if anything, poorer than they. The picture shows what
a sober, patient, sturdy little thing she was, with that dull life wearing
on her day by day. At the school they loved her for her quiet, gentle
ways. She got right up when asked and stood for her picture without a
question and without a smile.
"What kind of work do you do?" I asked, thinking to interest her while I
made ready.
"I scrubs," she replied, promptly, and her look guaranteed that what she
scrubbed came out clean.
[Illustration: "I SCRUBS."--KATIE, WHO KEEPS HOUSE IN WEST FORTY-NINTH
STREET.]
Katie was one of the little mothers whose work never ends. Very early the
cross of her sex had been laid upon the little shoulders that bore it so
stoutly. Tony's, as likely as not, would never begin. There were ear-marks
upon the boy that warranted the suspicion. They were the ear-marks of the
street to which his care and education had been left. The only work of
which it heartily approves is that done by other people. I came upon Tony
once under circumstances that foreshadowed his career with tolerable
distinctness. He was at the head of a gang of little shavers like himself,
none over eight or nine, who were swaggering around in a ring, in the
middle of the street, rigged out in war-paint and hen-feathers, shouting
as they went: "Whoop! We are the Houston Streeters." They meant no harm
and they were not doing any just then. It was all in the future, but it
was there, and no mistake. The game which they were then rehearsing was
one in which the policeman who stood idly swinging his club on the corner
would one day take a hand, and not always the winning one.
The fortunes of Tony and Katie, simple and soon told as they are,
encompass as between the covers of a book the whole story of the children
of the poor, the story of the bad their lives struggle vainly to conquer,
and the story of the good that crops out in spite of it. Sickness, that
always finds the poor unprepared and soon leaves them the choice of
beggary or starvation, hard times, the death of the bread-winner, or the
part played by the growler in the poverty of the home, may vary the theme
for the elders; for the children it is the same sad story, with little
variation, and that rarely of a kind to improve. Happily for their peace
of mind, they are the least concerned about it. In New York, at least, the
poor children are not the stunted repining lot we have heard of as being
hatched in cities abroad. Stunted in body perhaps. It was said of Napoleon
that he shortened the average stature of the Frenchman one inch by getting
all the tall men killed in his wars. The tenement has done that for New
York. Only the other day one of the best known clergymen in the city, who
tries to attract the boys to his church on the East Side by a very
practical interest in them, and succeeds admirably in doing it, told me
that the drill-master of his cadet corps was in despair because he could
barely find two or three among half a hundred lads verging on manhood,
over five feet six inches high. It is queer what different ways there are
of looking at a thing. My medical friend finds in the fact that poverty
stunts the body what he is pleased to call a beautiful provision of nature
to prevent unnecessary suffering: there is less for the poverty to pinch
then. It is self-defence, he says, and he claims that the consensus of
learned professional opinion is with him. Yet, when this shortened
sufferer steals a loaf of bread to make the pinching bear less hard on
what is left, he is called a thief, thrown into jail, and frowned upon by
the community that just now saw in his case a beautiful illustration of
the operation of natural laws for the defence of the man.
Stunted morally, yes! It could not well be otherwise. But stunted in
spirits--never! As for repining, there is no such word in his vocabulary.
He accepts life as it comes to him and gets out of it what he can. If that
is not much, he is not justly to blame for not giving back more to the
community of which by and by he will be a responsible member. The kind of
the soil determines the quality of the crop. The tenement is his soil and
it pervades and shapes his young life. It is the tenement that gives up
the child to the street in tender years to find there the home it denied
him. Its exorbitant rents rob him of the schooling that is his one chance
to elude its grasp, by compelling his enrolment in the army of
wage-earners before he has learned to read. Its alliance with the saloon
guides his baby feet along the well-beaten track of the growler that
completes his ruin. Its power to pervert and corrupt has always to be
considered, its point of view always to be taken to get the perspective
in dealing with the poor, or the cart will seem to be forever getting
before the horse in a way not to be understood. We had a girl once at our
house in the country who left us suddenly after a brief stay and went back
to her old tenement life, because "all the green hurt her eyes so." She
meant just what she said, though she did not know herself what ailed her.
It was the slum that had its fatal grip upon her. She longed for its
noise, its bustle, and its crowds, and laid it all to the green grass and
the trees that were new to her as steady company.
From this tenement the street offered, until the kindergarten came not
long ago, the one escape, does yet for the great mass of children--a
Hobson's choice, for it is hard to say which is the most corrupting. The
opportunities rampant in the one are a sad commentary on the sure
defilement of the other. What could be expected of a standard of decency
like this one, of a household of tenants who assured me that Mrs. M----,
at that moment under arrest for half clubbing her husband to death, was "a
very good, a very decent, woman indeed, and if she did get full, he (the
husband) was not much." Or of the rule of good conduct laid down by a
young girl, found beaten and senseless in the street up in the Annexed
District last autumn: "Them was two of the fellers from Frog Hollow," she
said, resentfully, when I asked who struck her; "them toughs don't know
how to behave theirselves when they see a lady in liquor."
Hers was the standard of the street, the other's that of the tenement.
Together they stamp the child's life with the vicious touch which is
sometimes only the caricature of the virtues of a better soil. Under the
rough burr lie undeveloped qualities of good and of usefulness, rather,
perhaps, of the capacity for them, that crop out in constant exhibitions
of loyalty, of gratitude, and true-heartedness, a never-ending source of
encouragement and delight to those who have made their cause their own and
have in their true sympathy the key to the best that is in the children.
The testimony of a teacher for twenty-five years in one of the ragged
schools, who has seen the shanty neighborhood that surrounded her at the
start give place to mile-long rows of big tenements, leaves no room for
doubt as to the influence the change has had upon the children. With the
disappearance of the shanties--homesteads in effect, however humble--and
the coming of the tenement crowds, there has been a distinct descent in
the scale of refinement among the children, if one may use the term. The
crowds and the loss of home privacy, with the increased importance of the
street as a factor, account for it. The general tone has been lowered,
while at the same time, by reason of the greater rescue-efforts put
forward, the original amount of ignorance has been reduced. The big loafer
of the old day, who could neither read nor write, has been eliminated to a
large extent, and his loss is our gain. The tough who has taken his place
is able at least to spell his way through "The Bandits' Cave," the pattern
exploits of Jesse James and his band, and the newspaper accounts of the
latest raid in which he had a hand. Perhaps that explains why he is more
dangerous than the old loafer. The transition period is always critical,
and a little learning is proverbially a dangerous thing. It may be that in
the day to come, when we shall have got the grip of our compulsory school
law in good earnest, there will be an educational standard even for the
tough, by which time he will, I think, have ceased to exist from sheer
disgust, if for no other reason. At present he is in no immediate danger
of extinction from such a source. It is not how much book-learning the boy
can get, but how little he can get along with, and that is very little
indeed. He knows how to make a little go a long way, however, and to serve
on occasion a very practical purpose; as, for instance, when I read
recently on the wall of the church next to my office in Mulberry Street
this observation, chalked in an awkward hand half the length of the wall:
"Mary McGee is engagd to the feller in the alley." Quite apt, I should
think, to make Mary show her colors and to provoke the fight with the
rival "feller" for which the writer was evidently spoiling. I shall get
back, farther on, to the question of the children's schooling. It is so
beset by lies ordinarily as to be seldom answered as promptly and as
honestly as in the case of a little fellow whom I found in front of St.
George's Church, engaged in the æsthetic occupation of pelting the
Friends' Seminary across the way with mud. There were two of them, and
when I asked them the question that estranged Tony, the wicked one dug his
fists deep down in the pockets of his blue-jeans trousers and shook his
head gloomily. He couldn't read; didn't know how; never did.
"He?" said the other, who could, "he? He don't learn nothing. He throws
stones." The wicked one nodded. It was the extent of his education.
But if the three R's suffer neglect among the children of the poor, their
lessons in the three D's--Dirt, Discomfort, and Disease--that form the
striking features of their environment, are early and thorough enough. The
two latter, at least, are synonymous terms, if dirt and discomfort are
not. Any dispensary doctor knows of scores of cases of ulceration of the
eye that are due to the frequent rubbing of dirty faces with dirty little
hands. Worse filth diseases than that find a fertile soil in the
tenements, as the health officers learn when typhus and small-pox break
out. It is not the desperate diet of ignorant mothers, who feed their
month-old babies with sausage, beer, and Limburger cheese, that alone
accounts for the great infant mortality among the poor in the tenements.
The dirt and the darkness in their homes contribute their full share, and
the landlord is more to blame than the mother. He holds the key to the
situation which her ignorance fails to grasp, and it is he who is
responsible for much of the unfounded and unnecessary prejudice against
foreigners, who come here willing enough to fall in with the ways of the
country that are shown to them. The way he shows them is not the way of
decency. I am convinced that the really injurious foreigners in this
community, outside of the walking delegate's tribe, are the foreign
landlords of two kinds: those who, born in poverty abroad, have come up
through tenement-house life to the ownership of tenement property, with
all the bad traditions of such a career; and the absentee landlords of
native birth who live and spend their rents away from home, without
knowing or caring what the condition of their property is, so the income
from it suffer no diminution. There are honorable exceptions to the first
class, but few enough to the latter to make them hardly worth mentioning.
To a good many of the children, or rather to their parents, this latter
statement and the experience that warrants it must have a sadly familiar
sound. The Irish element is still an important factor in New York's
tenements, though it is yielding one stronghold after another to the
Italian foe. It lost its grip on the Five Points and the Bend long ago,
and at this writing the time seems not far distant when it must vacate for
good also that classic ground of the Kerryman, Cherry Hill. It is Irish
only by descent, however; the children are Americans, as they will not
fail to convince the doubter. A school census of this district, the Fourth
Ward, taken last winter, discovered 2,016 children between the ages of
five and fourteen years. No less than 1,706 of them were put down as
native born, but only one-fourth, or 519, had American parents. Of the
others 572 had Irish and 536 Italian parents. Uptown, in many of the poor
tenement localities, in Poverty Gap, in Battle Row, and in Hell's Kitchen,
in short, wherever the gang flourishes, the Celt is still supreme and
seasons the lump enough to give it his own peculiar flavor, easily
discovered through its "native" guise in the story of the children of the
poor.
The case of one Irish family that exhibits a shoal which lies always close
to the track of ignorant poverty is even now running in my mind, vainly
demanding a practical solution. I may say that I have inherited it from
professional philanthropists, who have struggled with it for more than
half a dozen years without finding the way out they sought.
There were five children when they began, depending on a mother who had
about given up the struggle as useless. The father was a loafer. When I
took them the children numbered ten, and the struggle was long since over.
The family bore the pauper stamp, and the mother's tears, by a transition
imperceptible probably to herself, had become its stock in trade. Two of
the children were working, earning all the money that came in; those that
were not lay about in the room, watching the charity visitor in a way and
with an intentness that betrayed their interest in the mother's appeal. It
required very little experience to make the prediction that, shortly, ten
pauper families would carry on the campaign of the one against society, if
those children lived to grow up. And they were not to blame, of course. I
scarcely know which was most to be condemned, when we tried to break the
family up by throwing it on the street as a necessary step to getting
possession of the children--the politician who tripped us up with his
influence in the court, or the landlord who had all those years made the
poverty on the second floor pan out a golden interest. It was the
outrageous rent for the filthy den that had been the most effective
argument with sympathizing visitors. Their pity had represented to him, as
nearly as I could make out, for eight long years, a capital of $2,600
invested at six per cent., payable monthly. The idea of moving was
preposterous; for what other landlord would take in a homeless family with
ten children and no income?
Children anywhere suffer little discomfort from mere dirt. As an
ingredient of mud-pies it may be said to be not unwholesome. Play with the
dirt is better than none without it. In the tenements the children and the
dirt are sworn and loyal friends. In his early raids upon the established
order of society, the gutter backs the boy up to the best of its ability,
with more or less exasperating success. In the hot summer days, when he
tries to sneak into the free baths with every fresh batch, twenty times a
day, wretched little repeater that he is, it comes to his rescue against
the policeman at the door. Fresh mud smeared on the face serves as a
ticket of admission which no one can refuse. At least so he thinks, but in
his anxiety he generally overdoes it and arouses the suspicion of the
policeman, who, remembering that he was once a boy himself, feels of his
hair and reads his title there. When it is a mission that is to be raided,
or a "dutch" grocer's shop, or a parade of the rival gang from the next
block, the gutter furnishes ammunition that is always handy. Dirt is a
great leveller;[6] it is no respecter of persons or principles, and
neither is the boy where it abounds. In proportion as it accumulates such
raids increase, the Fresh Air Funds lose their grip, the saloon
flourishes, and turbulence grows. Down from the Fourth Ward, where there
is not much else, this wail came recently from a Baptist Mission Church:
"The Temple stands in a hard spot and neighborhood. The past week we had
to have arrested two fellows for throwing stones into the house and
causing annoyance. On George Washington's Birthday we had not put a flag
over the door on Henry Street half an hour before it was stolen. When they
neither respect the house of prayer or the Stars and Stripes one can feel
young America is in a bad state." The pastor added that it was a comfort
to him to know that the "fellows" were Catholics; but I think he was
hardly quite fair to them there. Religious enthusiasm very likely had
something to do with it, but it was not the moving cause. The dirt was; in
other words: the slum.
Such diversions are among the few and simple joys of the street child's
life, Not all it affords, but all the street has to offer. The Fresh Air
Funds, the free excursions, and the many charities that year by year
reach farther down among the poor for their children have done and are
doing a great work in setting up new standards, ideals, and ambitions in
the domain of the street. One result is seen in the effort of the poorest
mothers to make their little ones presentable when there is anything to
arouse their maternal pride. But all these things must and do come from
the outside. Other resources than the sturdy independence that is its
heritage the street has none. Rightly used, that in itself is the greatest
of all. Chief among its native entertainments is that crowning joy, the
parade of the circus when it comes to town in the spring. For many hours
after that has passed, as after every public show that costs nothing, the
matron's room at Police Headquarters is crowded with youngsters who have
followed it miles and miles from home, devouring its splendors with hungry
eyes until the last elephant, the last soldier, or the last policeman
vanished from sight and the child comes back to earth again and to the
knowledge that he is lost.
If the delights of his life are few, its sorrows do not sit heavily upon
him either. He is in too close and constant touch with misery, with death
itself, to mind it much. To find a family of children living, sleeping,
and eating in the room where father or mother lies dead, without seeming
to be in any special distress about it, is no unusual experience. But if
they do not weigh upon him, the cares of home leave their mark; and it is
a bad mark. All the darkness, all the drudgery is there. All the freedom
is in the street; all the brightness in the saloon to which he early finds
his way. And as he grows in years and wisdom, if not in grace, he gets his
first lessons in spelling and in respect for the law from the card behind
the bar, with the big black letters: "No liquor sold here to children."
His opportunities for studying it while the barkeeper fills his growler
are unlimited and unrestricted.
Someone has said that our poor children do not know how to play. He had
probably seen a crowd of tenement children dancing in the street to the
accompaniment of a hand-organ and been struck by their serious mien and
painfully formal glide and carriage--if it was not a German neighborhood,
where the "proprieties" are less strictly observed--but that was only
because it was a ball and it was incumbent on the girls to act as ladies.
Only ladies attend balls. "London Bridge is falling down," with as loud a
din in the streets of New York, every day, as it has fallen these hundred
years and more in every British town, and the children of the Bend march
"all around the mulberry-bush" as gleefully as if there were a green shrub
to be found within a mile of their slum. It is the slum that smudges the
game too easily, and the kindergarten work comes in in helping to wipe off
the smut. So far from New York children being duller at their play than
those of other cities and lands, I believe the reverse to be true. Only in
the very worst tenements have I observed the children's play to languish.
In such localities two policemen are required to do the work of one.
Ordinarily they lack neither spirit nor inventiveness. I watched a crowd
of them having a donkey party in the street one night, when those parties
were all the rage. The donkey hung in the window of a notion store, and a
knot of tenement-house children with tails improvised from a newspaper,
and dragged in the gutter to make them stick, were staggering blindly
across the sidewalk trying to fix them in place on the pane. They got a
heap of fun out of the game, quite as much, it seemed to me, as any
crowd of children could have got in a fine parlor, until the storekeeper
came out with his club. Every cellar-door becomes a toboggan-slide where
the children are around, unless it is hammered full of envious nails;
every block a ball-ground when the policeman's back is turned, and every
roof a kite-field; for that innocent amusement is also forbidden by city
ordinance "below Fourteenth Street."
[Illustration: PRESENT TENANTS OF JOHN ERICSSON'S OLD HOUSE NOW THE BEACH
STREET INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL.]
It is rather that their opportunities of mischief are greater than those
of harmless amusement; made so, it has sometimes seemed to me, with
deliberate purpose to hatch the "tough." Given idleness and the street,
and he will grow without other encouragement than an occasional "fanning"
of a policeman's club. And the street has to do for a playground. There is
no other. Central Park is miles away. The small parks that were ordered
for his benefit five years ago exist yet only on paper. Games like
kite-flying and ball-playing, forbidden but not suppressed, as happily
they cannot be, become from harmless play a successful challenge of law
and order, that points the way to later and worse achievements. Every year
the police forbid the building of election bonfires, and threaten
vengeance upon those who disobey the ordinance; and every election night
sees the sky made lurid by them from one end of the town to the other,
with the police powerless to put them out. Year by year the boys grow
bolder in their raids on property when their supply of firewood has given
out, until the destruction wrought at the last election became a matter of
public scandal. Stoops, wagons, and in one place a show-case, containing
property worth many hundreds of dollars, were fed to the flames. It has
happened that an entire frame house has been carried off piecemeal, and
burned up election night. The boys, organized in gangs, with the one
condition of membership that all must "give in wood," store up enormous
piles of fuel for months before, and though the police find and raid a
good many of them, incidentally laying in supplies of kindling-wood for
the winter, the pile grows again in a single night, as the neighborhood
reluctantly contributes its ash-barrels to the cause. The germ of the
gangs that terrorize whole sections of the city at intervals, and feed our
courts and our jails, may without much difficulty be discovered in these
early and rather grotesque struggles of the boys with the police.
Even on the national day of freedom the boy is not left to the enjoyment
of his firecracker without the ineffectual threat of the law. I am not
defending the firecracker, but arraigning the failure of the law to carry
its point and maintain its dignity. It has robbed the poor child of the
street-band, one of his few harmless delights, grudgingly restoring the
hand-organ, but not the monkey that lent it its charm. In the band that,
banished from the street, sneaks into the back-yard, horns and bassoons
hidden under bulging coats, the boy hails no longer the innocent purveyor
of amusement, but an ally in the fight with the common enemy, the
policeman. In the Thanksgiving Day and New Year parades which the latter
formally permits, he furnishes them with the very weapon of gang
organization which they afterward turn against him to his hurt.
And yet this boy who, when taken from his alley into the country for the
first time, cries out in delight, "How blue the sky and what a lot of it
there is!"--not much of it at home in his barrack--has in the very love of
dramatic display that sends him forth to beat a policeman with his own
club or die in the attempt, in the intense vanity that is only a
perverted form of pride, capable of any achievement, a handle by which he
may be most easily grasped and led. It cannot be done by gorging him _en
masse_ with apples and gingerbread at a Christmas party.[7] It can be done
only by individual effort, and by the influence of personal character in
direct contact with the child--the great secret of success in all dealings
with the poor. Foul as the gutter he comes from, he is open to the
reproach of "bad form" as few of his betters. Greater even than his desire
eventually to "down" a policeman, is his ambition to be a "gentleman," as
his sister's to be a "lady." The street is responsible for the caricature
either makes of the character. On a play-bill I saw in an East Side
street, only the other day, this _repertoire_ set down: "Thursday--The
Bowery Tramp; Friday--The Thief." It was a theatre I knew newsboys, and
the other children of the street who were earning money, to frequent in
shoals. The play-bill suggested the sort of training they received there.
I wish I might tell the story of some of these very lads whom certain
enthusiastic friends of mine tried to reclaim on a plan of their own, in
which the gang became a club and its members "Knights," who made and
executed their own laws; but I am under heavy bonds of promises made to
keep the peace on this point. The fact is, I tried it once, and my
well-meant effort made no end of trouble. I had failed to appreciate the
stride of civilization that under my friends' banner marched about the
East Side with seven-league boots. They read the magazines down there and
objected, rather illogically, to being "shown up." The incident was a
striking revelation of the wide gap between the conditions that prevail
abroad and those that confront us. Fancy the _Westminster Review_ or the
_Nineteenth Century_ breeding contention among the denizens of East London
by any criticism of their ways? Yet even from Hell's Kitchen had I not
long before been driven forth with my camera by a band of angry women, who
pelted me with brickbats and stones on my retreat, shouting at me never to
come back unless I wanted my head broken, or let any other "duck" from the
(mentioning a well-known newspaper of which I was unjustly suspected of
being an emissary) poke his nose in there. Reform and the magazines had
not taken that stronghold of toughdom yet, but their vanguard, the
newspapers, had evidently got there.
"It only shows," said one of my missionary friends, commenting upon the
East Side incident, "that we are all at sixes and at sevens here." It is
our own fault. In our unconscious pride of caste most of us are given to
looking too much and too long at the rough outside. These same workers
bore cheerful testimony to the "exquisite courtesy" with which they were
received every day in the poorest homes; a courtesy that might not always
know the ways of polite society, but always tried its best to find them.
"In over fifty thousand visits," reports a physician, whose noble life is
given early and late to work that has made her name blessed where sorrow
and suffering add their sting to bitter poverty, "personal violence has
been attempted on but two occasions. In each case children had died from
neglect of parents, who, in their drunken rage, would certainly have taken
the life of the physician, had she not promptly run away." Patience and
kindness prevailed even with these. The doctor did not desert them, even
though she had had to run, believing that one of the mothers at least
drank because she was poor and unable to find work; and now, after five
years of many trials and failures, she reports that the family is at work
and happy and grateful in rooms "where the sun beams in." Gratitude,
indeed, she found to be their strong point, always seeking an outlet in
expression--evidence of a lack of bringing up, certainly. "Once," she
says, "the thankful fathers of two of our patients wished to vote for us,
as 'the lady doctors have no vote.' Their intention was to vote for
General Butler; we have proof that they voted for Cleveland. They have
even placed their own lives in danger for us. One man fought a duel with a
woman, she having said that women doctors did not know as much as men.
After bar-tumblers were used as weapons the question was decided in favor
of women doctors by the man. It seemed but proper that 'the lady doctor'
was called in to bind up the wounds of her champion, while a 'man doctor'
performed the service for the woman."
My friends, in time, by their gentle but firm management, gained the
honest esteem and loyal support of the boys whose manners and minds they
had set out to improve, and through such means worked wonders. While some
of their experiences were exceedingly funny, more were of a kind to show
how easily the material could be moulded, if the hands were only there to
mould it. One of their number, by and by, hung out her shingle in another
street with the word "Doctor" over the bell (not the physician above
referred to), but her "character" had preceded her, and woe to the urchin
who as much as glanced at that when the gang pulled all the other bells
in the block and laughed at the wrath of the tenants. One luckless chap
forgot himself far enough to yank it one night, and immediately an angry
cry went up from the gang, "Who pulled dat bell?" "Mickey did," was the
answer, and Mickey's howls announced to the amused doctor the next minute
that he had been "slugged" and she avenged. This doctor's account of the
first formal call of the gang in the block was highly amusing. It called
in a body and showed a desire to please that tried the host's nerves not a
little. The boys vied with each other in recounting for her entertainment
their encounters with the police enemy, and in exhibiting their intimate
knowledge of the wickedness of the slums in minutest detail. One, who was
scarcely twelve years old, and had lately moved from Bayard Street, knew
all the ins and outs of the Chinatown opium dives, and painted them in
glowing colors. The doctor listened with half-amused dismay, and when the
boys rose to go, told them she was glad they had called. So were they,
they said, and they guessed they would call again the next night.
"Oh! don't come to-morrow," said the doctor, in something of a fright;
"come next week!" She was relieved upon hearing the leader of the gang
reprove the rest of the fellows for their want of style. He bowed with
great precision, and announced that he would call "in about two weeks."
The testimony of these workers agrees with that of most others who reach
the girls at an age when they are yet manageable, that the most abiding
results follow with them, though they are harder to get at. The boys
respond more readily, but also more easily fall from grace. The same good
and bad traits are found in both; the same trying superficiality--which
merely means that they are raw material; the same readiness to lie as the
shortest cut out of a scrape; the same generous helpfulness,
characteristic of the poor everywhere. Out of the depth of their bitter
poverty I saw the children in the West Fifty-second Street Industrial
School, last Thanksgiving, bring for the relief of the aged and helpless
and those even poorer than they such gifts as they could--a handful of
ground coffee in a paper bag, a couple of Irish potatoes, a little sugar
or flour, and joyfully offer to carry them home. It was on such a trip I
found little Katie. In her person and work she answered the question
sometimes asked, why we hear so much about the boys and so little of the
girls; because the home and the shop claim their work much earlier and to
a much greater extent, while the boys are turned out to shift for
themselves, and because, therefore, their miseries are so much more
commonplace, and proportionally uninteresting. It is a woman's lot to
suffer in silence. If occasionally she makes herself heard in querulous
protest; if injustice long borne gives her tongue a sharper edge than the
occasion seems to require, it can at least be said in her favor that her
bark is much worse than her bite. The missionary who complains that the
wife nags her husband to the point of making the saloon his refuge, or the
sister her brother until he flees to the street, bears testimony in the
same breath to her readiness to sit up all night to mend the clothes of
the scamp she so hotly denounces. Sweetness of temper or of speech is not
a distinguishing feature of tenement-house life, any more among the
children than with their elders. In a party sent out by our committee for
a summer vacation on a Jersey farm, last summer, was a little knot of six
girls from the Seventh Ward. They had not been gone three days before a
letter came from one of them to the mother of one of the others. "Mrs.
Reilly," it read, "if you have any sinse you will send for your child."
That they would all be murdered was the sense the frightened mother made
out of it. The six came home post haste, the youngest in a state of high
dudgeon at her sudden translation back to the tenement. The lonesomeness
of the farm had frightened the others. She was little more than a baby,
and her desire to go back was explained by one of the rescued ones thus:
"She sat two mortil hours at the table a stuffin' of herself, till the
missus she says, says she, 'Does yer mother lave ye to sit that long at
the table, sis?'" The poor thing was where there was enough to eat for
once in her life, and she was making the most of her opportunity.
Not rarely does this child of common clay rise to a height of heroism that
discovers depths of feeling and character full of unsuspected promise. It
was in March a year ago that a midnight fire, started by a fiend in human
shape, destroyed a tenement in Hester Street, killing a number of the
tenants. On the fourth floor the firemen found one of these penned in with
his little girl and helped them to the window. As they were handing out
the child, she broke away from them suddenly and stepped back into the
smoke to what seemed certain death. The firemen climbing after, groped
around shouting for her to come back. Half-way across the room they came
upon her, gasping and nearly smothered, dragging a doll's trunk over the
floor.
"I could not leave it," she said, thrusting it at the men as they seized
her; "my mother----"
They flung the box angrily through the window. It fell crashing on the
sidewalk and, breaking open, revealed no doll or finery, but the deed for
her dead mother's grave. Little Bessie had not forgotten her, despite her
thirteen years.
Yet Bessie might, likely would, have been found in the front row where
anything was going on or to be had, crowding with the best of them and
thrusting herself and her claim forward regardless of anything or anybody
else. It is a quality in the children which, if not admirable, is at least
natural. The poor have to take their turn always, and too often it never
comes, or, as in the case of the poor young mother, whom one of our
committee found riding aimlessly in a street car with her dying baby, not
knowing where to go or what to do, when it is too late. She took mother
and child to the dispensary. It was crowded and they had to wait their
turn. When it came the baby was dead. It is not to be expected that
children who have lived the lawless life of the street should patiently
put up with such a prospect. That belongs to the discipline of a life of
failure and want. The children know generally what they want and they go
for it by the shortest cut. I found that out, whether I had flowers to
give or pictures to take. In the latter case they reversed my Hell's
Kitchen experience with a vengeance. Their determination to be "took," the
moment the camera hove in sight, in the most striking pose they could
hastily devise, was always the most formidable bar to success I met. The
recollection of one such occasion haunts me yet. They were serving a
Thanksgiving dinner free to all comers at a charitable institution in
Mulberry Street, and more than a hundred children were in line at the door
under the eye of a policeman when I tried to photograph them. Each one of
the forlorn host had been hugging his particular place for an hour,
shivering in the cold as the line slowly advanced toward the door and the
promised dinner, and there had been numberless little spats due to the
anxiety of some one farther back to steal a march on a neighbor nearer the
goal; but the instant the camera appeared the line broke and a howling mob
swarmed about me, up to the very eye of the camera, striking attitudes on
the curb, squatting in the mud in alleged picturesque repose, and shoving
and pushing in a wild struggle to get into the most prominent position.
With immense trouble and labor the policeman and I made a narrow lane
through the crowd from the camera to the curb, in the hope that the line
might form again. The lane was studded, the moment I turned my back, with
dirty faces that were thrust into it from both sides in ludicrous anxiety
lest they should be left out, and in the middle of it two frowsy,
ill-favored girls, children of ten or twelve, took position, hand in hand,
flatly refusing to budge from in front of the camera. Neither jeers nor
threats moved them. They stood their ground with a grim persistence that
said as plainly as words that they were not going to let this, the supreme
opportunity of their lives, pass, cost what it might. In their rags,
barefooted, and in that disdainful pose in the midst of a veritable bedlam
of shrieks and laughter, they were a most ludicrous spectacle. The boys
fought rather shy of them, of one they called "Mag" especially, as it
afterward appeared with good reason. A chunk of wood from the outskirts of
the crowd that hit Mag on the ear at length precipitated a fight in which
the boys struggled ten deep on the pavement, Mag in the middle of the
heap, doing her full share. As a last expedient I bethought myself of a
dog-fight as the means of scattering the mob, and sent around the corner
to organize one. Fatal mistake! At the first suggestive bark the crowd
broke and ran in a body. Not only the hangers-on, but the hungry line
collapsed too in an instant, and the policeman and I were left alone. As
an attraction the dog-fight outranked the dinner.
This unconquerable vanity, if not turned to use for his good, makes a
tough of the lad with more muscle than brains in a perfectly natural way.
The newspapers tickle it by recording the exploits of his gang with
embellishments that fall in exactly with his tastes. Idleness encourages
it. The home exercises no restraint. Parental authority is lost. At a
certain age young men of all social grades know a heap more than their
fathers, or think they do. The young tough has some apparent reason for
thinking that way. He has likely learned to read. The old man has not; he
probably never learned anything, not even to speak the language that his
son knows without being taught. He thinks him "dead slow," of course, and
lays it to his foreign birth. All foreigners are "slow." The father works
hard. The boy thinks he knows a better plan. The old man has lost his grip
on the lad, if he ever had any. That is the reason why the tough appears
in the second generation and disappears in the third. By that time father
and son are again on equal terms, whatever those terms may be. The
exception to this rule is in the poorest Irish settlements where the
manufacture of the tough goes right on, aided by the "inflooence" of the
police court on one side and the saloon on the other. Between the two the
police fall unwillingly into line. I was in the East Thirty-fifth Street
police station one night when an officer came in with two young toughs
whom he had arrested in a lumber yard where they were smoking and
drinking. They had threatened to kill him and the watchman, and loaded
revolvers were taken from them. In spite of this evidence against them,
the Justice in the police court discharged them on the following morning
with a scowl at the officer, and they were both jeering at him before
noon. Naturally he let them alone after that. It was one case of hundreds
of like character. The politician, of course, is behind them. Toughs have
votes just as they have brickbats and brass-knuckles; when the emergency
requires, an assortment to suit of the one as of the other.
The story of the tough's career I told in "How the Other Half Lives," and
there is no need of repeating it here. Its end is generally lurid, always
dramatic. It is that even when it comes to him "with his boots off," in a
peaceful sick bed. In his bravado one can sometimes catch a glimpse of the
sturdiest traits in the Celtic nature, burlesqued and caricatured by the
tenement. One who had been a cut-throat, bruiser, and prizefighter all his
brief life lay dying from consumption in his Fourth Ward tenement not long
ago. He had made what he proudly called a stand-up fight against the
disease until now the end had come and he had at last to give up.
"Maggie," he said, turning to his wife with eyes growing dim, "Mag! I had
an iron heart, but now it is broke. Watch me die!" And Mag told it proudly
at the wake as proof that Pat died game.
And the girl that has come thus far with him? Fewer do than one might
think. Many more switch off their lovers to some honest work this side of
the jail, making decent husbands of them as they are loyal wives, thus
proving themselves truly their better halves. But of her who goes his way
with him--it is not generally a long way for either--what of her end? Let
me tell the story of one that is the story of all. I came across it in the
course of my work as a newspaper man a year ago and I repeat it here as I
heard it then from those who knew, with only the names changed. The girl
is dead, but he is alive and leading an honest life at last, so I am told.
The story is that of "Kid" McDuff's girl.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER V.
THE STORY OF KID McDUFF'S GIRL
The back room of the saloon on the northwest corner of Pell Street and the
Bowery is never cheery on the brightest day. The entrance to the dives of
Chinatown yawns just outside, and in the bar-room gather the vilest of the
wrecks of the Bend and the Sixth Ward slums. But on the morning of which I
speak a shadow lay over it even darker than usual. The shadow of death was
there. In the corner, propped on one chair, with her feet on another, sat
a dead woman. Her glassy eyes looked straight ahead with a stony,
unmeaning stare until the policeman who dozed at a table at the other end
of the room, suddenly waking up and meeting it, got up with a shudder and
covered the face with a handkerchief.
What did they see, those dead eyes? Through its darkened windows what a
review was the liberated spirit making of that sin-worn, wasted life,
begun in innocence and wasted--there? Whatever their stare meant, the
policeman knew little of it and cared less.
"Oh! it is just a stiff," he said, and yawned wearily. There was still
half an hour of his watch.
The clinking of glasses and the shuffle of cowhide boots on the sanded
floor outside grew louder and was muffled again as the door leading to the
bar was opened and shut by a young woman. She lingered doubtfully on the
threshold a moment, then walked with unsteady step across the room toward
the corner where the corpse sat. The light that struggled in from the
gloomy street fell upon her and showed that she trembled, as if with the
ague. Yet she was young, not over twenty-five; but on her heavy eyes and
sodden features there was the stamp death had just blotted from the
other's face with the memory of her sins. Yet, curiously blended with it,
not yet smothered wholly, there was something of the child, something that
had once known a mother's love and pity.
"Poor Kid," she said, stopping beside the body and sinking heavily in a
chair. "He will be sorry, anyhow."
"Who is Kid?" I asked.
"Why, Kid McDuff! You know him? His brother Jim keeps the saloon on
---- Street. Everybody knows Kid."
"Well, what was she to Kid?" I asked, pointing to the corpse.
"His girl," she said promptly. "An' he stuck to her till he was pulled for
the job he didn't do; then he had to let her slide. She stuck to him too,
you bet.
"Annie wasn't no more nor thirteen when she was tuk away from home by the
Kid," the girl went on, talking as much to herself as to me; the policeman
nodded in his chair. "He kep' her the best he could, 'ceptin' when he was
sent up on the Island the time the gang went back on him. Then she kinder
drifted. But she was all right agin he come back and tuk to keepin' bar
for his brother Jim. Then he was pulled for that Bridgeport skin job, and
when he went to the pen she went to the bad, and now----"
Here a thought that had been slowly working down through her besotted mind
got a grip on her strong enough to hold her attention, and she leaned over
and caught me by the sleeve, something almost akin to pity struggling in
her bleary eyes.
"Say, young feller," she whispered hoarsely, "don't spring this too hard.
She's got two lovely brothers. One of them keeps a daisy saloon up on
Eighth Avenue. They're respectable, they are."
Then she went on telling what she knew of Annie Noonan who was sitting
dead there before us. It was not much. She was the child of an honest
shoemaker who came to this country twenty-two or three years before from
his English home, when Annie was a little girl of six or seven. Before she
was in her teens she was left fatherless. At the age of thirteen, when she
was living in an East Side tenement with her mother, the Kid, then a young
tough qualifying with one of the many gangs about the Hook for the
penitentiary, crossed her path. Ever after she was his slave, and followed
where he led.
The path they trod together was not different from that travelled by
hundreds of young men and women to-day. By way of the low dives and
"morgues" with which the East Side abounds, it led him to the Island and
her to the street. When he was sent up the first time, his mother died of
a broken heart. His father, a well-to-do mechanic in the Seventh Ward, had
been spared that misery. He had died before the son was fairly started on
his bad career. The family were communicants at the parish church, and
efforts without end were made to turn the Kid from his career of wicked
folly. His two sisters labored faithfully with him, but without avail.
When the Kid came back from the Island to find his mother dead, he did not
know his oldest sister. Grief had turned her pretty brown hair a snowy
white.
He found his girl a little the worse for rum and late hours than when he
left her, but he "took up" with her again. He was loyal at least. This
time he tried, too, to be honest. His mother's death had shocked him to
the point where his "nerve" gave out. His brother gave him charge of one
of his saloons and the Kid was "at work" keeping bar, with the way to
respectability, as it goes on the East Side, open to him, when one of his
old pals, who had found him out, turned up with a demand for money. He was
a burglar and wanted a hundred dollars to "do up a job" in the country.
The Kid refused, and his brother came in during the quarrel that ensued,
flew into a rage, and grabbing the thief by the collar, threw him into the
street. He went his way shaking his fist and threatening vengeance on
both.
It was not long in coming. A jewelry store in Bridgeport was robbed and
two burglars were arrested. One of them was the man "Jim" McDuff had
thrown out of his saloon. He turned State's evidence and swore that the
Kid was in the job too. He was arrested and held in bail of ten thousand
dollars. The Kid always maintained that he was innocent. His family
believed him, but his past was against him. It was said, too, that back of
the arrest was political persecution. His brother the saloon-keeper, who
mixed politics with his beer, was the under dog just then in the fight in
his ward. The situation was discussed from a practical standpoint in the
McDuff household, and it ended with the Kid going up to Bridgeport and
pleading guilty to theft to escape the worse charge of burglary. He was
sentenced to four years' imprisonment. That was how he got into "the pen."
Annie, after he had been put in jail, went to the dogs on her own account
rather faster than when they made a team. For a time she frequented the
saloons of the Tenth Ward. When she crossed the Bowery at last she was
nearing the end. For a year or two she frequented the disreputable houses
in Elizabeth and Hester Streets. She was supposed to have a room in
Downing Street, but it was the rarest of all events that she was there.
Two weeks before this morning, Fay Leslie, the girl who sat there telling
me her story, met her on the Bowery with a cut and bruised face. She had
been beaten in a fight in a Pell Street saloon with Flossie Lowell, one of
the habitues of Chinatown. Fay took her to Bellevue Hospital, where she
"had a pull with the night watch," she told me, and she was kept there
three or four days. When she came out she drifted back to Pell Street and
took to drinking again. But she was a sick girl.
The night before she was with Fay in the saloon on the corner, when she
complained that she did not feel well. She sat down in a chair and put her
feet on another. In that posture she was found dead a little later, when
her friend went to see how she was getting on.
"Rum killed her, I suppose," I said, when Fay had ended her story.
"Yes! I suppose it did."
"And you," I ventured, "some day it will kill you too, if you do not look
out."
The girl laughed a loud and coarse laugh.
"Me?" she said, "not by a jugful. I've been soaking it fifteen years and I
am alive yet."
The dead girl sat there yet, with the cold, staring eyes, when I went my
way. Outside the drinking went on with vile oaths. The dead wagon had been
sent for, but it had other errands, and had not yet come around to Pell
Street.
Thus ended the story of Kid McDuff's girl.
CHAPTER VI.
THE LITTLE TOILERS
Poverty and child-labor are yoke-fellows everywhere. Their union is
perpetual, indissoluble. The one begets the other. Need sets the child to
work when it should have been at school and its labor breeds low wages,
thus increasing the need. Solomon said it three thousand years ago, and it
has not been said better since: "The destruction of the poor is their
poverty."
It is the business of the State to see to it that its interest in the
child as a future citizen is not imperilled by the compact. Here in New
York we set about this within the memory of the youngest of us. To-day we
have compulsory education and a factory law prohibiting the employment of
young children. All between eight and fourteen years old must go to school
at least fourteen weeks in each year. None may labor in factories under
the age of fourteen; not under sixteen unless able to read and write
simple sentences in English. These are the barriers thrown up against the
inroads of ignorance, poverty's threat. They are barriers of paper. We
have the laws, but we do not enforce them.
By that I do not mean to say that we make no attempt to enforce them. We
do. We catch a few hundred truants each year and send them to
reformatories to herd with thieves and vagabonds worse than they, rather
illogically, since there is no pretence that there would have been room
for them in the schools had they wanted to go there. We set half a dozen
factory inspectors to canvass more than twice as many thousand workshops
and to catechise the children they find there. Some are turned out and go
back the next day to that or some other shop. The great mass that are
under age lie and stay. And their lies go on record as evidence that we
are advancing, and that child-labor is getting to be a thing of the past.
That the horrible cruelty of a former day is; that the children have
better treatment and a better time of it in the shops--often a good enough
time to make one feel that they are better off there learning habits of
industry than running about the streets, so long as there is no way of
_making_ them attend school--I believe from what I have seen. That the law
has had the effect of greatly diminishing the number of child-workers I do
not believe. It has had another and worse effect. It has bred wholesale
perjury among them and their parents. Already they have become so used to
it that it is a matter of sport and a standing joke among them. The child
of eleven at home and at night-school is fifteen in the factory as a
matter of course. Nobody is deceived, but the perjury defeats the purpose
of the law.
More than a year ago, in an effort to get at the truth of the matter of
children's labor, I submitted to the Board of Health, after consultation
with Dr. Felix Adler, who earned the lasting gratitude of the community by
his labors on the Tenement House Commission, certain questions to be asked
concerning the children by the sanitary police, then about to begin a
general census of the tenements. The result was a surprise, and not least
to the health officers. In the entire mass of nearly a million and a
quarter of tenants[8] only two hundred and forty-nine children under
fourteen years of age were found at work in living-rooms. To anyone
acquainted with the ordinary aspect of tenement-house life the statement
seemed preposterous, and there are valid reasons for believing that the
policemen missed rather more than they found even of those that were
confessedly or too evidently under age. They were seeking that which, when
found, would furnish proof of law-breaking against the parent or employer,
a fact of which these were fully aware. Hence their coming uniformed and
in search of children into a house could scarcely fail to give those a
holiday who were not big enough to be palmed off as fourteen at least.
Nevertheless, upon reflection, it seemed probable that the policemen were
nearer the truth than their critics. Their census took no account of the
factory in the back yard, but only of the living rooms, and it was made
during the day. Most of the little slaves, as of those older in years,
were found in the sweater's district on the East Side, where the home work
often only fairly begins after the factory has shut down for the day and
the stores released their army of child-laborers. Had the policemen gone
their rounds after dark they would have found a different state of things.
Between the sweat-shops and the school, which, as I have shown, is made to
reach farther down among the poorest in this Jewish quarter than anywhere
else in this city, the children were fairly accounted for in the daytime.
The record of school attendance in the district shows that forty-seven
attended day-school for every one who went to night-school.
To settle the matter to my own satisfaction I undertook a census of a
number of the most crowded houses, in company with a policeman not in
uniform. The outcome proved that, as regards those houses at least, it was
as I suspected, and I have no doubt they were a fair sample of the rest.
In nine tenements that were filled with home-workers we found five
children at work who owned that they were under fourteen. Two were girls
nine years of age. Two boys said they were thirteen. We found thirteen who
swore that they were of age, proof which the policeman as an uninterested
census-taker would have respected as a matter of course, even though he
believed with me that the children lied. On the other hand, in seven
back-yard factories we found a total of 63 children, of whom 5 admitted
being under age, while of the rest 45 seemed surely so. To the other 13 we
gave the benefit of the doubt, but I do not think they deserved it. All
the 63 were to my mind certainly under fourteen, judging not only from
their size, but from the whole appearance of the children. My subsequent
experience confirmed me fully in this belief. Most of them were able to
write their names after a fashion. Few spoke English, but that might have
been a subterfuge. One of the home-workers, a marvellously small lad whose
arms were black to the shoulder from the dye in the cloth he was sewing,
and who said in his broken German, without evincing special interest in
the matter, that he had gone to school "e' bische'," referred us to his
"mother" for a statement as to his age. The "mother," who proved to be the
boss's wife, held a brief consultation with her husband and then came
forward with a verdict of sixteen. When we laughed rather incredulously
the man offered to prove by his marriage certificate that the boy must be
sixteen. The effect of this demonstration was rather marred, however, by
the inopportune appearance of another tailor, who, ignorant of the crisis,
claimed the boy as his. The situation was dramatic. The tailor with the
certificate simply shrugged his shoulders and returned to his work,
leaving the boy to his fate.
One girl, who could not have been twelve years old, was hard at work at a
sewing-machine in a Division Street shirt factory when we came in. She got
up and ran the moment she saw us, but we caught her in the next room
hiding behind a pile of shirts. She said at once that she was fourteen
years old but didn't work there. She "just came in." The boss of the shop
was lost in astonishment at seeing her when we brought her back. He could
not account at all for her presence. There were three boys at work in the
room who said "sixteen" without waiting to be asked. Not one of them was
fourteen. The habit of saying fourteen or sixteen--the fashion varies with
the shops and with the degree of the child's educational
acquirements--soon becomes an unconscious one with the boy. He plumps it
out without knowing it. While occupied with these investigations I once
had my boots blacked by a little shaver, hardly knee-high, on a North
River ferry-boat. While he was shining away, I suddenly asked him how old
he was. "Fourteen, sir!" he replied promptly, without looking up.
In a Hester Street house we found two little girls pulling basting-thread.
They were both Italians and said that they were nine. In the room in which
one of them worked thirteen men and two women were sewing. The child could
speak English. She said that she was earning a dollar a week and worked
every day from seven in the morning till eight in the evening. This
sweat-shop was one of the kind that comes under the ban of the new law,
passed last winter--that is, if the factory inspector ever finds it. Where
the crowds are greatest and the pay poorest, the Italian laborer's wife
and child have found their way in since the strikes among the sweater's
Jewish slaves, outbidding even these in the fierce strife for bread.
Even the crowding, the feverish haste of the half-naked men and women, and
the litter and filth in which they worked, were preferable to the silence
and desolation we encountered in one shop up under the roof of a Broome
Street tenement. The work there had given out--there had been none these
two months, said the gaunt, hard-faced woman who sat eating a crust of dry
bread and drinking water from a tin pail at the empty bench. The man sat
silent and moody in a corner; he was sick. The room was bare. The only
machine left was not worth taking to the pawnshop. Two dirty children,
naked but for a torn undershirt apiece, were fishing over the stair-rail
with a bent pin on an idle thread. An old rag was their bait.
From among a hundred and forty hands on two big lofts in a Suffolk Street
factory we picked seventeen boys and ten girls who were patently under
fourteen years of age, but who all had certificates, sworn to by their
parents, to the effect that they were sixteen. One of them whom we judged
to be between nine and ten, and whose teeth confirmed our diagnosis--the
second bicuspids in the lower jaw were just coming out--said that he had
worked there "by the year." The boss, deeming his case hopeless, explained
that he only "made sleeves and went for beer." Two of the smallest girls
represented themselves as sisters, respectively sixteen and seventeen, but
when we came to inquire which was the oldest, it turned out that she was
the sixteen-year one. Several boys scooted as we came up the stairs. When
stopped they claimed to be visitors. I was told that this sweater had been
arrested once by the Factory Inspector, but had successfully barricaded
himself behind his pile of certificates. I caught the children laughing
and making faces at us behind our backs as often as these were brought out
anywhere. In an Attorney Street "pants" factory we counted thirteen boys
and girls who could not have been of age, and on a top floor in Ludlow
Street, among others, two brothers, sewing coats, who said that they were
thirteen and fourteen, but, when told to stand up, looked so ridiculously
small as to make even their employer laugh. Neither could read, but the
oldest could sign his name and did it thus, from right to left:
[Illustration: (signature)]
It was the full extent of his learning, and all he would probably ever
receive.
He was one of many Jewish children we came across who could neither read
nor write. Most of them answered that they had never gone to school. They
were mostly those of larger growth, bordering on fourteen, whom the
charity school managers find it next to impossible to reach, the children
of the poorest and most ignorant immigrants, whose work is imperatively
needed to make both ends meet at home, the "thousand" the school census
failed to account for. To banish them from the shop serves no useful
purpose. They are back the next day, if not sooner. One of the Factory
Inspectors told me of how recently he found a little boy in a sweat-shop
and sent him home. He went up through the house after that and stayed up
there quite an hour. On his return it occurred to him to look in to see
if the boy was gone. He was back and hard at work, and with him were two
other boys of his age who, though they claimed to have come in with dinner
for some of the hands, were evidently workers there.
So much for the sweat-shops. Jewish, Italian, and Bohemian, the story is
the same always. In the children that are growing up, to "vote as would
their master's dogs if allowed the right of suffrage," the community reaps
its reward in due season for allowing such things to exist. It is a kind
of interest in the payment of which there is never default. The physician
gets another view of it. "Not long ago," says Dr. Annie S. Daniel, in the
last report of the out-practice of the Infirmary for Women and Children,
"we found in such an apartment five persons making cigars, including the
mother. Two children were ill with diphtheria. Both parents attended to
the children; they would syringe the nose of each child and, without
washing their hands, return to their cigars. We have repeatedly observed
the same thing when the work was manufacturing clothing and
under-garments, to be bought as well by the rich as the poor. Hand-sewed
shoes, made for a fashionable Broadway shoe store, were sewed at home by a
man in whose family were three children with scarlet fever. And such
instances are common. Only death or lack of work closes tenement-house
manufactories. When reported to the Board of Health, the inspector at once
prohibits further manufacture during the continuance of the disease, but
his back is scarcely turned before the people return to their work. When
we consider that stopping this work means no food and no roof over their
heads, the fact that the disease may be carried by their work cannot be
expected to impress the people."
[Illustration: SHINE, SIR?]
And she adds: "Wages have steadily decreased. Among the women who earned
the whole or part of the income the finishing of pantaloons was the most
common occupation. For this work in 1881 they received ten to fifteen
cents per pair; for the same work in 1891 three to five, at the most ten
cents per pair. When the women have paid the express charges to and from
the factory there is little margin left for profit. The women doing this
work claim that wages are reduced because of the influx of Italian women."
The rent has not fallen, however, and the need of every member of the
family contributing by his or her work to its keep is greater than ever.
The average total wages of 160 families whom the doctor personally treated
and interrogated during the year was $5.99 per week, while the average
rent was $8.62-3/4. The list included twenty-three different occupations
and trades. The maximum wages was $19, earned by three persons in one
family; the minimum $1.50, by a woman finishing pantaloons and living in
one room for which she paid $4 a month rent! In nearly every instance
observed by Dr. Daniel, the children's wages, when there were working
children, was the greater share of the family income. A specimen instance
is that of a woman with a consumptive husband, who is under her treatment.
The wife washes and goes out by the day, when she can get such work to do.
The three children, aged eleven, seven, and five years, not counting the
baby for a wonder, work at home covering wooden buttons with silk at four
cents a gross. The oldest goes to school, but works with the rest evenings
and on Saturday and Sunday, when the mother does the finishing. Their
combined earnings are from $3 to $6 a week, the children earning
two-thirds. The rent is $8 a month.
The doctor's observations throw a bright side-light upon the economic home
conditions that lie at the root of this problem of child labor in the
factories. With that I have not done. Taking the Factory Inspector's
report for 1890, the last at that time available, I found that in that
year his deputies got around to 2,147 of the 11,000 workshops (the number
given in the report) in the Second district, which is that portion of New
York south of Twenty-third Street. In other words, they visited less than
one-fifth of them all. They found 1,102 boys and 1,954 girls under sixteen
at work; 3,485 boys under eighteen, and 12,701 girls under twenty-one, as
nearly as I could make the footings. The figures alone are instructive, as
showing the preponderance of girls in the shops. The report, speaking of
the State as a whole, congratulates the community upon the alleged fact
"that the policy of employing very young children in manufactories has
been practically abolished." It states that "since the enactment of the
law the sentiment among employers has become nearly unanimous in favor of
its stringent enforcement," and that it "has had the further important
effect of preventing newly arrived non-English speaking foreigners from
forcing their children into factories before they learned the language of
the country," these being "now compelled to send their children to school,
for a time at least, until they can qualify under the law." Further, "the
system of requiring sworn certificates, giving the name, date, and place
of birth of all children under sixteen years of age ... has resulted in
causing parents to be very cautious about making untrue statements of the
ages of their children." The deputies "are aware of the various
subterfuges which have been tried in order to evade the law and put
children at labor before the legal time," and the Factory Inspector is
"happy to say that they are not often imposed upon by such tactics."
Without wading through nearly seventy pages of small print it was not
possible to glean from the report how many of the "under sixteen" workers
were really under fourteen, or so adjudged. A summary of what has been
accomplished since 1886 showed that 1,614 children under fourteen were
discharged by the Inspector in the Second District in that time, and that
415 were discharged because they could not read or write simple sentences
in the English language. The "number of working children who could not
read and write English" was in 1890 alone 252, according to the report, or
more than one-half of the whole number discharged in the four years, which
does not look as if the law had had much effect in that way, at least in
New York city. I determined to see for myself what were the facts.
I visited a number of factories, in a few instances accompanied by the
deputy factory inspector, more frequently alone. Where it was difficult to
gain admission I watched at the door when the employees were going to or
coming from work, finding that on the whole the better plan, as affording
a fairer view of the children and a better opportunity to judge of their
age than when they sat at their work-benches. I found many shops in which
there were scarcely any children, some from which they had been driven, so
I was informed by the inspectors. But where manufacturers were willing to
employ their labor--and this I believe to be quite generally the case
where children's labor can be made to pay--I found the age certificate
serving as an excellent protection for the employer, never for the child.
I found the law considered as a good joke by some conscienceless men, who
hardly took the trouble to see that the certificates were filled out
properly; loudly commended by others whom it enabled, at the expense of a
little perjury in which they had no hand, to fill up their shops with
cheap labor, with perfect security to themselves. The bookkeeper in an
establishment of the conscienceless kind told me with glee how a boy who
had been bounced there three times in one year, upon his return each time
had presented a sworn certificate giving a different age. He was fifteen,
sixteen, and seventeen years old upon the records of the shop, until the
inspectors caught him one day and proved him only thirteen. I found boys
at work, posing as seventeen, who had been so recorded in the same shop
three full years, and were thirteen at most. As seventeen-year freaks they
could have made more money in a dime museum than at the work-bench, only
the museum would have required something more convincing than the
certificate that satisfied the shop. Some of these boys were working at
power-presses and doing other work beyond their years. An examination of
their teeth often disproved their stories as to their age. It was not
always possible to make this test, for the children seemed to see
something funny in it, and laughed and giggled so, especially the girls,
as to make it difficult to get a good look. Some of the girls, generally
those with decayed teeth,[9] would pout and refuse to show them. These
were usually American girls, that is to say, they were born here. The
greater number of the child-workers I questioned were foreigners, and our
birth returns could have given no clue to them. The few natives were alert
and on the defensive from the moment they divined my purpose. They easily
defeated it by giving a false address.
I finally picked out a factory close to my office where Italian girls were
employed in large numbers, and made it my business to ascertain the real
ages of the children. They seemed to me, going and coming, to average
twelve or thirteen years. The year before the factory inspector had
reported that nearly a hundred girls "under sixteen" were employed there.
She had discharged sixty of them as unable to read or write English. I
went to see the manufacturers. They were not disposed to help me and fell
back on their certificates--no child was employed by them without
one--until I told them that my purpose was not to interfere with their
business but to prove that a birth-certificate was the only proper warrant
for employment of child-labor.
"Why," said the manufacturer, in his astonishment forgetting that he had
just told me his children were all of age, "my dear sir! would you throw
them all out of work?"
It was what I expected. I found out eventually that a number of the
children attended the evening classes in the Leonard Street Italian
School, and there one rainy night I corralled twenty-three of them, all
but one officially certified under oath to be fourteen or sixteen. But for
the rain I might have found twice the number. The twenty-three I polled,
comparing their sworn age with the entry in the school register, which the
teachers knew to be correct. This was the result: one was eleven years old
and had worked in the factory a year; one, also eleven, had just been
engaged and was going for her certificate that night; three were twelve
years old, and had worked in the factory from one month to a year; seven
were thirteen, and of them three had worked in the shop two years, the
others one; nine were fourteen; one of them had been there three years,
four others two years, the rest shorter terms; one was fifteen and had
worked in the factory three years; the last and tallest was sixteen and
had been employed in the one shop four years. She said with a laugh that
she had a "certificate of sixteen" when she first went there. Not one of
them all was of legal age when she went to work in the shop, under the
warrant of her parents' oath. The majority were not even then legally
employed, since of those who had passed fourteen there were several who
could not read simple sentences in English intelligibly; yet they had been
at work in the factory for months and years. One of the eleven-year
workers, who felt insulted somehow, said spitefully that "I needn't
bother, there was lots of other girls in the shop younger than she." I
have no doubt she was right. I should add that the firm was a highly
respectable one, and its members of excellent social standing.
I learned incidentally where the convenient certificates came from, at
least those that were current in that school. They were issued, the
children said, free of charge, by a benevolent undertaker in the ward. I
thought at first that it was a bid for business, or real helpfulness. The
neighborhood undertaker is often found figuring suggestively as the
nearest friend of the poor in his street, when they are in trouble. But I
found out afterward that it was politics combined with business. The
undertaker was an Irishman and an active organizer of his district.
Unpolitical notaries charged twenty-five cents for each certificate. This
one made them out for nothing. All they had to do was to call for them.
The girls laughed scornfully at the idea of there being anything wrong in
the transaction. Their parents swore in a good cause. They needed the
money. The end conveniently justified the means in their case. Besides
"they merely had to touch the pen." Evidently, any argument in favor of
education could scarcely be expected to have effect upon parents who thus
found in their own ignorance a valid defence against an accusing
conscience as well as a source of added revenue.
My experience satisfied me that the factory law has had little effect in
prohibiting child labor in the factories of New York City, although it may
have had some in stimulating attendance at the night schools. The census
figures, when they appear, will be able to throw no valuable light on the
subject. The certificate lie naturally obstructs the census as it does the
factory law. The one thing that is made perfectly clear by even such
limited inquiry as I have been able to make, is that a birth certificate
should be substituted for the present sworn warrant, if it is intended to
make a serious business of the prohibition. In the piles upon piles of
these which I saw, I never came across one copy of the birth registry.
There are two obstacles to such a change. One is that our birth returns
are at present incomplete; the other, that most of the children are not
born here. Concerning the first, the Registrar of Vital Statistics
estimates that he is registering nearly or quite a thousand births a month
less than actually occur in New York; but even that is a great improvement
upon the record of a few years ago. The registered birthrate is increasing
year by year, and experience has shown that a determination on the part of
the Board of Health to prosecute doctors and midwives who neglect their
duty brings it up with a rush many hundreds in a few weeks. A wholesome
strictness at the Health Office on this point would in a short time make
it a reliable guide for the Factory Inspector in the enforcement of the
law. The other objection is less serious than it appears at first sight.
Immigrants might be required to provide birth certificates from their old
homes, where their children are sure to be registered under the stringent
laws of European governments. But as a matter of fact that would not often
be necessary. They all have passports in which the name and ages of their
children are set down. The claim that they had purposely registered them
as younger to cheapen transportation, which they would be sure to make,
need not be considered seriously. One lie is as good and as easy as
another.
Another lesson we may learn with advantage from some old-country
governments, which we are apt to look down upon as "slow," is to punish
the parents for the truancy of their children, whether they are found
running in the street or working in a shop when they should have been at
school. Greed, the natural child of poverty, often has as much to do with
it as real need. In the case of the Italians and the Jewish girls it is
the inevitable marriage-portion, without which they would stand little
chance of getting a husband, that dictates the sacrifice. One little one
of twelve in a class in the Leonard Street School, who had been working on
coats in a sweat-shop nine months, and had become expert enough to earn
three dollars a week, told me that she had $200 in bank, and that her
sister, also a worker, was as forehanded. Their teacher supported her
story. But often a meaner motive than the desire to put money in bank
forges the child's fetters. I came across a little girl in an East Side
factory who pleaded so pitifully that she had to work, and looked so poor
and wan, that I went to her home to see what it was like. It was on the
top floor of a towering tenement. The mother, a decent German woman, was
sewing at the window, doing her share, while at the table her husband, a
big, lazy lout who weighed two hundred pounds if he weighed one, lolled
over a game of checkers with another vagabond like himself. A half-empty
beer-growler stood between them. The contrast between that pitiful child
hard at work in the shop, and the big loafer taking his ease, was enough
to make anybody lose patience, and I gave him the piece of my mind he so
richly deserved. But it rolled off him as water rolls off a duck. He
merely ducked his head, shifted his bare feet under the table, and told
his crony to go on with the play.
It is only when the child rebels in desperation against such atrocious
cruelty and takes to the street as his only refuge, that his tyrant hands
him over to the justice so long denied him. Then the school comes as an
avenger, not as a friend, to the friendless lad, and it is scarcely to be
wondered at if behind his prison-bars he fails to make sense of the
justice of a world that locks him up and lets his persecutor go
free--likely enough applauds him for his public spirit in doing what he
did. When the child ceases to be a source of income because he will not
work, and has to be supported, at the odd intervals at least when he comes
back from the street, the father surrenders him as a truant and
incorrigible. A large number of the children that are every year sent to
the Juvenile Asylum are admitted in that way. The real animus of it crops
out when it is proposed to put the little prisoner in a way of growing up
a useful citizen by sending him to a home out of the reach of his grasping
relatives. Then follows a struggle for the possession of the child that
would make the uninitiated onlooker think a gross outrage was about to be
perpetrated on a fond parent. The experienced Superintendent of the
Asylum, who has fought many such fights to a successful end, knows better.
"In a majority of these cases," he remarks in his report for last year,
"the opposition is due, not to any special interest in the child's
welfare, but to self-interest, the relative wishing to obtain a situation
for the boy in order to get his weekly wages."
Little Susie, whose picture I took while she was pasting linen on tin
covers for pocket-flasks--one of the hundred odd trades, wholly impossible
of classification, one meets with in the tenements of the poor--with hands
so deft and swift that even the flash could not catch her moving arm, but
lost it altogether, is a type of the tenement-house children whose work
begins early and ends late. Her shop is her home. Every morning she drags
down to her Cherry Street court heavy bundles of the little tin boxes,
much too heavy for her twelve years, and when she has finished running
errands and earning a few pennies that way, takes her place at the bench
and pastes two hundred before it is time for evening school. Then she has
earned sixty cents--"more than mother," she says with a smile. "Mother"
has been finishing "knee-pants" for a sweater, at a cent and a-quarter a
pair for turning up and hemming the bottom and sewing buttons on; but she
cannot make more than two and a-half dozen a day, with the baby to look
after besides. The husband, a lazy, good-natured Italian, who "does not
love work well," in the patient language of the housekeeper, had been out
of a job, when I last saw him, three months, and there was no prospect of
his getting one again soon, certainly not so long as the agent did not
press for the rent long due. That was Susie's doings, too, though he
didn't know it. Her sunny smile made everyone and everything, even in that
dark alley, gentler, more considerate, when she was around.
[Illustration: LITTLE SUSIE AT HER WORK.]
Of Susie's hundred little companions in the alley--playmates they could
scarcely be called--some made artificial flowers, some paper-boxes, while
the boys earned money at "shinin'" or selling newspapers. The smaller
girls "minded the baby," so leaving the mother free to work. Most of them
did something toward earning the family living, young as they were. The
rest did all the mischief. The occupations that claim children's labor in
and out of the shop are almost as numberless as the youngsters that swarm
in tenement neighborhoods. The poorer the tenements the more of them
always. In an evening school class of nineteen boys and nine girls which I
polled once I found twelve boys who "shined," five who sold papers, one of
thirteen years who by day was the devil in a printing-office, and one of
twelve who worked in a wood-yard. Of the girls, one was thirteen and
worked in a paper-box factory, two of twelve made paper lanterns, one
twelve-year-old girl sewed coats in a sweat-shop, and one of the same age
minded a push-cart every day. The four smallest girls were ten years old,
and of them one worked for a sweater and "finished twenty-five coats
yesterday," she said with pride. She looked quite able to do a woman's
work. The three others minded the baby at home; one of them found time to
help her mother sew coats when baby slept.
I have heard it said that the factory law has resulted in crowding the
children under age into the stores, where they find employment as "cash"
girls and boys, and have to fear only the truant officer, whose calls are
as rare as angels' visits. I do not believe this is true to any great
extent. The more general employment of automatic carriers and other
mechanical devices for doing the work once done by the children would
alone tend to check such a movement, if it existed. The Secretary of the
Working Women's Society, who has made a study of the subject, estimates
that there are five thousand children under fourteen years so employed all
the year round. In the holiday season their number is much larger.
Native-born children especially prefer this work, as the more genteel and
less laborious than work in the factories. As a matter of fact it is, I
think, much the hardest and the more objectionable of the two kinds, and
not, as a rule, nearly as well paid. If the factory law does not drive the
children from the workshops, it can at least punish the employer who
exacts more than ten hours a day of them there, or denies them their legal
dinner hour. In the store there is nothing to prevent their being worked
fifteen and sixteen hours during the busy season. Few firms allow more
than half an hour for lunch, some even less. The children cannot sit down
when tired, and their miserable salaries of a dollar and a-half or two
dollars a week are frequently so reduced by fines for tardiness as to
leave them little or nothing. The sanitary surroundings are often most
wretched. At best the dust-laden atmosphere of a large store, with the
hundreds of feet tramping through it and the many pairs of lungs breathing
the air over and over again, is most exhausting to a tender child. An hour
spent in going through such a store tires many grown persons more than a
whole day's work at their accustomed tasks. These children spend their
whole time there at the period when the growth of the body taxes all their
strength.
An effort was made last year to extend the prohibition of the factory law
to the stores, but it failed. It ought not to fail this winter, but if it
is to be coupled with the sworn certificate, it were better to leave
things as they are. The five thousand children under age are there now in
defiance of one law that requires them to go to school. They lied to get
their places. They will not hesitate to lie to keep them. The royal road
is provided by the certificate plan. Beneficent undertakers will not be
wanting to smooth the way for them.
There is still another kind of employment that absorbs many of the boys
and ought to be prohibited with the utmost rigor of the law. I refer to
the messenger service of the District Telegraph Companies especially.
Anyone can see for himself how old some of these boys are who carry
messages about the streets every day; but everybody cannot see the kind of
houses they have to go to, the kind of people they meet, or the sort of
influences that beset them hourly at an age when they are most easily
impressed for good or bad. If that were possible, the line would be drawn
against their employment rather at eighteen than at sixteen or fourteen.
At present there is none except the fanciful line drawn against truancy,
which, to a boy who has learned the tricks of the telegraph messenger, is
very elastic indeed.
[Illustration: MINDING THE BABY.]
To send the boys to school and see that they stay there until they have
learned enough to at least vote intelligently when they grow up, is the
bounden duty of the State--celebrated in theory but neglected in practice.
If it did its duty much would have been gained, but even then the real
kernel of this question of child labor would remain untouched. The trouble
is not so much that the children have to work early as with the sort of
work they have to do. It is, all of it, of a kind that leaves them, grown
to manhood and womanhood, just where it found them, knowing no more, and
therefore less, than when they began, and with the years that should have
prepared them for life's work gone in hopeless and profitless drudgery.
How large a share of the responsibility for this failure is borne by the
senseless and wicked tyranny of so-called organized labor, in denying to
our own children a fair chance to learn honest trades, while letting
foreign workmen in in shoals to crowd our market under the plea of the
"solidarity of labor"--a policy that is in a fair way of losing to labor
all the respect due it from our growing youth, I shall not here discuss.
The general result was well put by a tireless worker in the cause of
improving the condition of the poor, who said to me, "They are down on the
scrub level; there you find them and have to put them to such use as you
can. They don't know anything else, and that is what makes it so hard to
find work for them. Even when they go into a shop to sew, they come out
mere machines, able to do only one thing, which is a small part of the
whole they do not grasp. And thus, without the slightest training for the
responsibilities of life, they marry and transmit their incapacity to
another generation that is so much worse to start off with." She spoke of
the girls, but what she said fitted the boys just as well. The incapacity
of the mother is no greater than the ignorance of the father in the mass
of such unions. Ignorance and poverty are the natural heritage of the
children.
I have in mind a typical family of that sort which our relief committee
wrestled with a whole summer, in Poverty Gap. Suggestive location! The man
found his natural level on the island, where we sent him first thing. The
woman was decent and willing to work, and the girls young enough to train.
But Mrs. Murphy did not get on. "She can't even hold a flat-iron in her
hand," reported her first employer, indignantly. The children were sent to
good places in the country, and repaid the kindness shown them by stealing
and lying to cover up their thefts. They were not depraved; they were
simply exhibiting the fruit of the only training they had ever
received--that of the street. It was like undertaking a job of original
creation to try to make anything decent or useful out of them.
I confess I had always laid the blame for this discouraging feature of the
problem upon our general industrial development in a more or less vague
way--steam, machinery, and all that sort of thing--until the other day I
met a man who gave me another view of it altogether. He was a manufacturer
of cheap clothing, a very intelligent and successful one at that; a large
employer of cheap Hebrew labor and, heaven save the mark!--a Christian.
His sincerity was unquestionable. He had no secrets to keep from me. He
was in the business to make money, he said with perfect frankness, and one
condition of his making money was, as he had had occasion to learn when he
was himself a wage-worker and a union man, to keep his workmen where they
were at his mercy. He had some four hundred hands, all Jewish immigrants,
all working for the lowest wages for which he could hire them. Among them
all there was not one tailor capable of making a whole garment. His policy
was to keep them from learning. He saw to it that each one was kept at
just one thing--sleeves, pockets, buttonholes--some small part of one
garment, and never learned anything else.
"This I do," he explained, "to prevent them from going on strike with the
hope of getting a job anywhere else. They can't. They don't know enough.
Not only do we limit them so that a man who has worked three months in my
shop and never held a needle before is just as valuable to me as one I
have had five years, but we make the different parts of the suit in
different places and keep Christians over the hands as cutters so that
they shall have no chance to learn."
Where we stood in his shop, a little boy was stacking some coats for
removal. The manufacturer pointed him out. "Now," he said, "this boy is
not fourteen years old, as you can see as well as I. His father works here
and when the Inspector comes I just call him up. He swears that the boy is
old enough to work, and there the matter ends. What would you? Is it not
better that he should be here than on the street? Bah!" And this
successful Christian manufacturer turned upon his heel with a vexed air.
It was curious to hear him, before I left, deliver a homily on the
"immorality" of the sweat-shops, arraigning them severely as "a blot on
humanity."
CHAPTER VII.
THE TRUANTS OF OUR STREETS
On my way to the office the other day, I came upon three boys sitting on a
beer-keg in the mouth of a narrow alley intent upon a game of cards. They
were dirty and "tough." The bare feet of the smallest lad were nearly
black with dried mud. His hair bristled, unrestrained by cap or covering
of any kind. They paid no attention to me when I stopped to look at them.
It was an hour before noon.
"Why are you not in school?" I asked of the oldest rascal. He might have
been thirteen.
"'Cause," he retorted calmly, without taking his eye off his neighbor's
cards, "'cause I don't believe in it. Go on, Jim!"
I caught the black-footed one by the collar. "And you," I said, "why don't
you go to school? Don't you know you have to?"
The boy thrust one of his bare feet out at me as an argument there was no
refuting. "They don't want me; I aint got no shoes." And he took the
trick.
I had heard his defence put in a different way to the same purpose more
than once on my rounds through the sweat-shops. Every now and then some
father, whose boy was working under age, would object, "We send the child
to school, as the Inspector says, and there is no room for him. What shall
we do?" He spoke the whole truth, likely enough; the boy only half of it.
There was a charity school around the corner from where he sat struggling
manfully with his disappointment, where they would have taken him, and
fitted him out with shoes in the bargain, if the public school rejected
him. If anything worried him, it was probably the fear that I might know
of it and drag him around there. I had seen the same thought working in
the tailor's mind. Neither had any use for the school; the one that his
boy might work, the other that he might loaf and play hookey.
Each had found his own flaw in our compulsory education law and succeeded.
The boy was safe in the street because no truant officer had the right to
arrest him at sight for loitering there in school-hours. His only risk was
the chance of that functionary's finding him at home, and he was trying to
provide against that. The tailor's defence was valid. With a law
requiring--compelling is the word, but the compulsion is on the wrong
tack--all children between the ages of eight and fourteen years to go to
school at least one-fourth of the year or a little more; with a costly
machinery to enforce it, even more costly to the child who falls under the
ban as a truant than to the citizens who foot the bills, we should most
illogically be compelled to exclude, by force if they insisted, more than
fifty thousand of the children, did they all take it into their heads to
obey the law. We have neither schools enough nor seats enough in them. As
it is, we are spared that embarrassment. They don't obey it.
This is the way the case stands: Computing the school population upon the
basis of the Federal census of 1880 and the State census of 1892, we had
in New York, in the summer of 1891, 351,330 children between five and
fourteen[10] years. I select these limits because children are admitted
to the public schools under the law at the age of five years, and the
statistics of the Board of Education show that the average age of the
pupils entering the lowest primary grade is six years and five months. The
whole number of different pupils taught in that year was 196,307.[11] The
Catholic schools, parochial and select, reported a total of 35,055; the
corporate schools (Children's Aid Society's, Orphan Asylums, American
Female Guardian Society's, etc.), 23,276; evening schools, 29,165;
Nautical School, 111; all other private schools (as estimated by
Superintendent of Schools Jasper), 15,000; total, 298,914; any possible
omissions in this list being more than made up for by the thousands over
fourteen who are included. So that by deducting the number of pupils from
the school population as given above, more than 50,000 children between
the ages of five and fourteen are shown to have received no schooling
whatever last year. As the public schools had seats for only 195,592,
while the registered attendance exceeded that number, it follows that
there was no room for the fifty thousand had they chosen to apply. In
fact, the year before, 3,783 children had been refused admission at the
opening of the schools after the summer vacation because there were no
seats for them. To be told in the same breath that there were more than
twenty thousand unoccupied seats in the schools at that time, is like
adding insult to injury. Though vacant and inviting pupils they were
worthless, for they were in the wrong schools. Where the crowding of the
growing population was greatest and the need of schooling for the
children most urgent, every seat was taken. Those who could not travel far
from home--the poor never can--in search of an education had to go
without.
The Department of Education employs twelve truant officers, who in 1891
"found and returned to school" 2,701 truants. There is a timid sort of
pretence that this was "enforcing the compulsory education law," though it
is coupled with the statement that at least eight more officers are needed
to do it properly, and that they should have power to seize the culprits
wherever found. Superintendent Jasper tells me that he thinks there are
only about 8,000 children in New York who do not go to school at all. But
the Department's own records furnish convincing proof that he is wrong,
and that the 50,000 estimate is right. That number is just about
one-seventh of the whole number of children between five and fourteen
years, as stated above. In January of this year a school-census of the
Fourth and Fifteenth wards,[12] two widely separated localities, differing
greatly as to character of population, gave the following result: Fourth
Ward, total number of children between five and fourteen years, 2,016;[13]
of whom 297 did not go to school. Fifteenth Ward, total number of
children, 2,276; number of non-attendants, 339. In each case the
proportion of non-attendants was nearly one-seventh, curiously
corroborating the estimate made by me for the whole city.
Testimony to the same effect is borne by a different set of records, those
of the reformatories that receive the truants of the city. The Juvenile
Asylum, that takes most of those of the Protestant faith, reports that of
28,745 children of school age committed to its care in thirty-nine years
32 per cent. could not read when received. The proportion during the last
five years was 23 per cent. At the Catholic Protectory, of 3,123 boys and
girls cared for during the year 1891, 689 were utterly illiterate at the
time of their reception and the education of the other 2,434 was
classified in various degrees between illiterate and "able to read and
write" only.[14] The moral status of these last children may be inferred
from the statement that 739 of them possessed no religious instruction at
all when admitted. The analysis might be extended, doubtless with the same
result as to illiteracy, throughout the institutions that harbor the
city's dependent children, to the State Reformatory, where the final
product is set down in 75 per cent. of "grossly ignorant" inmates, in
spite of the fact that more than that proportion is recorded as being of
"average natural mental capacity." In other words, they could have
learned, had they been taught.
[Illustration: "SHOOTING CRAPS" IN THE HALL OF THE NEWSBOYS' LODGING
HOUSE.]
How much of this bad showing is due to the system, or the lack of system,
of compulsory education, as we know it in New York, I shall not venture to
say. In such a system a truant school or home would seem to be a logical
necessity. Because a boy does not like to go to school, he is not
necessarily bad. It may be the fault of the school and of the teacher as
much as of the boy. Indeed, a good many people of sense hold that the boy
who has never planned to run away from home or school does not amount to
much. At all events, the boy ought not to be classed with thieves and
vagabonds. But that is what New York does. It has no truant home. Its
method of dealing with the truant is little less than downright savagery.
It is thus set forth in a report of a special committee of the Board of
Education, made to that body on November 18, 1891. "Under the law the
truant agents act upon reports received from the principals of the
schools. After exhausting the persuasion that they may be able to exercise
to compel the attendance of truant children, and in cases which seem to
call for the enforcement of the law, the agent procures the indorsement
of the President of the Board of Education and the Superintendent of
Schools upon his requisition for a warrant for the arrest of the truant,
which warrant, under the provisions of the law, is then issued by a Police
Justice. A policeman is then detailed to make the arrest, and when
apprehended the truant is brought to the Police Court, where his parents
or guardians are obliged to attend. Should it happen that the latter are
not present, the boy is put in a cell to await their appearance. It has
sometimes happened that a public-school boy, whose only offence against
the law was his refusal to attend school, has been kept in a cell two or
three days with old criminals pending the appearance of his parents or
guardians.[15] While we fully realize the importance of enforcing the laws
relating to compulsory education, we believe that bringing the boys into
associations with criminals in this way and making it necessary for
parents to be present under such circumstances, is unjust and improper,
and that criminal associations of this kind in connection with the
administration of the truancy laws should not be allowed to continue. The
Justice may, after hearing the facts, commit the child, who, in a majority
of cases, is between eight and eleven years old, to one of the
institutions designated by law. We do not think that the enforcement of
the laws relating to compulsory education should at any time enforce
association with criminal classes."
But it does, all the way through. The "institutions designated by law" for
the reception of truants are chiefly the Protectory and the Juvenile
Asylum. In the thirty-nine years of its existence the latter has harbored
11,636 children committed to it for disobedience and truancy. And this
was the company they mingled with there on a common footing: "Unfortunate
children," 8,806; young thieves, 3,097; vagrants, 3,173; generally bad
boys and girls, 1,390; beggars, 542; children committed for peddling, 51;
as witnesses, 50. Of the whole lot barely a hundred, comprised within the
last two items, might be supposed to be harmless, though there is no
assurance that they were. Of the Protectory children I have already
spoken. It will serve further to place
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