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Title: The house on Henry Street
Author: Wald, Lillian D.
Language: English
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[Illustration: THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET]
THE HOUSE ON
HENRY STREET
BY
LILLIAN D. WALD
With Illustrations from Etchings and Drawings by
Abraham Phillips and from Photographs
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1915,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
November, 1938
Printed in U. S. A.
TO
THE COMRADES
WHO HAVE BUILT THE HOUSE
PREFACE
Much of the material contained in this book has been published in a
series of six articles that appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ from March
to August, 1915. And indeed it was due to the kindly insistence on the
part of the editors of that magazine that more permanent form should
be given to the record of the House on Henry Street that the story was
published at all.
During the two decades of the existence of the Settlement there has been
a significant awakening on matters of social concern, particularly those
affecting the protection of children throughout society in general; and
a new sense of responsibility has been aroused among men and women, but
perhaps more distinctively among women, since the period coincides with
their freer admission to public and professional life. The Settlement is
in itself an expression of this sense of responsibility, and under its
roof many divergent groups have come together to discuss measures “for
the many, mindless, mass that most needs helping,” and often to assert
by deed their faith in democracy. Some have found in the Settlement
an opportunity for self-realization that in the more fixed and older
institutions has not seemed possible.
I cannot acknowledge by name the many individuals who, by gift of money
and through understanding and confidence, through work and thought and
sharing of the burdens, have helped to build the House on Henry Street.
These colleagues have come all through the years that have followed since
the little girl led me to her rear tenement home. Though we are working
together as comrades for a common cause, I cannot resist this opportunity
to express my profound personal gratitude for the precious gifts that
have been so abundantly given. The first friends who gave confidence and
support to an unknown and unexperimented venture have remained staunch
and loyal builders of the House. And the younger generation with their
gifts have developed the plans of the House and have found inspiration
while they have given it.
In the making of the book, much help has come from these same friends,
and I should be quite overwhelmed with the debt I owe did I not feel that
all of us who have worked together have worked not only for each other
but for the cause of human progress; that is the beginning and should be
the end of the House on Henry Street.
LILLIAN D. WALD.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO 1
II. ESTABLISHING THE NURSING SERVICE 26
III. THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY 44
IV. CHILDREN AND PLAY 66
V. EDUCATION AND THE CHILD 97
VI. THE HANDICAPPED CHILD 117
VII. CHILDREN WHO WORK 135
VIII. THE NATION’S CHILDREN 152
IX. ORGANIZATIONS WITHIN THE SETTLEMENT 169
X. YOUTH 189
XI. YOUTH AND TRADES UNIONS 201
XII. WEDDINGS AND SOCIAL HALLS 216
XIII. FRIENDS OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM 229
XIV. SOCIAL FORCES 249
XV. SOCIAL FORCES, _Continued_ 270
XVI. NEW AMERICANS AND OUR POLICIES 286
INDEX 313
FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET _Frontispiece_
Etching by Abraham Phillips
LILLIAN D. WALD AND MARY M. BREWSTER IN HOSPITAL UNIFORM, 1893 6
WITH PRAYER-SHAWL AND PHYLACTERY 22
Etching by Abraham Phillips
THE NURSE IN THE TENEMENT 28
A SHORT CUT OVER THE ROOFS OF THE TENEMENTS 52
AND THEIR ECSTASY AT THE SIGHT OF A WONDERFUL DOGWOOD TREE 78
IT HAS BEEN CALLED THE “BUNKER HILL” OF PLAYGROUNDS 82
THE CHILDREN PLAY ON OUR ROOF 82
THE KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN LEARN THE REALITY OF THE THINGS THEY
SING ABOUT 90
USES OF THE BACK YARD IN ONE OF THE BRANCHES OF THE HENRY STREET
SETTLEMENT 162
HERE AND THERE ARE STILL FOUND REMINDERS OF OLD NEW YORK 170
Etching by Abraham Phillips
ESTHER 182
Drawing by Esther J. Peck
THE NEIGHBORHOOD PLAYHOUSE 186
Drawing by Abraham Phillips
IN A CLUB-ROOM 192
Drawing by Abraham Phillips
AFTER THE LONG DAY 204
Drawing by Abraham Phillips
AN INCIDENT IN THE HISTORICAL PAGEANT ON HENRY STREET,
COMMEMORATING THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SETTLEMENT 214
THE OLDER GENERATION 218
Etching by Abraham Phillips
PRINCE KROPOTKIN 234
BABUSCHKA, LITTLE GRANDMOTHER 242
THE SYNAGOGUES ARE EVERYWHERE—IMPOSING OR SHABBY-LOOKING
BUILDINGS 254
Etching by Abraham Phillips
A MOTHER IN ISRAEL 268
Etching by Abraham Phillips
THE DRAMATIC CLUB PRESENTED “THE SHEPHERD” 272
A REGION OF OVERCROWDED HOMES 298
AT ELLIS ISLAND THERE IS A STREAM OF INFLOWING LIFE 308
Photograph by Louis Hines
THE HOUSE ON HENRY STREET
CHAPTER I
THE EAST SIDE TWO DECADES AGO
A sick woman in a squalid rear tenement, so wretched and so pitiful
that, in all the years since, I have not seen anything more appealing,
determined me, within half an hour, to live on the East Side.
I had spent two years in a New York training-school for nurses; strenuous
years for an undisciplined, untrained girl, but a wonderful human
experience. After graduation, I supplemented the theoretical instruction,
which was casual and inconsequential in the hospital classes twenty-five
years ago, by a period of study at a medical college. It was while at the
college that a great opportunity came to me.
I had little more than an inspiration to be of use in some way or
somehow, and going to the hospital seemed the readiest means of realizing
my desire. While there, the long hours “on duty” and the exhausting
demands of the ward work scarcely admitted freedom for keeping informed
as to what was happening in the world outside. The nurses had no time
for general reading; visits to and from friends were brief; we were
out of the current and saw little of life save as it flowed into the
hospital wards. It is not strange, therefore, that I should have been
ignorant of the various movements which reflected the awakening of the
social conscience at the time, or of the birth of the “settlement,” which
twenty-five years ago was giving form to a social protest in England and
America. Indeed, it was not until the plan of our work on the East Side
was well developed that knowledge came to me of other groups of people
who, reacting to a humane or an academic appeal, were adopting this mode
of expression and calling it a “settlement.”
Two decades ago the words “East Side” called up a vague and alarming
picture of something strange and alien: a vast crowded area, a foreign
city within our own, for whose conditions we had no concern. Aside from
its exploiters, political and economic, few people had any definite
knowledge of it, and its literary “discovery” had but just begun.
The lower East Side then reflected the popular indifference—it almost
seemed contempt—for the living conditions of a huge population. And the
possibility of improvement seemed, when my inexperience was startled
into thought, the more remote because of the dumb acceptance of these
conditions by the East Side itself. Like the rest of the world I had
known little of it, when friends of a philanthropic institution asked me
to do something for that quarter.
[Illustration]
Remembering the families who came to visit patients in the wards, I
outlined a course of instruction in home nursing adapted to their needs,
and gave it in an old building in Henry Street, then used as a technical
school and now part of the settlement. Henry Street then as now was the
center of a dense industrial population.
From the schoolroom where I had been giving a lesson in bed-making, a
little girl led me one drizzling March morning. She had told me of her
sick mother, and gathering from her incoherent account that a child had
been born, I caught up the paraphernalia of the bed-making lesson and
carried it with me.
[Illustration]
The child led me over broken roadways,—there was no asphalt, although
its use was well established in other parts of the city,—over dirty
mattresses and heaps of refuse,—it was before Colonel Waring had shown
the possibility of clean streets even in that quarter,—between tall,
reeking houses whose laden fire-escapes, useless for their appointed
purpose, bulged with household goods of every description. The rain added
to the dismal appearance of the streets and to the discomfort of the
crowds which thronged them, intensifying the odors which assailed me
from every side. Through Hester and Division streets we went to the end
of Ludlow; past odorous fish-stands, for the streets were a market-place,
unregulated, unsupervised, unclean; past evil-smelling, uncovered
garbage-cans; and—perhaps worst of all, where so many little children
played—past the trucks brought down from more fastidious quarters
and stalled on these already overcrowded streets, lending themselves
inevitably to many forms of indecency.
[Illustration]
The child led me on through a tenement hallway, across a court where open
and unscreened closets were promiscuously used by men and women, up into
a rear tenement, by slimy steps whose accumulated dirt was augmented that
day by the mud of the streets, and finally into the sickroom.
All the maladjustments of our social and economic relations seemed
epitomized in this brief journey and what was found at the end of it.
The family to which the child led me was neither criminal nor vicious.
Although the husband was a cripple, one of those who stand on street
corners exhibiting deformities to enlist compassion, and masking the
begging of alms by a pretense at selling; although the family of seven
shared their two rooms with boarders,—who were literally boarders, since
a piece of timber was placed over the floor for them to sleep on,—and
although the sick woman lay on a wretched, unclean bed, soiled with a
hemorrhage two days old, they were not degraded human beings, judged by
any measure of moral values.
[Illustration: LILLIAN D. WALD MARY M. BREWSTER
In hospital uniform, 1893]
In fact, it was very plain that they were sensitive to their condition,
and when, at the end of my ministrations, they kissed my hands (those who
have undergone similar experiences will, I am sure, understand), it would
have been some solace if by any conviction of the moral unworthiness of
the family I could have defended myself as a part of a society which
permitted such conditions to exist. Indeed, my subsequent acquaintance
with them revealed the fact that, miserable as their state was, they were
not without ideals for the family life, and for society, of which they
were so unloved and unlovely a part.
[Illustration]
That morning’s experience was a baptism of fire. Deserted were the
laboratory and the academic work of the college. I never returned to
them. On my way from the sickroom to my comfortable student quarters
my mind was intent on my own responsibility. To my inexperience it
seemed certain that conditions such as these were allowed because people
did not _know_, and for me there was a challenge to know and to tell.
When early morning found me still awake, my naïve conviction remained
that, if people knew things,—and “things” meant everything implied in
the condition of this family,—such horrors would cease to exist, and I
rejoiced that I had had a training in the care of the sick that in itself
would give me an organic relationship to the neighborhood in which this
awakening had come.
* * * * *
To the first sympathetic friend to whom I poured forth my story, I
found myself presenting a plan which had been developing almost without
conscious mental direction on my part. It was doubtless the accumulation
of many reflections inspired by acquaintance with the patients in the
hospital wards, and now, with the Ludlow Street experience, resistlessly
impelling me to action.
Within a day or two a comrade from the training-school, Mary Brewster,
agreed to share in the venture. We were to live in the neighborhood as
nurses, identify ourselves with it socially, and, in brief, contribute to
it our citizenship. That plan contained in embryo all the extended and
diversified social interests of our settlement group to-day.
[Illustration]
We set to work immediately to find quarters—no easy task, as we clung to
the civilization of a bathroom, and according to a legend current at the
time there were only two bathrooms in tenement houses below Fourteenth
Street. Chance helped us here. A young woman who for years played an
important part in the life of many East Side people, overhearing a
conversation of mine with a fellow-student, gave me an introduction to
two men who, she said, knew all about the quarter of the city which I
wished to enter. I called on them immediately, and their response to
my need was as prompt. Without stopping to inquire into my antecedents
or motives, or to discourse on the social aspects of the community, of
which, I soon learned, they were competent to speak with authority,
they set out with me at once, in a pouring rain, to scour the adjacent
streets for “To Let” signs. One which seemed to me worth investigating
my newly acquired friends discarded with the explanation that it was in
the “red light” district and would not do. Later I was to know much of
the unfortunate women who inhabited the quarter, but at the time the term
meant nothing to me.
After a long tour one of my guides, as if by inspiration, reminded the
other that several young women had taken a house on Rivington Street
for something like my purpose, and perhaps I had better live there
temporarily and take my time in finding satisfactory quarters. Upon that
advice I acted, and within a few days Miss Brewster and I found ourselves
guests at the luncheon table of the College Settlement on Rivington
Street. With ready hospitality they took us in, and, during July and
August, we were “residents” in stimulating comradeship with serious
women, who were also the fortunate possessors of a saving sense of humor.
Before September of the year 1893 we found a house on Jefferson Street,
the only one in which our careful search disclosed the desired bathtub.
It had other advantages—the vacant floor at the top (so high that the
windows along the entire side wall gave us sun and breeze), and, greatest
lure of all, the warm welcome which came to us from the basement, where
we found the janitress ready to answer questions as to terms.
Naturally, objections to two young women living alone in New York under
these conditions had to be met, and some assurance as to our material
comfort was given to anxious, though at heart sympathetic, families
by compromising on good furniture, a Baltimore heater for cheer, and
simple but adequate household appurtenances. Painted floors with easily
removed rugs, windows curtained with spotless but inexpensive scrim, a
sitting-room with pictures, books, and restful chairs, a tiny bedroom
which we two shared, a small dining-room in which the family mahogany did
not look out of place, and a kitchen, constituted our home for two full
years.
The much-esteemed bathroom, small and dark, was in the hall, and
necessitated early rising if we were to have the use of it; for, as we
became known, we had many callers anxious to see us before we started on
our sick rounds. The diminutive closet-space was divided to hold the bags
and equipment we needed from day to day, and more ample store-closets
were given us by the kindly people in the school where I had first given
lessons to East Side mothers. Any pride in the sacrifice of material
comfort which might have risen within us was effectually inhibited by
the constant reminder that we two young persons occupied exactly the same
space as the large families on every floor below us, and to one of our
basement friends at least we were luxurious beyond the dreams of ordinary
folk.
[Illustration]
The little lad from the basement was our first invited guest. The simple
but appetizing dinner my comrade prepared, while I set the table and
placed the flowers. The boy’s mother came up later in the evening to find
out what we had given him, for Tommie had rushed down with eyes bulging
and had reported that “them ladies live like the Queen of England and eat
off of solid gold plates.”
We learned the most efficient use of the fire-escape and felt many
times blessed because of our easy access to the roof. We also learned
the infinite uses to which stairs can be put. Later we achieved “local
color” in our rooms by the addition of interesting pieces of brass and
copper purchased from a man on Allen Street whom we and several others
had “discovered.” His little dark shop under the elevated railway
was fitfully illuminated by the glowing forge. On our first visit the
proprietor emerged from a still darker inner room with prayer-shawl and
phylactery. He became one of our pleasant acquaintances and lost no
occasion of acknowledging what he considered his debt to the appreciative
customers who had helped to make him and his wares known to a wider
circle than that of the neighborhood.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
The mere fact of living in the tenement brought undreamed-of
opportunities for widening our knowledge and extending our human
relationships. That we were Americans was wonderful to our
fellow-tenants. They were all immigrants—Jews from Russia or Roumania.
The sole exception was the janitress, Mrs. McRae, who at once dedicated
herself and her entire family to the service of the top floor. Dear Mrs.
McRae! From her basement home she covered us with her protecting love
and was no small influence in holding us to sanity. Humor, astuteness,
and sympathy were needed and these she gave in abundance.
[Illustration]
It was vouchsafed us to know many fine personalities who influenced and
guided us from the first few weeks of residence in the friendly college
settlement through the many years that have followed. The two women who
stand out with greatest distinction from the first are this pure-souled
Scotch-Irish immigrant and Josephine Shaw Lowell. Both, if they were
here, would understand the tribute in linking them together.
Occasionally Mrs. McRae would feel impelled to reprove us for “overdoing”
ourselves, and from our top story we were hard pushed to save visitors
from being sent away when she thought we needed to finish a meal or go
to bed. Cautious as we were not to make any distinctions in commenting
upon the visitors who came to see us, she made her own deductions. At
whatever hour we returned, she would be at the door to welcome us and to
report on the happenings during our absence. “So-and-so was here”: shrewd
descriptions which often enabled us to identify individuals when names
were forgotten. “Lots of visitors to-night,” she would report. “Were
messages left, or names?” we would naturally inquire. “No, darlints,
nothing at all. I know sure they didn’t bring you anything.”
The key to our apartments, usually left with her, was one day forgotten,
and when, upon unlocking the door, we saw a well-known society woman
seated in our little living-room, we were naturally puzzled to know how
she had arrived there. Mrs. McRae explained that she had taken her up
the fire-escape!—no slight venture and exertion for the inexperienced.
We suggested that other ways might have been more agreeable and safer.
“Whisht,” said Mrs. McRae, with a smile and a wink, “it’s no harm at all.
She’ll be havin’ lots of talk for her friends on this.”
When her roving husband died at home, the funeral arrangements were given
a last touch by Mrs. McRae, who placed on the casket his tobacco and pipe
and ordered the procession to pass his tenement home twice before driving
to the cemetery, “So he’d not think we were not for forgivin’ him and
hurryin’ him away.”
Her first love went to my comrade, whose beauty and humor and goodness
captured her Celtic heart. During our second year in the tenement
Miss Brewster was taken seriously ill, and one evening we had at last
succeeded in forcing Mrs. McRae to go home and had locked the door.
Unknown to us the dear friend remained on the floor outside all through
the night, trying to catch the sound of life from the loved one.
Bringing up a large family, with no help from the “old man,” and with
stern ideals of conduct and integrity, was not easy. Some of her
children, endowed with her character, gave her solace, but she was too
astute not to estimate each one properly.
When we moved from the tenement to our first house Mrs. McRae and her
family gave up the basement rooms, which were rent free because of her
janitor service, in order to be near us, and she spread her warmth over
the new abode. When, some years later, she was ill and we knew that the
end was near, one close to me in my own family claimed my attention. Torn
between the two affections, I was loath to leave the city while Mrs.
McRae was so ill. She guessed the cause of my perturbed state and advised
me to go. “Darlin’, you ought to go. You go. I promise not to die until
you come back.”
Letters kept up this assurance and the promise was fulfilled.
* * * * *
Times were hard that year. In the summer the miseries due to unemployment
and rising rents and prices began to be apparent, but the pinch came
with the cold weather. Perhaps it was an advantage that we were so early
exposed to the extraordinary sufferings and the variety of pain and
poverty in that winter of 1893-94, memorable because of extreme economic
depression. The impact of strain, physical and emotional, left neither
place nor time for self-analysis and consequent self-consciousness, so
prone to hinder and to dwarf wholesome instincts, and so likely to have
proved an impediment to the simple relationship which we established with
our neighbors.
It has become almost trite to speak of the kindness of the poor to each
other, yet from the beginning of our tenement-house residence we were
much touched by manifestations of it. An errand took me to Michael the
Scotch-Irish cobbler as the family were sitting down to the noonday meal.
There was a stranger with them, whom Michael introduced, explaining when
we were out of hearing that he thought I would be interested to meet a
man just out of Sing Sing prison. I expressed some fear of the danger to
his own boys in this association. “We must just chance it,” said Michael.
“It’s no weather for a man like that to be on the streets, when honest
fellows can’t get work.”
When we first met the G⸺ family they were breaking up the furniture to
keep from freezing. One of the children had died and had been buried
in a public grave. Three times that year did Mrs. G⸺ painfully gather
together enough money to have the baby disinterred and fittingly buried
in consecrated ground, and each time she gave up her heart’s desire in
order to relieve the sufferings of the living children of her neighbors.
Another instance of this unfailing goodness of the poor to each other
was told by Nellie, who called on us one morning. She was evidently
embarrassed, and with difficulty related that, hearing of things to
be given away at a newspaper office, she had gone there hoping to get
something that would do for John when he came out of the hospital. She
said, “I drew this and I don’t know exactly what it is meant for,” and
displayed a wadded black satin “dress-shirt protector,” in very good
condition, and possibly contributed because the season was over! Standing
outside the circle of clamorous petitioners, Nellie and the woman next
her had exchanged tales of woe. When she mentioned her address the new
acquaintance suggested that she seek us.
Nellie proved to be a near neighbor. There were two children: a nursing
baby “none so well,” and a lad. John, her husband, was “fortunately” in
the hospital with a broken leg, for there were “no jobs around loose
anyway.” When we called later in the day to see the baby, we found that
Nellie was stopping with her cousin, a widower who “held his job down.”
There were also his two children, the widow of a friend “who would have
done as much by me,” and the wife and two small children of a total
stranger who lived in the rear tenement and were invited in to meals
because the father had been seen starting every morning on his hunt for
work, and “it was plain for anyone with eyes to see that he never did
get it.” So this one man, fortunate in having work, was taking care
of himself and his children, the widow of his friend, Nellie and her
children, and was feeding the strangers. Said Nellie: “Sure he’s doing
that, and why not? He’s the only cousin I’ve got outside of Ireland.”
Mrs. S⸺, who called at the settlement a few days ago, reminded me that
it was twenty-one years since our first meeting, and brought vividly
before me a picture of which she was a part. She was the daughter
of a learned rabbi, and her husband, himself a pious man, had great
reverence for the traditions of her family. In their extremity they had
taken bread from one of the newspaper charities, but it was evidently a
painful humiliation, and before we arrived they had hidden the loaf in
the ice-box. My visit was due to a desire to ascertain the condition of
the families who had applied for this dole. Both house and people were
scrupulously clean. It was amazing that under the biting pressure of want
and anxiety such standards could be maintained. Yet, though passionately
devoted to his family, the husband refused advantageous employment
because it necessitated work on the Sabbath. This would have been to them
a desecration of something more vital than life itself.
[Illustration]
We found that winter, in other instances, that the fangs of the wolf were
often decorously hidden. In one family of our acquaintance the father,
a cigarmaker, left the house each morning in search of work, only to
return at night hungrier and more exhausted by his fruitless exertions.
One Sabbath eve I entered his tenement, to find the two rooms scrubbed
and cleaned, and the mother and children prepared for the holy night.
Over a brisk fire fed by bits of wood picked up by the children two
covered pots were set, as if a supper were being prepared. But under the
lids it was only water that bubbled. The proud mother could not bear to
expose her poverty to the gossip of the neighbors, the humiliation being
the greater because she was obliged to violate the sacred custom of
preparing a ceremonious meal for the united family on Friday night.
If the formalism of our neighbors in religious matters was constantly
brought to our attention, instances of their tolerance were also far from
rare. A Jewish woman, exhausted by her long day’s scrubbing of office
floors, walked many extra blocks to beg us to get a priest for her Roman
Catholic neighbor whose child was dying. An orthodox Jewish father,
who had been goaded to bitterness because his daughter had married an
“Irisher” and thus “insulted his religion,” felt that the young husband
and his mother were equally wronged. This man, when I called on a Sabbath
evening, took one of the lights from the table to show the way down the
five flights of dark tenement stairs, and to my protest,—knowing, as I
did, that he considered it a sin to handle fire on the Sabbath,—he said:
“It is no sin for me to handle a light on the Sabbath to show respect to
a friend who has helped to keep a family together.”
[Illustration: WITH PRAYER-SHAWL AND PHYLACTERY]
There was the story of Mary, eldest daughter, as we supposed, of an
orthodox family. When we went to her engagement party we were surprised
to see that the young man was not of the family faith. The mother told
us that Mary, “such a pretty baby,” had been left on their doorstep
in earlier and more prosperous days in Austria. “The Burgomeister had
made proclamation,” but no one came to claim her, and the husband and
wife, who as yet had no children of their own, decided to keep her. “God
rewarded us and answered our prayers,” said Mrs. L⸺, for many children
came afterward; but Mary, blonde and blue-eyed, was always the most
cherished, the first-comer who had brought the others. When she was quite
a young girl she was taken ill—a cold following exposure after her first
“grown-up” party, for which her foster-mother had dressed her with pride.
It seemed that nothing could save her, and the foster-mother in her
distress thought with pity of the woman who had borne this sweet child.
Surely she must be dead. No living mother could have abandoned so lovely
a baby. And if she were dead and in the Christian heaven, she would look
in vain there for her daughter. “So I called the priest and told him,”
said Mrs. L⸺, “and he made a prayer over Mary, and said, ‘Now she is a
_Krist_.’ The doctor, we called him too, and he said to get a goat, for
the milk would be good for Mary; and she get well, but no so strong, as
you see, and that is why she don’t go out to work like her brothers and
sisters. We lose our money, that’s why we come to America, and Mary, now
she marry a _Krist_.”
[Illustration]
Gradually there came to our knowledge difficulties and conflicts not
peculiar to any one set of people, but intensified in the case of our
neighbors by poverty, unfamiliarity with laws and customs, the lack of
privacy, and the frequent dependence of the elders upon the children.
Workers in philanthropy, clergymen, orthodox rabbis, the unemployed,
anxious parents, girls in distress, troublesome boys, came as individuals
to see us, but no formal organization of our work was effected till we
moved into the house on Henry Street, in 1895.
So precious were the intimate relationships with our neighbors in the
tenement that we were reluctant to leave it. My companion’s breakdown,
the persuasion of friends who had given their support and counsel
that there was an obligation upon us to effect some kind of formal
organization without further delay, finally prevailed. As usual the
neighborhood showed its interest in what we did; and though my comrade
and I had carefully selected men from the ranks of the unemployed to
move our belongings, when all was accomplished not one of them could be
induced to take a penny for the work.
From this first house have since developed the manifold activities in
city and country now incorporated as the Henry Street Settlement.
I should like to make it clear that from the beginning we were most
profoundly moved by the wretched industrial conditions which were
constantly forced upon us. In succeeding chapters I hope to tell of the
constructive programmes that the people themselves have evolved out
of their own hard lives, of the ameliorative measures, ripened out of
sympathetic comprehension, and, finally, of the social legislation that
expresses the new compunction of the community.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER II
ESTABLISHING THE NURSING SERVICE
When I first entered the training-school my outpourings to the
superintendent,—a woman touched with a genius for sympathy,—my youthful
heroics, and my vow to “nurse the poor” were met with what I deemed vague
reference to the “Mission.” Afterwards when I sought guidance I found
that in New York the visiting (or district) nurse was accessible only
through sectarian organizations or the free dispensary.
As our plan crystallized my friend and I were certain that a system for
nursing the sick in their homes could not be firmly established unless
certain fundamental social facts were recognized. We tried to imagine how
loved ones for whom we might be solicitous would react were they in the
place of the patients whom we hoped to serve. With time, experience, and
the stimulus of creative minds our technique and administrative methods
have naturally improved, but this test gave us vision to establish
certain principles, whose soundness has been proved during the growth of
the service.
We perceived that it was undesirable to condition the nurse’s service
upon the actual or potential connection of the patient with a religious
institution or free dispensary, or to have the nurse assigned to the
exclusive use of one physician, and we planned to create a service on
terms most considerate of the dignity and independence of the patients.
We felt that the nursing of the sick in their homes should be undertaken
seriously and adequately; that instruction should be incidental and not
the primary consideration; that the etiquette, so far as doctor and
patient were concerned, should be analogous to the established system of
private nursing; that the nurse should be as ready to respond to calls
from the people themselves as to calls from physicians; that she should
accept calls from all physicians, and with no more red-tape or formality
than if she were to remain with one patient continuously.
[Illustration]
The new basis of the visiting-nurse service which we thus inaugurated
reacted almost immediately upon the relationship of the nurse to the
patient, reversing the position the nurse had formerly held. Chagrin
at having the neighbors see in her an agent whose presence proclaimed
the family’s poverty or its failure to give adequate care to its sick
member was changed to the gratifying consciousness that her presence, in
conjunction with that of the doctor, “private” or “Lodge,”[1] proclaimed
the family’s liberality and anxiety to do everything possible for the
sufferer. For the exposure of poverty is a great humiliation to people
who are trying to maintain a foothold in society for themselves and their
families.
My colleague and I realized that there were large numbers of people
who could not, or would not, avail themselves of the hospitals. It
was estimated that ninety per cent. of the sick people in cities were
sick at home,—an estimate which has been corroborated (1913-14) by
the investigation of the Committee of Inquiry into the Departments of
Health, Charities, and Bellevue and Allied Hospitals of New York,—and a
humanitarian civilization demanded that something of the nursing care
given in hospitals should be accorded to sick people in their homes.
[Illustration: THE NURSE IN THE TENEMENT
Ninety per cent. of the sick of the city remain at home]
We decided that fees should be charged when people could pay. It was
interesting to discover that, although nominal in amount compared with
the cost of the service, these fees represented a much larger proportion
of the wage in the case of the ordinary worker who paid for the hourly
service than did the fee paid by a man with a salary of $5,000, who
engaged the full time of the nurse. Our plan, we reasoned, was analogous
to the custom of “private” hospitals, which give free treatment or charge
according to the resources of the ward patients. Both private hospitals
and visiting nursing are thereby lifted out of “charity” as comprehended
by the people.
[Illustration]
We felt that for economic reasons valuable and expensive hospital space
should be saved for those for whom the hospital treatment is necessary;
and an obvious social consideration was that many people, particularly
women, cannot leave their homes without imperiling, or sometimes
destroying, the home itself.
* * * * *
Almost immediately we found patients who needed care, and doctors ready
to accept our services with probably the least amount of friction
possible under the circumstances; for those doctors who had not been
internes in the hospitals were unfamiliar with the trained nurse, whose
work was little known at that time outside the hospitals and the homes of
the well-to-do.
Despite the neighborhood’s friendliness, however, we struggled, not
only with poverty and disease, but with the traditional fate of the
pioneer: in many cases we encountered the inevitable opposition which
the unusual must arouse. It seems almost ungracious to relate some of
our first experiences with doctors. No one can give greater tribute than
do the nurses of the settlement to the generosity of physicians and
surgeons when we recall how often paying patients were set aside for more
urgent non-paying ones; the counsel freely given from the highest for
the lowliest; the eager readiness to respond. Occasionally sage advice
came from a veteran who knew the people well and lamented the economic
pressure which at times involved, to their spiritual disaster, doctors as
well as patients.
[Illustration]
The first day on which we set out to discover the sick who might need
a nurse, my comrade found a woman with high temperature in an airless
room, more oppressive because of the fetid odor from the bed. Service
with one of New York’s skilled specialists had trained the nurse well
and she identified the symptoms immediately. “Yes, there was a Lodge
doctor.—He had left a prescription.—He might come again.” With fine
diplomacy an excuse was made to call upon the doctor and to assume that
he would accept the nurse’s aid. My colleague presented her credentials
and offered to accompany him to the case immediately, as she was “sure
conditions must have changed since his last visit or he would doubtless
have ordered” so-and-so,—suggesting the treatment the distinguished
specialists were then using. He promised to go, and the nurse waited
patiently for hours at the woman’s bedside. When he arrived he
pooh-poohed and said, “Nothing doing.” We had ascertained the financial
condition of the family from the evidence of the empty push-cart and the
fact that the fish-peddler was not in the market with his merchandise.
Five dollars was loaned that night to purchase stock next day.
My comrade and I decided to visit the patient early the next morning, to
mingle judgments on what action could be taken in this serious illness
with due respect to established etiquette. When we arrived, the Lodge
doctor and a “Professor” (a consultant) were in the sickroom, and our
five dollars, left for fish, was in their possession. Cigarettes in
mouths and hats on heads, they were questioning husband and wife, and
only Dickens could have done justice to the scene. We were not too timid
to allude to the poverty and the source of the fee, and felt free when
we were told to “go ahead and do anything you like.” That permission we
acted upon instantly and received, over the telephone, authority from
the distinguished specialist to get to work. We were prudent enough to
report the authority and treatment given, with solemn etiquette, to the
physician in attendance, who in turn congratulated us on having helped
him to save a life!
Not all our encounters with this class of practitioner were fruitful of
benefit to their patients. Heartbreaking was the tragedy of Samuel, the
twenty-one-year-old carpenter, and Ida, his bride. They had been boy and
girl sweethearts in Poland, and the coming to America, the preparation
of the clean two-roomed home, the expectation of the baby, made a pretty
story which should have had happy succeeding chapters, the start was so
good. Samuel knocked at our door, incoherent in his fright, but we were
fast accustoming ourselves to recognize danger-signals, and I at once
followed him to the top floor of his tenement.
Plain to see, Ida was dying. The midwife said she had done all she could,
but she was obviously frightened. “No one could have done any better,”
she insisted, “not any doctor”; but she had called one and he had left
the woman lacerated and agonizing because the expected fee had been paid
only in part. It was Samuel’s last dollar. The septic woman could only be
sent to the city hospital. The ambulance surgeon was persuaded to let the
boy husband ride with her, and he remained at the hospital until she and
the baby died a few hours later.
Here my comrade and I came against the stone wall of professional
etiquette. It seemed as if public sentiment ought to be directed by the
doctors themselves against such practices, but although I finally called
upon one of the high-minded and distinguished men who had signed the
diploma of the offending doctor, I could not get reproof administered,
and my ardor for arousing public indignation in the profession was
chilled. Later, when I heard protests from employers against insistence
by labor organizations on the closed shop, it occurred to me that they
failed to recognize analogies in the professional etiquette which
conventional society has long accepted.
However, many friendly strong bonds were made and have been sustained
with a large majority of the doctors during all the years of our
service. We have mutual ties of personal and community interests, and
work together as comrades; the practitioners with high standards for
themselves and ideals for their sacred profession comprehend our common
cause and strengthen our hands. It is rare now, although at first it was
very frequent, that the physician who has called in the nurse for his
patient demands her withdrawal when he himself has been dismissed. He
has come to see that although the nurse exerts her influence to preserve
his prestige, for the patient’s sake as well as his own, nevertheless,
emotional people, unaccustomed to the settled relation of the family
doctor, may and often do change physicians from six to ten times in the
course of one illness. The nurse, however, may remain at the bedside
throughout all vicissitudes.
The most definite protest against the newer relationship came from
a woman active in many public movements, who was a stickler for the
orthodox method of procuring a visiting nurse only through the doctor. To
illustrate the importance of freedom for the patients, I cited the case
of the L⸺ family. A neighbor had called for aid. “Some kind of an awful
catching sickness on the same floor I live on, to the right, front,” she
whispered. A worn and haggard woman was lifting a heavy boiler filled
with “wash” from the stove when I entered; on the floor in the other
room three little children lay ill with typhoid fever, one of them with
meningitis. The feather pillows, most precious possession, had been
pawned to pay the doctor. The father dared not leave the shop, for money
was needed, and all that he earned was far from enough. The mother, when
questioned as to the delay in sending for nursing help, said that the
doctor had frightened her from doing so by telling her that, if a nurse
came, the children would surely be sent to the hospital. No disinfectant
was found in the house, and the mother declared that no instructions had
been given her.
The nurse who took possession of the sickroom refrained from mentioning
the hospital; but when the mother saw the skilled ministration, and
the tired father, on his return from work, watched the deft feeding
of the unconscious child, they awoke to their limitations. The poor,
unskilled woman, bent with fatigue, then exclaimed, “O God, is that
what I should have been doing for my babies?” When the nurse was about
to leave them for the night the parents clung to her and asked her if a
hospital would do as much as she had done. “More, much more, I hope,”
she said. “I cannot give here what the little ones need.” Late at night
three carriages started for the children’s ward of the hospital; the
father, the mother, the nurse, each with a patient across the seat of the
carriage.
Said the critic when I had finished my story: “I think the nurse should
have asked permission of their doctor before she granted the request of
the parents.”
All the social agencies combined have not been able to dislodge
permanently the quack who preys upon ignorance and superstition. One day
a teacher in a nearby school asked us to visit a pupil who was highly
excited and uncontrollable. The mother, when questioned, confessed that
she had employed the “witch doctor” to exorcise the devil, who, he said,
had taken possession of the girl. In our efforts to free the girl from
this man’s control I invoked the aid of the parish priest, suggesting
that his powers were being usurped. The County Medical Society finally
secured conviction of the “doctor” on the charge of practicing without a
license.
In the Italian quarter this species still preys upon the superstitious
fears of some of the people, and the secrecy involved in his “treatment”
makes permanent riddance extremely difficult. The people on the whole,
however, give remarkable response to the “American” custom of employing a
regular practitioner and the visiting nurse.
* * * * *
In this country, unfortunately, we have little data on morbidity.
Statisticians desirous of obtaining figures for study have found
interesting material in our files, and it has been possible to make
comparison of the results of hospital and home treatment. Those who
are familiar with the discussion upon papers presented by children’s
specialists in recent conferences on the saving of child life have had
their attention drawn to the disadvantage of institutional treatment.
Discussion of this subject is recent, and the laity do not always know
that certain complications incident to the hospital care of children are
obviated by keeping them at home. Among these are cross-infections, while
the high mortality among infants in hospitals has long been recognized
and deplored as unavoidable.
We soon found that children’s diseases, particularly those of brief
duration, lent themselves most advantageously to home treatment. Our
records show that in 1914 the Henry Street staff cared for 3,535 cases
of pneumonia of all ages, with a mortality rate of 8.05 per cent. For
purposes of comparison four large New York hospitals gave us their
records of pneumonia during the same period. Their combined figures
totaled 1,612, with a mortality rate of 31.2 per cent. Among children
under two—the age most susceptible to unfortunate termination of this
disorder—the mortality rate from pneumonia in one hospital was 51 per
cent., and the average of the four was 38 per cent., while among those of
a corresponding age cared for by our nurses it was 9.3 per cent.
[Illustration]
Doctors and nurses highly trained in hospital routine are apt to be
hospital propagandists until they learn by experience that there is
justification for the resistance, on the part of mothers, to the removal
of their children to institutions, and that even in homes which, at first
glance, it seems impossible to organize in accordance with sickroom
standards, the little patients’ chances for recovery are better than
when sent away. Diseases requiring climatic or operative treatment, or
peculiar apparatus, must usually be excluded from home care.
In a letter written to a friend more than twenty years ago I find this
account of one of our patients:
“Peter had pneumonia, complicated with whooping-cough. He
is a beautiful yellow-haired boy, and even if the hospital
could have admitted him, or his mother would have agreed to
his removal (which she wouldn’t), I should not have liked
to send him. The sense of responsibility for the sick child
seemed a force that could not be spared for rousing an erring
father. He is, apparently, devoted to the child, but had been
drinking, and there was not a dollar in the house. The child,
desperately ill, clung to him, calling upon him with endearing
names. During the illness he worked all day (he is a driver)
and sat up all night, and I think he will never forget his
shame and remorse. The doctor had ordered bath treatments every
two hours. These I gave until eight o’clock and the mother
continued them after my last visit, but when the temperature
was highest she was worn out, and active night-nursing seemed
imperative. This Miss S⸺ willingly undertook—a service more
difficult than appears in the mere telling, for the vermin
in these old houses are horribly active at night, and this
sweet girl ended her first vigil with neck and face inflamed
from bites. Yet the people themselves were clean, and in this
were not blameworthy. There is nothing harder to endure than
to watch by a night sick-bed in these old, worn houses and see
the crawling creatures and the babes so accustomed to them that
their sleep is scarcely disturbed. Peter has had a beautiful
recovery, rewarding his nurses by a most satisfactory return to
a normal state of good health.”
[Illustration: Convalescent Home—“The Rest.”]
The staff, which in the beginning consisted of two nurses, my friend
and myself, has been increased until it is now large enough to answer
calls from the sick anywhere in the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx,
and the calls in the year 1913-14 came from nearly 1,100 more patients
than the combined total of those treated during the same period in three
of the large hospitals in New York—a comparison valuable chiefly as
measuring the growing demand of the sick for the visiting nurse.
The service, though covering so wide a territory, is capable of control
and supervision. The division into districts, with separate staffs
for contagious and obstetrical cases, may be compared to the hospital
division into wards. Like the hospital, it has a system of bedside notes,
case records, and an established etiquette between physicians, nurses,
and patients. Those that can best be cared for in the hospitals are sent
there, the sifting process being accomplished by the doctors and nurses
working together. Approximately ten per cent. of our patients are sent to
the hospitals.
Serious nurses are gratified that the former casual and almost
sentimental attitude of the public toward them and their work has been
replaced by a demand for standards of efficiency.
Enthusiasm, health, and uncommon good sense on the part of the nurse are
essential, for without the vision of the importance of their task they
could not long endure the endless stair-climbing, the weight of the bag,
and the pulls upon their emotions.
There has been an extraordinary development of the visiting-nurse service
throughout the country since we began our rounds, and the practical
arguments for sustaining such work would seem irresistible. It requires
imagination, however, to visualize the steady, competent, continuous
routine so quietly performed, unseen by the public, and its financial
support is the more precarious because there can be no public reminder of
its existence by impressive buildings and monuments of marble.
CHAPTER III
THE NURSE AND THE COMMUNITY
The work begun from the top floor of the tenement comprised, in simple
forms, those varied lines of activity which have since been developed
into the many highly specialized branches of public health nursing now
covering the United States and engaging thousands of nurses.[2]
In trying to forestall every obstacle to the establishment of our nursing
service on the East Side, it seemed desirable to have some connection
with civic authority. Through a mutual friend I met the President of the
Board of Health and, I fear rather presumptuously, asked that we be given
some insignia. Desirous of serving his friend and tolerant of my intense
earnestness, he sanctioned our wearing a badge which had engraved on its
circle, “Visiting Nurse. Under the Auspices of the Board of Health.”
As it transpired, we did not find it necessary or always felicitous
to utilize this privilege, but our connection with the Board of Health
was not a perfunctory or merely complimentary one. We found from the
beginning an inclination on the part of the officials of the department
to treat us more or less like comrades. Every night, during the first
summer, I wrote to the physician in charge, reporting the sick babies
and describing the unsanitary conditions Miss Brewster and I found,
and we received many encouraging reminders that what we were doing was
considered helpful.
[Illustration]
In the new activity for the promotion of public health many campaigns
have been waged to popularize the study of social diseases. Education
is the watchword, and where emphasis is laid upon the preservation of
health rather than upon the treatment of disease, the nurses constitute
an important factor. Appreciation of this is recorded by the Commission
which drafted the new health law for New York State (1913). “The advent
of trained nursing,” says its report, “marks not only a new era in the
treatment of the sick, but a new era in public health administration.”
This Commission also created the position of Director of the Division of
Public Health Nursing in the state department of health.
* * * * *
I had been downtown only a short time when I met Louis. An open door in a
rear tenement revealed a woman standing over a washtub, a fretting baby
on her left arm, while with her right she rubbed at the butcher’s aprons
which she washed for a living.
Louis, she explained, was “bad.” He did not “cure his head,” and what
would become of him, for they would not take him into the school because
of it? Louis, hanging the offending head, said he had been to the
dispensary a good many times. He knew it was awful for a twelve-year-old
boy not to know how to read the names of the streets on the lamp-posts,
but “every time I go to school Teacher tells me to go home.”
It needed only intelligent application of the dispensary ointments to
cure the affected area, and in September I had the joy of securing the
boy’s admittance to school for the first time in his life. The next
day, at the noon recess, he fairly rushed up our five flights of stairs
in the Jefferson Street tenement to spell the elementary words he had
acquired that morning.
It had been hard on Louis to be denied the precious years of school,
yet one could sympathize with the harassed school teachers. The classes
were overcrowded; there were frequently as many as sixty pupils in a
single room, and often three children on a seat. It was, perhaps, not
unnatural that the eczema on Louis’s head should have been seized upon
as a legitimate excuse for not adding him to the number. Perhaps it was
not to be expected that the teacher should feel concern for one small
boy whom she might never see again, or should realize that his brief
time for education was slipping away and that he must go to work fatally
handicapped because of his illiteracy.
The predecessor of our present superintendent of schools had apparently
given no thought to the social relationship of the school to the pupils.
The general public, twenty years ago, had no accurate information
concerning the schools, and, indeed, seemed to have little interest
in them. We heard of flagrant instances of political influence in the
selection and promotion of teachers, and later on we had actual knowledge
of their humiliation at being forced to obtain through sordid “pull”
the positions to which they had a legitimate claim. I had myself once
been obliged to enter the saloon of N⸺, the alderman of our district,
to obtain the promise of necessary and long-delayed action on his part
for the city’s acceptance of the gift of a street fountain, which I had
been indirectly instrumental in securing for the neighborhood. I had
been informed by his friends that without this attention he would not be
likely to act.
Louis set me thinking and opened my mind to many things. Miss Brewster
and I decided to keep memoranda of the children we encountered who had
been excluded from school for medical reasons, and later our enlarged
staff of nurses became equally interested in obtaining data regarding
them. When one of the nurses found a small boy attending school while
desquamating from scarlet fever, and, Tom Sawyer-like, pulling off the
skin to startle his little classmates, we exhibited him to the President
of the Department of Health, and I then learned that the possibility of
having physicians inspect the school children was under discussion, and
that such evidence of its need as we could produce would be helpful in
securing an appropriation for this purpose.
I had come to the conclusion that the nurse would be an essential
factor in making effective whatever treatment might be suggested for
the pupils, and, following an observation of mine to this effect, the
president asked me to take part, as nurse, in the medical supervision in
the schools. This offer it did not seem wise to accept. We were embarking
upon ventures of our own which would require all our faculties and all
our strength. It seemed better to be free from connections which would
make demand upon our energies for routine work outside the settlement.
Moreover, the time did not seem ripe for advocating the introduction of
both the doctor and the nurse. The doctor himself, in this capacity,
was an innovation. The appointment of a nurse would have been a radical
departure.
[Illustration]
In 1897 the Department of Health appointed the first doctors; one hundred
and fifty were assigned to the schools for one hour a day at a salary of
$30 a month. They were expected to examine for contagious diseases and
to send out of the classrooms all those who showed suspicious symptoms.
It proved to be a perfunctory service and only superficially touched the
needs of the children.
In 1902, when a reform administration came into power, the medical
staff was reduced and the salary increased to $100 a month, while three
hours a day were demanded from the doctors. The Health Commissioner of
that administration, an intelligent friend of children, now ordered an
examination of all the public school pupils, and New York was horrified
to learn of the prevalence of trachoma. Thousands of children were
sent out of the schools because of this infectious eye trouble, and in
our neighborhood we watched many of them, after school hours, playing
with the children for whose protection they had been excluded from
the classrooms. Few received treatment, and it followed that truancy
was encouraged, and, where medical inspection was most thorough, the
classrooms were depleted.
The President of the Department of Education and the Health Commissioner
sought for guidance in this predicament. Examination by physicians
with the object of excluding children from the classrooms had proved a
doubtful blessing. The time had come when it seemed right to urge the
addition of the nurse’s service to that of the doctor. My colleagues
and I offered to show that with her assistance few children would lose
their valuable school time and that it would be possible to bring under
treatment those who needed it. Reluctant lest the democracy of the
school should be invaded by even the most socially minded philanthropy,
I exacted a promise from several of the city officials that if the
experiment were successful they would use their influence to have the
nurse, like the doctor, paid from public funds.
Four schools from which there had been the greatest number of exclusions
for medical causes were selected, and an experienced nurse, who possessed
tact and initiative, was chosen from the settlement staff to make the
demonstration. A routine was devised, and the examining physician sent
daily to the nurse all the pupils who were found to be in need of
attention, using a code of symbols in order that the children might be
spared the chagrin of having diseases due to uncleanliness advertised to
their associates.
With the equipment of the settlement bag and, in some of the schools,
with no more than the ledge of a window or the corner of a room for the
nurse’s office, the present system of thorough medical inspection in
the schools and of home visiting was inaugurated. Many of the children
needed only disinfectant treatment of the eyes, collodion applied to
ringworm, or instruction as to cleanliness, and such were returned at
once to the class with a minimum loss of precious school time. Where more
serious conditions existed the nurse called at the home, explained to the
mother what the doctor advised, and, where there was a family physician,
urged that the child should be taken to him. In the families of the poor
information as to dispensaries was given, and where the mother was at
work, and there was no one free to take the child to the dispensary, the
nurse herself did this. Where children were sent to the nurse because
of uncleanliness, the mother was given tactful instruction and, when
necessary, a practical demonstration on the child himself.
[Illustration: A SHORT CUT OVER THE ROOFS OF THE TENEMENTS]
One month’s trial proved that, with the exception of the very small
proportion of major contagious and infectious diseases, the addition
of the nurse to the staff made it possible to reverse the object of
medical inspection from excluding the children from school to keeping the
children in the classroom and under treatment. An enlightened Board of
Estimate and Apportionment voted $30,000 for the employment of trained
nurses, the first municipalized school nurses in the world, now a feature
of medical school supervision in many communities in this country and in
Europe.
The first nurse was placed on the city payroll in October, 1902, and
this marked the beginning of an extraordinary development of the public
control of the physical condition of children. Out of this innovation New
York City’s Bureau of Child Hygiene has grown.
The Department of Health now employs 650 nurses for its hospital and
preventive work. Of this number 374, in the year 1914, were engaged for
the Bureau of Child Hygiene.
Poor Louis, who all unconsciously had started the train of incidents that
led to this practical reform, has long since moved from his Hester Street
home to Kansas, and was able to write us, as he did with enthusiasm, of
his identification with the West.
* * * * *
Our first expenditures were for “sputum cups and disinfectants for
tuberculosis patients.” The textbooks had said that Jews were practically
immune from this disease, and here we found ourselves in a dense colony
of the race with signs everywhere of the white plague, which we soon
thought it fitting to name “tailors’ disease.”
Long before the great work was started by the municipality to combat its
ravages through education and home visitation, we organized for ourselves
a system of care and instruction for patients and their families, and
wrote to the institutions that were known to care for tuberculosis cases
for the addresses of discharged patients, that we might call upon them to
leave the cups and disinfectants and instruct the families.
Since 1904 the anti-tuberculosis movement has been greatly accelerated,
and although it is pre-eminently a disease of poverty and can never
be successfully combated without dealing with its underlying economic
causes—bad housing, bad workshops, undernourishment, and so on—the most
immediate attack lies in education in personal hygiene. For this the
approach to the families through the nurse and her ability to apply
scientific truth to the problems of human living have been found to be
invaluable.[3]
Infant mortality is also a social disease—“poverty and ignorance, the
twin roots from which this evil springs.” There is a large measure of
preventable ignorance, and in the efforts for the reduction of infant
mortality the intelligent reaction of the tenement-house mother has been
remarkably evidenced. In the last analysis babies of the poor are kept
alive through the intelligence of the mothers. Pasteurized or modified
milk in immaculate containers is of limited value if exposed to pollution
in the home, or if it is fed improperly and at irregular periods.
[Illustration]
The need of giving the mother training seemed so evident that, in the
course of lessons given on the East Side antedating our nursing service,
I had demonstrated with a primitive sterilizer a simple method of
insuring “safe” milk for babies.
The settlement established a milk station in 1903, when one of its
directors began sending milk of high grade from his private dairy.
Following our principle of building up the homes wherever possible, the
modification of the milk has always been taught there. The nurses report
that it is very rare to find a woman who cannot learn the lesson when
made to understand its importance to her children.
[Illustration]
Children under two years who show the greatest need are given the
preference in admission to our clinic. Excellent physicians practicing
in the neighborhood have contributed their services as consultants, and
conferences are held regularly. In 1914 the number of infants cared for
was 518 and the mortality 1.8 per cent. The previous year, with 400
infants, the mortality was one-half of one per cent.
The Health Commissioner of Rochester, N. Y., a pioneer in his specialty,
founded municipal milk stations for that city in 1897. He states that
the reduction of infant mortality that followed the establishment of the
stations was due, not so much to the milk, but to the education that went
out with the milk through the nurse and in the press.
In 1911 New York City authorized the municipalization of fifteen milk
stations, and so satisfactory was the result that the next year the
appropriation permitted more than the trebling of this number. A nurse
is attached to each station to follow into the homes and there lay the
foundation, through education, for hygienic living. A marked reduction in
infant mortality has been brought about and, moreover, a realization, on
the part of the city, of the immeasurable social and economic value of
keeping the babies alive.
The Federal Children’s Bureau in its first report on the study of infant
mortality in the United States showed that, in the city selected for
investigation, the infant death rate, in those sections where conditions
were worst, was more than five times that in the choice residential
sections.
This report constitutes a serious indictment of society, and should goad
civic and social conscience to aggressive action. But there are evidences
(and, indeed, the existence of the Bureau is one) that the public is
beginning to realize the profound importance in our national life of
saving the children that are born.
* * * * *
Perhaps nothing indicates more impressively our contempt for alien
customs than the general attitude taken toward the midwife. In other
lands she holds a place of respect, but in this country there seems to
be a general determination on the part of physicians and departments of
health to ignore her existence and leave her free to practice without
fit preparation, despite the fact that her services are extensively used
in humble homes. In New York City the midwife brings into the world over
forty per cent. of all the babies born there, and ninety-eight per cent.
of those among the Italians.
We had many experiences with them, beginning with poor Ida, the
carpenter’s wife, and some that had the salt of humor. Before our first
year had passed I wrote to the superintendent of a large relief society
operating in our neighborhood, advising that the society discontinue its
employment of midwives as a branch of relief, because of their entire
lack of standards and their exemption from restraining influence.
To force attention to the harmful effect of leaving the midwife without
training in midwifery and asepsis free to attend women in childbirth, the
Union Settlement in 1905 financed an investigation under the auspices of
a committee of which I was chairman.
A trained nurse was selected to inquire into and report upon the
practice of the midwives. The inquiry disclosed the extent to which
habit, tradition, and economic necessity made the midwife practically
indispensable, and gave ample proof of the neglect, ignorance, and
criminality that prevailed; logical consequences of the policy that
had been pursued. The Commissioner of Health and eminent obstetricians
now co-operated to improve matters, and legislation was secured making
it mandatory for the Department of Health to regulate the practice of
midwifery. Five years later the first school for midwives in America was
established in connection with Bellevue Hospital.
[Illustration]
Part of the duty assigned to nurses of the Bureau of Child Hygiene is
to inspect the bags of the midwives licensed to practice, and to visit
the new-born in the campaign to wipe out _ophthalmia neonatorum_, that
tragically frequent and preventable cause of blindness among the new-born.
These are a few of the manifestations of the new era in the development
of the nurse’s work. She is enlisted in the crusade against disease and
for the promotion of right living, beginning even before life itself is
brought forth, through infancy into school life, on through adolescence,
with its appeal to repair the omissions of the past. Her duties take
her into factory and workshop, and she has identified herself with the
movement against the premature employment of children, and for the
protection of men and women who work that they may not risk health and
life itself while earning their living. The nurse is being socialized,
made part of a community plan for the communal health. Her contribution
to human welfare, unified and harmonized with those powers which aim at
care and prevention, rather than at police power and punishment, forms
part of the great policy of bringing human beings to a higher level.
With the incorporation of the nurse’s service in municipal and state
departments for the preservation of health, other agencies, under
private and semi-public auspices, have expanded their functions to the
sick.
I had felt that the American Red Cross Society held a unique position
among its sister societies of other nations, and that in time it might
be an agency that could consciously provide valuable “moral equivalents
for war.” The whole subject, in these troubled times, is revived in
my memory, and I find that in 1908 I began to urge that in a country
dedicated to peace it would be fitting for the American Red Cross to
consecrate its efforts to the upbuilding of life and the prevention of
disaster, rather than to emphasize its identification with the ravages of
war.
The concrete recommendation made was that the Red Cross should develop
a system of visiting nursing in the vast, neglected country areas. The
suggestion has been adopted and an excellent beginning made with a
Department of Town and Country Nursing directed by a special committee.
A generous gift started an endowment for its administration. Many
communities not in the registered area and remote from the centers of
active social propaganda will be given stimulus to organize for nursing
service, and from this other medical and social measures will inevitably
grow. It requires no far reach of the imagination to visualize the
time when our country will be districted from the northernmost to the
southernmost point, with the trained graduate nurse entering the home
wherever there is illness, caring for the patient, preaching the gospel
of health, and teaching in simplest form the essentials of hygiene. Such
an organization of national scope, its powers directed toward raising
the standard in the homes without sacrifice of independence, is bound to
promote the social progress of the nation.
* * * * *
In the year 1909 the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company undertook
the nursing of its industrial policyholders—an important event in the
annals of visiting nursing. I had suggested the practicality of this
to one of the officials of the company, a man of broad experience, and
he, immediately responsive, provided opportunity for me to present to
his colleagues evidence of the reduction of mortality, the hastening of
convalescence, and the ability to bring to sick people the resources that
the community provides for treatment through the institution of visiting
nursing.
The company employed our staff to care for its patients, and the
experiment has been extended until a nursing service practically covers
its industrial policyholders in Canada and the United States. The company
thereby gave an enormous impetus to education and hygiene in the homes
and treatment of the sick on the only basis that makes it possible for
persons of small means to receive nursing without charity—namely, through
insurance.
The demand for the public health nurse coming from all sides was so great
that for a time it could not be adequately met. Women of initiative
and personality with broad education were needed, for much of the work
required pioneering zeal. Instructive inspection, on the nurse’s part,
like other educational work, requires suitable and sound preparation, a
superstructure of efficiency upon woman’s natural aptitudes.
[Illustration]
The Henry Street Settlement and other groups with well-established
visiting nursing systems responded to the need by offering opportunities
for post-graduate training and experience in the newly opened field of
public health nursing, and sought co-ordination with formal educational
institutions for instruction in social theories and pedagogy. In 1910
the Department of Nursing and Health was created at Teachers College,
Columbia University, embracing in its completed form the Department
of Hospital Economics established there in 1899 by the efforts of
training-school superintendents. This department is in affiliation with
the settlement. At least four important training-schools for nurses are
now working under the direction of universities, and other provision has
been made to give education supplementary to the hospital training.
Nurses themselves have taken the initiative in securing the means for
equipping women in their profession to meet the new requirements. They
are providing helpful literature and finding stimulating associations
with others enlisted in similar efforts for human welfare. I had the
honor to be elected first president of the National Organization for
Public Health Nursing. At the conference held in 1913 (less than a year
after the formation of the society) an assemblage of women gathered from
all parts of the country to seek guidance and inspiration for this work,
and something that was very like religious fervor characterized their
meetings.
The need of consecration to the sick and the young that has touched
generation after generation with new impulse was manifested in their
eagerness to serve the community. From the root of the old gospel another
branch has grown, a realization that the call to the nurse is not
only for the bedside care of the sick, but to help in seeking out the
deep-lying basic causes of illness and misery, that in the future there
may be less sickness to nurse and to cure.
A pleasant indication that the academic world reached out its fellowship
to the nurses in their zeal for public service was given some months
later when Mt. Holyoke College, at the commemoration of its seventy-fifth
anniversary, honored me by conferring on me the LL.D. degree.
CHAPTER IV
CHILDREN AND PLAY
The visitor who sees our neighborhood for the first time at the hour
when school is dismissed reacts with joy or dismay to the sight, not
paralleled in any part of the world, of thousands of little ones on a
single city block.
Out they pour, the little hyphenated Americans, more conscious of their
patriotism than perhaps any other large group of children that could
be found in our land; unaware that to some of us they carry on their
shoulders our hopes of a finer, more democratic America, when the worthy
things they bring to us shall be recognized, and the good in their
old-world traditions and culture shall be mingled with the best that lies
within our new-world ideals. Only through knowledge is one fortified
to resist the onslaught of arguments of the superficial observer who,
dismayed by the sight, is conscious only of “hordes” and “danger to
America” in these little children.
They are irresistible. They open up wide vistas of the many lands from
which they come. The multitude passes: swinging walk, lagging step;
smiling, serious—just little children, forever appealing, and these,
perhaps, more than others, stir the emotions. “Crime, ignorance, dirt,
anarchy!” Not theirs the fault if any of these be true, although
sometimes perfectly good children are spoiled, as Jacob Riis, that
buoyant lover of them, has said. As a nation we must rise or fall as we
serve or fail these future citizens.
[Illustration]
Their appeal suggests that social exclusions and prejudices separate far
more effectively than distance and differing language. They bring a hope
that a better relationship—even the great brotherhood—is not impossible,
and that through love and understanding we shall come to know the shame
of prejudice.
[Illustration]
Instinctively the sympathetic observer feels the possibilities of the
young life that passes before the settlement doors, and sincerity demands
that something shall be known of the conditions, economic, political,
religious, or, perchance, of the mere spirit of venture that brought
them here. How often have the conventionally educated been driven to
the library to obtain that historic perspective of the people who are
in our midst, without which they cannot be understood! What fascinating
excursions have been made into folklore in the effort to comprehend some
strange custom unexpectedly encountered!
When the anxious friends of the dying Italian brought a chicken to be
killed over him, the tenement-house bed became the sacrificial altar of
long ago; and when the old, rabbinical-looking grandfather took hairs
from the head of the sick child, a bit of his finger-nail, and a garment
that had been close to his body, and cast them into the river while he
devoutly prayed that the little life might be spared, he declared his
faith in the purification of running water.
[Illustration]
It is necessary to spend a summer in our neighborhood to realize fully
the conditions under which many thousands of children are reared. One
night during my first month on the East Side, sleepless because of the
heat, I leaned out of the window and looked down on Rivington Street.
Life was in full course there. Some of the push-cart venders still sold
their wares. Sitting on the curb directly under my window, with her
feet in the gutter, was a woman, drooping from exhaustion, a baby at her
breast. The fire-escapes, considered the most desirable sleeping-places,
were crowded with the youngest and the oldest; children were asleep on
the sidewalks, on the steps of the houses and in the empty push-carts;
some of the more venturesome men and women with mattress or pillow
staggered toward the riverfront or the parks. I looked at my watch. It
was two o’clock in the morning!
[Illustration]
Many times since that summer of 1893 have I seen similar sights, and
always I have been impressed with the kindness and patience, sometimes
the fortitude, of our neighbors, and I have marveled that out of
conditions distressing and nerve-destroying as these so many children
have emerged into fine manhood and womanhood, and often, because of their
early experiences, have become intelligent factors in promoting measures
to guard the next generation against conditions which they know to be
destructive.
Before I lived in the midst of this dense child population, and while
I was still in the hospital, I had been touched by glimpses of the
life revealed in the games played in the children’s ward. Up to that
time my knowledge of little ones had been limited to those to whom the
people in fairy tales were real, and whose games and stories reflected
the protective care of their elders. My own earliest recollections of
play had been of story-telling, of housekeeping with all the things in
miniature that grown-ups use, and of awed admiration of the big brother
who graciously permitted us to witness hair-raising performances in the
barn, to which we paid admittance in pins. The children in the hospital
ward who were able to be about, usually on crutches or with arms in
slings, played “Ambulance” and the “Gerry Society.” The latter game
dramatized their conception of the famous Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children as an ogre that would catch them. The ambulance
game was of a child, or a man at work, injured and carried away to the
hospital.
Many years’ familiarity with the children’s attempts to play in the
streets has not made me indifferent to its pathos, which is not the
less real because the children themselves are unconscious of it. In the
midst of the push-cart market, with its noise, confusion, and jostling,
the checker or crokinole board is precariously perched on the top of a
hydrant, constantly knocked over by the crowd and patiently replaced by
the little children. One tearful small boy described his morning when
he said he had done nothing but play, but first the “cop” had snatched
his dice, then his “cat” (a piece of wood sharpened at both ends), and
nobody wanted him to chalk on the sidewalk, and he had been arrested for
throwing a ball.
A man since risen to distinction in educational circles, whose childhood
was passed in our neighborhood, told me how he and his companions had
once taken a dressmaker’s lay figure. They had no money to spend on
the theater and no place to play in but a cellar. They had admired the
gaudy posters of a melodrama in which the hero rescues the lady and
carries her over a chasm. Having no lady in their cast, they borrowed
the dressmaker’s lay figure—without permission. Fortunately, and
accidentally, they escaped detection. It is not difficult to see how the
entire course of this boy’s career might have been altered if arrest had
followed, with its consequent humiliation and degradation. At least,
looking back upon it, the young man sees how the incident might have
deflected his life.
The instruction in folk-dancing which the children now receive in
the public schools and recreation centers has done much to develop a
wholesome and delightful form of exercise, and has given picturesqueness
to the dancing in the streets. But yesterday I found myself pausing on
East Houston Street to watch a group of children assemble at the sound of
a familiar dance from a hurdy-gurdy, and looking up I met the sympathetic
smile of a teamster who also had stopped. The children, absorbed in their
dance, were quite unconscious that congested traffic had halted and that
busy people had taken a moment from their engrossing problems to be
refreshed by the sight of their youth and grace. For that brief instant
even the cry of “War Extra” was unheeded.
* * * * *
Touching as are the little children deprived of opportunity for wholesome
play, a deeper compassion stirred our hearts when we began to realize
the critically tender age at which many of them share the experiences,
anxieties, and tragedies of the adult. I cannot efface from my memory
the picture of a little eight-year-old girl whom I once found standing
on a chair to reach a washtub, trying with her tiny hands to cleanse
some bed-linen which would have been a task for an older person. Every
few minutes the child got down from her chair to peer into the next room
where her mother and the new-born baby lay, all her little mind intent
upon giving relief and comfort. She had been alone with her mother when
the baby was born and terror was on her face.
I think the memory never left her, but it may be only that her presence
called up, even after the lapse of years, a vision of the anxious little
face inevitably contrasted in my mind with the picture of irresponsible
childhood.
At about the same time we made the acquaintance of the K⸺ family, through
nursing one of the children. The mother was a large-framed, phlegmatic,
seemingly emotionless type, although she did show appreciation of our
liking for her children. The father was only occasionally mentioned. We
assumed that he was away seeking work, a common explanation then of the
absence of the men of the families. One afternoon I stopped at their
house to make arrangements for the children’s trip to the country. Early
the next morning, awakened by a pounding on the door, I opened it to
find little Esther beside herself with excitement, repeating over and
over, “My mother she die! My mother she die!” Following fast, it was not
possible to keep pace with her. When, breathless, I entered their rooms
it was to see the mother’s body hanging from a doorway. She had been
brooding over a summons to testify in court that morning against her
husband, who had been arrested for bigamy, and this was her answer to the
court and to the other woman.
The frightened little children were scattered among different
institutions. From one of these Esther was sent West, to a home that was
found for her. Possibly she was so young that the terrible picture faded
from her mind. At least there was no mention of it in the first letter
which she wrote, announcing that her new home was a farm and that they
had “six cows, eighty chickens, eleven pigs, and a _nephew_.” The nephew
Esther eventually married.
In the first party of children that we sent to the country were three
little girls, daughters of a skilled cobbler. The mother, a complaining,
exacting invalid, spent a large proportion of her husband’s earnings for
patent medicines. Annie, not quite twelve, was the household drudge,
and the coming of the settlement nurse lifted only part of her burden.
The new friends, determined to get at least two weeks of care-free
childhood for the little girls, procured an invitation for them, through
a Fresh-Air agency, from a farmer in the western part of the state. It
was necessary to secure the mother’s admission to a hospital during the
time the children would be absent from home—not an easy task, as she was
not what is termed a “hospital case.” When we met the children at the
railroad station on their return, their joyousness and bubbling spirits
attracted the attention of the on-lookers; but as Annie neared home its
responsibilities fell like a heavy cloud upon her, and before we reached
the tenement she was silent. Her quick eye discerned the absence of the
brick which had kept the front hall door open, and in a second she had
darted into the yard and replaced it. Before we left, with sleeves rolled
up she was beginning to wash the pile of dishes that had accumulated
in her absence. Gone was the gayety. The little drudge had resumed her
place. Later, when the child swore falsely to her age, and the notary
public, upon whose certificate employment papers could at that time
be obtained, affixed his signature to her perjury, the position she
secured as cash girl in the basement of a department store was, to her,
emancipation from hateful labor and an opportunity for fellowship with
children.
* * * * *
Recalling early days, I am constantly reminded of the sympathy and
comprehension of those friends who, though not stimulated as my comrade
and I were by constant reminders of the children’s needs, from the
beginning promoted and often anticipated our efforts to provide innocent
recreation. We had not thought of the possibility of giving pleasure to
large groups of children in picnics and day parties, when a friend, a
few days after our arrival in the neighborhood, asked us to celebrate
his sister’s birthday by giving “fun” to some of our new acquaintances.
I yet remember the thrill I felt when I realized that this gift was not
for shoes or practical necessities, but for “just what children anywhere
would like.”
Two memories of this first party stand out sharply: the songs the
children sang,—“She’s More to be Pitied than Censured,” and “Judge,
Forgive Him, ’Tis His First Offense,”—painfully revealing a precocious
knowledge, and their ecstasy at the sight of a wonderful dogwood tree.
Now, when the settlement children go on day parties, they have another
repertory, and the music they learn in the public schools reflects the
finer thought for the child.
[Illustration]
During the two years that Miss Brewster and I lived in the Jefferson
Street house we frequently made up impromptu parties to visit the distant
parks, usually on Sunday afternoons when we were likely to be free. After
a while it was not difficult to secure comradeship for the children from
men and women of our acquaintance, and the parties were multiplied. In
the winter, rumors of “a fine hill all covered with snow” on Riverside
Drive would be a stimulus to secure a sled or improvise a toboggan, and
we found that, given opportunity and encouragement, the city tenement
boys threw themselves readily into venturesome sport.
[Illustration: AND THEIR ECSTASY AT THE SIGHT OF A WONDERFUL DOGWOOD
TREE]
Happily some of the early prejudice against ball-playing on Sunday has
vanished. We were perplexed in those days to explain to the lads why,
when they saw the ferries and trains convey golfers suitably attired
and expensively equipped for a day’s sport, their own games should
outrage respectable citizens and cause them to be constantly “chased”
by the police. The saloons could be entered, as everybody knew, and I
remember a father, defending his eight-year-old son from an accusation of
theft, instancing as proof of the child’s trustworthiness that “all the
Christians on Jackson Street sent him for their beer on Sundays.”
In our search for a place where the boys might play undisturbed, one of
the settlement residents, a never-failing friend of the young people,
invoked the Federal Government itself, and secured for them an unused
field on Governor’s Island.
Now, in summer time, many of the organized activities of the settlement
are removed from the neighborhood. Early in the season the “hikers” begin
their walks with club leaders. I felt a glow of happiness one Sunday
morning when I stood on the steps of our house and watched six different
groups of boys set off for the country, with ball and bat and sandwiches,
each group led by a young man who had himself been a member of our early
parties and had been first introduced to trees and open spaces, and the
more active forms of healthful play by his settlement friends.
[Illustration]
The woeful lack of imagination displayed in building a city without
recognizing the need of its citizens for recreation through play, music,
and art, has been borne in upon us many times. New Yorkers need to be
reminded that the Metropolitan Museum of Art was effectually closed to
a large proportion of the citizens until, on May 31, 1891, it opened
its doors on Sundays. It is interesting to recall that of the 80,000
signatures to the petition for this privilege, 50,000 were of residents
of the lower East Side and were presented by the “Working People’s
Petition Committee.” The report of the Museum trustees following the
Sunday opening notes that after a little disorder and confusion at
the start the experiment proved a success; that the attendance was
“respectable, law-abiding, and intelligent,” and that “the laboring
classes were well represented.” They were also obliged to report,
however, that the Sunday opening had “offended some of the Museum’s best
friends and supporters,” and that it had “resulted in the loss of a
bequest of $50,000.”
* * * * *
When we left the tenement house we were fortunate to find for sale, on
a street that still bore evidences of its bygone social glory, a house
which readily lent itself to the restorer’s touch. Tradition says that
many of these fine old East Side houses were built by cabinetmakers
who came over from England during the War of 1812 and remained here as
citizens. The generous purchaser allowed us freedom to repair, restore,
and alter, as our taste directed. Attractive as we found the house, we
were even more excited over the possibilities of the little back yard.
Our first organized effort for the neighborhood was to convert this
yard and one belonging to an adjacent school, with, later, the yard of
a third house rented by one of our residents, into a miniature but very
complete playground. There was so little precedent to guide us that our
resourcefulness was stimulated, and we succeeded in achieving what the
President of the National Playground Association has called the “Bunker
Hill” of playgrounds.
Along the borders we planted bright-colored flowers—which were not
disturbed by the children. An old wistaria vine on a trellis covered
nearly a third of the playground, and two ailanthus trees, usually
regarded with contempt by tree lovers, were highly cherished by those who
otherwise would have lived a treeless life. Window-boxes jutted from the
rear windows of the two houses controlled by the settlement, and in one
corner, shaded by a striped awning, we put the big sand-pile. Joy-giving
“scups” (the local name for swings) were erected, and some suitable
gymnastic apparatus, parallel bars and overhead ladder placed. Baby
hammocks were swung, their occupants tenderly cared for by little mothers
and little fathers. Manual training was provided by a picturesque sailor
from Sailors’ Snug Harbor, who, at a stretching frame, taught the making
of hammocks.
In the morning under the pergola an informal kindergarten was conducted,
and in the afternoon attendants directed play and taught the use of
gymnastic apparatus. Later in the day the mothers and older children
came, and a little hurdy-gurdy occasionally marked the rhythm of the
dance. So interested in the playground were the household and their
visitors that at odd moments an enthusiast would rush in from other
duties and give the hurdy-gurdy an extra turn, to supplement the
entertainment. At night the baby hammocks and chairs were stored away and
Japanese lanterns illuminated the playground, which then welcomed the
young people who, after their day’s work, took pleasure in each other’s
society and in singing familiar songs.
[Illustration: IT HAS BEEN CALLED THE “BUNKER HILL” OF PLAYGROUNDS]
[Illustration: THE CHILDREN PLAY ON OUR ROOF]
On Saturday afternoons the playground was used almost exclusively by
fathers and mothers, but it was a pretty sight at all times, and the
value placed upon it by those who used it was far in excess of our own
estimate. It was something more than amusement that moved us when a young
couple, who had been invited to one of the evening parties, stood at the
back door of the settlement house and gazed admiringly at the little
pleasure place. Gowned in white, we awaited our guests, and as I rose
from the bench under the pergola to cross the yard and give them welcome,
the young printer said with enthusiasm, “This must be like the scenes of
country life in English novels.”
It was a heaven of delight to the children, and ingenuity was displayed
by those who sought admittance. The children soon learned that “little
mothers” and their charges had precedence, and there was rivalry as to
who should hold the family baby. When (as rarely happened) there was
none in the family, a baby was borrowed. Six-year-olds, clasping babies
of stature almost equal to their own, would stand outside, hoping to
attract attention to their special claims. Once, when the playground was
filled to capacity, and the sidewalk in front of the house was thronged,
the Olympian at the gate endeavored to make it clear that no more could
enter. One persistent small girl stood stolidly and when reminded of the
condition said, “Yes, teacher, but can’t I get in? I ain’t got no mother.”
There was much illness, unemployment, and consequent suffering the
next winter. One day, when I visited a school in the neighborhood, the
principal asked the pupils if they knew me. She doubtless anticipated
some reference to the material services which the settlement had
rendered, but the answer to her question was a glad chorus of, “Yes,
ma’am, yes, ma’am, she’s our scupping teacher.” “Teacher” was a generic
term for the residents, and nothing that the settlement had contributed
to the life of the neighborhood impressed the children as had the
playground. It is worth reminding those who are associated with young
people that the power to influence is given to those who play with,
rather than to those who only teach, them. Our children on the East Side
are not peculiar in this respect. To this day I receive letters from men
and women who try to recall themselves to my memory by saying that they
once played in our back yard.
[Illustration]
An organized propaganda for outdoor gymnasia and playgrounds crystallized
in 1898 in the formation of the Outdoor Recreation League, in which the
settlement participated. The tireless president of the League eventually
succeeded in obtaining the use of a large space in our neighborhood,
originally purchased by the city, during a brief reform administration,
for a park. Some very undesirable tenement houses had been destroyed,
and when a Tammany administration returned to power a hot summer was
allowed to pass with nothing done to accomplish the original purpose.
Unsightly holes, once cellars, remained to fill with stagnant water,
amputated sewer- and gas-pipes were exposed, and among these the children
played mimic battles of the Spanish-American War, then in progress.
The accident that the Commissioner of Health, a semi-invalid, felt
gratitude to a trained nurse who had cared for him, gave me an
opportunity to approach him on the subject. He promised (and he kept his
promise) to use his influence to get an appropriation on the score of
the menace to the health of the city. The appropriation was sufficient
to fill in the space and surround it with a fence, and the Outdoor
Recreation League was able to demonstrate the value of playgrounds.
In 1902 the Board of Estimate and Apportionment of Mayor Seth Low’s
reform administration, at its first meeting, appropriated money for the
equipment and maintenance of Seward Park, as it was named,—the first
municipal playground in New York City. So much interest had been aroused
in this phase of city government that two city officials left the board
meeting while it was in progress to telephone to the settlement that the
appropriation had been passed.
Many friends of the children combined to urge the use of the public
schools as recreation centers, and in the summer of 1898 the first
schools were opened for that purpose. Those of us who had practical
experience helped to start these by acting as volunteer inspectors.
The settlement then felt justified in devoting less effort to its own
playground, and deflected some of the energies it required to meet other
pressing needs.
* * * * *
It is a delight to give the children stories from the Bible and the old
mythologies, fairy tales, and lives of heroes, and we mark as epochal
Maude Adams’s inspiration to invite our children and others not likely to
have the opportunity to see Peter Pan. She has given joy to thousands,
but it is doubtful if she can measure, as we do, the influence of “the
everlasting boy.” Through him romance has touched these children, and not
a few of the letters spontaneously written to Peter Pan from tenement
homes have seemed to us not unworthy of Barrie himself. Protest against
leaving the big, familiar farmhouse at one of our country places, when
an overflow of visitors necessitated a division of the little ones at
night, was immediately withdrawn when the children were told that the
annex, perched on high ground, was a “Wendy House.”
[Illustration]
The need of care for convalescents was early recognized, and the
settlement’s first country house was for them. It was opened in 1899,
and its maintenance is the generous gift of a young woman, a member of
the early group that gathered in the Henry Street house. We soon felt,
however, that it was essential that children and young people as well as
invalids should have knowledge of life other than that of the crowded
tenement and factory; and from the time of the establishment of our first
kindergarten we longed to have the children know the reality of the
things they sang about, the birds and animals which so often formed the
subject of their games. A little girl in one of the parties taken to see
Peter Pan turned to her beloved club leader when the crocodile appeared
and asked timidly if it was a _field-mouse_! A recent lesson had been
about that “animal.” It seems almost incredible that the description,
probably supplemented by a picture, should not have made a more definite
impression upon the child’s mind; but I am inclined to think that little
children can form no accurate conception of unknown objects from pictures
or description. A neighborhood teacher took her class to the menagerie
in Central Park just after a lesson on the cow and its “gifts”—milk,
cream, butter. She hoped that the young buffalo’s resemblance to the cow
might suggest itself to the children who, of course, had never seen a
cow. In answer to her question an eager little boy gave testimony to the
impression the lesson had made on his mind when he answered, “Yes, ma’am.
I know it. It’s a _butterfly_.”
[Illustration]
We value the “day parties” for incidental education as well as for the
pleasure they afford. Each year as spring approaches a census is taken
of the surrounding blocks, that the new arrivals may be included in the
excursions. The most treasured invitations for these parties come from
friends whose country estates are near enough to offer hospitality,
and to whose gardens and stables the children are taken. The larger
parties, composed of women and children, usually go to the seashore in
chartered cars, and these excursions, purely recreative, compete, and not
unsuccessfully, with the clam-bakes and outings of the old-time political
leaders.
[Illustration: THE KINDERGARTEN CHILDREN LEARN THE REALITY OF THE THINGS
THEY SING ABOUT]
The beautiful country places presented to the settlement for vacation
purposes, and the comparative readiness with which money for equipment
and maintenance for non-paying guests has been given, indicates the
favor with which this development of neighborhood work is regarded.
Opportunities for confidence and mutual understanding, not always
possible in the formal relationships of clubs and classes, are afforded
by the intimacy of country-house parties. The possibility of giving
direction at critical periods of character-formation, particularly
during adolescence, and of discovering clews to deep-lying causes of
disturbance, makes the country life a valuable extension of the organized
social work of the settlement. “Riverholm,” overhanging the Hudson; “Camp
Henry,” on a beautiful lake; the “House in the Woods,” “Echo Hill Farm,”
and a commodious house in New Jersey, lent by friends during the summer
months, give us the means whereby some of the plans we cherish may be
carried out.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: “House in the Woods.”]
It would be inconsistent with settlement theories if these country
places did not express refinement and beauty,—the beauty that belongs
to simplicity,—not only in the buildings, but also in the service and
housekeeping. It has seemed to us, therefore, worth the additional
expenditure of effort to have small, distinct household units wherever
practicable. People who live in crowded homes, walk on crowded streets,
ride on crowded cars, and as children attend crowded classrooms,
must inevitably acquire distorted views of life; and the settlement
is reluctant to add to these the experience of crowded country life.
Valuable training in housekeeping is possible in a household even of
from fifteen to twenty-five persons,—a small unit according to New York
standards,—and tactful direction can often be given toward acquiring
those manners generally recognized as “good.” Many of the children who
come to us know only foreign customs and foreign table-manners; and the
extreme difficulty of maintaining orderly home life in the tenement
makes it important to supplement the home-training or to supply what
it can never give. Indeed, we recognize in this desire to protect our
children from being marked as peculiar or alien because of non-essential
differences the same reason that urges the careful mother to insist on
“manners,” that her children may not be discredited when they mingle with
the fastidious.
[Illustration]
The ideal of limitation as to numbers cannot always be carried out,
and naturally it does not apply to the camp, where a freer and less
conventional life attracts and satisfies boys and young men.
The older members of the settlement, who are earning money, use the camp
and country places as clubs, paying for the privilege and conforming to
the regulations which they have had a share in establishing.
[Illustration]
Those who have promoted the various Fresh-Air agencies throughout the
country may not realize that physical benefit is not all that has been
secured. We are persuaded that opportunity to know life away from the
city is in part the explanation of the increasing number of city boys
who elect training in agriculture and forestry. Formerly, when careers
were discussed, the future held no happiness unless it promised a
profession—law or medicine.
If I appear to lay too much stress upon the importance of play and
recreation, it may be well to point out that it is one way of recognizing
the dignity of the child. The study of juvenile delinquency shows how
often the young offender’s presence in the courts may be traced to a
play-impulse for which there was no safe outlet.
Perhaps nothing more definitely indicates the changed attitude toward
children and play than the fact that last summer (1914) the police
officers of the precinct called to enlist our co-operation in carrying
out the orders of the city administration that during certain hours of
the day traffic was to be shut off from designated streets, that the
children might play there. The visit brought to mind years of painstaking
effort to secure the toleration of harmless play, and the hope we
had dared to express, despite incredulity on the part of the police,
that some day the children might come to regard them as guardians and
protectors, rather than as a fear-inspiring and hated force. One captain
of the precinct, at least, had proved the practicability of our theory,
and when he was transferred we lost a valuable co-worker. The Governor
of New York, campaigning for re-election in the fall of this year (1914),
advocated that public schools should be surrounded by playgrounds at “no
matter what cost.”
Tremendous impetus has been given to the playground movement throughout
the entire country by individuals and societies organized for the
purpose. Wise men and women have expounded the social philosophy of play
and recreation, pointing out that these may afford wholesome expression
for energies which might otherwise be diverted into channels disastrous
to peace and happiness; that clean sport and stimulating competition
can replace the gang feud and even modify racial antagonisms. The most
satisfactory evidence of this conviction is, of course, the recognition
of the child’s right to play, as an integral part of his claim upon the
state.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER V
EDUCATION AND THE CHILD
Perhaps nothing makes a profounder impression on the newcomer to our
end of the city than the value placed by the Jew upon education; an
overvaluation, one is tempted to think, in view of the sacrifices which
are made, particularly for the boys,—though of late years the girls’
claims have penetrated even to the Oriental home.
One afternoon a group of old-world women sat in the reception-room at the
settlement while one of the residents sang and played negro melodies.
With the melancholy minor of “Let My People Go,” the women began
crooning a song that told the story of Cain and Abel. The melody was not
identical, but so similar that they thought they recognized the song as
their own; and when a discussion arose upon the coincidence that two
persecuted peoples should claim this melody, the women, touched by the
music, confessed their homesick longing for Russia—for Russia that had
dealt so unkindly with them.
“Rather a stone for a pillow in my own home,” said one woman on whom
life had pressed hard. “Would you go back?” she was asked. “Oh, no, no,
no!” emphasizing the words by a swaying of the body and a shaking of the
head. “It is not poverty we fear. It is not money we are seeking here. We
do not expect things for ourselves. It is the chance for the children,
education and freedom for them.”
[Illustration]
The passion of the Russian Jews for intellectual attainment recalls the
spirit of the early New England families and their willingness to forego
every comfort that a son might be set apart for the ministry. Here we are
often witnesses of long-continued deprivation on the part of every member
of the family, a willingness to deny themselves everything but the barest
necessities of life, that there may be a doctor, a lawyer, or a teacher
among them. Submission to bad housing, excessive hours, and poor working
conditions is defended as of “no matter because the children will have
better and can go to school—maybe college.” Said a baker who showed the
ill-effects of basement and night work and whose three rooms housed a
family of ten: “My boy is already in the high school. If I can’t keep on,
the Herr Gott will take it up where I leave off.”
A painful instance was that of a woman who came to the settlement one
evening. Her son was studying music under one of the most famous masters
in Vienna, and she had exiled herself to New York in order to earn more
money for him than she could possibly earn at home. Literally, as I
afterwards discovered, she spent nothing upon herself. A tenement family
gave her lodging (a bed on chairs) and food, in return for scrubbing done
after her day’s work in the necktie factory. The Viennese master, not
knowing his pupil’s circumstances, or, it is possible, not caring, had
written that the young man needed to give a concert, an additional demand
which it was utterly impossible for her to meet. She had already given up
her home, she had relinquished her wardrobe, and she had sold her grave
for him.
One young lad stands out among the many who came to talk over their
desire to go through college. He dreamed of being great and, this period
of hardship over, of placing his family in comfort. I felt it right to
emphasize his obligation to the family; the father was dead, the mother
burdened with anxiety for the numerous children. How reluctant I was to
do this he could not realize; only fourteen, he had impressed us with
his fine courage and intelligence, and it was hard to resist the young
pleader and to analyze with him the common-place sordid facts. He had
planned to work all summer, to work at night, and he was hardly going to
eat at all. But his young mind grasped, almost before I had finished, the
ethical importance of meeting his nearest duties. He has met the family
claims with generosity, and has realized all our expectations for him by
acquiring through his own efforts education and culture; and he evinces
an unusual sense of civic responsibility.
[Illustration]
Those who have had for many years continuous acquaintance with the
neighborhood have countless occasions to rejoice at the good use made of
the education so ardently desired, and achieved in spite of what have
seemed overwhelming odds. New York City is richer for the contributions
made to its civic and educational life by the young people who grew up in
and with the settlements, and who are not infrequently ready crusaders
in social causes. A country gentleman one day lamented to me that he had
failed to keep in touch with what he was pleased to call our humanitarian
zeal, and recalled his own early attempt to take an East Side boy to his
estate and employ him. “He could not even learn to harness a horse!”
he said, with implied contempt of such unfathomable inefficiency.
Something he said of the lad’s characteristics made it possible for me to
identify him, and I was able to add to that unsatisfactory first chapter
another, which told of the boy’s continuance in school, of his success
as a teacher in one of the higher institutions of learning, and of his
remarkable intelligence in certain vexed industrial problems.
Such achievements are the more remarkable because the restricted tenement
home, where the family life goes on in two or three rooms, affords little
opportunity for reading or study. A vivid picture of its limitations was
presented by the boy who sought a quiet corner in a busy settlement. “I
can never study at home,” he said, “because sister is always using the
table to wash the dishes.”
Study-rooms were opened in the settlement in 1907, where the boys
and girls find, not only a quiet, restful place in which to do their
work, but also the needed “coaching.” The school work is supplemented
by illuminating bulletins on current topics, and the young student is
provided with the aid which in other conditions is given by parents
or older brothers and sisters. Such study-rooms are now maintained by
the Board of Education in numerous schools of the city,—“Thanks to the
example set by the settlement,” the superintendent of the New York school
system reported.
The settlement children are given instruction in the selection of
books before they are old enough to take out their cards in the public
libraries. Once a week, on Friday afternoon, when there are no lessons to
be prepared, our study-room is reserved for these smallest readers. The
books are selected with reference to their tastes and attainments, and
fairy tales are on the shelves in great numbers. Of course, no settlement
could entirely satisfy the insatiable desire for these.
One day when the room was being used for study purposes a wee neighbor
sauntered in and said to the custodian, “Please, I’d like a fairy tale.”
Although reminded that these books were not given out excepting on the
special day, the child lingered. She saw a boy’s request for “The Life
of Alexander Hamilton” and a girl’s wish for “The Life of Joan of Arc”
complied with. Evidently there was a way to get one’s heart’s desire.
The child went out, reappeared in a few moments, and with an air of
confidence again addressed the librarian, this time with, “_Please, I’d
like the life of a giant_.”
[Illustration]
It is easy to excite sympathy in our neighborhood for people deprived of
books and learning. One year I accompanied a party of Northern people
to the Southern Educational Conference. We were all much stirred by the
appeal of an itinerant Southern minister who told how the poor white
natives traveled miles over the mountains to hear books read. He pictured
vividly the deprivation of his neighbors, who had no access to libraries
of any kind. When I returned to the settlement and related the story to
the young people in the clubs, without suggestion on my part they eagerly
voted to send the minister books to form a library; and for two years or
more, until the Southerner wrote that he had sufficient for his purpose,
the clubs purchased from their several funds one book each month,
suited to different ages and tastes, according to their own excellent
discrimination.
* * * * *
The first public school established in New York City (Number 1) is
on Henry Street. Number 2 is a short distance from it, on the same
street, and Number 147 is at our corner. Between their sites are several
semi-public and private educational institutions, and from School No. 1
to School No. 147 the distance is not more than three-quarters of a mile.
It is not unnatural, therefore, that the school should loom large in
our consciousness of the life of the child. The settlement at no time
would, even if it could, usurp the place of school or home. It seeks to
work with both or to supplement either. The fact that it is flexible
and is not committed to any fixed programme gives opportunity for
experimentation not possible in a rigid system, and the results of these
experiments must have affected school methods, at least in New York City.
[Illustration]
Intelligent social workers seize opportunities for observation, and
almost unconsciously develop methods to meet needs. They see conditions
as they are, and become critical of systems as they act and react upon
the child or fail to reach him at all. They reverse the method of the
school teacher, who approaches the child with preconceived theories and a
determination to work them out. Where the school fails, it appears to the
social workers to do so because it makes education a thing apart,—because
it separates its work from all that makes up the child’s life outside the
classroom. Great emphasis is now laid upon the oversight of the physical
condition of children from the time of their birth through school life;
but the suggestion of this extension of socialized parental control did
not emanate from those within the school system.
[Illustration]
Cooking has been taught in the public schools for many years, and
the instruction is of great value to those who are admitted to the
classes; but appropriations have never been sufficient to meet all the
requirements, and the teaching is given in grades already depleted by
the girls who have gone to work, and who will perhaps never again have
leisure or inclination to learn how to prepare meals for husband and
children,—the most important business in life for most women.
The laboratory method employed in the schools never seemed to us
sufficiently related to the home conditions of vast numbers of the city’s
population; and, therefore, when the settlement undertook, according to
its theory, to supplement the girls’ education, all the essentials of our
own housekeeping—stove, refrigerator, bedrooms, and so on—were utilized.
But neither were single bedrooms and rooms set apart for distinct
purposes entirely satisfactory in teaching domestic procedure to the
average neighbor; and the leader finally developed out of her knowledge
of their home conditions the admirable system of “Housekeeping Centers”
now sustained and administered by a committee of men and women on which
the settlement has representation.
A flat was rented in a typical Henry Street tenement. Intelligence and
taste were exercised in equipping it inexpensively and with furniture
that required the least possible labor to keep it free from dirt and
vermin. Classes were formed to teach housekeeping in its every detail,
using nothing which the people themselves could not procure,—a tiny
bathroom, a gas stove, no “model” tubs, but such as the landlord provided
for washing. Cleaning, disinfecting, actual purchasing of supplies in
the shops of the neighborhood, household accounts, nursing, all the
elements of homekeeping, were systematically taught. The first winter
that the center was opened the entire membership of a class consisted of
girls engaged to be married,—clerks, stenographers, teachers; none were
prepared and all were eager to have the homes which they were about to
establish better organized and more intelligently conducted than those
from which they had come. When one young woman announced her betrothal,
she added, “And I am fully prepared because I have been through the
Housekeeping Center.”
Other centers have been established by the committee in different parts
of the city. Dr. Maxwell, Superintendent of Schools, always sympathetic
and ready to fit instruction to the pupils’ needs, has encouraged the
identification of these housekeeping centers with the schools. Whenever
an enterprising principal desires it, the teachers of the nearby
housekeeping center are made a part of the school system. Perhaps we may
some day see one attached to every public school; and I am inclined to
believe that, when institutions of higher learning fully realize that
education is preparation for life, they too will wonder if the young
women graduates of their colleges should not, like our little girl
neighbors, be fitted to meet their great home-making responsibilities.
Out of the experience of the originator of the housekeeping centers
“Penny Lunches” for the public schools have been inaugurated, and provide
a hot noonday meal for children. The committee now controlling this
experiment has inquired into food values, physical effects on children,
relation to school attendance, and so on.
The schools in a great city have an additional responsibility, as many
of the pupils are deprived of home training because of extreme poverty
or the absence of the mother at work, and a measure of failure may be
traced to an imperfect realization of the conditions under which pupils
live, or to a lack of training on the part of some of the teachers. The
Home-and-School Visitor, whose duties are indicated in her title, is
charged to bring the two together, that each may help the other; but
there are few visitors as yet, and the effect upon the great number of
pupils in attendance (over 800,000 in New York) is obviously limited.
We are not always mindful of the fact that children in normal homes get
education apart from formal lessons and instruction. Sitting down to
a table at definite hours, to eat food properly served, is training,
and so is the orderly organization of the home, of which the child so
soon becomes a conscious part. There is direction toward control in the
provision for privacy, beginning with the sequestered nursery life.
The exchange of letters, which begins with most children at a very
early age, the conversation of their elders, familiarity with telegrams
and telephones, and with the incidents of travel, stimulate their
intelligence, resourcefulness, and self-reliance.
[Illustration]
Contrast this regulated domestic life with the experience of children—a
large number in New York—who may never have been seated around a table in
an orderly manner, at a given time, for a family meal. Where the family
is large and the rooms small, and those employed return at irregular
hours, its members must be fed at different times. It is not uncommon in
a neighborhood such as ours to see the mother lean out of the fourth-
or fifth-story window and throw down the bread-and-butter luncheon to
the little child waiting on the sidewalk below—sometimes to save him the
exertion of climbing the stairs, sometimes because of insufficient time.
The children whose mothers work all day and who are locked out during
their absence are expected to shift for themselves, and may as often
be given too much as too little money to appease their hunger. Having
no more discretion in the choice of food than other children of their
age, they become an easy prey for the peddlers of unwholesome foods and
candies (often with gambling devices attached) who prowl outside the
school limits.
[Illustration]
Even those students who are better placed economically, or who have the
perseverance to go on into the higher schools, may have had no experience
but that of a disorganized tenement home. Emil was an instance of this.
He supported himself while attending school by teaching immigrants
at night. We invited him to a party at one of our country places and
instructed him to call in the morning for his railroad ticket. He failed
to appear until long after the appointed hour, not realizing that trains
leave on schedule time. Apparently he had never consulted a time-table
or taken a journey except with a fresh-air party conducted by someone
else. Next morning he returned the ticket, and I learned that he had not
reached the farm because he did not know the way to it from the station.
Somewhat disconcerted to learn that he had taken fruitlessly a trip of
something over an hour’s duration, I asked why he had not telephoned
to the farm for directions. This seventeen-year-old boy, in his third
year in the high school, had not thought of a telephone in the country.
Moreover, he had never used one anywhere.
Happily, there is a growing realization among educators of the necessity
of relating the school more closely to the children’s future, and it is
not an accident that one of the widely known authorities on vocational
guidance has had long experience in settlements.[4]
* * * * *
A friend has recently given to me the letters which I wrote regularly to
her family during the first two years of my life on the East Side. I had
almost forgotten, until these letters recalled it to me, how often Miss
Brewster and I mourned over the boys and girls who were not in school,
and over those who had already gone to work without any education. Almost
everyone has had knowledge at some time of the chagrin felt by people who
cannot read or write. One intelligent woman of my acquaintance, born in
New York State, ingeniously succeeded for many years in keeping the fact
of her illiteracy secret from the people with whom she lived on terms of
intimacy, buying the newspaper daily and making a pretense of reading it.
We had naïvely assumed that elementary education was given to all, and
were appalled to find entire families unable to read or write, even
though some of the children had been born in America. The letters remind
me, too, of the efforts we made to get the children we encountered into
school,—day school or night school, public or private,—and how many
different people reacted to our appeals. The Department of Health, to
facilitate our efforts, supplied us with virus points and authority to
vaccinate, since no unvaccinated child could be admitted to school. We
gave such publicity as was in our power to the conditions we found, not
disdaining to stir emotionally by our “stories” when dry and impersonal
statistics failed to impress.
Since those days, New York City has established a school census and has
almost perfected a policy whereby all children are brought into school;
but throughout the state there are communities where the compulsory
education law is disregarded. The Federal Census of 1910 shows in this
Empire State, in the counties (Franklin and Clinton) inhabited by the
native-born, illiteracy far in excess of that in the counties where the
foreign-born congregate.
Wonderful advance has been made within two decades in the conception of
municipal responsibility for giving schooling to all children. Now the
blind, the deaf, the cripples, and the mentally defective are included
among those who have the right to education. When in 1893 I climbed the
stairs in a Monroe Street tenement in answer to a call to a sick child, I
found Annie F⸺ lying on a tumbled bed, rigid in the braces which encased
her from head to feet. All about her white goods were being manufactured,
and five machines were whirring in the room. She had been dismissed from
the hospital as incurable, and her mother carried her at intervals to an
uptown orthopedic dispensary. A pitiful, emaciated little creature! The
sweatshop was transfigured for Annie when we put pretty white curtains
at the window upon which she gazed, hung up a bird-cage, and placed a
window-box full of growing plants for her to look at during the long
days. Then, realizing that she might live many years and would need, even
more than other children, the joys that come from books, we found a young
woman who was willing to go to her bedside and teach her.
Nowadays children crippled as Annie was may be taken to school daily,
under the supervision of a qualified nurse, in a van that calls for them
and brings them home. One of these schools, established by intelligent
philanthropists, is on Henry Street; the instructors are engaged and
paid by the Department of Education. There are also classes in different
sections of the city equipped for the special needs of cripples, to give
them industrial training which will provide for their future happiness
and economic independence.
CHAPTER VI
THE HANDICAPPED CHILD
Educators have only recently realized the existence of large numbers
of pupils within the schools who are unequal to the routine class-work
because of mental defects. It was one of our settlement residents, a
teacher in a Henry Street school, who first startled us into serious
consideration of these children. In the year 1899 she brought to us from
time to time reports of a colleague, Elizabeth Farrell, whose attention
was fixed upon the “poor things” unable to keep up with the grade. She
had, our resident declared, “ideas” about them. We sought acquaintance
with her, and we felt it a privilege to learn to know the noble
enthusiasm of this young woman for those pupils who, to teachers, must
always seem the least hopeful.
The Board of Education permitted her to form the first class for ungraded
pupils, in School Number 1, in 1900, and the settlement gladly helped
develop her theory of separate classes and special instruction for the
defectives, not alone for their sakes, but to relieve the normal classes
which their presence retarded. We provided equipment not yet on the
School Board’s requisition list, obtained permission for her to attend
children’s clinics, secured treatment for the children, and, finally, and
not least important, made every effort to interest members of the School
Board and the public generally in this class of children.
[Illustration]
The plan included the provision of a luncheon. For this we purchased
tables, paper napkins, and dishes. The children brought from home bread
and butter, and a penny for a glass of milk, and an alert principal made
practical the cooking lessons given to the older girls in the school by
having them prepare the main dish of the pupils’ luncheon—incidentally
the first to be provided in the grade schools. Occasionally the approval
of the families would be expressed in extra donations, and in the
beginning this sometimes took the form of a bottle of beer. Every day
one pupil was permitted to invite an adult member of his family to the
luncheon, which led naturally to an exchange of visits between members of
the family and the teacher.
Among the pupils in this first class was Tony, a Neapolitan, impossible
in the grade class because of emotional outbursts called “bad temper,”
and an incorrigible truant. When defects of vision were corrected the
outbursts became less frequent, and manual work disclosed a latent power
of application and stimulated a willingness to attend school. Tony is now
a bricklayer, a member of the union in good standing, and last spring he
and his father bought a house in Brooklyn.
[Illustration]
Another was Katie. Spinal meningitis when she was very young had left
her with imperfect mental powers. Careful examination disclosed impaired
control, particularly of the groups of smaller muscles. She has never
learned to read, but has developed skill in clay-modeling, and sews and
embroiders very well. She makes her clothes and is a cheerful helper
to her mother in the work about the house. Last Christmas she sent to
the school warm undergarments which she had made, to be given to the
children who needed them. Her intelligent father feels that but for the
discriminating instruction in the ungraded class her powers would have
progressively deteriorated and Katie “would be in darkness.”
The teacher who thus first fixed our attention upon these defective
children has long been a member of the settlement family. She has carried
us with her in her zeal for them, and we have come to see that it is
because the public conscience has been sluggish that means and methods
have not been more speedily devised toward an intelligent solution of
this serious social problem.
From the small beginnings of the experimental class in Henry Street a
separate department in the public schools was created in 1908, and this
year (1915) there are 3,000 children throughout the city under the care
of specially trained teachers who have liberty to adapt the school work
to the children’s peculiar needs. All these ungraded classes are under
the direction of Miss Farrell.
Looking back upon the struggles to win formal recognition of the
existence of these children, who now so much engage the attention of
educators and scientists, we realize that our colleague’s devotion to
them, her power to excite enthusiasm in us, and her understanding of the
social implications of their existence, came from a deep-lying principle
that every human being, even the least lovely, merits respectful
consideration of his rights and his personality.
Much is required of the public school teachers, and many of them rise to
every demand; but naturally, in so great a number, there are some who
do not recognize that theirs is the responsibility for discovering the
children who are not normal. Harry sits on our doorsteps almost every
day, ready to run errands, and harmless as yet. Obviously defective, a
“pronounced moron,” he was promoted from class to class, and when one of
his settlement friends called upon the teacher to discuss Harry’s special
needs, the teacher, somewhat contemptuous of our anxiety, observed that
“all that Harry needed was a whipping.”
From one-half of one per cent. to two per cent. of children of school
age are, it is estimated, in need of special instruction because of the
quality or the imperfect functioning of their mental powers. The public
school has the power, and should exercise it, to bring within its walls
all the children physically and mentally competent to attend it. If
children are under intelligent observation, departures from the normal
can in many instances be recognized in time for training and education
according to the particular need. Long-continued observation and record
of the child are essential to intelligent treatment of abnormalities
concerning which there is even now very little accurate information.
Cumulative experience and data, such as can be obtained only through the
compulsory attendance at school of the multitudes of children of this
type, will finally give a basis for scientific and humanitarian action
regarding them.
[Illustration]
Up to a certain period the child’s helplessness demands that every
opportunity for development be given him, but that is not the whole of
society’s responsibility. The time comes when the child’s own interests
and those of the community demand the wisest, least selfish, and most
statesmanlike action. Society must state in definite terms its right
to be protected from the hopelessly defective and the moral pervert,
wherever found. This constitutes the real problem of the abnormal. At the
adolescent period those unfit for parenthood should be guarded—girls and
boys—and society should be vested with authority and power to accomplish
segregation, the conditions of which should attract and not repel.
Because so much needs to be said upon it, if anything is said at all, I
am loath to touch upon the one great obstacle to the effective use of
all the intelligence and the resources available for the well-being of
these children, the most baffling impediment to their and the community’s
protection, namely, the supreme authority of parenthood, be it never so
inefficient, avaricious, or even immoral.
* * * * *
The breaking up of the family because of poverty, through the death or
disappearance of the wage-earner, was, until comparatively recent years,
generally accepted as inevitable.
In the first winter of our residence on the East Side we took care of
Mr. S⸺, who was in an advanced stage of phthisis; and we daily admired
the wonderful ability of his wife, who kept the home dignified while she
sewed on wrappers, nursed her husband, and allowed nothing to interfere
with the children’s daily attendance at school. When her husband died
it seemed the most natural thing in the world to help her to realize
her own wishes and to approve her good judgment in desiring to keep
the family together. The orphan asylum would doubtless have taken the
children from her, leaving her childless as well as widowed, and with no
counterbalancing advantage for the children to lighten her double woe.
A large-minded lover of children, who gave his money to orphans as well
as to orphanages, readily agreed to give the mother a monthly allowance
until the eldest son could legally go to work. It was our first “widow’s
pension.”
Our hopes in this particular case have been more than realized. The
eldest boy, it is true, has not achieved any notable place in the
community; but his sisters are teachers and most desirable elements in
the public school system of the city,—living testimony to the worth of
the mother’s character.
In no instance where we have prevented the disintegration of the family
because of poverty have we had reason to regret our decision. Of course,
the ability of the mother to maintain a standard in the home and control
the children is a necessary qualification in any general recommendation
for this treatment of the widow and orphan, and competent supervision is
essential to insure the maintenance of these conditions.
[Illustration]
At the famous White House Conference on Children, held at the invitation
of President Roosevelt, there was practical unanimity on the part of the
experts who gathered there that institutional life was undesirable and
that wherever possible family life should be maintained. Testimony as to
this came from many sources; and keeping the family together, or boarding
the orphan with a normal family when adoption could not be arranged,
became the dominant note of the conference.
The children, in this as in many other instances, led us into searching
thought many years ago. Forlorn little Joseph had called upon me with a
crumpled note which he reluctantly dragged from a pocket. It was from
the admitting agent of an orphanage, explaining that Joseph could not
be taken into the institution until his head was “cured”; and it gave
some details regarding the family, the worthiness of the mother, and
her exceeding poverty. The agent hoped that I might relieve her by
expediting Joseph’s admission.
I tried to make the child’s daily visit to me interesting. The treatment
was not painful, but the end of each visit—he came with patient
regularity every day—left me as dolorous as himself. One day I tried,
by promise of a present or of any treat he fancied, to bring out some
expression of youthful spirit—all unavailingly. “But you must wish for
something,” I urged; “I never knew a boy who didn’t.” For the first time
the silent little lad showed enthusiasm. “I wish you wouldn’t cure my
head, so I needn’t go to the orphan asylum.”
Unscrupulous parents, I am well aware, often try to shift the
responsibility for their children upon public institutions, but there
are many who share Joseph’s aversion to the institutional life, and we
early recognized that the dislike is based upon a sound instinct and
that a poor home might have compensating advantages compared with the
well-equipped institution.
There have been great changes in institutional methods since I first had
knowledge of them, and much ingenuity has been shown in devising means
to encourage the development of individuality and initiative among the
orphans. The cottage plan has been introduced in some institutions to
modify the abnormal life of large congregations of children. But at best
the life is artificial, and the children lose inestimably through not
having day by day the experiences of normal existence. Valuable knowledge
is lost because the child does not learn from experience the connection
between the cost of necessities and the labor necessary to earn them. It
was somewhat pathetic, at another conference on child-saving, to hear
one of the speakers explain that he tried to meet this need by having
the examples in arithmetic relate to the cost of food and household
expenditures.
The lack of a normal emotional outlet is of consequence, and as a result
astute physiognomists often recognize what they term the “institution
look.” Maggie, an intelligent girl, who has since given abundant evidence
of spontaneity and spirit, spent a short time in an excellent orphanage.
She told me the other day, and wept as she told it, that she had met no
unkindness there, but remembered with horror that when they arose in the
morning the “orphans” waited to be told what to do; and that feeling was
upon her every hour of the day. In fact, Maggie had stirred me to make
arrangements to take her out of the institution because, when I brought
her for a visit to the settlement, she stood at the window the entire
afternoon, wistfully watching the children play in our back yard, and
not joining them because no one had told her that she might.
One is reluctant to speak only of the disadvantages of institutional
life, for there are many children rescued from unfortunate family
conditions who testify to the good care they received, and who, in after
life, look back upon the orphanage as the only home they have known.
For some children, doubtless, such care will continue to be necessary,
but the conservative and rigid administration can be softened, and the
management and their charges delivered out of the rut into which they
have fallen, and from the tyranny of rules and customs which have no
better warrant than that they have always existed.
Perhaps these illustrations are not too insignificant to record.
Happening to pass through a room in an asylum when the dentist was paying
his monthly visit, I saw a fine-looking young lad about to have a sound
front tooth extracted because he complained of toothache. No provision
had been made for anything but the extraction of teeth. An offer to have
the boy given proper treatment outside the institution was not accepted,
but it needed no more than this to insure better dentistry in his case
and in the institution in future. The reports stated that corporal
punishment was not administered. When a little homesick lad displayed
his hands, swollen from paddling, a request for an investigation, and
that I be privileged to hear the inquiry, put a stop, and I am assured
a permanent one, to this form of discipline. These are the more obvious
disadvantages of institutional life for the child. The more subtle and
dangerous are the curbing of initiative and the belittling of personality.
An intelligent observer of the effects of institution life on boys,
a Roman Catholic priest, established a temporary home in New York to
which they could come on their release from the institution until they
found employment and suitable places to board. His insight was shown
by his provision for the boys during their brief sojourn with him of
a formal table service, and weekly dances to which girls whom he knew
were invited. As he astutely observed, the boys often went into common
society, or society which made no demands, because, from their lack of
experience, they felt ill at ease in a circle where any conventions were
observed.
Where life goes by rule there is little spontaneous action or
conversation, but the children occasionally give clews to their passion
for personal relationships. In an institution which I knew the children
were allowed to write once a month to their friends. More than one
child without family ties took that opportunity to write letters to an
imaginary mother, to send messages of affection to imaginary brothers and
sisters, and to ask for personal gifts. They knew, of course, that the
letters would never leave the institution.
An unusual instance of intense longing for family life and the desire to
“belong” to someone was given by Tillie, who had lived all her life in
an orphan asylum. Sometimes she dreamed of her mother, and often asked
where she was. When she was ten years old the wife of the superintendent
told her that her mother had brought her to the asylum, but that all she
could remember about her was that she had red hair. From that day the
child’s desire to re-establish relations with her mother never flagged.
In the files of the asylum a letter was discovered from an overseer of
the poor in an upstate town, saying that the woman had wandered there. At
Tillie’s urgent request he was written to again, and after a search on
his part it was learned that she had been declared insane and taken to
the hospital at Rochester. The very day that Tillie was released from the
orphan asylum she secured money for the trip and went to Rochester. The
officials of the hospital received her kindly and took her into the ward
where, although she had no memory of having seen her, she identified
her mother—doubtless by the color of her hair. The mother, alas, did
not recognize her. Two years later the girl revisited the hospital and
found her mother enjoying an interval of memory. Tillie told me that
she learned “two important things”—that she had had a brother and my
name. How I was connected with the fortunes of the family the poor,
bewildered woman could not explain, and I have no recollection of her.
Tillie followed these clews, as she has every other. She has learned that
the brother was sent West with orphans from an Eastern institution, and
that he has joined the army. The devoted girl is making every effort to
establish a home to which she can bring the mother and brother, utterly
regardless of the burden it will place on her young shoulders.
We must turn to the younger countries for testimony as to the wisdom
of the non-institutional care of dependent children. In Australia the
plan for many years in all the provinces has been to care for them in
homes, and in Queensland and New South Wales the laws permit the children
to be boarded out to their own mothers. It is encouraging to note the
increasing number of responsible people in America who are ready to adopt
children. It may not be possible to find a sufficient number of suitable
homes to provide for all who are dependent; but once the policy of
decentralization is established, other methods will be evolved to avoid
large congregations of boys and girls. Two of my colleagues and I have
found much happiness in assuming responsibility for eight children. Quite
apart from our own pleasure in taking to ourselves these “nieces” and
“nephews,” we believe that we shall be able to demonstrate convincingly
the practicability of establishing small groups of children, without
ties of their own, as a family unit. Our children live the year round in
our country home, and are identified with the life of the community; and
we hope to provide opportunity for the development of their individual
tastes and aptitudes.
[Illustration: On the Farm]
Education and the child is a theme of widest social significance. To the
age-old appeal that the child’s dependence makes upon the affections
has been added a conviction of the necessity for a guarded and trained
childhood, that better men and women may be developed. It is a modern
note in patriotism and civic responsibility, which impels those who are
brought in contact with the children of the poor to protect them from
premature burdens, to prolong their childhood and the period of growth.
Biologists bring suggestive and illuminating analogies, but when one has
lived many years in a neighborhood such as ours the children themselves
tell the story. We know that physical well-being in later life is largely
dependent upon early care, that only the exceptional boys and girls can
escape the unwholesome effects of premature labor, and that lack of
training is responsible for the enormous proportion of unskilled and
unemployable among the workers.
The stronghold of our democracy is the public school. This conviction
lies deep in the hearts of those social enthusiasts who would keep the
school free from the demoralization of cant and impure politics, and
restore it to the people, a shrine for education, a center for public
uses.
The young members of the settlement clubs hear this doctrine preached
not infrequently. Last June the City Superintendent, addressing a class
graduating from the normal school, made an appeal for idealism in their
work. He spoke of the possibilities in their profession for far-reaching
social service, and named as one who exemplified his theme the principal
of a great city school, once one of our settlement boys.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VII
CHILDREN WHO WORK
Bessie has had eight “jobs” in six months. Obviously under sixteen,
she has had to produce her “working papers” before she could be taken
on. The fact that she has met the requirements necessary to obtain the
papers, and that her employer has demanded them, is evidence of the
advance made in New York State since we first became acquainted with
the children of the poor. Bessie has had to prove by birth certificate
or other documentary evidence that she is really fourteen, has had to
submit to a simple test in English and arithmetic, present proof of at
least 130 days’ school attendance in the year before leaving, and, after
examination by a medical officer, has had to be declared physically fit
to enter shop or factory.
No longer could Annie, the cobbler’s daughter, by unchallenged perjury
obtain the state sanction to her premature employment. Gone are the easy
days when Francesca’s father, defying school mandates, openly offered
his little ones in the labor market. Yet we are far from satisfied.
Bessie, though she meets the requirements of the law, goes out wholly
unprepared for self-support; she is of no industrial value, and is easily
demoralized by the conviction of her unimportance to her “boss,” certain
that her casual employment and dismissal have hardly been noted, save
as she herself has been affected by the pay envelope. Her industrial
experience is no surprise to her settlement friends, for she is a type of
the boys and girls who, twice a year, swarm out of the school and find
their way to the Department of Health to obtain working papers. Bessie’s
father is a phthisis case; her mother, the chief wage-earner, an example
of devotion and industry. The girl has been a fairly good student and
dutiful in the home, where for several years she has scrubbed the floors
and “looked after” the children in her mother’s absence.
Tommy also appeared at the office with his credentials and successfully
passed all the tests, until the scale showed him suspiciously weighty for
his appearance. Inquiry as to what bulged one of his pockets disclosed
the fact that he had a piece of lead there. He had been told that he
probably would not weigh enough to pass the doctor. Talking the matter
over with Mrs. Sanderson, I learned that the immediate reason for
taking Tommy out of school was his need of a pair of shoes. The mother
was not insensitive to his pinched appearance. A few days later Tommy
was taken to visit our children at the farm, and it was pleasant to see
that the natural boy had not been crushed. He devoured the most juvenile
story-books and was “crazy” about the sledding. The self-respecting
mother was not injured in her pride of independence by a little necessary
aid carefully given; and though I have not seen Tommy recently, I am sure
that neither he nor his employer lost anything because of the better
physical condition in which he entered work after his happy winter at the
farm.
This attempt to cheat the law by the very children for whose protection
it was designed, and the occasional disregard of the purposes of the
enactments by enforcing officials, suggest Alice’s perplexity when she
encountered the topsy-turvy Wonderland.
It was about twelve years ago that a group of settlement people in
New York gathered to consider the advisability of organizing public
sentiment against the exploitation of child workers. The New York Child
Labor Committee thereupon came into existence, under the chairmanship
of the then head of the University Settlement, and that committee has
since been steadily engaged in advancing standards of conditions under
which children may work. Through legislative enactment and publicity it
has endeavored to form public opinion on those socially constructive
principles inherent in the conservation of children.
Of necessity child labor laws approach the problem from the negative
side of prohibition. To meet the problem positively, the Henry Street
Settlement established in 1908 a definite system of “scholarships” for
children from fourteen to sixteen, to give training during what have been
termed the “two wasted years” to as many as its funds permitted.
A committee of administration receives the applications which come from
all parts of the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, and preference is
given to those children of widows or disabled fathers whose need seems
greatest. Careful inquiry is made by the capable secretary to discover
natural inclinations or aptitudes, and these are used as guides in
determining the character of the instruction to be given. Three dollars a
week—somewhat less than the sum the children might have been earning—is
given weekly for two years, during which time they are under continual
supervision at home, at school, and through regular visits to the
settlement. They are looked after physically, provided with occasional
recreation, and, in the summer time, whenever possible, a vacation in
the country. The committee keeps in close touch with the educational
agencies throughout the city, gathers knowledge of the trades that give
opportunity for advancement, and, to aid teachers, settlement workers,
parents, and children, publishes from time to time a directory of
vocational resources in the city.[5]
Approval of this endowment for future efficiency comes from many sources,
but no encouragement has been greater than the fact that, while the plan
was still in its experimental stage, my own first boys’ club, the members
of which had now grown to manhood, celebrated their fifteenth anniversary
by contributing three scholarships; and that the Women’s Club, whose
members feel most painfully the disadvantage of the small wage of the
unskilled, have given from their club treasury or by voluntary assessment
for this help to the boys and girls.
The children who show talent and those whose immaturity or poverty of
intellect makes their early venture into the world more pitiful, have
equal claim upon these scholarships.
Pippa was one of the latter. She was scorned at home for obvious slowness
of wit and “bad eyes”; her mother deplored the fact that there was
nothing for her to do but “getta married.” Pippa’s club leader’s reports
were equally discouraging, save for the fact that she had shown some
dexterity in the sewing class. At the time when she would have begun her
patrol of the streets, looking for signs of “Girls Wanted,” the offer of
a scholarship prevailed with the mother, and she was given one year’s
further education in a trade school. After a conference between the
teachers and her settlement friends, sample-mounting was decided upon as
best suited to Pippa’s capacities. She has done well with the training,
and is now looked up to as the one wage-earner in the family who is
regularly employed.
One of the accompanying charts compares the wage-earning capacity of the
boys and girls who have had the advantage of these scholarships with that
of an equal number of untrained young people whose careers are known
through their industrial placement by perhaps the most careful juvenile
employment agency in the city.[6] The deductions that we made from the
experience of the Henry Street children were corroborated by an inquiry
made by one of our residents into the industrial history of one thousand
children who had applied for working papers at the Department of Health.
The employment-record chart was compiled from data obtained in that
inquiry.
[Illustration: Comparative Weekly Wages of 72 Children Who Have Worked
Four Years without Previous Training, from the Record of ⸺ Employment
Bureau; and of Scholarship Children Who Have Had Two Years of Vocational
Training.]
Our connections in the city enable us occasionally to coax opportunities
for those boys and girls for whom experience in the shop itself would
seem best. Jimmy had lost a leg “hooking on the truck,” and his mother
supposed that “such things happen when you have to lock them out all
day.” In the whittling class the lad showed dexterity with the sloyd
knife, and he was thereupon given special privileges in the carpentry
and carving classes of the settlement. When he reached working age,
one of our friends, a distinguished patron of a high-grade decorator,
induced the latter to give the boy a chance. Misgivings as to the
permanency of his tenure of the place were allayed when Jimmy, aglow
with enthusiasm over his work, brought a beautifully carved mahogany box
and told of the help the skilled men in the shop were giving him. On the
whole, he concluded, “a fellow with one leg” had advantages over other
cabinetmakers; “he could get into so many more tight places and corners
than with two.”
The Typical Employment Record of One Child between the Ages of 14 and 16.
+------------------+----------------------+---------------------------+
| POSITIONS HELD |LENGTH OF TIME IN EACH| KIND OF WORK |
+------------------+----------------------+---------------------------+
| First | 3 Days |In Factory, Sorting Buttons|
+------------------+----------------------+---------------------------+
| Second | 2 Months | Ribboning Corset Covers & |
| | | Machine Work on Them |
+------------------+----------------------+---------------------------+
| Third | 1 Week | Ribboning & Buttoning |
| | | Corset Covers |
+------------------+----------------------+---------------------------+
| Fourth | Time Unknown | Ladies’ Underwear |
+------------------+----------------------+---------------------------+
| Fifth | Up To Christmas | Errand Girl |
+------------------+----------------------+---------------------------+
| Sixth | 2½ Months | Ribboning Corset Covers |
+------------------+----------------------+---------------------------+
| Seventh | Time Unknown | Errand Girl |
+------------------+----------------------+---------------------------+
| Eighth | A Few Weeks | Trim, Cut & Examine |
| | | Mens’ Ties |
+------------------+----------------------+---------------------------+
| Ninth | A Few Weeks | Return To Second Job |
+------------------+----------------------+---------------------------+
| Tenth | A Few Weeks | Home Work, Ribboning |
+------------------+----------------------+---------------------------+
Bessie and Jimmy and Pippa and Esther and their little comrades stir
us to contribute our human documents to the propaganda instituted in
behalf of children. In this, as in other experiments at the settlement,
we do not believe that what we offer is of great consequence unless
the demonstrations we make and the experience we gain are applicable
to the problems of the community. On no other single interest do the
members of our settlement meet with such unanimity. Years of concern
about individual children might in any case have brought this about, but
irresistible has been the influence exercised by Mrs. Florence Kelley,
now and for many years a member of the settlement family. She has long
consecrated her energies to securing protective legislation throughout
the country for children compelled to labor and, with the late Edgar
Gardner Murphy, of Alabama, suggested the creation of the National Child
Labor Committee. In its ten years’ existence it has affected legislation
in forty-seven states, which have enacted new or improved child labor
laws. On this and on the New York State Committee Mrs. Kelley and I have
served since their creation.
Though much has been accomplished during this decade, the field is
immensely larger than was supposed, and forces inimical to reform, not
reckoned with at first, have been encountered. Despite this opposition,
however, we believe that the abolition of child labor abuses in America
is not very far off.
In Pennsylvania, within a very few years, insistence upon satisfactory
proof of age was strenuously opposed. Officials who should have been
working in harmony with the committee persisted in declaring that
the parent’s affidavit, long before discarded in New York State, was
sufficient evidence, despite the fact that coroners’ inquests after mine
disasters showed child workers of ten and eleven years. The Southern
mill children, the little cranberry-bog workers, the oyster shuckers,
and the boys in glass factories and mines have shown that this disregard
of children is not peculiar to any one section of the country, though
Southern states have been most tenacious of the exemption of children of
“dependent parents” or “orphans” from working-paper requirements.
In the archives at Washington much interesting evidence lies buried in
the unpublished portions of reports of the federal investigation into the
work of women and children. The need of this investigation was originally
urged by settlement people. One mill owner greeted the government
inspectors most cordially and, to show his patriotism, ordered the flag
to be raised above the works. The raising of the flag, as it afterwards
transpired, was a signal to the children employed in the mill to go home.
In the early days of child labor reform in New York the children on
Henry Street would sometimes relate vividly their experience of being
suddenly whisked out of sight when the approach of the factory inspector
was signaled.
It is perhaps unnecessary to mention the obvious fact that the child
worker is in competition with the adult and drags down his wages. At
the Child Labor Conference held in Washington in January, 1915, a
manufacturer in the textile industry cited the wages paid to adults in
certain operations in the mills as fourteen cents per hour where there
were prohibitive child labor laws and eleven cents an hour where there
were none.
The National Child Labor Committee now asks Congress through a federal
bill to outlaw interstate traffic in goods produced by the labor of
children. Such a law would protect the public-spirited employer who is
now obliged to compete in the market with men whose business methods he
condemns.
* * * * *
Sammie and his brother sold papers in front of one of the large hotels
every night. The more they shivered with cold, the greater the harvest
of pennies. No wonder that the white-faced little boy stayed out long
after his cold had become serious. He himself asked for admission to
the hospital, and died there before his absence was noted. After his
death relatives appeared, willing to aid according to their small means,
and the relief society increased its stipend to his family. At any time
during his life this aid might have been forthcoming, had not the public
unthinkingly made his sacrifice possible by the purchase of his papers.
[Illustration]
Opposition to regulating and limiting the sale of papers by little
boys on the streets is hard to overcome. A juvenile literature of
more than thirty years ago glorified the newsboy and his improbable
financial and social achievements, and interest in him was heightened
by a series of pictures by a popular painter, wherein ragged youngsters
of an extraordinary cleanliness of face were portrayed as newsboys
and bootblacks. In opposition to the charm of this presentation, the
practical reformer offers the photographs, taken at midnight, of tiny
lads asleep on gratings in front of newspaper offices, waiting for the
early editions. He finds in street work the most fruitful source of
juvenile delinquency, with newsboys heading the list.
I am aware that at this point numerous readers will recall instances
of remarkable achievements by the barefoot boy, the wide-awake young
news-seller. We too have known the exceptional lad who has accomplished
marvels in the teeth of, sometimes because of, great disadvantages; but
after twenty years I, for one, have no illusions as to the outcome for
the ordinary child.
When the New York Child Labor Committee secured the enactment of a
law making it mandatory for the schoolboy who desired to sell papers
to obtain the consent of his parents before receiving the permissive
badge from the district school superintendent, we sent a visitor from
the settlement to the families of one hundred who had expressed their
intention to secure the badge. Of these families over sixty were opposed
to the child’s selling papers on the street. The boy wanted to “because
the other fellows did,” and the parents based their objections, in most
cases, on precisely those grounds urged by social workers,—namely, that
street work led the boys into bad company, irregular hours, gambling, and
“waste of shoe leather.” Some asserted that they received no money from
the children from the sale of the papers. On the other hand, a committee
of which I was chairman, which made city-wide inquiry into juvenile
street work, found instances of well-to-do parents who sent their little
children on the streets to sell papers, sometimes in violation of the law.
The three chief obstacles to progress in protection of the children are
the material interests of the employers, many of whom still believe
that the child is a necessary instrument of profit; a sentimental,
unanalytical feeling of kindness to the poor; and the attitude of
officials upon whom the enforcement of the law depends, but who are
often tempted by appeals to thwart its humane purpose. A truant officer
of my acquaintance took upon himself discretionary power to condone the
absence of a little child from school on the ground that the child was
employed and the widowed mother poor. Himself a tender father, cherishing
his small son, I asked him if that was what he would have me do in case
he died and I found his child at work. Oddly enough, he seemed then
to realize for the first time that those who were battling for school
attendance for the children of the poor and prevention of their premature
employment, even though the widow and child might have to receive
financial aid, were trying to take, in part, the place of the dead
father.
To meet cases where enforcement of the new standards of the law
involves undeniable hardship, another form of so-called “scholarship”
is given by the New York Child Labor Committee. Upon investigation a
sum approximating the possible earnings of the child is furnished until
such time as he or she can legally go to work. An indirect but important
result of the giving of these scholarships has been the continuous
information obtained regarding enforcement of the school attendance law.
Inquiry into the history of candidates disclosed, at first, many cases in
which, although the family had been in New York for years, some of the
children had never attended school, and perhaps never would have done so
had they not been discovered at work illegally. The number of these cases
is now diminishing.
Allusion to these two forms of “scholarships” should not be made without
mention of one other in the settlement, known as the “Alva Scholarship.”
The interest on the endowment is used to promote the training of
gifted individuals and to commemorate a beloved club leader. The money
to establish it was given by the young woman’s associates in the
settlement, and small sums have been contributed to it by the girls who
were members of her own and other clubs.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VIII
THE NATION’S CHILDREN
Few people have any idea of the extent of tenement-house manufactures.
There are at present over thirteen thousand houses in Greater New York
alone licensed for this purpose, and each license may cover from one to
forty families. These figures give no complete idea of the work done
in tenements. Much of it is carried on in unlicensed houses, and work
not yet listed as forbidden is carried home. To supervise this immense
field eight inspectors only were assigned in 1913. Changing fashions in
dress and the character of certain of the seasonal trades make it very
difficult for the Department of Labor to adjust the license list. This
explains, to some extent, the lack of knowledge concerning home work on
the part of officials, even when the Department of Labor is efficiently
administered. Nevertheless, home work has greatly decreased.
Twenty years ago, when we went from house to house caring for the sick,
manufacturing was carried on in the tenements on a scale that does not
exist to-day. With no little consternation we saw toys and infants’
clothing, and sometimes food itself, made under conditions that would not
have been tolerated in factories, even at that time. And the connection
of remote communities and individuals with the East Side of New York was
impressed upon us when we saw a roomful of children’s clothing shipped
to the Southern trade from a tenement where there were sixteen cases of
measles. One of our patients, in an advanced stage of tuberculosis, until
our appearance on the scene, sat coughing in her bed, making cigarettes
and moistening the paper with her lips. In another tenement in a nearby
street we found children ill with scarlet fever. The parents worked as
finishers of women’s cloaks of good quality, evidently meant to be worn
by the well-to-do. The garments covered the little patients, and the bed
on which they lay was practically used as a work-table. The possibility
of infection is perhaps the most obvious disadvantage of home work,
and great changes have been wrought since the days when we first knew
the sweatshop; but we are here discussing only its connection with the
children.
[Illustration]
When work is carried on in the home all the members of the family can
be and are utilized without regard to age or the restrictions of the
factory laws. One Thanksgiving Day I carried an offering from prosperous
children of my acquaintance to a little child on Water Street whose
absence from the kindergarten had been reported on account of illness. He
had chicken-pox, and I found him, with flushed face, sitting on a little
stool, working on knee pants with other members of the family. They
interrupted their industry long enough to drag the concertina from under
the bed and to join in singing Italian songs for my entertainment, but
the father shrugged his shoulders in dissent from my protest against the
continuance of the work.
Examination of the school attendance of children who do home work bears
testimony to its relation to truancy. Josephine, eleven years of age,
stays out of school to work on finishing; Francesca, aged twelve, to
sew buttons on coats; Santa, nine years old, to pick out nut meats;
Catherine, eight years old, sews on tags; Tiffy, another eight-year-old,
helps her mother finish; Giuseppe, aged ten, is a deft worker on
artificial flowers.
It is painful to recall the R⸺ family, who lived in a basement, all of
the children engaged in making paper bags which the mother sold to the
small dealers. Something, we know not what, impelled one of the five
children to come for help to the nurse in the First Aid Room at the
settlement. His head showed evidence of neglect, and when our nurse
inquired of him how it had escaped the school medical inspection, the
fact was disclosed that he had never been in school. Immediate inquiry
on our part revealed the basement sweatshop and the fact that none of
the children, all of whom had been born in America, had ever been to
school. When the mother was questioned, she answered that she did not
like to ask for more aid than she was already receiving from the relief
society, and when we reproved the other children in the tenement for
not having drawn our attention to their little neighbors, they answered
that they themselves had not known of the existence of the R⸺ children
because “they never came out to play.” The stupidity of the mother and
the circumstances of the family have continually tested the endurance of
their well-meaning friends; nevertheless, at this writing the eldest boy
is in high school and supporting himself by work outside school hours at
a subway news-stand.
What I have written thus far has been in large measure confined to the
lower East Side of New York; but it may not be amiss to remind the reader
that through the nursing service and other organized work our contact
with the tenement home workers extends over the two boroughs of Manhattan
and the Bronx. The settlement has never made a scientific study of work
done in the homes, but our information regarding it is continuous and
current. This cumulative knowledge is probably the more valuable because
it is obtained incidentally and naturally, and not as the result of
a special investigation, which, however fair and impartial, must be
somewhat affected by the consciousness of its purpose.
In 1899 a law was passed in New York State licensing individual workers
in the tenements for certain trades. In 1904 this law was superseded,
primarily at the instigation of the settlement, by one licensing the
entire tenement house, thus making the owner of the house responsible.
In 1913 a law recommended by the New York State Factory Investigating
Commission was passed by the legislature; this law brought under its
jurisdiction all articles manufactured in the tenements, prohibited
entirely the home manufacture of food articles, dolls or dolls’ clothing,
children’s or infants’ wearing apparel, and forbade the employment of
children under fourteen on any articles made in tenements.
All our experience points to the conclusion that it is impossible to
control manufacture in the tenements. Restrictive legislation (such
as the law forbidding the employment of children under fourteen) is
practically impossible of enforcement, for it is a delusion to suppose
that any human agency can find out what manufactures are going on
in tenement-house homes. The inspectors become known in the various
neighborhoods; and at their approach the word is passed along, and
garments on which women are working may be hidden, or the work taken
from children’s hands. The more painstaking and conscientious the
attempts at enforcement, the more secretive the workers become, and one
is forced to the conclusion that the only practical remedy is to prohibit
this parasitic form of industry outright. More of the men in these
families would go to work if it were not so easy to employ the women
and children; and many of the women would be able to work regular hours
in establishments suitably constructed for manufacturing purposes and
under state inspection and supervision. During the period of transition,
suffering will doubtless come to some families whose poor living has been
maintained by this form of industry, and relief measures must carry them
over the time of adjustment. Most families working at home are already
receiving aid from societies, which thus indirectly help to support the
parasitic trade.
* * * * *
In 1913, 41,507 children of Greater New York secured working papers. But
the record for 1914 shows a decrease of about 10,000 in the applications
for papers, and consequently so many more children in school, because of
the amended statute which raised the minimum educational requirement. A
public sentiment which keeps boys and girls longer in school emphasizes
the need of more educational facilities adapted to industrial pursuits.
The children least promising in book studies may often become adepts in
manual work, and respond readily to instruction that calls for exercise
of the motor energies. The armies of children who go to work immature,
unprepared, uneducated in essentials, with no more than a superficial
precocity, are likely to be thrown upon the scrap-heap of the unskilled
early in life, and yet many of these have potentialities of skill and
efficiency.
[Illustration]
It is not surprising that with increasing knowledge of the children’s
condition plans for their guidance, training, and reasonable employment
should have made advance in the last decade. The settlement is now
interested in promoting an inquiry for New York City that should lead to
the establishment of a juvenile bureau intended to combine vocational
guidance and industrial supervision,—a bureau associated with an
educational system and dissociated from the free employment exchanges
which as yet do not inquire into the character of employment offered.
One outcome of this inquiry has been the formation of a society of
employers designed to bring about scientific consideration of the present
misemployment of children and adults, underemployment, and other wastes
of industry.
We believe that continuation schools are necessary for all boys and girls
engaged in shop or factory work, and that expert vocational guidance and
educational direction should be offered those who leave school to become
wage-earners. It is inevitable that to people at all socially minded
close contact with many children should exercise the humanities. The
stress that we lay on the enforcement of these protective measures comes
from a conviction that the children of the poor, more than all others,
need to be prepared for the responsibilities of life that so soon come
upon them.
The great majority of the boys and girls accept passively the conditions
of the trade or occupation into which chance and their necessities have
forced them. The desire for something different seldom becomes articulate
or strong enough to impel them to overcome the almost insuperable
barriers. Occasionally, however, the spirit of revolt asserts itself.
“I work in a sweatshop,” said a young girl who brought her drawings
to me for criticism, “and it harasses my body and my soul. Perhaps I
could earn enough to live on by doing these, and my brother bids me to
display them”; and she added, “I could live on three dollars a week if
I were happy.” The drawings were promising, and the temperamental young
creature, in answer to my questioning, admitted that she had illustrated
_David Copperfield_ for pastime and had “given David a weak chin.”
The difficulty of proper placement in industry experienced by the
ordinary boy and girl is intensified in the case of the colored
juveniles. It is now nine years since a woman called at the Henry Street
house and almost challenged me to face their problem. She was what is
termed a “race woman,” and desired to work for her own people. It was
not difficult to provide an opening for her. The devoted daughter of
a man who had felt friendship for the colored people made it possible
for us to establish a branch of the settlement on the west side of the
city in that section known as San Juan Hill. At “Lincoln House,” with
the co-operation of representatives of the race and their friends, a
programme of social and educational work adapted to the needs of the
neighborhood is carried on. To find admirably trained and efficient
colored nurses was a comparatively simple matter; and the response of the
colored people themselves in this respect was immediately encouraging.
Necessity for patient adherence to the principle of giving opportunity
to the most needy children, that they may be better equipped for the
future, is emphasized in the case of the colored children in school
and when seeking work; but difficulties, mountainous in proportion and
testing the most buoyant optimism, loom up when social barriers and
racial characteristics enter into individual adjustments. The restricted
number of occupations open to them discourages ambition and in time
reacts unfavorably upon character and ability; and thus we complete the
vicious circle of diminishing opportunities and lessening vigor and
skill. Colored women are often conspicuously good and tender mothers, and
when I have watched large groups of them assembled in their clubrooms,
exhibiting their babies with justifiable pride, I have felt a wave of
unhappiness because of the consciousness of the enormous handicap with
which these little ones must face the future.
[Illustration: USES OF THE BACK YARD IN ONE OF THE BRANCHES OF THE HENRY
STREET SETTLEMENT]
A distinguished musician told me not long ago that he gave specially of
his time and talent to the colored people of New York because of a debt
he owed to a gifted colored neighbor. When he was a boy, his attempts to
play the violin attracted the man’s attention; the latter offered his
services as instructor when he learned that the boy could not afford to
take lessons. The colored man had great talent and had studied with the
best masters in Europe, but when he returned to America he was unable to
obtain engagements or procure pupils, and in order to earn his living was
obliged to learn to play the guitar. Discouraging as was his experience,
there is, I believe, relatively freer opportunity for the exceptionally
gifted of the colored race in the arts and professions than for the
ordinary young men and women who seek vocational careers.
* * * * *
Experience in Henry Street, and a conviction that intelligent interest
in the welfare of children was becoming universal, gradually focused my
mind on the necessity for a Federal Children’s Bureau. Every day brought
to the settlement, by mail and personal call,—as it must have brought
to other people and agencies known to be interested in children,—the
most varied inquiries, appeals for help and guidance, reflecting every
social aspect of the question. One well-known judge of a children’s
court was obliged to employ a clerical staff at his own expense to reply
to such inquiries. Those that came to us we answered as best we might
out of our own experience or from fragmentary and incomplete data.
Even the available information on this important subject was nowhere
assembled in complete and practical form. The birth rate, preventable
blindness, congenital and preventable disease, infant mortality, physical
degeneracy, orphanage, desertion, juvenile delinquency, dangerous
occupations and accidents, crimes against children, are questions
of enormous national importance concerning some of which reliable
information was wholly lacking.
[Illustration]
Toward the close of President Roosevelt’s administration a colleague and
I called upon him to present my plea for the creation of this bureau. On
that day the Secretary of Agriculture had gone South to ascertain what
danger to the community lurked in the appearance of the boll weevil. This
gave point to our argument that nothing that might have happened to the
children of the nation could have called forth governmental inquiry.
The Federal Children’s Bureau was conceived in the interest of all
children; but it was fitting that the National Committee on which I
serve, dedicated to working children, should have become sponsor for the
necessary propaganda for its creation.
It soon became evident that the suggestion was timely. Sympathy and
support came from every part of the country, from Maine to California,
and from every section of society. The national sense of humor was
aroused by the grim fact that whereas the Federal Government concerned
itself with the conservation of material wealth, mines and forests,
hogs and lobsters, and had long since established bureaus to supply
information concerning them, citizens who desired instruction and
guidance for the conservation and protection of the children of the
nation had no responsible governmental body to which to appeal.
[Illustration]
Though the suggestion was approved by President Roosevelt and widely
supported by press and people, it was not until the close of President
Taft’s administration that the Federal Children’s Bureau became a fact,
and the child with all its needs was brought into the sphere of federal
care and solicitude. The appointment of Miss Julia Lathrop, a woman of
conspicuous personal fitness and adequate training, to be its first chief
was a guarantee of the auspicious beginning of its work. In the brief
time of its service it has had continuous evidence that the people of
these United States intelligently avail themselves of the opportunity
for acquiring better understanding of the great responsibility that is
placed upon each generation.
[Illustration]
The Federal Children’s Bureau would not fulfill the purpose of its
originators if its service were limited to the study and record of the
pathological conditions surrounding children. Its greatest work for the
nation should be, and doubtless will be, to create standards for the
states and municipalities which may turn to it for expert advice and
guidance. With the living issues involved it is not likely to become
mechanical.
The Children’s Bureau is a symbol of the most hopeful aspect of America.
Founded in love for children and confidence in the future, its existence
is enormously significant. The first time I visited Washington after the
establishment of the Bureau I felt a thrill of the new and the hopeful,
and I contrasted its bare office with the splendid monuments that had
been erected and dedicated to the past. Some day, I thought, a lover of
his country, understanding that the children of to-day are our future,
will build a temple to them in the seat of the Federal Government. This
building will be more beautiful than those inspired by the army and
navy, by the exploits of science or commemoration of the dead. As my
imagination soared I fairly visualized the Children’s Bureau developed,
expanded, drawing from all corners of the land eager parents and teachers
to learn not only the theory of child culture, but to see demonstrations
of the best methods in playgrounds, clinics, classes, clubs, buildings,
and equipment. The vision became associated with a memory of the first
time I saw the Lucca della Robbias on the outer wall of the Florentine
asylum and felt the inspiration of linking a great artist with a little
waif. But those lovely sculptured babes are swathed. Some day, when
the beautiful building of the Federal Children’s Bureau is pointed out
in Washington, I have it in my heart to believe that the genius who
decorates in paint or plastic art will convey the new conception of the
child,—free of motion, uplooking, the ward of the nation.
CHAPTER IX
ORGANIZATIONS WITHIN THE SETTLEMENT
The settlement, through its preservation of several of the fine old
houses of the neighborhood, maintains a curious link with what, in this
city of rapid changes, is already a shadowy past. The families of some
of the residents once lived nearby, and recall, when they visit us, the
schools and churches they attended, their dancing classes, and the homes
where they were entertained. One visitor told of the scandal in the best
society, more than half a century ago, at the extravagance of a proud
father, then an occupant of one of the settlement houses, who gave his
young daughter a necklet of pearls on the day of her “coming-out” party.
Old men and women for whom the names of the streets evoke reminiscences
delight to revive the happy memories of their youth and to identify the
few buildings, greatly altered as to their uses, that still remain.
Cherry Street and Cherry Hill, a short distance away, call up traditions
of a great orchard to which we owe their names, its beauty in the
blossoming time, the quaint, clean houses, each in its garden, all the
pleasant, comfortable life of a bygone time. There is nothing pleasant or
comfortable about Cherry Street to-day. Legends of the daring deeds of
the Cherry Hill gang lend a dubious glamour to some parts of it, but for
the rest it is dingy and dull.
* * * * *
We met Lena in one of the dull houses where we had been called because of
her illness. The family were attractive Russians of the blond type, and
the patient herself was very beautiful, her exceeding pallor giving her
an almost ethereal look. The rooms were as bare as the traditional poor
man’s home of the story-books, but the mother had hidden the degradation
of the broken couch with a clean linen sheet, relic of her bridal outfit.
[Illustration: HERE AND THERE ARE STILL FOUND REMINDERS OF OLD NEW YORK]
After convalescence Lena was glad to accept employment and resume her
share of the family burden. One day she rushed in from the tailor’s shop
during working hours, and, literally upon her knees, begged for other
work. She could no longer endure the obscene language of her employer,
which she felt was directed especially to her. The story to experienced
ears signaled danger, but to extricate her without destruction of the
pride which repelled financial aid was not simple. Readjustments had to
be made to give her a belated training that would fit her for employment
outside the ranks of the unskilled. Fortunately, the parents needed
little stimulus to comprehend the humiliation to their daughter, and they
readily agreed to the postponement of help from her, although they were
at a low tide of income.
The very coarseness of this kind of attack upon a girl’s sensibilities
I have learned in the course of years, makes it easier to combat than
the subtle and less tangible suggestions that mislead and then betray.
Sometimes these are inherent in the work itself.
A girl leading an immoral life was once sent to me for possible help. She
called in the evening, and we sat together on the pleasant back porch
adjoining my sitting-room. Here the shrill noises of the street came but
faintly, and the quiet and privacy helped to create an atmosphere that
led easily to confidence.
It was long past midnight when we separated. The picture of the wretched
home that she had presented,—its congestion, the slovenly housekeeping,
the demanding infant, the ill-prepared food snatched from the stove by
the members of the family as they returned from work,—I knew it only too
well. The girl herself, refined in speech and pretty, slept in a bed with
three others. She had gone to work when she was eleven, and later became
a demonstrator in a department store, where the display of expensive
finery on the counters and its easy purchase by luxurious women had
evidently played a part in her moral deterioration. Her most conscious
desire was for silk underwear; at least it was the only one she seemed
able to formulate! And this trivial desire, infinitely pathetic in its
disclosure, told her story. As I stood at the front door after bidding
her good-night, and watched her down the street, it did not seem possible
that so frail a creature could summon up the heroism necessary to rise
above the demoralization of the home to which she was returning and the
kind of work open to her.
During that summer she came each day to the settlement for instruction
in English, preliminary to a training in telegraphy, for which she had
expressed a preference. Nothing in her conduct during that time could
have been criticised, but subsequent chapters in her career have shown
that she was unable to overcome the inclinations that were the evil
legacy of her mode of life.
The menace to the morals of youth is not confined to the pretty,
poor young girl. The lad also is exposed. I could wish there were
more sympathy with the very young men who at times are trapped into
immorality by means not so very different, except in degree, from those
that imperil the girl. The careless way in which boys are intrusted with
money by employers has tempted many who are not naturally thievish. I
have known dishonesty of this kind on the part of boys who never in after
life repeated the offense.
An instance of grave misbehavior of another character was once brought
to me by our own young men, three of whom called upon me, evidently in
painful embarrassment. After struggling to bring their courage to the
speaking point, they told me that L⸺ was leading an immoral life, and
they were sure that if I knew it I would not allow him to dance with the
girls. They had been considering for some time whether or not I should
be informed. Heartily disliking the task, one of the young men had
consulted his mother and she had made it plain that it was my right to
know. Fortunately the district attorney then in office had from time to
time invoked the co-operation of the settlement in problems that could
not be met by a prosecutor. A telephone message to him brought the needed
aid with dispatch. When all the facts were known, I felt that the young
man had been snared exactly as had been the young girl who was with him.
Both were victims of the wretched creature whose exile from New York
the district attorney insisted upon. The three had met in a dance-hall,
widely advertised and popular among young people.
The inquiry of the famous Committee of Fifteen, as New Yorkers know, was
given its first impetus by the action of a group of young men of our
neighborhood, already distinguished for the ethical stand they had taken
on social matters, and every one of them members for many years of clubs
in another settlement and our own. They comprehended the hideous cost of
the red-light district and resented its existence in their neighborhood,
where not even the children escaped knowledge of its evils.
Although in the twenty-one years of the organized life of the settlement
no girl or young woman identified with us has “gone wrong” in the usual
understanding of that term, we have been so little conscious of working
definitely for this end that my attention was drawn to the fact only when
a woman distinguished for her work among girls made the statement that
never in the Night Court or institutions for delinquents had she found a
girl who had “belonged” to our settlement.[7]
I record this bit of testimony with some hesitation, as it does not seem
right to make it matter for marvel or congratulation. One does not expect
a mother to be surprised or gratified that her daughters are virtuous;
and it would be a grave injustice to the girls of character and lofty
ideals who through the years have been connected with the settlement if
we assumed the credit for their fine qualities.
But as in ordinary families there are diversities of character, of
strength, and of weakness, so in a large community family, if I may so
define the relationship of the settlement membership, these diversities
are more strongly marked; and it is a gratification that we are often
able to give to young girls—frail, ignorant, unequipped for the struggle
into which they are so early plunged—some of the protection that under
other circumstances would be provided by their families and social
environment.
All classes show occasional instances of girls who “go wrong.” The
commonly accepted theory that the direct incentive is a mercenary one is
not borne out by our experience. The thousands of poor young girls we
have known, into whose minds the thought of wrong-doing of this kind has
never entered, testify against it.
However, a low family income means a poor home, underfeeding,
congestion, lack of privacy, and lack of proper safeguards against the
emotional crises of adolescence for both boys and girls. Exhaustion
following excessive or monotonous toil weakens moral and physical
resistance; and as a result of the inadequate provision for wholesome,
inexpensive recreation, pleasures are secured at great risk.
In the summer of 1912 a notorious gambler was murdered in New York,
and the whole country was shocked by the disclosure of the existence
of groups of young men organized for crime and designated as “gunmen.”
There is not space here for a discussion of this tragic result of street
life. It is probable that the four young men who were executed for
the murder were led astray, in the first place, by their craving for
adventure. They were found to have been the tools of a powerful police
officer, and it was generally believed that they were mentally defective,
and were thus made more readily the dupes of an imposing personality.
They had not suffered from extreme poverty, nor had they been without
religious instruction. Two of them, in fact, came from homes of orthodox
strictness; but it was plain from their histories that there had been no
adjustment of environment to meet their needs. There was no evidence that
they had at any time come in contact with people or institutions that
recognized the social impulses of youth.
[Illustration]
At the time of the murder I was in the mountains recovering from an
illness. The letters I received, following the disclosure of the
existence of the “gunmen,” particularly those from young men, carried a
peculiar appeal. Our own club members urged the need of the settlement’s
extending protection to greater numbers of boys. Some of the young men
wrote frankly of perils from which they had barely escaped and of which
I had had no knowledge. They all laid stress upon the importance of
_preventing_ disaster by the provision of wholesome recreation which, as
one correspondent wrote, “should have excitement also.” Their belief in
the efficacy of club control is firmly fixed. A few evenings ago one of
the young men of the settlement conversant with conditions, speaking to
a new resident, defined a “gang” as “a club gone wrong.”
[Illustration]
Mothers from time to time come to the Henry Street house for help to
rescue their erring sons. They come secretly, fearing to have their sons
or the police trace disclosures to them. A poolroom on a nearby street,
said to have been, at one time, a “hang-out” of the gunmen, and its lure
evidently enhanced by that fact, was reported to us as “suspicious.”
The police and a society organized to suppress such places told me that
the evidence they could secure was insufficient to warrant hope of
conviction. Mothers who suspected that stolen property was taken there,
made alert by anxiety for their sons, furnished me with evidence that
warranted insistence on my part that the Police Commissioner order the
place closed.
Formal meetings with parents to consider matters affecting their children
are a fixed part of the settlement programme, and the problems of
adolescence are freely and frankly discussed. An experienced and humane
judge, addressing one such meeting, spoke simply and directly of the
young people who were brought before him charged with crime, showing his
understanding of the causes that led to it and his sympathy with the
offenders as well as with their harassed parents. He begged for a revival
of the old homely virtues and for the strengthening of family ties. A
mother in the group rose and confessed her helplessness. She reminded
the judge of the difficulty of keeping young people under observation
and guarding them from the temptations of street life when the mothers,
like herself, went out to work. Ordinary boys and girls, she thought,
could not resist these temptations unaided; and speaking of her own boy,
who had been brought before him, she summed up her understanding of the
situation in the words: “It’s not that my son is bad; it’s just that he’s
not a hero.”
* * * * *
I do not know who originated the idea of a “club” as a means of guidance
and instruction for the young. Our inducement to organize socially
came from a group of small boys in the summer of 1895, our first in the
Henry Street house. We had already acquired a large circle of juvenile
friends, and it soon became evident that definite hours must be set aside
for meeting different groups if our time was not to be dissipated in
fragmentary visits. When these boys of eleven and twelve years of age,
who had not, up to that time, given any evidence of partiality for our
society, called to ask if they could see me some time when I “wasn’t
busy,” I made an appointment with them for the next Saturday evening,
whereupon the club was organized.
[Illustration]
It is still in existence with practically the original membership; and
the relationship of the members of this first group to the settlement and
to me personally has been of priceless value. Many of its members have
for years been club leaders. They contribute generously to the settlement
and in a variety of ways enter into its life and responsibilities.
Clubs formed since then, for all ages and almost all nationalities, have
proved to be of great value in affording opportunity for fellowship, and,
during the susceptible years, in aiding the formation of character; and
the continuity of the relationship has made possible an interchange of
knowledge and experience of great advantage to those brought together.
The training of club leaders is as essential as the guidance of the club
members. Brilliant personalities are attracted to the settlement, but
it can use to good purpose the moderate talents and abilities of more
ordinary people whose good-will and interest are otherwise apt to be
wasted because they find no expression for them.
Given sincerity, and that vague but essential quality called personality,
in the leaders, we do not care very much what the programme of a club may
be. I have never known a club leader possessing these qualifications who
did not get out of the experience as much as it was possible to give, if
not more. An interest in basic social problems develops naturally out of
the club relationship. Housing conditions, immigration, unemployment,
minimum wage, political control, labor unions, are no longer remote and
academic. They are subjects of immediate concern because of their vital
importance to the new circle of friends.
[Illustration: A Settlement Interior.]
The leaders of the clubs meet regularly for inspiration and guidance.
Their conferences might be likened to serious faculty meetings, only here
the social aspects of life and individual problems are discussed. We ask
them to bear in mind the necessity of encouraging the altruistic impulses
inherent in normal human kind, but, like other faculties, needing to be
exercised. Where the material needs challenge the sympathies one must
be reminded that “where there is no vision the people perish.” In our
neighborhood there are traditions among the people that readily lend
themselves to the reaffirmation of this message.
[Illustration: ESTHER]
The girls’ and children’s department has long had the inspiration of a
gifted young woman who, though a non-resident, has contributed in equal
measure with those who have found it possible to detach themselves
sufficiently from their family obligations to reside in the settlement.
Among the leaders are young men and women who themselves have been
members of the clubs, some of them now occupying positions of trust and
authority in the city.
The classes have more definite educational programmes, but in the
settlement they are interrelated with the clubs and made to harmonize
with their purpose. For children attending school the manual training is
planned to demonstrate the value of new experiments or to supplement the
instruction the school system affords. The art classes are limited and
informal, and without studio equipment as yet, but interested teachers
have given their time to students who show inclination or ability,
and effort is made to bring out not conventional, imitative work, but
the power to see and to portray honestly the things about us. All the
settlement family felt that for this reason, if for no other, it was
fitting to have the story of “The House on Henry Street” illustrated by
one who had found his art expression there.
* * * * *
The dramatic instinct is very strong in the Jewish child, and musical
gifts are not uncommon. With encouragement a high degree of talent is
often developed. Perhaps the most impressive evidence of this has been
given in the cycle of Hebrew ritual festivals, poetical interpretations
of the ceremonies cherished by the Henry Street neighborhood. The
value of these is not limited to the educational effect upon the young
people. They interpret anew to the community the rich inheritance of
our neighbors, and the parents of those who participate give touching
evidence of their appreciation.
[Illustration]
When a beautiful pageant based on the incident of Miriam and her maidens
was in rehearsal an intractable small boy was dismissed from the cast. In
the evening his father, a printer, called and expressed the hope that
if his son’s behavior was not unforgivable we would take him back. He
wished the boy might carry through life the memory of having had a part
in something as beautiful as this festival. After a performance a woman
who had suffered bitterly in her Russian home blocked for a moment the
outgoing crowd at the door while she stopped to say how beautiful she
thought it, adding with deep feeling, “I thank most for showing respect
to our religion.”
The dramatic club has attempted serious work, and “The Shepherd,” by
Olive Tilford Dargan, and Galsworthy’s “Silver Box” were two of their
performances given at Clinton Hall that, in the judgment of the critical,
reached a high level of excellence.
[Illustration: THE NEIGHBORHOOD PLAYHOUSE]
The Neighborhood Playhouse, opened in February, 1915, is the outcome
of the work of the festival and dramatic groups of the Henry Street
Settlement. For nine years gifted leaders have devoted themselves to
this interest, and the building of the well-appointed little theater
was necessary for the further development of the work. In addition to
the education incident to performing parts in good plays under cultured
instructors, and the music, poetry, and dance of the festival classes,
the playhouse offers training in the various arts and trades connected
with stage production. Practically all the costumes, settings, and
properties used in the settlement performances have been made in the
classes and workshops.
[Illustration]
“Jephthah’s Daughter,” a festival, opened the playhouse. We were pleased
to believe that the performance gained in significance because the music,
the dance, and the color were a reminder of the dower brought to New York
by the stranger. Seventy-eight young people were in the cast, and many
more had a share in the production. Children belonging to the youngest
clubs in the settlement pulled the threads to make the fringes; designers
and makers of costumes, craftsmen, composers, painters and musicians,
seamstresses, directors, and producers, all contributed in varying
degrees, showing a community of interest, service, and enthusiasm only
possible when the purpose lies outside the materialist’s world.
[Illustration: From “Jephthah’s Daughter.”]
It is our hope that the playhouse, identified with the neighborhood,
may recapture and hold something of the poetry and idealism that belong
to its people and open the door of opportunity for messages in drama
and picture and song and story. In its first brief season, beside
the productions of the groups for whose development the theater was
constructed, there have been special performances for the children at
which famous story-tellers have appeared. Important anniversaries have
been impressively celebrated. Ellen Terry, of imperishable charm, gave
Shakespearean readings on the poet’s birthday, and Sarah Cowell Le Moyne
gave the readings from Browning on his day. Ibsen and Shaw and Dunsany
have been interpreted, and distinguished professionals have found
pleasure in acting before audiences at once critical and appreciative.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER X
YOUTH
We remind our young people from time to time that conventions established
in sophisticated society have usually a sound basis in social experience,
and the cultivation of the minor morals of good manners develops
consideration for others.
[Illustration]
We interpret the “coming-out” party as a glorification of youth. When the
members of the young women’s clubs reach the age of eighteen, the annual
ball of the settlement, its most popular social function, is made the
occasion of their formal introduction and promotion to the senior group.
As Head Resident I am their hostess, and in giving the invitations I make
much of the fact that they have reached young womanhood, with the added
privileges, dignity, and responsibility that it brings.
Intimate and long-sustained association, not only with the individual,
but with the entire family, gives opportunities that would never open up
if the acquaintance were casual or the settlement formally institutional.
The incidents that follow illustrate this, and I could add many more.
Two girls classified as “near tough” seemed beyond the control of their
club leader, who entreated help from the more experienced. On a favorable
occasion Bessie was invited to the cozy intimacy of my sitting-room. That
she and Eveline, her chum, were conscious of their exaggerated raiment
was obvious, for she hastened to say, “I guess it’s on account of my
yellow waist. Eveline and me faded away when we saw you at dancing class
the other night.” It was easy to follow up her introduction by pointing
out that pronounced lack of modesty in dress was one of several signs;
that their dancing, their talk, their freedom of manner, all combined
to render them conspicuous and to cause their friends anxiety. Bessie
listened, observed that she “couldn’t throw the waist away, for it cost
five dollars,” but insisted that she was “good on the inside.” An offer
to buy the waist and burn it because her dignity was worth more than
five dollars was illuminating. “That strikes me as somethin’ grand. I
wouldn’t let you do it, but I’ll never wear the waist again.” So far as
we know, she has kept her word.
* * * * *
Annie began to show a pronounced taste in dress, and gave unmistakable
signs of restlessness. She confided her aspirations toward the stage. The
young club leader, with insight and understanding, used the settlement
influence to secure the coveted interview with a manager.
Promptly at the appointed hour on Saturday, when the girl’s half-holiday
made the engagement possible, Miss B⸺ went to the factory to meet her. In
the stream of girls that poured from it Annie, who had dressed for the
occasion, was conspicuous. It required some fortitude on the part of her
settlement friend to adhere to their original programme, but they rode on
the top of a Fifth Avenue stage, ate ice cream at a fashionable resort,
and finally met the theatrical authority, who gave most effectively the
discouragement needed.
* * * * *
When Sophie’s manner and dress caused comment among her associates, her
club leader, who had been waiting for a suitable opportunity, called to
see her on Sunday morning, when the girl would be sure to be at home.
Sitting on the edge of the bed in the cramped room, they talked the
matter over. As for the paint,—many girls thought it wise to use it, for
employers did not like to have jaded-looking girls working for them; and
as for the finery,—“Lots of uptown swells are wearing earrings.”
Contrasted with the girl’s generosity to her family the cost of the
finery was pathetically small. She had spent on an overcoat for her
father the whole of the Christmas gratuity given by her employer for a
year of good service, and her pay envelope was handed unopened to her
mother every week.
Sophie finally comprehended the reason for her friend’s solicitude, and
at the end of their talk said she would have done the same for a young
sister.
It is often a solace to find eternal youth expressing itself in harmless
gayety of attire, which it is possible to construe as evidence of a
sense of self-respect and self-importance. It is, at any rate, a more
encouraging indication than a sight I remember in the poor quarter of
London. I watched the girls at lunch time pour into a famous tea-house
from the nearby factories, many of them with buttonless shoes, the tops
flapping as they walked; skirts separated from untidy blouses, unkempt
hair,—a sight that could nowhere be found among working girls in America.
[Illustration: IN A CLUB-ROOM]
The settlement’s sympathy with this aspect of youth may not seem
eminently practical, but when Mollie took the accumulated pay for many
weeks’ overtime, amounting to twenty-five dollars, and “blew it in” on
a hat with a marvelous plume, we thought we understood the impulse that
might have found more disastrous expression. The hat itself became a
white elephant, a source of endless embarrassment, but buying it had been
an orgy. This interpretation of Mollie’s extravagance, when presented to
the mother, who in her vexation had complained to us, influenced her to
refrain from nagging and too often reminding the girl of the many uses to
which the money might have been put.
[Illustration]
At the hearing of the Factory Investigation Commission in New York
during the winter of 1914-15 a witness testified regarding the dreary
and incessant economies practiced by low-paid working girls. This
stimulated discussion, and an editorial in a morning paper queried
where the girls were, pointing out that the working girls of New York
presented not only an attractive but often a stylish appearance. I
asked a young acquaintance, whose appearance justified the newspaper
description, to give me her budget. She had lived on five dollars a week.
Her board and laundry cost $4. She purchased stockings from push-cart
venders, “seconds” of odd colors but good quality, for ten cents a pair;
combinations, “seconds” also, cost 25 cents. She bought boys’ blouses,
as they were better and cheaper. These cost 25 cents. Hats (peanut
straw) cost 10 cents; tooth-paste 10 cents a month. Having very small
and narrow feet, she was able to take advantage of special sales, when
she could buy a good pair of shoes for 50 cents. Her coat, bought out
of season for $7, was being worn for the third winter. Conditions were
exceptional in her case, as she boarded with friends who obviously
charged her less than she would otherwise have been compelled to pay; but
there was practically nothing left for carfares, for pleasure, or for the
many demands made upon even the most meager purse; and few people, in any
circumstances, would be able to show such excellent discretion in the
expenditure of income.
* * * * *
In the tenements family life is disturbed and often threatened with
disintegration by the sheer physical conditions of the home. Where there
is no privacy there is inevitable loss of the support and strength that
come from the interchange of confidences and assurance of understanding.
I felt this anew when I called upon Henrietta on the evening of the day
her father died. The tie between father and daughter had been close. When
I sought to express the sympathy that even the strong and self-reliant
need, so crowded were the little rooms that we were forced to sit
together on the tenement-house stairs, amid the coming and going of
sympathetic and excited neighbors, and all the passing and repassing of
the twenty other families that the house sheltered. It would have been
impossible for anyone to offer, in the midst of that curious though not
ill-meaning crowd, the solace she so sadly needed.
Emotional experiences cannot be made public without danger of blunting or
coarsening the fiber of character. Privacy is needed for intimate talks,
even between mother and daughter. The casual nature of the employment
of the unskilled has also its bearing upon the family relationship. The
name or address of the place of employment of the various members of the
family is often not known. “How could I know Louisa was in trouble?” said
a simple mother of our neighborhood. “She is a good girl to me. I don’t
know where she works. I don’t know her friends.”
And the wide span that stretches between the conventions of one
generation and another must also be reckoned with. The clash between
them, unhappily familiar to many whose experiences never become known
outside the family circle, is likely to be intensified when the
Americanized wage-earning son or daughter reverses the relationship of
child and parent by becoming the protector and the link between the
outside world and the home. The service of the settlement as interpreter
seems in this narrower sphere almost as useful as its attempts to bring
about understanding between separated sections of society.
[Illustration]
One evening an eloquent speaker addressing a senior group dwelt upon the
hardships of the older people and the obligations of their children to
them. The young women lingered after the speaker had gone, discussing the
lecture and applying it to themselves. Though sensitive to the appeal,
they were loath to relinquish their right to self-expression. One girl
thought her parents demanded an impossible sacrifice by insisting on
living in a street to which she was ashamed to bring her associates. The
parents refused to leave the quarter where their countrymen dwelt, and
although the daughter willingly gave her earnings and paid tribute to her
mother’s devotion and housekeeping skill, she said she felt irritated and
mortified every time she returned to her home.
Quite naturally it came about in the beginning of our understanding of
the young people that we should take some action to protect them from
the disastrous consequences of their ignorance; for it is difficult
for the mothers to touch upon certain themes of great import. They are
not indifferent, but rather helpless, in the face of the modern city’s
demands upon motherhood. Rarely do they feel adequate to meet them. Yet
they desire that their girls, and the boys too, should be guarded from
the dangers that threaten them.
Years ago we invited the school teachers of the neighborhood to a
conference on sex problems and offered them speakers and literature.
The public has since then become aroused on the subject of sex hygiene,
and possibly, in some instances, the pendulum has swung too far; but
we are convinced that this obligation to the young cannot be ignored
without assuming grave risks. Never have I known an unfavorable reaction
when the presentation of this subject has been well considered. It is
impossible to give directions as to how it should be done; temperament,
development, and environment influence the approach. The girl invariably
responds to the glorification of her importance as woman and as future
mother, and the theme leads on naturally to the miracle of nature that
guards and then creates; and the young men have shown themselves far
from indifferent to their future fatherhood. Fathers and mothers should
be qualified, and an increasing number are trying to take this duty upon
themselves; but where the parents confess their helplessness the duty
plainly devolves upon those who have established confidential relations
with the members of the family.
[Illustration: At Riverholm.]
WHITHER?
(To a Young Girl)
Say whither, whither, pretty one?
The hour is young at present!
How hushed is all the world around!
Ere dawn—the streets hold not a sound.
O whither, whither do you run?
Sleep at this hour is pleasant.
The flowers are dreaming, dewy-wet;
The bird-nests they are silent yet.
Where to, before the rising sun
The world her light is giving?
“To earn a living.”
O whither, whither, pretty child,
So late at night a-strolling?
Alone—with darkness round you curled?
All rests!—and sleeping is the world.
Where drives you now the wind so wild?
The midnight bells are tolling!
Day hath not warmed you with her light;
What aid canst hope then from the night?
Night’s deaf and blind!—Oh, whither, child,
Light-minded fancies weaving?
“To earn a living.”
[_From “Songs of Labor” by Morris Rosenfeld,
translated by Rose Pastor Stokes and Helena Frank._]
CHAPTER XI
YOUTH AND TRADES UNIONS
The portrayal of youth in a neighborhood such as ours cannot be
dissociated from labor conditions, and it was not incongruous that some
of the deeper implications of this problem should have been brought to us
by young women.
In the early nineties nothing in the experience or education of young
people not in labor circles prepared them to understand the movement
among working people for labor organization. Happily for our democracy
and the breadth of our culture, that could not be so sweepingly said
to-day. Schools, colleges, leagues for political education, clubs, and
associations bring this subject now to the attention of pupils and the
public.
[Illustration]
Our neighbors in the Jefferson Street tenement where we at first lived
had, like ourselves, little time for purely social intercourse. With
the large family on the floor below we had established a stairway
acquaintance. We had remarked the tidy appearance of a daughter of
the house, and wondered how, with her long hours of work, she was able
to accomplish it,—for we knew our own struggle to keep up a standard
of beauty and order. We often saw her going out in the evening with
books under her arm, and surmised that she attended night school. She
called one evening, and our pleasure was mingled with consternation to
learn that she wished aid in organizing a trades union. Even the term
was unknown to me. She spoke without bitterness of the troubles of her
shop-mates, and tried to make me see why they thought a union would
bring them relief. It was evident that she came to me because of her
faith that one who spoke English so easily would know how to organize in
the “American” way, and perhaps with a hope that the union might gain
respectability from the alliance. We soon learned that one great obstacle
to the organization of young women in the trades was a fear on their part
that it would be considered “unladylike,” and might even militate against
their marriage.
The next day I managed to find time to visit the library for academic
information on the subject of trades unions. That evening, in a basement
in a nearby street, I listened to the broken English of the cigarmaker
who was trying to help the girls; and it was interesting to find that
what he gave them was neither more nor less than the philosophic argument
of the book I had consulted,—that collective power might be employed to
insure justice for the individual himself powerless.
The girls had real grievances, for which they blamed their forewoman. One
or two who tried to reach the owner of the factory had been dismissed,—at
the instance of the forewoman, they believed. It was determined to send a
committee to present their complaints and to stand by the girls who were
appointed on it.
The union organized that night did not last very long, for the stability
of the personnel of the trades union, particularly among women, cannot
always be reckoned on. People as yet step from class to class in America
with ease as compared to other countries, and this has obvious democratic
advantages; but it is not so fortunate for the trade organizations or
for the standardization of the trade itself, which is thus continually
recruited from the inexperienced. There is a flux among the workers, the
union officials, and the employers themselves. Among women, the more or
less ephemeral character of much of their work, their frequent change of
occupation, and marriage, all operate against permanency. The girl who
knocked at our door that night, to invite us to our first trades union
meeting, is now in a profession.
Later, when we moved to Henry Street, Minnie, who lived in the next
block, enlisted our sympathy in her efforts to organize the girls in her
trade. She based her arguments for shorter hours on their need of time
to acquire knowledge of housekeeping and home-making before marriage and
motherhood came to them, touching instinctively a fundamental argument
against excessive hours for women.
[Illustration: AFTER THE LONG DAY]
We invited Minnie to a conference of philanthropists on methods for
improving the condition of working girls, in order that she might give
her conception of what would be advantageous. Representatives of the
various societies reported on their work: vacations provided, seats in
stores, religious instruction, and so on. “We are the hands of the boss,”
said Minnie when her turn came. “What does he care for us? I say, Let our
hands be for him and our heads for ourselves. We must work for bread now,
but we must think of our future homes. What time has a working girl to
make ready for this? We never see a meal prepared. For all we know, soup
grows on trees.”
[Illustration]
Minnie, who was headlined by the press during a strike as a Joan of Arc
leading militant hosts to battle, had no educational preparation for
leadership; no equipment beyond her sound good sense and her woman’s
subtlety. Speaking once of the difficulty of earning a living without
training, she told me that her mother could do nothing but sell potatoes
from a push-cart in the street, “among those rough people.” Then,
repenting of her harshness, “Of course, some of those people must be
nice, too, but it is hard to find a diamond in the mud.”
Frequent and prolonged conferences at the settlement with Minnie and
Lottie, her equally intelligent companion, and with many others,
inevitably led to some action on our part; and long anticipating the
Women’s Trades Union League, we took the initiative in organizing a union
at the time of a strike in the cloak trade. The eloquence of the girl
leaders, the charm of our back yard as a meeting-place, and possibly our
own conviction that only through organization could wages be raised and
shop conditions improved, finally prevailed, and the union was organized.
One of our residents and a brilliant young Yiddish-speaking neighbor
took upon themselves some of the duties of the walking delegate. When
the strike was settled, and agreements for the season were about to be
signed by the contractors (or middlemen) and the leader of the men’s
organization, I was invited into a smoke-filled room in Walhalla Hall
long after midnight, to be told that the girls were included in the terms
of the contract.
[Illustration]
Though its immediate object was accomplished, this union also proved to
be an ephemeral organization. For years I held the funds, amounting to
sixteen dollars, because the members had scattered and we could never
assemble a quorum to dispose of the money.
When, in 1903, I was asked to participate in the formation of the
National Women’s Trades Union League, I recognized the importance of
the movement in enlisting sympathy and support for organizations among
working women. To my regret I cannot claim to have rendered services of
any value in the development of the League. It was inevitable that its
purpose, as epitomized in its motto—“The Eight-hour Day; A Living Wage;
To Guard the Home”—should draw to it effective participants and develop
strong leaders among working women themselves. Those who are familiar
with factory and shop conditions are convinced that through organization
and not through the appeal to pity can permanent reforms be assured. It
is undoubtedly true that the enforcement of existing laws is in large
measure dependent upon watchful trades unions. The women’s trades union
leagues, national and state, are not only valuable because of support
given to the workers, but because they make it possible for women other
than wage-earners to identify themselves with working people, and thus
give practical expression to their belief that with them and through
them the realization of the ideals of democracy can be advanced.
* * * * *
The imagination of New Yorkers has been fired from time to time by young
working women who have had no little influence in helping to rouse public
interest in labor conditions. My associates and I, in the early years
of the settlement, owed much to a mother and daughter of singularly
lofty mind and character, both working women, who for a time joined the
settlement family. They had been affiliated with labor organizations
almost all their lives. The ardor of the daughter continually prodded
us to action, and the clear-minded, intellectual mother helped us to a
completer realization of the deep-lying causes that had inspired Mazzini
and other great leaders, whose works we were re-reading.
More recently a young capmaker has stimulated recognition of the public’s
responsibility for the well-being of the young worker. Despite her long
hours, she found time to organize a union in her trade, not in a spurt
of enthusiasm, but as a result of a sober realization that women workers
must stand together for themselves and for those who come after them.
The inquiry that followed the disastrous fire in the factory of the
Triangle Waist Company in March, 1911, when one hundred and forty-three
girls were burned, or leaped from windows to their death, disclosed the
fact that the owners of this factory, like many others, kept the doors of
the lofts locked. Hundreds of girls, many stories above the streets, were
thus cut off from access to stairs or fire-escapes because of the fear of
small thefts of material. The girls in this factory had tried, a short
time before the fire, to organize a union to protest against bad shop
conditions and petty tyrannies.
After the tragedy, at a meeting in the Metropolitan Opera House called
together by horrified men and women of the city, this young capmaker
stood at the edge of the great opera-house stage and in a voice hardly
raised, though it reached every person in that vast audience, arraigned
society for regarding human life so cheaply. No one could have been
insensitive to her cry for justice, her anguish over the youth so
ruthlessly destroyed; and there must have been many in that audience
for whom ever after the little, brown-clad figure with the tragic voice
symbolized the factory girl in the lofts high above the streets of an
indifferent metropolis.
Before the fire the “shirt-waist strike” had brought out a wave of
popular sympathy. This was due in part to the youth of a majority of
the workers, to a realization of the heroic sacrifices some of them were
making (an inkling of which got to the public), and in part also to
disapproval of the methods used to break the strike. Fashionable women’s
clubs held meetings to hear the story from the lips of girl strikers
themselves, and women gave voice to their disapproval of judges who
sentenced the young strikers to prison, where they were associated—often
sharing the same cells—with criminals and prostitutes. Little wonder
that women who had never known the bitterness of poverty or oppression
found satisfaction in picketing side by side with the working girls who
were paying the great cost of the strike. Many, among them settlement
residents, readily went bail or paid fines for the girls who were
arrested.
* * * * *
Cruel and dramatic exploitation of workers is in the main a thing of the
past, but the more subtle injuries of modern industry, due to overstrain,
speeding-up, and a minimum of leisure, have only recently attracted
attention. It is barely three years (1912) since the New York Factory Law
was amended to prohibit the employment of girls over sixteen for more
than ten hours in one day or fifty-four hours a week. The legislation
reflected the new compunction of the community concerning these workers,
though unlimited hours are still permitted in stores during the Christmas
season.
[Illustration]
Few people realize what even a ten-hour day means, especially when the
worker lives at a distance from the shop or factory and additional hours
must be spent in going to and from the place of employment. And in New
York travel during the rush hours may mean standing the entire distance.
Working girls, in their own vernacular, have “two jobs.” Those who have
long hours and poor pay must live at the cheapest rate. Often they are
not able to pay for more than part use of a bed, and however generous
may be the provision of working girls’ hotels, the low-paid workers are
not able to avail themselves of these. The girl who receives the least
wage must live down to the bone, cook her own meals, wash and iron her
own shirt-waists, attend to all the necessary details for her home and
person, and this after the long day. The cheapest worker is also likely
to be the overtime worker, a fact that is most obvious to the public at
Christmas time.
The Factory Investigating Commission, appointed after the Triangle fire
to recommend measures for safety, was continued for the purpose of
inquiry into the wages of labor throughout the state and also into the
advisability of establishing a minimum wage rate. The reports of the
commission, the public hearings, and the invaluable contributions to
current periodicals are enlightening the community on the social perils
due to giving a wage less than the necessary cost of decent living; and
as the great majority of employees concerning whom this information has
been gathered are young girls, the appeal to the public is bound to bring
recommendations for safety in this respect. The dullness of life when
pettiest economies must be forever practiced has also been well pictured
in the testimony brought out by the commission.
* * * * *
In these chapters I have sought to portray the youth of our neighborhood
at its more conscious and responsible period, when the age of greatest
incorrigibility (said to be between thirteen and sixteen) has been
passed. Labor discussions and solemn conferences on social problems
may seem an incongruous background for a picture of youth. Happily, its
gayety is not easily suppressed, and comforting reassurance lies in the
fact that recreation has ever for the young its strong and legitimate
appeal; that art and music carry their message, and that the public
conscience which recognizes the requirements of youth is reflected in the
increasing provision for its pleasures. “Wider use of school buildings,”
“recreation directors,” “social centers,” “municipal dances,” are new
terms that have crept into our vocabularies.
[Illustration]
Though the Italians have brought charming _festas_ into our city
streets, it was not until I admired the decorations that enhance the
picturesque streets of Japan, and enjoyed the sight of the gay dancers
on the boulevards of Paris on the day in July when the French celebrate,
that it occurred to me that we might bring color and gayety to the
streets—even the ugly streets—of New York. For years Henry Street has
had its dance on the Fourth of July, and the city and citizens share in
the preparation and expense. The asphalt is put in good condition (once,
for the very special occasion of the settlement’s twentieth birthday,
the city officials hastened a contemplated renewal of the asphalt); the
street-cleaning department gives an extra late-afternoon cleaning and
keeps a white uniformed sweeper on duty during the festivity; the police
department loans the stanchions and the park department the rope; the
Edison Company illuminates with generosity; from the tenements and the
settlement houses hang the flags and the bunting streamers, and the
neighbors—all of us together—pay for the band. Asphalt, when swept and
cleaned, makes an admirable dancing floor, and to this street dance come
all the neighbors and their friends. The children play games to the music
in their roped-off section, the young people dance, and all are merry.
The first year of the experiment the friendly captain of the precinct
asked what protection was needed. We had courage and faith to request
that no officer should be added to the regular man on the beat, and the
good conduct of the five or six thousand who danced or were spectators
entirely justified the faith and the courage.
[Illustration: AN INCIDENT IN THE HISTORICAL PAGEANT ON HENRY STREET,
COMMEMORATING THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE SETTLEMENT]
The protective legislation, the new terms in our vocabulary, and the
dance on the street are but symbols of the acceptance by the community
of its responsibility for protecting and nurturing its precious
possession,—the youth of the city.
CHAPTER XII
WEDDINGS AND SOCIAL HALLS
When we came to Henry Street, the appearance of a carriage before the
door caused some commotion, and members of the settlement returning to
the house would be met by excited little girls who announced, “You’s
got a wedding by you. There’s a carriage there.” It was taken for
granted in those days that nothing short of a wedding would justify such
magnificence.
In one way or another we were continually reminded of the paramount
importance of the wedding in the life of the neighborhood. “What!”
said a shocked father to whom I expressed my occidental revolt against
insistence upon his daughter’s marriage to a man who was brought by the
professional matchmaker and was a stranger to the girl; “let a girl of
seventeen, with no judgment whatsoever, decide on anything so important
as a husband?” But as youth asserts itself under the new conditions,
the _Schadchen_, or marriage-broker, no longer occupies an important
position.
[Illustration]
When we first visited families in the tenements, we might have been
misled as to the decline in the family fortunes if we judged their
previous estate by the photographs hung high on the walls of the poor
homes, of bride and groom, splendidly arrayed for the wedding ceremony.
But we learned that the costumes had been rented and the photographs
taken, partly that the couple might keep a reminder of the splendor of
that brief hour, and also that relations on the other side of the water
might be impressed with their prosperity.
Since those days the neighborhood has become more sophisticated, and
brides are more likely to make their own wedding gowns, often exhibiting
good taste as well as skill; though the shop windows in the foreign
quarters still display waxen figures of modishly attired bride and groom,
with alluring announcements of the low rates at which the garments may be
hired.
We were invited to many weddings, and often pitied the little bride
who, having fasted all day as required by orthodox custom, went wearily
through the intricate ceremony, reminiscent of tribal days. One bride to
whom we offered our congratulations accepted them without enthusiasm, and
added, “’Tain’t no such easy thing to get married.”
The younger generation, born in America, whose loyalty and affection for
their elders is unimpaired by the changed conditions, but for whom the
old symbols and customs have no longer a religious meaning, often submit
to the orthodox wedding ceremony out of deference to the wishes of the
parents and grandparents.
[Illustration: THE OLDER GENERATION]
The ceremony in the rented hall (where it takes place owing to the
physical limitations of the home) loses some of its dignity, however
much it may have of warmth and affection. To the weddings come all the
family, from the aged grandparents to the youngest grandchildren. Before
the evening is over the babies are asleep in the arms of their parents or
under the care of the old woman in attendance in the cloak-room.
[Illustration]
At a typical wedding of twenty years ago the supper was spread in the
basement of one of the public halls, and the incongruities were not more
painfully obvious to us than to the delicate-minded bride. The rabbi
chanted the blessings, and the “poet” sang old Jewish legends, weaving
in stories of the families united that evening. We were moved almost to
tears by the pathos of these exiles clinging to the poetic traditions
of the past amid filthy surroundings; for the tables were encompassed
by piles of beer kegs, with their suggestion of drink so foreign to
the people gathered there; and men and women who were not guests came
and went to the dressing-rooms that opened into the dining-hall. Every
time we attended a wedding it shocked us anew that these sober and
right-behaving people were obliged to use for their social functions the
offensive halls over or behind saloons, because there were no others to
be had.
An incident a few days after my coming to the East Side had first brought
to my attention the question of meeting-places for the people. As usual
in hard times, it was difficult for the unhappy, dissatisfied unemployed
to find a place for the discussion of their troubles. Spontaneous
gatherings were frequent that summer, and in one of them, described by
the papers next morning as a street riot, I accidentally found myself.
It was no more than an attempt of men out of work to get together
and talk over their situation. They had no money for the rent of a
meeting-place, and having been driven by the police from the street
corners, they tried to get into an unoccupied hall on Grand Street. Rough
handling by the police stirred them to retaliation, and show of clubs was
met by missiles—pieces of smoked fish snatched from a nearby stand kept
by an old woman. Violence and ill-feeling might have been averted by the
simple expedient of permitting them to meet unmolested. Instinctively
I realized this, and felt for my purse, but I had come out with only
sufficient carfare to carry me on my rounds, and an unknown, impecunious
young woman in a nurse’s cotton dress was not in a position to speak
convincingly on the subject of renting halls.
Later, when I visited London, I could understand the wisdom of
non-interference with the well-known Hyde Park meetings. It is
encouraging to note that common sense is touching the judgment of New
York’s officials regarding the right of the people to meet and speak
freely.
Other occurrences of those early days pointed to the need of some place
of assemblage other than the unclean rooms connected with saloons.
Walhalla Hall, on Orchard Street, famous long ago as a meeting-place
for labor organizations, provided them with accommodations not more
appropriate than those I have described. When from time to time a
settlement resident helped to hide beer kegs with impromptu decorations,
we pledged ourselves that whenever it came into our power we would
provide a meeting-place for social functions and labor gatherings and a
forum for public debate that would not sacrifice the dignity of those who
used it. Our own settlement rooms were by that time in constant service
for the neighborhood; but it was plain that even if we could have given
them up entirely to such purposes, a place entirely free from “auspices”
and to be rented—not given under favor—was required. Prince Kropotkin,
then on a visit to America, urged upon me the wisdom of keeping a people
free by allowing freedom of speech, and of respecting their assemblages
by affording dignified accommodations for them.
[Illustration]
It was curious, when one realized it, that recognition of the normal,
wholesome impulse of young people to congregate should also have been
left to the saloon-keeper, and the young lads who frequented undesirable
places were often wholly unaware that they themselves were, to use their
own diction, “easy marks.”
A genial red-haired lad, a teamster by trade, referred with pride to his
ability as a boxer. In answer to pointed questions as to where and how
he acquired his skill, he said a saloon-keeper, “an awful good sport,”
allowed the boys to use his back room. Fortunately the “good sport’s”
saloon was at some distance; and, suggesting that it must be a bore to
go so far after a day’s hard work, I offered to provide a room and a
professional to coach them on fine points if James thought the “fellows”
would care for it. A call next morning at the office of the Children’s
Aid Society resulted in permission to put to this service an unused part
of a nearby building, and during the day a promising boxer was engaged.
James had not waited to inquire if I had either the room or trainer
ready, and appeared the next evening with a list of young men for the
club.
Some weeks later a “throw-away,” a small handbill to announce events,
came into my hands. It read:
EAT ’EM ALIVE!
Grand Annual Ball of the ⸺ of the
Nurses’ Settlement.[8]
The date was given and the price of admission “with wardrobe”;[9] and to
my horror the place designated for this function was a notorious hall
on the Bowery, its door adjacent to one opening into “Suicide Hall,” so
designated because of several self-murders recently committed there.
There was a great deal of mystery about the object of the ball, and
the instructor, guileless in almost everything but the art of boxing,
reluctantly betrayed the secret. They had in mind to make a large sum of
money and with it buy me a present. They dreamed of a writing-desk. It
was a difficult situation, but the young men, their chivalrous instincts
touched, reacted to my little speech and seemed to comprehend that it
would be embarrassing to the ladies of the settlement to be placed under
the implication of profiting by the sale of liquor,—though this was
delicate ground to tread upon, since members of the families of several
of the club boys were bartenders or in the saloon business; but the name
of the settlement had been used to advertise the ball, and “there was
something in it.”
To emphasize my point and to relieve them of complications, since they
had contracted for the use of the place, I offered to pay the owner of
the hall a sum of money (one hundred dollars, as I recall it) if he would
keep the bar closed on the night of the dance; and I pledged the young
men that we would all attend and help to make the ball a success if we
could compromise in this manner. The owner of the hall, however, as some
of the more worldly-wise members had prophesied, scoffed at my offer.
Public halls are the most common way of making money for a desired
end. Sometimes ephemeral organizations are created to “run” them and
divide the profits that may accrue. At other times, like the fashionable
“Charity” balls, the object is to raise money for a beneficent purpose.
It required some readjustment of the ordinary association of ideas
to purchase without comment the tickets offered at the door of the
settlement for a “grand ball,” the proceeds of which were to provide a
tombstone for a departed friend.
* * * * *
It was soon clear to us that an entirely innocent and natural desire for
recreation afforded continual opportunity for the overstimulation of the
senses and for dangerous exploitation. Later, when the question could be
formally brought to the notice of the public, men and women whose minds
had been turned to the evils of the dance-halls and the causes of social
unrest responded to our appeal, and the Social Halls Association was
organized.
Clinton Hall, a handsome, fireproof structure, was erected on Clinton
Street in 1904. It provides meeting-rooms for trades unions, lodges, and
benefit societies; an auditorium and ballroom, poolrooms, dining-halls,
and kitchens, with provision for the Kosher preparation of meals. In
summer there is a roof garden, with a stage for dramatic performances.
The building was opened with a charming dance given by the young men
of the settlement, followed soon after by a beautiful and impressive
performance of the _Ajax_ of Sophocles by the Greeks of New York.
The stock was subscribed for by people of means, by the small merchants
of the neighborhood, and by settlement residents and their friends. A
janitress brought her bank book, showing savings amounting to $200,
with which she desired to purchase two shares. She was with difficulty
dissuaded from the investment, which I felt she could not afford. When
I explained that the people who were subscribing for the stock were
prepared not to receive any return from it; that they were risking the
money for the sake of those who were obliged to frequent undesirable
halls, Mrs. H⸺ replied, “That’s just how Jim and me feel about it. We’ve
been janitors, and we know.” The Social Halls Association is a business
corporation, and has its own board of directors, of which I have been
president from the beginning.
Clinton Hall has afforded an excellent illustration of the psychology of
suggestion. The fact that no bar is in evidence, and no white-aproned
waiters parade in and out of the ballroom or halls of meetings, has
resulted in a minimum consumption of liquor, although, during the first
years, drinks could have been purchased by leaving the crowd and the
music and sitting at a table in a room one floor below the ballroom.
Leaders of rougher crowds than the usual clientele of Clinton Hall,
accustomed to a “rake-off” from the bar at the end of festivities, had to
have documentary evidence of the small sales, so incredible did it seem
to them that the “crowd” had drunk so little.
It has been a disappointment that the income has not met the reasonable
expectations of those interested. This is due partly to some mistakes
of construction,—not surprising since there was no precedent to guide
us,—largely to the competition of places with different standards which
derive profit from a stimulated sale of liquor, and also partly to the
inability, not peculiar to our neighbors, to distinguish between a direct
and an indirect charge. In all other respects the history of this
building has justified our faith that the people are ready to pay for
decency. It is patronized by five to six hundred thousand people every
year.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XIII
FRIENDS OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM
If spiritual force implies the power to lift the individual out of the
contemplation of his own interests into something great and of ultimate
value to the men and women of this and the generations to come, and if,
so lifted, sacrifices are freely offered on the altar of the cause, it
may truly be said that the Russian Revolution is a spiritual force on the
East Side of New York.
People who all through the day are immersed in mundane affairs, the
earning of money to provide food and shelter, are transfigured at its
appeal. Back of the Russian Jew’s ardor for the liberation of a people
from the absolutism that provoked terrorism lies also the memory of
pogroms and massacres.
Though I had agonized with my neighbors over the tales that crossed
the water and the pitiful human drift that came to our shores, I did
not know how far I was from realizing the depths of horror until I saw
at Ellis Island little children with saber-cuts on their heads and
bodies, mutilated and orphaned at the Kishineff massacre. Rescued by
compassionate people, they had been sent here to be taken into American
homes.
[Illustration]
The procession of mourners marching with black-draped flags after
the news of the Bialystok massacre, the mass-meetings called to give
expression to sorrow at the failure of Father Gapon’s attempt to obtain
a hearing for the workingmen on that “Bloody Sunday”[10] when, it will
be remembered, the priest led hosts of men, women, and children carrying
icons and the Emperor’s picture to his palace, only to be fired upon by
his order, are some of the events that keep the Russian revolutionary
movement a stirring propaganda in our quarter of New York, at least.
Our contact with the members of the Russian revolutionary committee in
New York is close enough to enable us to be of occasional service to
them, and some report of our trustworthiness must have penetrated into
the prisons, as the letters we receive and the exiles who come to us
indicate.
A volume might be written of these visitors. The share they have taken
in the revolutionary movement is known, and their coming is often
merely an assurance that hope still lives. The young women, intrepid
figures, are significant not only of the long-continued struggle for
political deliverance, but of the historical progress of womenkind toward
intellectual and social freedom.
When Dr. W⸺ called upon me he was on his way to Sakhalin to join his wife
after nearly twenty years’ separation. For participation in an act of
violence against an official notorious for his brutality and disregard
even of Russian justice she had been sentenced to death, but the sentence
had been commuted to imprisonment in the Schlüsselburg fortress, whither
she was conducted in heavy chains, and where she remained thirteen years.
Later she was rearrested and sentenced to exile for life. She had been
for five years in the frozen Siberian village of Sakhalin, when, in 1898,
her husband, having seen their only son established in life and settled
his own affairs, obtained permission from the government to join his wife
in her exile.
In imagination I followed this cultured, impressive-looking man on his
long journey with a hope that was almost a prayer that the reunited
husband and wife would find recompense in their comradeship for all that
had been given up and that the woman’s fine spirit would make up for
whatever she might have lost through deprivation of stimulating contact
with her own circle in the world.
My interest caused me to follow their subsequent history. A few years
after Dr. W⸺ had joined his wife they were permitted to remove to
Vladivostok. In 1906, after the October manifesto, there was a military
revolutionary movement in Vladivostok. The governor gave the order to
fire and Madame W⸺, who, with her husband, was watching the crowd, was
killed by a stray bullet. Her son is now a lawyer in Petrograd. Although
separated from his mother nearly all his life he shows his devotion to
her memory and his sympathy with the cause by defending the “politicals”
who come to him.
* * * * *
The settlement from time to time affords occasions for conference on
Russian affairs between influential Americans and visiting Russians who
entertain hopes of reform by other than active revolutionary methods
and it has also given a hearing and found sympathetic friends for other
unhappy subjects of the Czar.
Echoes came to us of the persecution of the Doukhobors, a Russian
religious communistic sect, whose creed bears resemblance to that of
the Friends. Like the active revolutionists, these people had suffered
flogging, imprisonment, and exile, but in their case for espousing the
doctrine of non-resistance.
In 1897, upon their refusal to take up arms, persecution again became
active. The Russian press was forbidden to allude to the subject, but a
petition was said to have been thrown into the carriage of the Empress
when she was traveling in the Caucasus, where the Doukhobors had been
banished, and her interest was aroused. By 1900 Tolstoi had succeeded in
fixing attention upon their plight, and arrangements were finally made,
chiefly through the efforts of Friends in England and America and the
devotion of Aylmer Maude, for their settlement in Canada.
In order to raise funds for the emigration of these peasants to Canada,
Tolstoi was persuaded to depart from his established principle and
accept copyright for “Resurrection,” but the Doukhobors refused to
benefit by the sale of a book which they did not consider “good.”
During the first years of their life in Manitoba things did not go well
with them, and the House on Henry Street became the headquarters for some
of their friends as they came and went from England. A young man who,
under the influence of Tolstoi, had given up his commission in the army
spent a winter in Canada helping them to lay out their farm lands.
When he visited us he paid full tribute to the sincerity of their
religious convictions, but somewhat ruefully lamented the fanatical
extremes to which they carried them. The Doukhobors, who believed that
all work should be shared, voted against one person milking their single
cow. “But the cow,” said the young ex-captain, “was not a communist, and
went dry.”
[Illustration: _Fraternal Greetings P Kropotkin_]
My association with the fortunes of the Doukhobors ended with a slight
incident some time later. A peasant, unable to speak any language or
dialect that we could command in the house or neighborhood, presented a
card at our door on which were written these three words, “Kropotkin,
Crosby, Wald.” When an interpreter was secured from Ellis Island we
learned that, hearing of the pilgrimage of the Doukhobors to Canada, he
had decided to follow them, and for clews had only the remote connection
of Kropotkin’s sympathy with Russian peasants, Ernest Crosby’s devotion
to Tolstoi, and some rumor of his and my interest in these people. That
he should have succeeded in finding me seemed quite remarkable. He was
sent to Canada, and subsequent letters from him gave evidence of his
contentment with the odd sect to which he had been attracted.
After rather serious conflict between their religious practices and the
Canadian regulations, the Doukhobors are reported to have settled their
differences and to have established flourishing communistic colonies
where thousands of acres have been brought under cultivation.
* * * * *
The Friends of Russian Freedom, a national association with headquarters
in New York, is composed of well-known American sympathizers, and, like
the society of the same name in England, recognizes the spirit that
animates Russians engaged in the struggle for political freedom, and is
watchful to show sympathy and give aid.
An occasion for this arose about eight years ago, when the Russian
Government demanded the extradition of one Jan Pouren as a common
criminal. The Commissioner before whom the case was brought acceded
to Russia’s demands and Pouren was held in the Tombs prison to await
extradition. Then this insignificant Lettish peasant became a center of
protest. Pouren, it was known, had been involved in the Baltic uprisings,
and acquiescence in Russia’s demands for his extradition would imperil
thousands who, like him, had sought a refuge here, and would take heart
out of the people who still clung to the party of protest throughout
Russia. A great mass-meeting held in Cooper Union bore testimony to
the tenacity with which high-minded Americans clung to the cherished
traditions of their country. Able counsel generously offered their
services, and it was hoped that this and other expressions of public
protest would induce the Secretary of State to order the case reopened.
My own participation came about because of a request from the members
of the Russian Revolutionary Committee in New York that I present to
President Roosevelt personally the arguments for the reopening of the
case. An hour preceding the weekly Cabinet meeting was appointed for my
visit. I took to the White House an extraordinary letter sent by Lettish
peasants, now hard-working and law-abiding residents of Massachusetts
and New Hampshire. It read: “We hear Jan Pouren is in prison, that he
is called a criminal. We called him ‘brother’ and ‘comrade.’ Do not let
him fall into the hands of the bloodthirsty vampire.” To this letter
were appended the signatures and addresses of men who had been in the
struggle in Russia and who, by identifying themselves with Pouren,
placed themselves in equal jeopardy should the case go against him. They
offered to give sworn affidavits, or to come in person to testify for
the accused. With the letter had come a considerable sum of money which
the signers had collected from their scanty wages for Pouren’s defense.
I also had with me a translation of the report to the second Duma on the
Baltic uprisings wherein this testimony, in reference to the attempt
of the Government to locate those involved in the disturbances, was
recorded: “They beat the eight-year-old Anna Pouren, demanding of her
that she should tell the whereabouts of her father.”
The President and the Secretaries concerned discussed the matter, and I
left with the assurance that the new evidence offered would justify the
reopening of the case. At the second hearing the Commissioner’s decision
was reversed and Russia’s demands refused, on the ground that the alleged
offenses were shown to be political and “not in any one instance for
personal grievance or for personal gain.”[11]
* * * * *
George Kennan, who first focused the attention of Americans upon the
political exiles through his dramatic portrayal of their condition in
the Siberian prisons, is still the eager champion of their cause. Prince
Kropotkin, who thrilled the readers of the _Atlantic Monthly_ with his
“Autobiography of a Revolutionist”;[12] Tschaikowsky, Gershuni, Marie
Sukloff[13]—a long procession of saints and martyrs, sympathizers, and
supporters—have crossed the threshold of the House on Henry Street and
stirred deep feeling there. Katharine Breshkovsky (Babuschka, little
grandmother)[14], most beloved of all who have suffered for the great
cause, is to many a symbol of the Russian revolution.
Who of those that sat around the fire with her in the sitting-room of
the Henry Street house can ever forget the experience? We knew vaguely
the story of the young noblewoman’s attempt to teach the newly freed
serfs on her father’s estate in the early sixties; how her religious
zeal to give all that she had to the poor was regarded as dangerous by
the Czar’s government, and how one suppression and persecution after
another finally drove her into the circle of active revolutionists. Her
long incarceration in the Russian prison and final sentence to the Kara
mines and hard labor was known to us, and we identified her as the woman
whose exalted spirit had stirred Mr. Kennan when he met her in the little
Buriat hamlet on the frontier of China so many years ago.
And then, after two decades of prison and Siberian exile, she sat with
us and thrilled us with glimpses of the courage of those who answered
the call. Lightly touching on her own share in the tragic drama, she
carried us with her on the long road to Siberia among the politicals
and the convicts who were their companions, through the perils of an
almost successful escape with three students to the Pacific, a thousand
miles away. She told of her recapture and return to hard labor in the
Kara mines; of the unspeakable outrages, and the heroic measures her
companions there took to draw attention to the prisoners’ plight, and
how, despite these things, she looked back upon that time as wonderful
because of the beautiful and valiant souls who were her fellow-prisoners
and companions, young women who had given up more than life itself for
the great cause of liberty.
Her visit to America in 1905 was made at a time when the long-cherished
hopes of the revolutionists had some promise of realization. It was
deemed necessary to gain the utmost sympathy and support from the
comrades here, and she did indeed reawaken in the hearts of our neighbors
their most passionate desire for the political emancipation of a country
so well beloved from a government so well hated.
I accompanied Madame Breshkovsky to a reception given in her honor by
her fellow-countrymen, and her approach was the signal for a great
demonstration. They lifted her from the floor and carried her, high above
the heads of the people, to her chair. They sang “The Marseillaise,” and
the men wept with the women. Love and deference equally were accorded
to her noble character and fine perceptions. In addition to her clear
and far-sighted vision, her gift of quick and accurate decision and her
extraordinary ability as an organizer gave her, I was told, remarkable
authority in the councils of her party.
When I last saw her, at the close of her stay in this country, she
implored me never to forget Russia and the struggle there, and said, as
we separated after a lingering embrace: “Should you ever grow cold, bring
before your mind the procession of men and women who for years have gone
in the early dawn of their lives to execution, and gladly, that others
might be free.”
Upon returning to Russia she was arrested, and after almost three years’
imprisonment in the Fortress of Peter and Paul, “that huge stone coffin,”
was sent to Siberia “_na poselenie_,” as a forced colonist. The first
letters that came to her friends from Siberia told of the journey to
the place of her exile in the Trans-Baikal, two or three hundred miles
northeast of Irkutsk. They traveled by train, on foot, in primitive
carts, or “crowded like herrings in a barrel” in boats that floated with
the current, having no other means of propulsion, and, finally, after
nearly three months spent on the way, reached the little island town of
Kirensk, surrounded by two rivers, “the immense and cold Lena and the
less majestic Kyrenga.”
A letter from a fellow-exile, written in August, 1910, tells of her
passing through his village in a company of two hundred and fifty
political exiles and criminals, surrounded by a numerous guard. “Among
the crowd in gray coats, under gray skies and rain, her imposing
figure struck everyone.” He notes how her first thought, after days of
travel through the pouring rain in a miserable cart, and nights spent
in barracks or around a bonfire in the open air, was for others, “our
unfortunate comrades.” “Their sufferings,” he adds, “do a terrible sore
at her heart.... She formed the center of the party and the object of
general attention, not only of her political comrades, but also of the
criminals and the soldiers of the convoy. When I had traveled under
escort to our exile some months before everywhere we heard ‘Babuschka is
coming. God grant us to see her!’ The prisoners and the exiles in Siberia
waited with reverence to see the miracle woman. She kissed us all and
cheered us all.”
Her attempted escape from Kirensk, recapture, and sentence to the Irkutsk
prison in the winter of 1913 are known to all the world. Her letters to
American friends from her Siberian exile revealed the heroic soul. Her
physical sufferings were only incidentally alluded to, as in one letter
where, in the quaint English acquired in America and by study during her
last imprisonment, she said: “My gait is not yet sure enough, and it will
take some time before my forces and my celerity rejoin me to the point as
to let me exercise my feet without the aid of anyone.” Nevertheless, she
continues quite undaunted, “I hope to restore my health and to live till
the day I see you again.”
[Illustration: “BABUSCHKA, LITTLE GRANDMOTHER”]
The sufferings and deprivations of the young political exiles caused her
the greatest sorrow. It was, indeed, the only suffering she acknowledged,
although she deplored that reasonable conversation was impossible, with
the spies always within sight and hearing, and expressed her “disgust”
that they accompanied her whenever she went out.
In Kirensk there are over a thousand exiles forced to live on their
earnings and the small stipend received from the government. There is
little work to be had, and that little is rendered more uncertain by the
fact that the police shift the exiles about, seldom allowing them to
remain in one place for more than six months. Most of them are thus kept
in a state of semi-starvation. The magazines, books, and picture post
cards which Madame Breshkovsky received were used by her to extraordinary
advantage. Of some periodicals that I had caused to be sent her she
wrote: “They make a great parade in Siberia, going as far as Irkutsk
and Yakutsk, and some of them find resting-place in the libraries and
museums.” She taught English to the young “politicals” and reading
and writing to the illiterate native Siberians. “You understand my
situation,” she wrote: “an old mother who would serve every one of them.
I aid, I grumble, I sustain, I hear confessions like a priest, I give
counsel and admonition, but this is a drop in the ocean of misery.” And
of herself again: “How happy I am; persecuted, banished, and yet beloved.”
From the letters that have come to America and are shared by the circle
of her friends here I select one, written in answer to a request that she
send a message of her philosophy to the students of a women’s college who
had asked me to tell the story of the Russian revolution as personified
in her:
“October 20, 1913, Kirensk.
“Very dear and well-beloved Lillian:—
“Your letter, as well as the postal cards which you were good
enough to send me, were received by me several days ago, and
perhaps it is with the last mail that I send you this reply.
Snow already covers the mountainous borders of the superb Lena,
and frost will soon fill the waters with masses of ice, which
will interrupt all communications for two or three weeks,
leaving us isolated on our little island, entirely engulfed by
cold, badly treated by the north wind. I hasten, therefore,
to thank you for your indefatigable attention towards the old
recluse who, habituated as she is to pass her days now and
again imprisoned or exiled, rejoices, nevertheless, to find
herself loved—to feel that the most noble hearts beat in unison
with hers.
“It is strange! Every time that I am asked to speak about
myself I am always confused and find nothing to say. It is
very likely that if I paid more attention to the exterior
circumstances of my life there would be enough to talk about
that would fill more than a book. But ever since my childhood
I have had the habit of creating a spiritual life, an interior
world, which responded better to my spiritual taste. This
imaginary world has had the upper hand over the real world in
its details, over all that is transient.
“The aim of our existence, the perfecting of human nature,
was always present to my vision, in my mind. The route, the
direction that we ought to take in order to approach our ideal,
was for me a problem, the solution of which absorbed the
efforts of my entire life. I was implacable for myself, for
my weaknesses, knowing that to serve a divine cause we must
sincerely love the object of our devotion, that is to say, in
this case, humanity.
“These meditations, and a vigorous imagination, which always
carried me far beyond the present, permitting me to inhabit the
most longed-for regions, combined to attract very little of my
attention to daily circumstances.
“Without doubt, I have had suffering in my life, as I have
had moments of joy, of happiness even. It is also true that
the struggle with my failings, with the habits engrafted by
a worldly education, have cost me more or less dearly. The
misery of those near to me tore my heart to the extreme. In a
word, life has passed in the same way as a bark thrown upon
the mercy of a sea often stormy. But as the ideal was always
there, present in my heart and in my mind, it guided me in my
course, it absorbed me to such a degree that I did not feel in
all their integrity the influences of passing events. _The duty
to serve the divine cause of humanity in its entirety, that of
my people in particular, was the law of my life_,—the supreme
law, whose voice stilled my passions, my desires, in short, my
weaknesses....
“Since I live in my thoughts more than by emotion, it is my
thoughts that I have to confess more than the facts of my life.
These facts, to tell the truth, are sufficiently confused in
my memory, and often I would not be able to relate them in
all their details. Also, in conversing with those who care to
listen to me, I feel that I am monotonous, for it is always my
ideas and my abstract observations that I want to communicate
to my listeners. I have studied a great deal in order to
understand even ever so little of the origin of the human soul,
in order to understand more or less its complexity of to-day.
There lies my only strength, so to speak, and I continue my
study, knowing how complex my object of study is, and what an
innumerable quantity of different combinations, of types, of
low types, have been formed during the long history of the
laboratory where is prepared the supreme fusion called the
human soul.
“The esteem for the individual of the human species, and the
adoration of the intellectual treasure of this individual,
ought to form the center of all religion, of all knowledge,
of all ideal. _It is only in venerating the human being as
the most beautiful creation of the world, it is only in
understanding the beauty and the indestructible grandeur of
an intelligence illuminated by love and knowledge, that the
education of the young generations will bring the desired
fruits...._
“Lillian, my friend, I hope to be understood by you ... I
embrace you. I kiss your two hands and thank you for your noble
and dear existence. To your entire settlement I send greetings.
“Your
“Katharine Breshkovsky.”
Madame Breshkovsky’s friends are to be found in every civilized nation,
and her influence, from an exile’s hut in an isolated village in the
Arctic Circle, has radiated to remote quarters of the globe. From her
prison at Irkutsk this woman, nearing her seventieth birthday, sends
messages of hope and cheer, proclaiming her unquenchable faith that the
cause is just, and therefore must prevail.
* * * * *
I would not have our profound interest in the Russian revolution entirely
explained by the fellowship we have had with those who have participated
in it, by the literature which has stirred hearts and minds everywhere,
or by our actual experience with innocent victims of outrages. The
continuance of a policy of suppression of freedom infiltrates the social
order everywhere, destroys the germination of new forms of social life,
and he who has not sympathy with the throbbing of the human heart, and
who does not revolt against injustice anywhere in the world, who does not
see in the gigantic struggle in Russia a world movement for freedom and
progress that is our struggle too, will not comprehend the significance
of the sympathy of the many Americans who are friends of Russian freedom.
CHAPTER XIV
SOCIAL FORCES
It would be impossible to give adequate presentation of those forces
termed social which have hold upon our neighborhood.
People with an ephemeral interest in the social order and some who
are only seeking new thrills are prone to look upon the East Side as
presenting a picturesque and alluring field for experimentation, and
they are, at times, responsible for the confused conception of the
neighborhood in the public mind.
The poor and the unemployed, the sick, the helpless, and the bewildered,
unable to articulate their woes, are with us in great numbers.
These, however, comprise only a part of our diverse, cosmopolitan
population. There are many men and women living on the East Side who
give keen scrutiny to measures for social amelioration. They are
likely to appreciate the sincerity of messages whether these relate to
living conditions, to the drama, or to music. Not only the East Side
“intellectuals,” but the alert proletariat, may furnish propagandists of
important social reforms.
The contrast between the character of the religious influences of the
remoter past, or even of twenty or thirty years ago, in our part of the
city, with those of the present day, is marked in the church edifices
themselves.
Across from the settlement’s main houses on Henry Street stands All
Saints’, with its slave gallery, calling up a picture of the rich and
fashionable congregation of long ago. For years after their removal
to other parts of the city, sentiment for the place, focusing on the
stately, young-minded, octogenarian clergyman who remained behind,
occasionally brought old members back, but now he too is gone, and the
services echo to empty pews. The Floating Church, moored to its dock
nearby, was removed but yesterday. Mariners’ Temple and the Church of the
Sea and Land still stand, and suggest an invitation to the seafaring man
to worship in Henry Street.
[Illustration: “All Saints’,” on Henry Street.]
Occasionally a zealot seeks to rekindle in the churches of our
neighborhood the fire that once brightened their altars, and social
workers hailed one as “comrade” who ventured to bring the infamy of the
red-light district to the knowledge of his bishop and the city. That
bishop, humane and socially minded, came down for a short time to live
among us, and in the evenings when he crossed the crowded street to call
or to dine with us he dwelt upon the pleasure he had in learning to know
the self-respect and dignity of his East Side parishioners. He spoke
with gratification of the fact that during his stay downtown no begging
letters had come to him from the neighborhood, nor had anyone belonging
to it taken advantage of his presence to ask for personal favors. The
neighborhood took his presence quite simply, regretting, with him, the
spectacular featuring of his visit by the newspapers. Indeed, the only
cynical comment that came to my ears was from a young radical, who,
hearing of the bishop’s tribute, said: “That’s nothing new. It’s only new
to a bishop.”
In the Roman Catholic churches the change is most marked by the dwindling
of the large Irish congregations and the coming of the Italians. Patron
saints’ days are celebrated with pomp and elaborate decoration. Arches
of light festoon the streets, altars are erected on the sidewalk, and
the image of the saint is enshrined on the church facade high above the
passer-by. Threading in and out of the throngs are picturesquely shawled
women with lovely babes in arms, fakirs and beggars, venders offering for
sale rosaries, candles, and holy pictures. Mulberry, Elizabeth and even
Goerck Streets’ sordid ugliness is then transformed for the time, and a
clew is given to the old-world influence of the Church through drama.
* * * * *
The change from the Russian pale where the rabbi’s control is both
civil and spiritual to a new world of complex religious and political
authority, or lack of authority, accentuates the difficulties of
readjustment for the pious Jew. The Talmudic students, cherished in the
old country and held aloof from all questions of economic needs because
of their learning and piety, find themselves without anchor in the new
environment and precipitated into entirely new valuations of worth and
strength.
Freedom and opportunity for the young make costly demands upon the
bewildered elders, who cling tenaciously to their ancient religious
observances. The synagogues are everywhere—imposing or shabby-looking
buildings—and the _chevras_, sometimes occupying only a small room where
the prescribed number meet for daily prayer. Often through the windows
of a dilapidated house the swaying figures of the devout may be seen
with prayer-shawl and phylactery and eyes turned to the East. At high
festivals every pew and bench are occupied and additional halls are
rented where services are held for those men, women, and young people
who, indifferent at other times, then meet and pray together.
But though the religious life is abundantly in evidence through the
synagogues and the _Talmud-Torah_ schools[15] and the _Chedorim_, where
the boys, confined for many hours, study Hebrew and receive religious
instruction, and although the _Barmitzvah_, or confirmation of the son
at thirteen, is still an impressive ceremony and the occasion of family
rejoicing, there is lament on the part of the pious that the house of
worship and the ritualistic ceremonial of the Jewish faith have lost
their hold upon the spiritual life of the younger generation.
For them new appeals take the place of the old religious commands. The
modern public-spirited rabbi offers his pulpit for the presentation
of current social problems. Zionism with its appeal for a spiritual
nationalism, socialism with its call to economic salvation, the extension
of democracy through the enfranchisement of women, the plea for service
to humanity through social work, stir the younger generation and give
expression to a religious spirit.
* * * * *
[Illustration: THE SYNAGOGUES ARE EVERYWHERE—IMPOSING OR SHABBY-LOOKING
BUILDINGS]
Settlements suffer at times from the criticism of those who sincerely
believe that, without definite religious propaganda, their full measure
of usefulness cannot be attained. It has seemed to us that something
fundamental in the structure of the settlement itself would be lost
were our policy altered. All creeds have a common basis for fellowship,
and their adherents may work together for humanity with mutual respect
and esteem for the conviction of each when these are not brought into
controversy. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, an occasional Buddhist, and
those who can claim no creed have lived and served together in the
Henry Street house contented and happy, with no attempt to impose their
theological convictions upon one another or upon the members of the clubs
and classes who come in confidence to us.
* * * * *
During any election campaign the swarming, gesticulating, serious-looking
street crowds of our neighborhood are multiplied and intensified.
Orators, not a few small boys among them, appear on nearly every street
corner, and an observer might almost measure the forces that influence
the people by the number and character of the orators, the appeals upon
which they base their hope of approval at the polls, and the reaction of
the crowds that surround them.
Pleas supported by reasonable show of argument are likely to find
intelligent response, although, as is but natural, the judgment of a
temperamental people is at times not clearly defined. During the recent
almost riotous support of a Governor who had been impeached (it was
generally believed at the behest of an irritated “boss” to whom he
had refused obedience) many New Yorkers who had come to count upon the
East Side for insight and understanding were perplexed at what seemed
hero-worship of a man against whom charges of misappropriation of funds
had been sustained. Those who knew the people discerned an emotional
desire for justice mingled with some gratitude to the man who, while in
Congress, had kept faith with his constituents on matters vital to them.
Stopping at a sidewalk stand on Second Avenue, I asked the owner what it
was all about. “Oh,” said he, “Sulzer ain’t being punished now for bein’
bad. Murphy’s hittin’ him for the good he done.”
[Illustration]
Our first realization of the dominating influence of political control
upon the individual and collective life of the neighborhood came,
naturally enough, through the gossip of our new acquaintances when we
came to live downtown, and we were not long oblivious to the power
invested in quite ordinary men whom we met.
Two distinguished English visitors to America, keen students and
historians of social movements, expressed a desire to learn of the
methods of Tammany Hall from someone in its inner councils. A luncheon
with a well-known and continuous officeholder was arranged by a mutual
friend. When my interest was first aroused in the political life of the
city this man’s position in the party had been cited as an example of
the astuteness of the “Boss.” He had revolted against certain conditions
and had shown remarkable ability in building up an opposition within the
party. Ever after he had enjoyed unchallenged some high-salaried office.
Under the genial influence of our host, and perhaps because he felt
secure with the English guests, the “Judge” (he had at one time presided
in an inferior court) talked freely of the details about which they
were curious,—how the organization tested the loyalty of its members
and increased their power and prestige as their record warranted it,
giving, incidentally, an interesting glimpse of the human elements in the
great political machine. His own success as judge he attributed to the
fact that he had used common sense where his highly educated colleagues
would have used textbooks, and with keen appreciation of the humor of
the situation he told how, when he was sworn in, a distinguished jurist
said he had come to his court “to see Judge ⸺ dispense with justice.”
He defended the logic, from the “Boss’s” point of view, of efficiently
administering such patronage as was available, and made much of the
kindness to the poor that was possible because of the district control.
Comparing their own with what he supposed to be my attitude to the poor,
he added with a smile of comprehension, “It’s the same thing, only _we_
keep books.”
A political organization watchful to capture personal loyalty makes
dramatic appeal, the potency of which cannot be ignored. The speedy
release of young offenders from jail was, years ago, the most impressive
demonstration of beneficent influence, and it was whispered that district
leaders were notified by the police of arrests, that they might have
an opportunity to get the young men out of trouble. Certain it is that
several times when anxious relatives rushed to us for help we found that
the leader had been as promptly notified as the families themselves.
So much genuine kindness is entwined with the administration of this
district control that one can well comprehend the loyalty that it wins;
and it is not the poor, jobless man who, at election times, remembers
favors of whom we are critical.
Opposed to the solidarity of the long dominant party are the other party
organizations and numerous cliques of radicals, independents, and
reformers. These, when the offenses of the party in power become most
flagrant, unite, and New York is temporarily freed from “boss” rule, to
enjoy a respite of “reform administration.” Into such “moral campaigns”
the House on Henry Street has always entered, and sometimes it has helped
to initiate them, though steadily refusing to be brought officially into
a political party or faction. Indeed, it would be impossible to range
residents or club members under one political banner. As is natural in so
large a group, nearly every shade of political faith is represented.
A large proportion of the young people who come to the settlements are
attracted to the independent political movements, and are likely to
respond to appeals to their civic conscience. While serving on a State
Commission I heard an upstate colleague repeat the rumor that Governor
Hughes, then a candidate for re-election, was to be knifed by his
party. We had seen in our section of the city no active campaign on his
behalf. Posters, pictures, and flattering references were conspicuously
absent. Governor Hughes had made a profound impression upon all but the
advocates of rigid party control because of his high-minded integrity
and emancipation from “practical” political methods. I telephoned two
or three of our young men that the time seemed ripe for some action in
our neighborhood. In an incredibly short time a small group of Democrats,
Republicans, and Socialists gathered in the sitting-room of the Henry
Street house, and within twenty-four hours an Independent League was
formed to bring the Governor’s candidacy before the neighborhood.
Financial and moral support came from other friends, and before the end
of the week he addressed in Clinton Hall an enthusiastic mass-meeting
organized by this league without help from the members of his own
political organization.
* * * * *
The sporadic attempts of good citizens to organize for reform have, I am
sure, given practical politicians food for merriment. One election night,
dispirited because of the defeat of an upright and able man, I was about
to enter the settlement when one of the district leaders said: “Your
friends don’t play the game intelligently. You telephone them _to-night_
to begin to organize if they want to beat us next election. You got to
begin early and stick to it.”
However, every sincere reform campaign is valuable because of its
immediate and far-reaching educational effect, even when the candidates
fail of election. It is gratifying to those who are socially interested
to watch the evolution of political platforms. Every party now inserts
human welfare planks and pledges devotion to measures that in the days
of our initiation were regarded as dreams and ridiculed as beyond the
realm of practicality. Settlements have increasing authority because
of the persistency of their interest in social welfare measures. They
accumulate in their daily routine significant facts obtainable in no
other way. Governors and legislators listen, and sooner or later act on
the representations of responsible advocates whose facts are current
and trustworthy. The experience of the social worker is often utilized
by the state. At the twentieth anniversary of our settlement the Mayor
drew public attention to the fact that no less than five important city
departments were intrusted to men and one woman who were qualified for
public duty by administration of or long-continued association with the
settlements.
Soon after our removal to Henry Street in 1895 messengers from the
“Association,” the important political club of the district, brought
lanterns and flags with which we were requested to decorate in honor of
a clambake to be given the next day. The event had been glaringly and
expensively advertised for some time. The marchers were to pass our house
in the morning and on their return in the evening. The young men glowed
with the excitement of their recital, and I can still see the blank
look of non-comprehension that passed over their faces when I tried to
soften refusal by explaining—lamely, I fear—our reasons for avoiding the
implications of participation. The courteous district leader of the other
great party was equally at sea when, a short time after, he brought flags
and decorations for their more humble celebration and met with the same
refusal. The immediate conclusion appeared to be that we were enemies or
“reformers,” and the charge was held against us.
* * * * *
The gay and spirited clambake parade, with its bands and flying banners,
the shooting rockets and loud applause of the friends of the marchers,
had passed by when we were drawn to the windows to gaze upon another
procession. Straggling, unkempt, dispirited-looking marchers returned
our scrutiny and held aloft a banner bearing the legend “Socialist Labor
Party,” the portrait of a man, and beneath it the name “Daniel De Leon.”
It was our first intimation of the socialist movement in America, and
students of its history will be able to identify this leader and recall
the pioneer part he played in its early phases, his alliance with the
once-powerful Knights of Labor, and the progress and decline of his
society now overshadowed by the present Socialist Party.[16]
Meeting a neighbor on the Bowery one day about two years later, he
stopped to explain that he was on his way to an interesting performance,
and invited me to accompany him. Together we walked along until we
reached the Thalia Theater, famous under its old name of the Bowery in
the annals of the American stage. In this theater Charlotte Cushman
made her first appearance in New York, and here the elder Booth, Lester
Wallack, and other great players delighted the theatergoers of their day.
Venders of suspenders, hot sausages, and plaster statuettes surrounded
the building, and placards on the Greek columns advertised the event as
“The Spoken Newspaper.” A huge audience was listening to editorials and
special articles read by the authors themselves, and the atmosphere was
charged with intense purpose. Acquaintances gathered quickly, and eagerly
explained to me that members of labor organizations and “intellectuals”
of the neighborhood had united for the purpose of publishing a newspaper
for socialist propaganda and to help the cause of the working classes.
They had little money; in fact, were in debt. The men had contributed
from their scanty wages; those who possessed watches had pawned them,
and they were using this medium (“The Spoken Newspaper”) to raise money
to pay the printer and other clamorous creditors, a charge of ten cents
being made for admission to the theater. A charter had been obtained
under the name of “The Forward Association,” but I was made to understand
that this was not a stock corporation and was not organized for profit.
The genuinely social purpose of the organization held the men together
during the lean years that were to follow. Finally, in 1908, the
Association became self-supporting, and in 1911 the charter was amended
to meet the enormously extended field. The Forward Association now
publishes a daily paper in Yiddish, with a regular circulation of
177,000, and a monthly periodical, and holds property estimated to be
worth half a million dollars. From its funds it has aided struggling
propagandist newspapers and has given help to labor organizations.
The hope of a more equal distribution of wealth bites early into the
consciousness of the proletariat. Even the children, who cannot be
excluded from any discussion in a tenement home, have opinions on the
subject. Happening one day upon a club of youngsters, I interrupted
a fiery debate on socialism. Its twelve-year-old defender presented
his argument in this fashion: “You see, gentlemen, it’s this way: The
millionaires sit round the table eating sponge-cake and the bakers are
down in the cellars baking it. But the day will come,”—and here the
young orator pointed an accusing finger at the universe—“when the bakers
will come up from their cellars and say, ‘Gentlemen, bake your own
sponge-cake.’”
Mixed with my admiration for the impressive oratory was the guilty
sense that the settlement was probably responsible for the picture of
licentious living manifested by the consumption of sponge-cake,—our most
popular refreshment, with ice cream added on great occasions.
* * * * *
However one may question the party socialists’ claim that an economic
and social millennium is exclusively dependent upon their dominance, few
acquainted with those active in the movement will deny the sincerity of
purpose, the almost religious exaltation that animate great numbers of
the party. The first socialist member from the East, and the second in
the United States, has been elected to Congress from our district; a
man universally esteemed for his probity, with a record of many years’
unselfish devotion to the workingmen’s cause.
A copious literature and widespread propaganda proclaim the willingness
of the American people now to give socialism a hearing. It seems a far
cry from that first unimpressive little parade that drew the settlement
family to the windows twenty years ago.
* * * * *
Years ago the lads in one of the settlement clubs debating the subject of
woman suffrage declared it to be “a well-known fact that when women had
the vote they cut off their hair, they donned men’s attire; their voices
became harsh.”
I cannot say that even to-day the ardent advocates of woman suffrage
come in great numbers from among the male members of the settlement
clubs, but, on the whole, the tendency is to accept women in politics as
a necessary phase of this transitional period and the readjustment of
the old relations. The conviction that the extension of democracy should
include women has found free expression in our part of the city, and Miss
L. L. Dock, a resident of many years, has mobilized Russians, Italians,
Irish, and native-born, all the nationalities of our cosmopolitan
community, for the campaign. When the suffrage parade marched down
Fifth Avenue in 1913, back of the settlement banner, with its symbol of
universal brotherhood, there walked a goodly company carrying flags with
the suffrage demand in ten languages. The cosmopolitanism of our district
was marked by the Sephardic Jewish girl who bore aloft the Turkish
appeal. The Chinese banner was made by a Chinese physician and a Chinese
missionary. There are four American-born Chinese voters in our part of
the city.
[Illustration]
The transition is significant from the position of women among orthodox
Jews to the motherly looking woman who stands on a soap-box at the corner
of Henry Street and makes her appeal for the franchise to a respectful
group of laboring men. The mere fact that this “mother in Israel” is
obliged to work in a factory six days of the week is an argument in
itself, but intelligently and interestingly she develops her plea, and
her appeal to the men’s reason brings sober nods of approval.
The Russian revolution owes much to the valorous women who from the
formation of the Tschaikowsky circles in the early ’70s have worked as
comrades for the cause, and this is well known to the “intellectuals”
of the East Side. I doubt whether a single man or woman could be found
among them opposed to granting the franchise to women. If they seem
indifferent, it is doubtless because they think it a matter of course and
strenuous effort to secure votes for women unnecessary. From the party
organization men there is not so much encouragement.
[Illustration: A MOTHER IN ISRAEL]
Commissioner of Corrections Katherine Davis testifies that the inmates of
the girls’ reformatory disapprove of women voting as “unladylike,” and
it may surprise those who do not know the thought of these poor women to
learn that they cling to orthodox ideals. I understand that I shocked
one girl, who had been sentenced to the “Island” from the Night Court,
by advocating the appointment of women police. The probation officer who
called upon her asked her opinion of my recommendation, which was then
sufficiently novel to attract newspaper attention. “Oh,” said the girl,
“it’s not right. Woman’s place is the home.”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER XV
SOCIAL FORCES, CONTINUED
The drama is taken seriously in our neighborhood, particularly among the
people whose taste has not been affected by familiarity with plays or
theaters classed as typically “American.” In the years of our residence
on the East Side there have been several transitions in the Yiddish
drama[17] from classic to modern and realistic. Feeling has at times run
high between the advocates of the different schools, and discussions in
the press and disputes in the cafés have reflected a very lively popular
interest.
Jacob Gordin, the Yiddish playwright, contributed an important chapter to
the history of the stage, and his art was, I think, a factor in drawing
intelligent attention to the East Side. The Yiddish drama, before his
time, had not been looked upon with great favor, and there was in this,
as in other instances, an implication of the contempt that Americans not
infrequently feel for the alien, and also a fear, on the part of members
of the older Jewish communities, that the Yiddish theater might retard
the Americanization of the immigrant.
Mr. Gordin was one of our early friends, and we found pleasure in our
theater parties. The audiences seemed scarcely less dramatic than the
performers, and we took sides, perhaps not illogically, with the new
school. Upon our appearance interpreters from various parts of the
house were sure to offer their kind services. The acting was of high
grade, and the fame of some of the performers has now gone far beyond
the neighborhood and the city. The stage during this period performed
its time-honored function of teaching and moralizing. One of Gordin’s
plays that had many seasons of popularity was “The Jewish King Lear.” It
depicted the endless clashing between the generations. The Shakespearean
Cordelia, on the Bowery stage, is the daughter of character who longs
for self-expression and becomes a physician. Another impressive play was
“God, Man, and the Devil.” Here was preached the story of man’s fall,
not because of poverty, but through the possession of riches. The pious
Jewish scribe resists the worldly man and his enticements, but having
come into the possession of money he becomes grasping, eager for power,
susceptible to flattery. The portrayal of his spiritual downfall gave the
playwright opportunity for remarkable delineation of Jewish character.
I also found it interesting to take William Archer, the English critic,
on his first visit to America, to see Ibsen metamorphosed in “The Jewish
Nora,” which was then playing at a nearby theater.
The Italians have now almost abandoned the marionette theater, and we
can no longer find on Mott, Elizabeth, and Spring Streets the stuffy
little theaters filled with workingmen (and an occasional woman), sitting
enthralled night after night while from the wings the fine voice of the
reader continued the story of Rinaldo and other popular knights.
The puppet theater was usually a family affair. Its members slept and
cooked behind the scenes, alternating in reading the story or operating
the puppet figures of knights and ladies. One hot night we strolled from
the settlement to a marionette theater nearby to show our guests (among
them a theatrical producer) the simplicity of the primitive stage still
to be found in the great city.
[Illustration: THE DRAMATIC CLUB PRESENTED “THE SHEPHERD”]
During the story that was then being enacted a doll, representing the
infant heir, was dropped in a miniature forest to be rescued by the
valorous knight. At that moment the naked baby of the proprietor walked
out from the wings, crossed the stage, and snatching up the doll, clasped
it tight in her little arms and disappeared. The audience gave no sign
that the current of their enchantment had been broken, nor did the reader
or the manipulator of the rescuing knight pause for a second in their
rôles.
The theaters on the Bowery and in its vicinity advertise Italian opera
and occasional revivals of serious drama, but more obvious at present
are the lurid advertisements of sensational melodrama. We are plainly
under the influence of Broadway and the “movies,” but at the Metropolitan
Opera House our neighbors can always be seen in great numbers among the
“appreciators” at the top of the house.
* * * * *
A short time ago an unselfish and well-beloved member of the older circle
of Russian revolutionists asked me to help him establish a comrade on
some self-supporting basis, and began by saying, “Being a literary man,
he wants to open a restaurant.” The fact of his being “literary” would
immediately bring him custom, and I foresaw another meeting-place for
philosophers, poets, and revolutionists, graduates of universities or
gymnasia, writers and publicists, students familiar with Kant and Comte
and Spinoza.
In these little East Side cafés, over a steaming glass of tea or a
temperate meal, endless discussions take place. In the groups that gather
there are many men of education who, during their first years in this
country, worked as cloakmakers, tailors, or factory operatives until they
were able to obtain employment more suited to their aptitudes or talents.
[Illustration]
The cafés and the bookshop where the interesting proprietor specializes
in radical literature are the meeting-places for the “intellectuals,”
centers from which radiate influences that are not insignificant. As they
prosper, many of these men move their families to other parts of the
city, but they continue to be East Siders at heart, and find congenial
atmosphere in their old haunts. So they come back for the fellowship they
miss in their new habitations.
The saloons of the neighborhood touch the life of an entirely different
set. They are informal club-houses for many men, some of whom have for
years been members of the same political organization. Not that the
organization trusts to the saloon alone. All through our neighborhood are
the club-houses maintained for members of the party who are kept together
through social intercourse.
However, among workingmen, the saloon may be patronized for other reasons
than refreshment and sociability. When I expressed to a sober man, long
out of work, my surprise that he should have been seen going into a
saloon, he explained that if a man did not sometimes go there he was
likely to be out of work a longer time. “The fellows just kind of talk
about jobs when they’re sittin’ round in the saloons, and sometimes you
pick up something.” His reasoning reminded me of a friend who professed
indifference to the numerous expensive clubs to which he belonged, but
found them useful in his business. “Often a chance conversation or a
meeting with men develops into something big.”
* * * * *
When the Empress of Austria was assassinated in 1898 newspaper reporters,
seeking “color,” asked the settlement’s direction to anarchists who, in
the excitement of the time, were believed to form a considerable portion
of the East Side population.
I recalled two men who, in a cellar in Grand Street, had a few rows of
books for sale which advertised them as “Dealers in Radical Literature.”
One partner proclaimed himself a State Socialist, the other a Philosophic
Anarchist. The latter, mild and gentle, devoted disciple of Prudhon,
with whose writings he was familiar, was almost pathetically grateful,
and showed not altogether complimentary surprise when we purchased
Kropotkin’s “Fields, Factories, and Workshops,” Tolstoi’s “My Life,” and
Walt Whitman’s poems. In his naïve simplicity he assumed that only those
unsure of food and shelter found interest in such literature, and later
he and his partner, in all seriousness, proposed, with our co-operation,
to reform society.
They had decided, after much thought, that the reason the people they
met at the settlement seemed to sympathize and understand was because
of the books they read. They felt sorry for the people on Fifth Avenue
who, living so far away from the poor, could not know how things might
be remedied. Their plan was that I should rent a store opening on the
avenue, place comfortable chairs and tables upon which books could be
spread. These books the merchants would loan,—their whole stock, if
necessary,—and then people passing on foot or driving by could stop and
read.
Such naïveté could hardly be met with to-day, for education and
discussion of themes of social interest have widened the minds of the
community and contact with people of different positions in life is much
more general.
Police interference with free speech and free assemblage in our country
has stirred vigorous protest from sober people and has had the effect of
kindling enthusiasm for propaganda of ultraradical philosophies among
those who might otherwise never have given thought to them. In some
quarters mere radicalism has become perilously popular. The spirit of
adventure, a kind of generous devotion not always balanced with knowledge
of definite issues or the constructive processes that are under way,
deflect forces that might be employed for immediate advances in social
welfare.
I recall the indignation of a young man, just graduated from one of
our universities, when chance took him into an East Side hall where a
well-known anarchist was addressing a large and attentive audience and
reading selections from Thoreau. Without any obvious provocation the
police jumped upon the platform, arrested the woman and those who sat
with her, refused them permission to call a cab, and drove them in the
patrol wagon to the police station. At the time there was no limit to
which this man would not have gone to show his resentment against the
injustice of the proceeding, and it was some relief to his chivalrous
spirit to testify against the police and to use the settlement’s
experience in giving publicity to the occurrence.
Something of this menace to cherished American institutions lay in the
occurrences at Lawrence, Massachusetts, during the winter of 1912.
Unsatisfactory labor conditions gave the Industrial Workers of the World
an opportunity to capture the loyalty and devotion of the discontented
operatives. Reports of the unwarranted action of police and militia
during a strike that ensued, the imprisonment of the strike leaders, and
the difficulty of securing for them an impartial hearing were incidents
too serious to be lightly dismissed from the mind. I went to Lawrence at
that time, and came away reflecting with sadness on the manifestations
there of how slight is our hold upon civilization, how insecure our
reliance upon the courts for justice when feelings run high.
The operatives’ story had not reached the general public, and I offered
the House on Henry Street as one medium for informing people in New York
who had no link with the working people.
A participant in the strike came to us to tell the story, and her
presentation, on the whole, seemed fair and reasonable. It was no less
an indictment of the leaders of the established labor organizations for
failure to unionize the workers, and thereby secure better wages and
shorter hours, than of the capitalist, who, the speaker thought, should
be held responsible for creating the conditions.
The reaction of the audience was definite—that the workers should have
tangible assurance of the existence of an American sentiment for justice,
and money came spontaneously to the settlement to be sent to the strikers
and toward the cost of the defense of the prisoners. The New York press,
on the whole, gave fair interpretation of the causes of discontent and
the disturbing consequences to society of what appeared to some observers
to be anarchistic methods on the part of those in authority.
* * * * *
The Social Reform Club, organized in 1894, was a factor in helping to
stimulate a more general public interest in matters of social concern.
The club aimed at the immediate future, and labored solely for measures
that had a fair promise of early success. Its members, wage-earners
and non-wage-earners in almost equal numbers, were required to have “a
deep active interest in the elevation of society, especially by the
improvement of the condition of wage-earners.”
Ernest Crosby, Tolstoian and reformer, was the first president, and the
original membership comprised distinguished men and women, courageous
thinkers who fully met the requirements of the society, and others, like
myself, who were to gain enlightenment regarding methods and theories for
the direct improvement of industrial and social conditions.
Father Ducey, whose support of Father McGlynn[18] during his time of
trial was then still referred to; Charles B. Spahr, and others no longer
living were among the organizers. On the club’s weekly programmes can
be read the names of men and women who were then and still are bearers
of light for the community. Devoted members of the club testified to
their indebtedness to the Knights of Labor as “a great educational force
for social reform,” and a younger generation gained immeasurably from
association with men and women who had given themselves unselfishly to
the early labor movements in this country.
It was at the time of excessive sweatshop abuses, and from the windows
of our tenement home we could look upon figures bent over the whirring
foot-power machines. One room in particular almost unnerved us. Never did
we go to bed so late or rise so early that we saw the machines at rest,
and the unpleasant conditions where manufacturing was carried on in the
overcrowded rooms of the families we nursed disquieted us more than the
diseases we were trying to combat.
Our sympathies were ready for enlistment when working people whom we
knew, and whose sobriety of habits and mind won confidence and esteem,
discussed the possibility of improving conditions through organization.
In another place I have told how the young girls first led us into the
trades union movement, but now where the standard of the entire family
was involved through the wage and working conditions of its chief
wage-earner, it became to us a movement of greater significance.
We were accorded a doubtful distinction by acquaintances who had no
point of contact with working people when we acknowledged friendship
with “demagogues” and “walking delegates” (terms which they used
interchangeably), and, inexperienced though we were, it was possible for
us, in a small way, to help build a bridge of understanding.
Research was not then a popular expression of social interest.
Discussions developed the need of a formal investigation into conditions,
and a distinguished economist of Yale was asked to send someone academic
and “without feeling for either side,” while we chose a labor leader,
well informed from the workers’ point of view, to make the inquiry. The
paraphernalia of cards, filing cabinets, et cetera, was provided, and a
room set apart in the settlement, but the investigation ended before it
was fairly begun with mutual scorn on the part of the two men.
Through the years that have followed the settlement has from time to time
been the neutral ground where both sides might meet, or has furnished the
“impartial third party” in industrial disputes.
One such conference lingers in my memory because of the open-mindedness
shown by a man whose traditions and training were far removed from
wage-earners’ problems. A friend and generously interested in all our
undertakings, he questioned my judgment in espousing the workingmen’s
side in a threatened strike, believing that a compromise on disputed
hours and pay during that unprosperous time was better than interrupted
employment. We believed that the “half loaf” might prove too costly. The
wage was already below a living minimum, and the workers’ contention
that at the beginning of the season the market could be made to meet a
fair charge for labor seemed to us an entirely reasonable one. My friend
agreed to bring representatives of the manufacturers and contractors if
I would bring an equal number of workers to a conference in the Henry
Street house, over which he would preside. No agreement was reached,
but when the strike was finally declared this friend, whose wisdom and
experience have placed him high in the councils of the nation, had come
to see that the workers could not do otherwise, and throughout the strike
he aided with money and sympathy.
Since those days cloaks are no longer made in New York tenement homes,
and the once unhappy, sweated workers, united with other garment-makers,
have been lifted into eminence because of the unusual character of their
organization.
In 1910, after a prolonged strike, peace was declared under a
“protocol,”[19] wherein were combined unique methods devised for the
control of shops and adjustment of difficulties between the association
of progressive manufacturers and the trades unions. New terms—“a
preferential union shop” and the “Joint Board of Sanitary Control”—were
introduced. Under the latter, for the first time in the history, of
industry, sanitary standards were enforced by the trade itself. On
this board, the expense of which was shared equally by the association
of manufacturers and the trades unions, were representatives of both
organizations, their attorneys, and three representatives of the public
unanimously elected by both parties to the agreement.
When I was asked to be one of the three representatives of the public,
already laden with responsibilities I was loath to accept another,
but the temptation to have even a small share in the socializing of
industries involving in New York City alone nearly 100,000 people and
several hundred millions of dollars was irresistible.
High sanitary standards and a living wage, with reasonable hours of
employment, were assured so long as both parties submitted to the terms
of the protocol. Whatever changes in the administration of the trade
agreement may be made, the protocol has established certain principles
invaluable for the present and for future negotiations. The world seemed
to have moved since we shuddered over the long hours and the germ-exposed
garments in the tenements.[20]
CHAPTER XVI
NEW AMERICANS AND OUR POLICIES
Illuminating anecdotes might be told of the storm and stress that often
lie beneath the surface of the immigrant’s experience from the time he
purchases his ticket in the old country until the gates at Ellis Island
close behind him and the process of assimilation begins. That he has so
often been left rudderless in strange seas forms a chapter in the history
of this “land of opportunity” that cannot be omitted.
[Illustration]
The confusion of the stranger, unable to speak the language and
encountering unfamiliar laws and institutions, often has tragic results.
Once in searching for a patient in a large tenement near the Bowery
I knocked at each door in turn. An Italian woman hesitatingly opened
one, no wider than to give me a glimpse of a slight creature obviously
stricken with fear. Her face brought instantly to my mind the famous
picture of the sorrowing mother. “Dolorosa!” I said. The tone and the
word sufficed, and she opened the door wide enough to let me enter. In a
corner of the room lay two children with marks of starvation upon them.
Laying my hat and bag upon the table, to indicate that I would return,
I flew to the nearest grocery for food, taking time, while my purchases
were being made ready, to telephone to a distinguished Italian upon whose
interest and sympathy I could rely to meet me at the tenement, that we
might learn the cause of this obvious distress.
My friend arrived before I had finished feeding the children, and to
him the little mother poured forth her tale. She, with three children,
had arrived some days before, to meet the husband who had preceded her
and had prepared the home for them. One _bambina_ was ill when they
reached port, and it was taken from her, why she could not explain. She
was allowed to land with the other two and join her husband, and the
following day, in answer to their frantic inquiries, they learned that
the child had been taken to a hospital and had died there. Then her
husband was arrested, and she, unacquainted with a single human being in
the city, found herself alone with two starving children, too frightened
to open the door or to venture upon the street. She thought her husband
was imprisoned somewhere nearby.
My friend and I went together to the Ludlow Street jail, and here a
curious thing occurred. We merely inquired for the prisoner; we asked no
questions. His cell door was opened and he was released. Later I learned
that he had been arrested because of failure to make a satisfactory
payment on a watch he was buying on the installment plan. There must have
been gross irregularity in the transaction, judging by the willingness
to release him and the fact that his creditor failed to appear against
him. It was hinted, at the time, that there was collusion between the
installment plan dealers and the prison officials.
A pleasanter story is that of the B⸺ family. One evening two neighborhood
women, shawls over their heads, called to ask if I would contribute to
a fund they were raising to furnish quarters for a family just arrived
from Ellis Island. When I expressed wonder that they should have been
permitted to land in a penniless condition the women shrugged their
shoulders in characteristic fashion and said, “Well, they’re here, and we
must do something.”
Not wishing to refuse, or to participate blindly, I asked for the
whereabouts of the man of the family. I found him in a basement, a very
dignified, gray-haired cobbler, between 40 and 45 years of age. When I
asked how it happened that the first step of his family in America should
be to claim help in this way he explained the complications in which they
had been involved. He had preceded his family to make a home for them,
and after some years had sent money for steamer tickets for them. When
they arrived at the frontier, owing to some technicality, they were sent
back. He had sent more money to defray the additional expenses; then
himself had been compelled to undergo an operation for appendicitis,
which took all he had hoarded to furnish the home. He was just out of the
hospital when wife and children arrived.
[Illustration]
Appreciating the importance of having the family begin life in their new
environment with dignity and self-respect, an offer was made to loan him
money if he would recall the women who were begging for him. Together we
figured out the minimum sum needed, and within an hour the twenty-five
dollars was in his hands and he had recalled the women with joy. He took
the loan without exaggerated protest or gratitude, merely saying: “As
there is a God in heaven you will not regret this.”
He was a skillful cobbler and the wife a good housekeeper, and in six
months they brought back the twenty-five dollars. It was pleasanter
not to think of the pinching in the household that made this prompt
repayment possible. Some time later he brought me forty dollars which
the family had saved, saying he knew it would give me pleasure to start
the savings-bank account which they would need for the education of the
children. The subsequent history of this family, like many another known
to us in Henry Street, shows the real contribution brought into American
life by immigrants of this character.
* * * * *
In discussions throughout the country of the problems of immigration
it is significant that few, if any, of the men and women who have had
extended opportunity for social contact with the foreigner favor a
further restriction of immigration.
The government’s policy regarding the immigrant has been negative,
concerned with exclusion and deportation, with the head tax and the
enforcement of treaties and international agreements. By our laws we are
protected from the pauper, the sick, and the vicious; but only within
recent years has a hearing been given to those who have asked that our
government assume an affirmative policy of protection, distribution, and
assimilation.
[Illustration]
The need of constructive social measures has long been indicated. The
planting of roots in the new soil can best be accomplished through an
intercourse with the immigrant in which the dignity of the individual
and of the family is recognized. Heroic measures may be necessary to
establish a satisfactory system of distribution, and these measures must
be based on a philosophic understanding of democracy. Among them should
be provision for giving instruction to the prospective immigrant in
regard to those laws, customs, or prohibitions with which he is liable to
come in contact, and also in regard to the industrial opportunities open
to him. Then, with competent medical examination at the port of departure
and humane consideration there and here, the tragedies now so frequent at
the port of arrival might be diminished, or even eliminated altogether.
In turn, the private banker, the employment agent, the ticket broker,
the lawyer, and the notary public have battened upon the helplessness
of the immigrant. Our experience has convinced us that in the interest
of the state itself the future citizens should be made to feel that
protection and fair treatment are accorded by the state. The greater
number of immigrants who come to us are adults for whose upbringing this
country has been at no expense. It would seem only just to give them
special protection during their first years in the country, to encourage
confidence in our institutions, and to promote assimilation. From an
academic point of view, it might be said that all institutions for the
citizen are available to the immigrant, but the statement carries with
it an implication of equal ability on the part of the latter to utilize
these institutions, and this is not borne out by the experience of those
familiar with actual conditions.
[Illustration]
Such thoughts as these lay back of an invitation to Governor Hughes to
dine and spend an evening at the settlement and there meet the colleagues
who could speak with authority on these matters.
The Governor left us armed with maps and documentary evidence. A few
months later the legislature authorized the creation of a commission to
“make full inquiry, examination, and investigation into the condition,
welfare, and industrial opportunities of aliens in the State of New
York.” Among its nine members were two women, Frances Kellor and myself.
Upon the recommendation of that commission the New York Bureau of
Industries and Immigration of the Department of Labor was created.[21]
Miss Kellor, the first woman to be head of a state bureau, became its
chief.
Pending the enactment of legislation, she and I, with a photographer and
a sympathetic companion interested in questions of labor, motored over
the state examining the construction camps of the barge canal (a state
contract), the camps connected with the city’s great new aqueduct, and
some of the canning establishments.
In the latter we found ample illustration of indifference on the part
of private employers. In the camps surrounding the canneries were
large numbers of idle children who should have been in school. The
local authorities were, perhaps not unnaturally, indisposed to enforce
the compulsory education law upon these children whose stay in the
community was to be a transient one. In the public work the New York
City contracts, with few exceptions, showed carefully thought-out and
standardized conditions for the men; but examination of the state
contracts showed that while elaborate provision had been made for the
expert handling of every other detail connected with the work, even to
the stabling of the mules, nowhere was any mention made of the men.
In a shack that held three tiers of bunks, occupied alternately by the
day and night shifts, with a cook-stove in a little clearing in the
middle, we found a homesick man, who chanced not to be on the works,
reading a book. When we engaged in conversation with him he pointed
contemptuously to the bunks and their dirty coverings, and said, “This
America! I show you Rome,” and produced from under his bed a photograph
of the Coliseum.
[Illustration]
The commission exposed many forms of exploitation of the immigrant,
and subsequent reports have corroborated its findings. Some safeguards
have now been established, and the reports of the Bureau of Industries
and Immigration in the first years of its existence bore interesting
testimony to its practical and social value. The significance of the
indifference of the state to its employees, as it appeared to the
investigators, was given publicity at the time, and roused comment and
discussion. I quote from it as follows:
“The state, as employer, alone determines the terms upon which its
new canal shall be built. It defines in great detail its standard of
materials and workmanship, but takes no thought for the workmen who
must operate in great transient groups. It does not leave to chance
the realization of its material standard, but sends inspectors to make
tests and provides a staff of engineers. It does leave to chance (in the
ignorance and cupidity of _padroni_) the quality and price of foods and
care of the men. It takes great care to prevent the freezing of cement,
but permits any kind of houses to be used for its laborers. It is wholly
indifferent as to how they are ventilated, lighted, or heated, how many
men sleep in them, or whether the sleeping quarters are also used for
cooking and eating and the bunks as cupboards. Neither does it care
whether the men can keep themselves or their clothes clean.
“The simplest standards which military history shows are essential in
handling such artificial bodies of people are grossly violated. Sanitary
conveniences are sometimes entirely omitted; the men drink any kind of
water they can obtain, and filthy grounds are of no evident concern.
The state does not inquire whether there are hospitals or physicians,
medicine, emergency aids, or anything of the kind. Notice is taken
of gambling, drunkenness, and immorality only when they impair the
efficiency of the men.... Men left alone in these miserable, uninspected
shacks, where vermin and dirt prevail ... must inevitably deteriorate.
The testimony of contractors themselves is that many of the laborers
become nomads, drifting from camp to camp, drinking, quarreling, and
averse to steady work.
“We commend this responsibility in all its phases to the various state
departments charged with education, health, letting of contracts,
payment of bills, supervision of highways and waterways, and protection
of laborers. We ask the state as employer to consider its gain from the
men at the most productive periods of their lives; we ask the state to
measure the influence of this life upon its future citizens during their
first years in the country when they are most receptive to impressions of
America.”[22]
Quite recently the Public Health Council of the New York State Department
of Health has adopted a sanitary code for all labor camps.
It is impossible to compute the sums that have been lost by immigrants
through fake banks, fake express companies, and irresponsible steamship
agencies. In New York State these were practically legislated out of
existence through the efforts of the Commission of Immigration of 1909
just referred to, yet in the winter of 1914-15 approximately $12,000,000
was lost on the lower East Side by the failure of private banks, sweeping
away the savings and capital of between 60,000 and 70,000 depositors.
Happily, the postal savings bank has come, and is already much used by
immigrants, incidentally keeping a large amount of money in this country.
In important centers the stations might be socialized to the still
greater advantage of the depositors and the service by having someone
assigned to interpret, to write addresses and give information. These
favors have been the bait held out to the timid stranger by the private
agencies.
[Illustration: A REGION OF OVERCROWDED HOMES]
Perhaps an even greater loss has come to us through the land-sale
deceptions. Farms cultivated in New York State are actually decreasing,
while the population increases. The census of 1900-1910 shows 4.9 per
cent. decrease of farms and 25.4 per cent. increase of population. Great
numbers of the immigrants are peasants, and land-hungry, and if there was
a policy throughout the states of registration of land for prospective
settlers, and if severe penalties attached to land frauds, I have little
doubt that valuable workers might be directed to the enormous areas that
need cultivation. “I am an agriculturist,” said a man who found his way
to the settlement to tell his troubles, “and I pull out nails in a box
factory in New York.” His entire family have followed him to the land
that he is now cultivating.
One winter a number of peasants from the Baltic provinces found
themselves stranded in New York. It was a period of unemployment, and
they could find no work. Unaccustomed to cities, they eagerly seized upon
an opportunity to leave New York. At the settlement, where they were
assembled, a state official told them of wood-cutters needed—in Herkimer
County, as I remember it. An advertisement called for forty men, and the
responsibility of the advertiser was vouched for by the local banker.
“Who can cut trees?” I asked. A shout went up from these countrymen—“Who
cannot cut trees?” _Forty_ to go? Everyone was ready. So we financed them
in their quest for work, and bade good-by to a radiant, grateful group.
_Alas! only four men were needed._ The contractor preferred to have a
larger number come, that he might make selection. And this is not an
exceptional instance. Ask the itinerant workers, the tramps even, how
much faith can be placed in the advertisements of “Hands Wanted” in the
East and in the West at the gathering of the crops.
The possibility of deflecting people to the land has been demonstrated
by Jewish societies in New York, and with proper support other
organizations interested in this phase of the immigrant’s welfare might
repeat their success. Such programmes of distribution, however, cannot
be carried out without effective co-operation from the people in the
rural regions, and assimilative processes will not be wholly successful
until the native-born American is freed from some of his prejudices and
provincialism.
An unsocial attitude in the country naturally drives the stranger to an
intensive colony life which accentuates the disadvantages of the barriers
he and we build up.
An experience in Westchester County illustrates this very well. We were
seeking lodgings for two intelligent and attractive young Italians
who were working on a dam at one of our settlement country places.
Incidentally, the work they were doing was quite beyond the powers of any
native workers in the vicinity of whom we could hear. We asked an old
native couple, squatters on some adjacent land, to rent an unoccupied
floor of their house to the two young men. The man, despite their
extremely indigent condition (the wife went to the almshouse a short time
after), absolutely refused, fearing the loss of social prestige if they
“lived in the house with dagoes.”
Perhaps, having little else, they were justified in clinging to their
social exclusiveness, but their action in this case illustrates the
almost universal attitude toward the immigrant, particularly the more
recent ones, and perhaps only those who have felt the isolation and
loneliness of the newcomer can comprehend its cruelty.
An educated Chinese merchant who once called at the settlement apologized
for the eagerness with which he accepted an offer to show him over the
house, explaining that although he had been thirty years in this country
ours was the first American home he had been invited to enter.
We need also to analyze the philosophy of much of the discrimination
against aliens in the matter of employment, and it is not pleasant to
remember that until recently a state employing an enormous number of
foreign workers forbade the bringing of suit by the non-resident family
of the alien, although he might have lost his life in an accident
through no fault of his own.
Scorn of the immigrant is not peculiar to our generation. A search of
old newspaper files will show that the arrival of great numbers of
immigrants of any one nationality has always been considered a problem.
In turn each nationality as it became established in the new country has
considered the next-comers a danger. The early history of Pennsylvania
records the hostility to the Germans—“fear dominated the minds of the
Colonists”—despite the fact that the German invaders were land-owning and
good farmers.
An Irish boy observed to one of our residents that on Easter Day he
intended to kill his little Jewish classmate. Having had long experience
of the vigorous language and kind heart of the young Celt, she paid
little attention to the threat, but was more startled when the soft-eyed
Francesco chimed in that he was also going to destroy him “because he
killed my Gawd.” “But,” said the teacher, “Christ was a Jew.” “Yes, I
know,” answered the young defender of the faith, “He was then, but He’s
an American now.”
Despite its absurdity, was not the boy’s conception an exaggerated
illustration of that surface patriotism which is almost universally
stimulated and out of which soul-deadening prejudices may grow—may take
root even in the public schools?
* * * * *
Great is our loss when a shallow Americanism is accepted by the newly
arrived immigrant, more particularly by the children, and their national
traditions and heroes are ruthlessly pushed aside. The young people have
usually to be urged by someone outside their own group to recognize the
importance and value of customs, and even of ethical teaching, when given
in a foreign language, or by old-world people with whom the new American
does not wish to be associated in the minds of his acquaintances. This
does not apply only to the recent immigrant, to whom his children often
hear contemptuous terms applied. I remember attending a public hearing
before the Department of Education of New York City at which Germans
vigorously urged the study of their native tongue in the public schools,
because of the impossibility of persuading their children to learn or use
the language by any other means than that of having it made a part of the
great American public school system.
It is difficult to find evidence of any serious effort on our part to
comprehend the mental reaction upon the immigrant of the American
institutions he encounters. Indeed, gathering up the story of the
immigrant, I sometimes wonder if he, like the fairies, does not hold up a
magic mirror wherein our social ethics are reflected, rather than his own
visage.
What we are to the immigrant in our civic, social, and ethical relations
is quite as important as what he is to us. We risk destruction of the
spirit—that element of life that makes it human—when we disregard our
neighbor’s personality.
* * * * *
Recent discussion of immigration bills focuses attention on two points
deemed of fundamental importance by the settlement groups.
Three Presidents have vetoed bills for the restriction of immigration
by means of a literacy test or by conditions that would virtually deny
the right of asylum for political refugees. Once, in addressing a
committee of the House on such proposed legislation, I protested against
a departure from our tradition and reminded the members of the committee
of the splendid Americans who would have been lost to this country had
the door been so closed upon them. A young physician of Polish parentage
followed, and his cultured diction and attractive appearance lent
emphasis to his story. “My father,” he said, “came an illiterate to this
country because the priest of his parish happened not to be interested in
education, not because my father was indifferent. He has struggled all
his life to give his children what he himself could never have, and has
worshiped the country that gave us opportunity.”
In his veto of the bill President Wilson admirably formulated his reasons
for opposing restriction of this character, and as these are exactly the
arguments upon which social workers have based their objections, I cannot
do better than quote him here:
“In two particulars of vital consequence this bill embodies a radical
departure from the traditional and long-established policy of this
country, a policy in which our people have conceived the very character
of their government to be expressed, the very mission and spirit of the
nation in respect of its relations to the peoples of the world outside
their borders. It seeks to all but close entirely the gates of asylum,
which have always been open to those who could find nowhere else the
right and opportunity of constitutional agitation for what they conceived
to be the natural and inalienable rights of men, and it excludes those
to whom the opportunities of elementary education have been denied
without regard to their character, their purposes, or their natural
capacity.”
* * * * *
The immigrant brings in a steady stream of new life and new blood to
the nation. The unskilled have made possible the construction of great
engineering works, have helped to build bridges and roadways above
and under ground. The number of skilled artisans and craftsmen among
immigrants and the contribution they make to the cultural side of our
national life are too rarely emphasized. Alas for our educational system!
we must still look abroad for the expert cabinet-maker or stone-carver,
the weaver of tapestry, or the artistic worker in metals, precious or
base.
[Illustration]
In another place I have spoken of the rise of certain needle trades from
those of sweaters and sweaters’ victims to a standardized industry,
with an output estimated at hundreds of millions yearly. The industry
of cloak- and suit-making has been to a large extent developed by the
immigrants themselves. When the stranger looks upon the loft buildings
in other parts of the city, gigantic beehives with the swarms of workers
going in and out, he seldom comprehends that great wealth has been
created for the community by these humble workers.
The man who now stands at the gates of Ellis Island turns his socially
trained mind toward the development of methods for the protection and
assimilation of the immigrant after the gates have closed upon him. But
the best conceived plans of this Commissioner of Immigration and others
who have long studied the question will be fruitless unless, throughout
the country, an intelligent and respectful attitude toward the stranger
is sedulously cultivated.
In the early glow of our enthusiasm, when we were first brought in
contact with the immigrant, we dreamed of making his coming of age—his
admission to citizenship—something of a rite. Many who come here to
escape persecution or the hardships suffered under a militaristic
government idealize America. They bring an enthusiasm for our
institutions that would make it natural to regard admission to the rights
and responsibilities of citizenship with seriousness. Years ago we urged
the use of school buildings, that registration and the casting of the
ballot might be dignified by formal surroundings. This has been done in
several cities, although not yet in New York.
* * * * *
The foreign press, particularly the Yiddish, has a distinct Americanizing
influence. Many adults never learn the new language and, indeed,
acquire here the habit of newspaper-reading. The history of the United
States, biographies of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and other
distinguished Americans appear in the pages of these papers, and one
Italian daily published serially the Constitution of the United States.
Effective, too, as an educational and assimilating measure have been the
lectures in foreign languages conducted for many years by the Educational
Alliance on East Broadway and by the various settlements, and included,
for some years past, in the evening courses of the Department of
Education.
* * * * *
In our neighborhood the physical changes of the last twenty years have
been great. Since that first disturbing walk with the little girl to
the rear tenement on Ludlow Street asphalt has replaced unclean, rough
pavements; beautiful school buildings (some the finest in the world) have
been erected; streets have been altered, and rows of houses demolished to
make room for new bridges and small parks. Subway tubes take the working
population to scattered parts of the greater city; piers have been built
for recreation purposes, and a chain of small free libraries of beautiful
design. A Tenement House Department has been created, charged with
supervision and enforcement of the laws regulating the housing of 80 per
cent. of the city’s population, and so far assaults upon this protective
legislation have been repulsed, despite the tireless lobby of the owners
year after year.
[Illustration: AT ELLIS ISLAND
There is a stream of inflowing life]
As our neighbors have prospered many have moved to quarters where they
find better houses, less congestion, more bathtubs; but an enormous
working population still finds occupation in the lower part of the city.
Carfare is an expense, and time spent in overcrowded cars, which scarcely
afford standing-room, adds to the exhaustion of the long day, and these
considerations keep many near the workshop. Despite the exodus, we still
remain an overcrowded region of overcrowded homes. Through the tenements
there is a stream of inflowing as well as outflowing life. The newcomer
finds a lodging-place most readily in this vicinity, and the East Side is
the shore of the harbor.
* * * * *
The settlements have been before the public long enough to have lost
the glamour of moral adventure that was associated with their early
days. Many who were identified with them then have steadfastly remained,
although realizing, as one of them has said, that high purpose has often
been mocked by petty achievement.
A characteristic service of the settlement to the public grows out of its
opportunities for creating and informing public opinion. Its flexibility
as an instrument makes it pliant to the essential demands made upon it;
uncommitted to a fixed programme, it can move with the times.
Out of the enthusiasms and out of the sympathies of those who come to
it, though they be sometimes crude and formless, a force is created that
makes for progress. For these, as well as for the helpless and ignorant
who seek aid and counsel, the settlement performs a function.
The visitors who come from all parts of the world and exchange views and
experiences prove how absurd are frontiers between honest-thinking men
and women of different nationalities or different classes. Human interest
and passion for human progress break down barriers centuries old. They
form a tie that binds closer than any conventional relationship.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES
[1] The “Lodge” doctor is the physician provided by a mutual benefit
society or “Lodge” to attend its members.—THE AUTHOR.
[2] “Visiting Nursing in the United States,” by Y. G. Waters (Charities
Publication Committee).
[3] The National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis
in its report for 1915 states that the tuberculosis death rate in the
registration area of the United States has declined from 167.7 in 1905
to 127.7 in 1913 per 100,000 population; a net saving to this country of
over 200,000 lives from this one disease.
[4] “The Vocational Guidance of Youth,” by Meyer Bloomfield (Houghton
Mifflin Co.).
[5] Because of economic conditions in New York during the winter of 1915
and the compulsory idleness of many unskilled workers, the Scholarship
Committee of the Henry Street Settlement, among other efforts for relief,
rented a loft in a building near a trade school, and thus made it
possible for 160 untrained girls to receive technical instruction, the
Board of Education providing teachers and equipment.—THE AUTHOR.
[6] That the ephemeral character of work available for children of
fourteen to sixteen years of age is not peculiar to New York City is
shown by the following figures from the report of the Maryland Bureau of
Statistics for the year 1914. In Maryland, working papers are issued for
each separate employment. The number of original applications in one year
was 3,580 and the total of subsequent applications, 4,437. Of the 3,580
children 2,006 came back a second time, 1,036 a third time, 561 a fourth,
363 a fifth, 194 a sixth, 116 a seventh, 53 an eighth, 29 a ninth, 18 a
tenth, and one child came back for the eighteenth time in a twelvemonth,
for working papers. Many of the children told stories of long periods of
idleness between employments.—THE AUTHOR.
[7] While writing this we learn that a child attending a settlement club
has been involved in practices that indicate a perversion, but she cannot
properly be included in the above classification because of her extreme
youth.—THE AUTHOR.
[8] We have been popularly known as the Nurses’ Settlement, but our
corporate name is The Henry Street Settlement.—THE AUTHOR.
[9] Hat and coat checked without charge.
[10] January 22, 1905.
[11] U. S. Commissioner S. M. Hitchcock’s decision, delivered March 30,
1909.
[12] Now published, with considerable additions, as “Memoirs of a
Revolutionist” (Houghton Mifflin Co.).
[13] See “The Life Story of a Russian Exile,” by Marie Suldoff (The
Century Co.).
[14] See the sympathetic sketch, “Katharine Breshkovsky,” by Ernest Poole
(Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago).
[15] Report of the Federal Bureau of Education for 1913 shows 500 of
these schools in New York City.
[16] See “History of Socialism in the United States,” by Morris Hillquit
(Funk and Wagnalls).
[17] The early Hebrews possessed a few mystery plays, “The Sale of
Joseph,” “Esther and Haman,” and “David and Goliath,” and at the Jewish
carnival of Purim (Feast of Esther) merrymakers went from house to house
giving performances of song and mimicry, but the Yiddish theater is new
and was first introduced in Rumania not more than thirty-five years ago.
Transplanted to Russia, the actors, said to have been selected from the
original strolling companies, played a brilliant brief part until, under
government order, the Yiddish theaters were closed there.
[18] Dr. Edward McGlynn was suspended in 1884 under charge of advocacy of
Henry George and of holding opinions regarding the rights of property not
in accord with Catholic teaching, and later excommunicated. He organized
the famous Anti-Poverty Society in 1887. In 1892 he was reinstated, his
position being judged not contrary to the doctrine of the Church as
confirmed by the Encyclical _Rerum Novarum_ issued by Leo XIII on May 15,
1891.
[19] See reports and bulletins of the Joint Board of Sanitary Control
(Dr. George Price, Director), also Bulletins Nos. 98. 144, 145, and 146
of the U. S. Department of Labor, and “Sanitary Control of an Industry by
Itself,” by L. D. Wald, in the report of the International Congress of
Hygiene and Demography, 1913.
[20] In August, 1915, the protocol was succeeded by a time agreement of
two years. This agreement contains the main principles of the protocol,
with some modifications in the machinery of adjustment.
[21] Report of Commission on Immigration of the State of New York
transmitted to the legislature in April, 1909.
[22] “The Construction Camps of the People,” by Lillian D. Wald and
Frances A. Kellor (_The Survey_, January 1, 1910).
INDEX
Adams, Maude, 87
Adolescence, problems of, and settlement work, 170-179, 189-199
Anarchism, 274-279
Archer, William, 272
Bellevue Hospital, 28, 59
Bialystok massacre, 230
Breshkovsky, Katharine, 238-248
Brewster, Mary, 8, 10, 16, 45, 48, 78, 113
Budget of a working-girl, 194;
her “two jobs,” 211
Cafés, bookshops, and saloons, 273-275
Child Hygiene, Bureau of, 53, 57, 59
_Child labor_:
Children who work, 135-151;
conditions in New York City, 135-137,
—in Pennsylvania and the South, 144, 145;
National Committee on, 144, 146;
New York Committee on, 137, 144, 148, 150;
newsboys, 146-149;
obstacles to measures for protection of children, 149;
scholarships to aid children, 138-142;
statistics for Greater New York, 158;
sweatshops and children, 153-156;
typical employment record, 143;
Washington Conference on, 146
Clubs and classes in the settlement, 179-184
Columbia University creates Department of Nursing and Health, 64
Committee of Fifteen (New York), inquiry of, 174
Comte, 274
Continuation Schools, necessary for young workers, 160
Convalescents, country house for, 88
Crosby, Ernest, 234, 235, 280
Davis, Katherine, 268
_Defectives_:
Responsibility of society for, 122;
special classes instituted, 117-120
De Leon, Daniel, 262
Diseases of children and home treatment, 38-40
Dock, L. L., 266
Doukhobors, the, 233-235
_Drama_:
As a social force, 270-273;
dramatic instinct of Jewish child, 184;
marionette theater, 272;
Neighborhood Playhouse, 185;
pageants and plays, 184-187, 226;
Yiddish plays, 270-272
Ducey, Father, 280
Dunsany, Lord, 188
_Education_:
Bureau of vocational guidance proposed, 160;
continuation schools necessary, 160;
educational ideals and the settlement, 133;
effects of disorganized tenement life on, 110-113;
Federal Children’s Bureau, 57, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168;
foreign press as Americanizing influence, 307;
hardships endured for, 99-103;
institutional life and the child, 124-132;
necessity for early care and training, 133;
responsibility for defectives, 122;
scholarships, 138, 141, 150;
special training for defectives instituted, 117-120;
study-rooms at the settlement, 103
(_see also_ Public Schools)
Educational Alliance, The, 308
Empress of Austria, assassination of, 275
Factory law (New York) amended, 210
Farrell, Elizabeth, 117, 120
Federal Children’s Bureau, 57, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168
Forward Association, The, 264
Gapon, Father, 230
Gershuni, 238
Gordin, Jacob, 270, 271
Greeks of New York give “Ajax,” 226
_Henry Street_:
Instruction in home nursing begun in old building on, 3;
its links with city’s past, 169;
physical changes of twenty years, 308
Home and School Visitor, The, 110
_Hospitals_:
Children’s diseases and, 38-40;
first school for midwives in Bellevue, 59;
large numbers of city sick unable to avail themselves of, 28
Housekeeping centers, 108, 109
Hughes, Charles Evans, 259, 293
Ibsen, Henrik, 188, 272
Illiteracy, 113, 114
_Immigrants_:
Bureau of Industries and Immigration created, 293;
conditions of, in labor camps, 294-297;
contributions of, to national life, 305, 306;
dangers and early trials of, 286-293;
discrimination against, 300-302;
further restriction of immigration contrary to American
institutions, 290, 304;
land and the, 298-300;
positive governmental action and constructive social measures
needed, 291;
postal savings banks and, 298
_Industrial conditions_:
Programmes of betterment, 25;
unemployment in 1893-1894, 17;
wretched conditions impress Henry Street workers from the
beginning, 25;
youth and trades unions, 201-215
(_see also_ Child Labor and Sweatshops)
Industrial Workers of the World, 278
_Infant mortality_:
Federal Children’s Bureau report on, 57;
social disease, 54
Institutional life, disadvantages of, for children, 124-132
_Italians_:
Ancient customs preserved among, 69;
celebration of saints’ days, 252;
daily newspaper publishes Constitution, 308;
marionette theaters, 272;
preyed upon by quack doctors, 37;
tragic experience of Italian immigrant, 286-288
“Jephthah’s Daughter,” 186
_Jews_:
Cycle of Hebrew festivals at Henry Street, 184;
difficulties of, in complex new world, 252-254;
dramatic instinct of Jewish child, 184;
Talmud-Torah Schools and Chedorim, 253;
value put upon education by, 97-100;
wedding customs, 216-219;
Yiddish plays, 270-272;
Yiddish press, 307;
Zionism, 254
Kant, 274
Kelley, Florence, 144
Kellor, Frances, 293, 294
Kennan, George, 238, 239
Kindness of poor to each other, 17-20, 70
Kishineff massacre, 229
Knights of Labor, 263, 281
Kropotkin, Prince, 222, 234, 235, 238, 276
Land, The, and the immigrant, 298-300
Lathrop, Julia, 166
Lawrence strike, The, 278, 279
Le Moyne, Sarah Cowell, 188
Life insurance and nursing service, 62
Literacy test for immigrants, 304, 305
Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 14
McGlynn, Edward, 280
McRae, Mrs., 13-17
Maude, Aylmer, 233
Mazzini, 208
_Medical etiquette_:
And nursing service, 30-36;
its analogies with the “closed shop,” 34
Metropolitan Museum of Art, petition for Sunday opening of, 80
Midwives, 57-60
Milk stations, 55, 56
Morbidity, statistics of, 37, 38
Murphy, Edgar Gardner, 144
National Organization for Public Health Nursing, 64
National Playground Association, 81
_Negroes_:
“Lincoln House,” 162;
peculiar problems of, 162, 163;
restricted opportunities for, in industry, 162
Neighborhood Playhouse, The, 185
_Nursing service_:
Co-operation with Board of Health, 45;
co-ordination with educational institutions, 63;
Department of Nursing and Health at Columbia University, 64;
development of, throughout country, 44, 60;
division into districts, 42;
effect of new basis, 27, 28;
etiquette of, 27;
honored by Mt. Holyoke degree, 65;
life insurance company and, 62;
new era in development of, 60, 61;
nurses for public schools, 51-53;
post-graduate training in settlement, 63;
principles of, 26, 27, 29;
professional etiquette and, 30-36;
Public Health Nursing, division of, created in New York State, 46
—department of, in Columbia University, 64
—National Organization for, 64;
staff of settlement increased, 41, 42
Outdoor Recreation League, 85, 86
Pageants, festas, and street dances, 184, 214, 215, 226, 252
Picnics and day parties, 77-79, 89
Play, children and, 66-96
_Playgrounds_:
In Henry Street Settlement’s back yard, 81-84;
movement throughout country in favor of, 96;
Outdoor Recreation League, 85, 86;
playgrounds “at no matter what cost,” 96;
public schools used for, 87;
Seward Park, 86
Postal savings banks and the immigrant, 298
Pouren, Jan, 236-238
Protocol established in cloakmakers’ strike, 284, 285
Prudhon, 276
Public Health Nursing, division of, created in Columbia University, 64;
in New York State, 46;
National Organization for, 64
_Public schools_:
Cooking instruction in, 107;
doctors appointed for, 49-51;
first class for ungraded pupils in, 117-120;
infectious diseases and, 46-53;
opened as recreation centers, 87;
Penny Lunches for, 109;
responsibility for defectives, 114-123;
settlement seeks to co-operate with and supplement, 105;
stronghold of democracy, 133;
trachoma in, 50;
trained nurses in, 51-53
Quack doctors and the poor, 36, 37
_Red Cross_ (_American_):
An agency providing “moral equivalents for war,” 61;
Department of Town and Country Nursing, 61
Riis, Jacob, 67
Roosevelt, Theodore, 125, 164, 166, 236, 237
_Russian freedom_:
Case of Jan Pouren, 236-238;
Friends of, in New York, 235;
Katharine Breshkovsky, 238-248;
Russian visitors at Henry Street, 231-233;
Russia’s struggle our struggle, 248;
spiritual force of, on East Side, 229;
woman suffrage and, 268
Russian Revolution, 229, 230;
New York Committee, 231, 236
_Scholarships for children who work_:
“Alva Scholarship,” 150;
chart showing statistics of, 141;
Henry Street system, 138;
New York Child Labor Committee Scholarship, 150
_Settlements_:
Adherents of all creeds work together in, 254;
birth of idea, 2;
developments and opportunities for service, 309, 310;
College Settlement (New York), 10;
Union Settlement, 58;
University Settlement, 137
Sex hygiene, instruction in, 198
Shaw, George Bernard, 188
“Shepherd, The,” 185
Shirt-waist strike, The, 209, 210
“Silver Box,” The, 185
_Social forces_:
Drama, 270-273;
politics, 255-272;
radicalism, 276-279;
religion, 249-254;
socialism, 262-266;
social reform, 279-285;
woman suffrage, 266-269
_Social halls and meeting-places_:
Cafés, bookshops, and saloons, 273-275;
Clinton Hall, 185, 225, 227, 260;
need for, 219;
Social Halls Association, 225, 226
Socialist movement in America, 262-266
Social Reform Club, 279
Southern Educational Conference, 104
Spahr, Charles B., 280
Spinoza, 274
“Spoken Newspaper, The,” 263
Study-rooms and libraries in the settlement, 103, 104
Sukloff, Marie, 238
Summer scenes on the East Side, 69-71
_Sweatshops_:
Conditions in, 152-155, 281;
conferences on, 282;
protocol of 1910, 284;
restriction of, 157-158
Taft, William Howard, 166
Tammany Hall, 256-258
Terry, Ellen, 188
Thoreau, Henry D., 277
Tolerance, religious, instances of, 21-23
Tolstoi, Leo, 233-235, 276
_Trades unions_:
Difficulty of organizing women and girls, 203;
early organizations of girl workers, 203-206;
shirt-waist strike, 209;
Women’s Trade Union League, 206, 207;
Youth and, 201-215
Triangle fire and investigation, 208, 209, 212
Tschaikowsky, N., 238, 268
Tuberculosis, system of care and instruction of patients, 53, 54
Vacation houses and camps, 90-94
Vocational Guidance and Industrial Supervision, proposed Bureau of, 160
Waring, Colonel, 4
Wedding customs, 216-219
White House Conference on Children, 125
“Whither,” by Morris Rosenfeld, 200
Whitman, Walt, 276
Widows’ pensions, the first in Henry Street, 124
Wilson, Woodrow, 305
Woman suffrage, 266-269
Women’s Trade Union League, 206, 207
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