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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.