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Title: The Survey, Volume 30, Number 5, May 3, 1913
Author: Varius
Editor: Paul Underwood Kellogg
Release date: June 26, 2024 [eBook #73922]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Survey Associates, 1913
Credits: Richard Tonsing, Brian Wilson, Bryan Ness, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SURVEY, VOLUME 30, NUMBER 5, MAY 3, 1913 ***
The Survey
Volume XXX
No. 5
THE COMMON WELFARE
SPREAD OF THE SURVEY IDEA
A hundred and more cities in thirty-four states have asked for surveys
or advice in starting local survey movements. This nation-wide service
sought from the Department of Surveys and Exhibits of the Russell Sage
Foundation, since its organization last October[1], shows how thoroughly
the idea has gripped the leaders of social and civic effort throughout
the country. Furthermore, leading citizens and organizations, who once
looked askance at “exposures” and “muck raking,” have come to understand
the constructive value of a survey and now take active part in local
efforts in this direction.
In many cases requests are backed by local commercial organizations,
chambers of commerce and boards of trade. Business men are recognizing
the commercial value of making cities healthier, better and more
comfortable to live in. Cities in Canada and several other foreign
countries, notably India, have also sought information and advice from
the department.
Response to these requests has been determined by several
factors—chiefly the timeliness of the proposed survey and its probable
influence on other cities. As to timeliness consideration is made of the
probability of the project being adequately financed and of its
receiving representative local backing. If a city cannot see sufficient
value in a survey to be willing to pay for it (especially when all
overhead charges are borne by an outside organization) it is considered
not ready for a survey. Moreover, the undertaking should be a community
enterprise, aimed to advance the well being not of any particular
interest or set of interests, but of the community as generally as
possible. The survey is an effort toward a democratic solution of local
problems, and therefore must be shouldered by representatives of all
interests and groups in the population—in other words, by the community
through its representatives. Emphasis has been laid upon the importance
of the work being done by persons with adequate training and experience.
Emphasis has also been placed upon the importance of co-operation with
national organizations so that the local program following the survey,
whether it involves housing, organized charity, prison reform, or other
special effort, will be in harmony with the standards set up by the
national organizations in the various fields.
This method of procedure has tended in some instances to hold back
surveys rather than to encourage them, and this the department regards
as preferable to undertaking surveys where conditions are not favorable.
PATH-FINDER SURVEYING
Two kinds of field work in surveys have been undertaken—“pathfinder’s
surveys” and preliminary surveys. The former are quick diagnoses of
local conditions pointing to the need of the longer and more intensive
survey. They gather enough local facts to indicate the main lines of
investigation which should be taken up later, the probable length of
time necessary for the survey, and the probable cost.
[Illustration:
THE SOCIAL SURVEYOR
_Courtesy of the Scranton Tribune-Republican._
]
At the invitation of the Topeka (Kans.) Federation of Churches given
through its president, Rev. Roy B. Guild, such a pathfinder’s survey of
Topeka was made in December. As a result, a local survey committee
composed of representative citizens was formed, and a campaign started
to raise the funds estimated as necessary. Twelve hundred dollars in
cash was contributed within a few weeks after the campaign was started.
The Chairman, Judge T. F. Garver and Secretary, H. T. Chase have been
supported by a strong favorable public opinion among leading citizens.
Similarly, as a result of the sanitary survey of Springfield, Ill., made
by Dr. George T. Palmer, local citizens wished such other investigations
made as would in the end mean a general survey of the city. At their
invitation a “pathfinder’s” survey of Springfield was made by the
department, and a local survey committee headed by Senator Logan Hay and
with A. L. Bowen, secretary of the State Board of Charities, as
secretary, was organized. The appointment of a finance committee has
been authorized, and work toward raising the necessary funds is soon to
begin.
Another quick diagnosis of city conditions was made by the department
recently for Scranton, Pa. The project was urged by the Civic
Improvement Committee of the Scranton Century Club, of which Gertrude
Lovell is chairman. The Century Club became interested and through its
president, Mrs. Ronald P. Gleason, the Department of Surveys and
Exhibits was invited to make the preliminary examination. The report
presented to an open meeting of the club covered public health and
sanitation, taxation and public finance, community assets, civic
improvement, education, charity and other betterment agencies,
recreation, delinquency, work conditions and relations. The findings and
recommendations of this quick diagnosis were given wide circulation in
the city by the newspapers.
Among the larger efforts of the department is a preliminary survey of
Newburgh. N. Y., which was started March 15. The department’s field
director, Zenas L. Potter, is being assisted by Franz Schneider, Jr.,
also of the department’s staff, in the investigation of public health;
Margaret F. Byington of the Charity Organization Department of the
Russell Sage Foundation has investigated public and private charity
work; D. O. Decker is covering public finance and municipal efficiency;
E. F. Brown of the National Child Labor Committee is assisting in the
studies of labor conditions; and Franklin Zeiger is studying housing.
The New York Consumers League expects also to send a field worker to
co-operate for a fortnight. Amy Woods, secretary of the Newburgh
Associated Charities, started the movement toward the Newburgh survey.
The project has had the support of citizens representing the
business-men’s associations, labor unions, churches, charity and other
social organizations, city administration and women’s organizations. The
findings of this survey are soon to be ready for publication.
The preliminary surveys are designed to attain three kinds of results.
First, they aim to reveal sufficient local facts to permit the planning
of an intelligent program for community advance, say for a period of
five years. Not only liabilities but community assets—the forces to
build on and to build with—as well as what to build will be.
Second, the preliminary survey aims to be the means of enlisting public
support for measures which champion human welfare. The public official
with a vision of what he might accomplish toward social well being needs
the support of public opinion. His and other work for city progress are
as often hampered by public indifference as by the selfish interests of
an active few. Public indifference in matters of its own vital concern
disappears quickly when the public is intelligently informed. City
self-knowledge is a chief effort of the survey.
Third, the preliminary survey is to collect sufficient data to point out
the problems which need more thorough or continuous investigation.
PROSTITUTION BANISHED IN ONE NEW YORK TOWN
It is an innovation for the physicians of any community to protest in a
body against prostitution solely on the ground that it is a menace to
public health. Yet this has happened in Norwich, a village of 8,000
people in Chenango County, New York.
[Illustration:
_Newburgh, N. Y., Journal_
“I SEE BY THE PAPERS—”
]
Several months ago, Dr. Paul B. Brooks of Norwich, at a meeting of a
district branch of The New York State Medical Society presented a paper
on the Relation of the General Practitioner to the Prevalence of Veneral
Diseases. In it he declared that the medical profession possessed
information which, if frankly revealed, would bring about widespread
reforms. Through their inactivity, he said, doctors are more responsible
than any other class of citizens for the prevalence of veneral diseases.
He asserted that a large percentage of infections of this class could be
traced, directly or indirectly, to the public prostitute; that
prostitution is, in no sense, a “necessary evil,” and that if “the
people demand it,” then the moral sense of “the people” is open to
criticism. He believed that the police of any community, large or small,
if given power to drive out prostitutes, would be able to protect
virtuous women.
Shortly after this some eight or ten physicians, assembled for a meeting
of the Physician’s Club of Norwich, fell to comparing notes on the
prevalence of veneral diseases in the community. The result was
startling. Six or seven houses of prostitution, running openly and
apparently without restriction, were turning out dozens of men, and even
boys of school age, prepared to spread the scourge among innocent women,
and through them, to generations unborn. A large number of the inmates
of establishments were known to be actually infected.
The situation impressed these physicians as being so serious that they
determined to call a special meeting of the club and to invite the town
and village authorities to confer with them. In the meantime they
considered the various possibilities, including intervention by the
Board of Health, medical inspection, etc. In the end they decided that
there was but one feasible plan—to attempt the elimination of public
prostitution or at least all but such as was clandestinely practised.
They regarded it as their duty to advise, and demand, if necessary, the
removal of the obvious breeding grounds for disease.
When the local authorities met these physicians, some were skeptical as
to the results which would follow from such an attempt, though nearly
all agreed that the situation was serious enough to demand vigorous
action. The village attorney, who had openly opposed public prostitution
for many years, after hearing the evidence, declared: “If the fathers of
this town were to hear the evidence put before us by these physicians
they would mob these place, and discredit every one of us!” Some of the
establishments had been in operation for twenty years, and were regarded
as fixtures. It was said that they “made business”—certain it was that
many physicians had found the inmates regular and remunerative clients,
and that all had shared in the income from treatment of the diseases
which they bred. Some officials feared that public sentiment would not
support radical action and that the morals of innocent boys and girls
would be injured by having their attention called to conditions which
perhaps had escaped their notice. On the other hand they found
themselves in an unusual position—they were confronted by practically
all the local physicians, standing shoulder to shoulder in a demand for
drastic action.
Finally, these physicians brought the officials to their way of
thinking. They voted unanimously to clean out the “red light” district,
and proceeded at once and vigorously. In a month they had closed up
every known establishment, and had rid the town of a number of street
walkers. Greatly to their surprise, they found that public sentiment
strongly approved of their action. Since then there has been a reduction
of at least 75 per cent in number of the new cases of venereal
infection.
After the establishments within the corporation limits had been closed,
there was one house without the village jurisdiction, which remained in
operation for a short time. During that period, every new case, so far
as is known that came to a local physician, could be traced to that
establishment. The district attorney collected evidence, including the
testimony of a young man who had been infected, presented it to the
Grand Jury, and an indictment followed. A few weeks later, the
proprietor committed suicide. There has been scarcely a new case since.
“This town of ours,” says a local physician “is just an average town, no
better and no worse than other towns similar in size and environment.
The physicians, likewise, are average physicians. What we have
accomplished can be accomplished elsewhere, assuming that our results
are worth while.”
THE DEAD MAN AT MAMARONECK
It took the killing of one man in the prime of life, a strike
sympathizer—a small merchant and property holder, he was, of
Mamaroneck—and the wounding of half a dozen strikers by local police and
New York detective-agency men, to bring to public notice in New York not
only the low pay of the Italian “pick and shovel men” employed in the
suburban towns along the sound, but also the general violation of New
York state laws on jobs done under contract for the state and various
municipalities.
By a coincidence, one of the strikers who left the town hall of
Mamaroneck on April 16, after the Arbitration Bureau of the New York
State Labor Department had brought about a settlement, made much the
same comment as was made by the labor representatives before the
Massachusetts Board of Arbitration when the Lawrence strike was on.
“Why didn’t they investigate before we had to strike?” he asked. “Why
did we have to lose our brother to get what we have a right to anyway?”
The grievances which had led, two days before this settlement, to a
fight on a country road leading front Harrison to Mamaroneck were not
new.
Three months ago, wage and other demands were presented by the day
laborers on road and street work in this section of the state, who had
organized a year ago in the General Laborers’ International Union of
America. No response was made by the contractors. Thereupon several
thousand men throughout the region—which is the community zone of the
New York, New Haven & Hartford Railway, struck to enforce these demands.
On April 14 a couple of hundred strikers marched south from Harrison,
doubling their numbers as they went by calling out, some say by force,
the laborers on the estates they passed.
At the outskirts of Mamaroneck they were stopped by a score of town
officials on the ground that they had no permit to parade. In the fight
that followed, it was rock and fist—with a final appeal to
knives—against club and gun. One detective had a leg broken and was
otherwise seriously injured. The injuries of the strikers were bullet
wounds. One was killed. Following the conflict, the sheriff was appealed
to to swear in the detectives as his deputies, as vengeance for the
killing was feared; but he refused on the ground that that type of men
had proved, here and elsewhere, altogether too handy with the gun. They
had been brought out from a New York detective office by the mayor and
police of Mamaroneck, when the rumors of labor trouble in the contract
work grew thick. It apparently had not occurred to the town officials to
spend an equal amount of energy in finding out what the trouble was
about.
Road fights are not frequent occurrences in this region of gardens and
express trains and the alarm spread panic. Isolated households imagined
most anything at the hands of the “dagoes” who “must be kept down.”
There was a call for volunteer deputies, and citizens responded eagerly
with their hunting arms.
The strikers crowded in hundreds to the house of their dead comrade, but
after their first outbreak they were found to be so peaceably inclined
that all deputies, except the police department’s aides from New York,
were withdrawn, and the strikers were even given permission to follow
the hearse to the cemetery, the day after the strike settlement. This
cortege passed through many of the strike centers at Mamaroneck,
Larchmont, New Rochelle, Mt. Vernon, and other towns in which the
laborers’ union claims a membership of 10,000. It was the occasion for
no disorderly effort at vengeance.
The laborers’ demands of three months ago covered recognition of the
union, wage payments by the week, an eight-hour day, a wage minimum for
pick and shovel men of $2 a day with revised hour rates for others of
the lower grades of work. The eight-hour demand is essentially a demand
for compliance with the state law which all the contractors on these
public jobs have been breaking by working a nine hour day. The inquiry
brought out the fact that the superintendent of the biggest job of all,
the state road, was a brother of an official of the State Engineers’
Department, which is charged with the supervision of such work.
WHAT THE ARBITRATION BOARD HEARING REVEALED
By the agreement reached by strikers and contractors at the hearing
before the Bureau of Arbitration, the men waived the point of union
recognition. Since present estimates on the contractor’s work were made
before union demands were presented, the rate of pay for an eight hour
day is to be based on $2 for a nine hour day until present contracts
expire, all new contracts to be based on $2 for eight hours. Other terms
of the agreement call for the abolition of the padrone system; the
preferential employment of laborers living in the neighborhood of any
piece of work—in itself a blow at the padrone system, with its big
employment fees and rake-off from feeding and transporting the labor
gangs;—the abolition of the shack lodging house and its keeper and the
enforcement of weekly wage payments. The last two are merely corrections
of illegal conditions. This agreement was unsigned. It is perhaps given
some security by being filed with the bureau, but there was no one
designated to follow up and enforce any point except those correcting
illegal conditions.
However much the unearthing of these illegal conditions may reflect on
the state labor authorities as a whole, they are not the fault of the
bureau of arbitration, whose representatives settled the strike largely
on terms which call for a living up to the law in the future.
The mediators laid themselves open to criticism, however, in yielding
their places as impartial questioners of both parties to the
controversy, to a local official who showed open prejudice for the
contractors and a tendency to browbeat the strikers throughout the
hearing. This official made the original and astonishing statement that
the strikers’ demand for recognition was illegal as it constituted a
conspiracy in restraint of trade, and that it would therefore render the
paper on which their demands were written worthless before the law.
One of his taunting questions was: “How can you demand $2 a day for a
man who isn’t worth seventy-five cents?” The president of the union made
reply. He was an Italian and he spoke with some heat; perhaps he did not
know he was setting off a human estimate against what an economist would
call the commodity theory of labor?
“Man wort’ seventy-five cent a day?” he asked. “No man wort’
seventy-five cent, no man wort’ less than two dolla day. Man got a wife,
man got a child. Everybody wort’ two dolla day. That the least price
will take.
“I like the men live more nice. You no like to live ten in a room. You
no like take your children out of the school to work. You no like to be
out of work five mont’ in the year. Me figure this pay on basis twelve
mont’ to live on seven mont’ pay. That’s dolla day. Can you support
five, six child on that?
“Contractor can pay. On some men he make four dolla profit; big profit
on all de men. The men they want this two dolla. They no take less.”
Small as this strike was, in several respects it was remarkable. It is
an instance of the crystalization of unskilled labor into unions and its
spontaneous outbreak—in this instance without any revolutionary I. W. W.
leadership. The strike was not in an industrial center, but in a
community of homes, and there were people who looked out of their
windows and saw how the type of hired detective, who usually operates in
out of the way strike regions, shot into a crowd of strikers without
guns, who were in more senses than one, to be sure, taking the law into
their own hands, but doing so only long after the authority which the
men with the guns represented had failed to enforce it.
But beyond all that, the strike revealed the dread, the utter
misunderstanding, the gap between the people who live by the sides of
the roads and the men who build them. They did not know it was a desire
for settled employment, for homes instead of padrone’s barracks that was
arousing these workers.
SOME NEW STATE LAWS AFFECTING WOMEN’S WORK
Rhode Island was the first state to legislate in 1913 regarding women’s
hours of work. The law had previously failed to provide any protection
for women employed in stores. It had prohibited more than fifty-six
hours’ work in one week in manufacturing and mechanical establishments,
but it allowed more than ten hours’ work in one day for various causes.
The new law fixes a flat ten-hour day and fifty-four-hour week for all
women employed in any “factory, manufacturing, mechanical, business or
mercantile establishment.”
Several measures were presented to the Legislature dealing with this
subject. The bill as passed was introduced as a substitute, at the
request of Chief Factory Inspector J. Ellery Hudson. It was strongly
supported at the hearings before the Legislature by the Consumers’
League of Rhode Island, by the representatives of the labor unions,
women’s clubs, and the Rhode Island Medical Society. The removal of the
former exceptions in the law is as great a gain as the reduction of
hours and the inclusion of mercantile houses. The bill marks a notable
advance in Rhode Island.
Another important bill recently passed through effective concerted
action was in Delaware, where no law was ever before enacted to limit
women’s hours of labor. Two years ago the Consumers’ League of Delaware
carried on a campaign for a ten-hour bill. This measure passed the
Legislature, but was amended almost beyond recognition in the process,
and in the end it was not signed by the governor. This year a ten-hour
law committee of the Consumers’ League was formed of which Margaret H.
Shearman has been chairman. In spite of bitter opposition, a bill was
carried through, providing for a ten-hour day and a fifty-five-hour
week. Success followed a campaign of unusual vigor, conducted for months
throughout the state. The new law includes women employed in many
occupations—“in any mercantile, mechanical or manufacturing
establishment; laundry, baking or printing establishment; telephone and
telegraph office or exchange.” Women employed in canning establishments
are exempted. Many other exceptions and amendments were pressed, but
only one concession was made to secure the passage of the bill. This
allows one working day of twelve hours each week.
In Texas the Legislature proved more compliant to the powerful lobby
which opposed the passage of the first woman’s labor law in that state.
Cotton-mill owners, raising the familiar cry that their industry would
be ruined, succeeded in having themselves wholly excluded from the new
act. They may therefore continue to employ their women workers as long
as they choose, while the only manufacturers prohibited from employing
women more than ten hours in one day and fifty-four hours in one week
are those engaged in the garment trades!
According to the census of 1910 about 4,000 women are employed in the
factories in Texas. Textiles are not separately listed, but it is fair
to surmise that a small minority of the 4,000 women are garment workers
covered by the new law, and that the great majority are employed in the
cotton mills, without any legal limitation of hours.
Besides garment workers, the new law includes women employed in any
“printing office, dressmaking or millinery establishment, hotel,
restaurant or theater, telegraph or telephone office.” Laundry owners
are allowed to employ women eleven hours in twenty-four, provided that
“time and a half” is paid for work done in excess of ten hours. A
comment by the Texas commissioner of labor on the new law is worth
quoting: “Will not attempt to apologize for the same,” he writes, “but
will admit it is not much.”
In New York a new law has been enacted which is of national as well as
state importance. This measure was unanimously recommended by the New
York State Factory Investigating Commission after careful investigation.
It prohibits the employment of women at night in manufacture, between 10
P. M. and 6 A. M. It brings the Empire State with its 300,000 women
employed in manufacture up to the level of the fourteen civilized
nations of Europe which have by international treaty abolished the night
work of women in factories.
Hitherto only three states, Massachusetts, Indiana and Nebraska, have
enacted in their statutes the principle of assuring to working women a
fixed period of rest at night—a principle adopted by England as long ago
as 1847 in the first factory legislation.
In this country, usage has so blunted our perception of the effects of
work carried on to midnight or all night, that the establishment of a
legal closing hour is one of the last steps taken even by progressive
states. Yet in Massachusetts 10 P. M. has been the legal closing hour in
factories for almost twenty-five years, and the great textile trade has
flourished with an even earlier closing hour for women, set by law at 6
P. M. since 1907.
In recommending the enactment of the nightwork bill, the Factory
Investigating Commission carefully considered the adverse opinion of the
New York Court of Appeals, which five years ago, in the Williams case,
declared unconstitutional a similar law prohibiting the night work of
women. The commission concluded that two new circumstances justified the
enactment of a new law and the reargument of the principle at stake
before the highest court of New York—the only court of last resort which
has rendered a decision on this subject.
These two circumstances are, first, the decision of the Supreme Court of
the United States upholding the Oregon ten-hour law for women, handed
down since the decision in the Williams case was rendered; and second,
the existence of many “facts of common knowledge” regarding the
physical, moral and economic effects of night work, facts which were not
brought to the attention of the New York Court of Appeals when it
decided that Katie Mead was not likely to be injured by working at 10.20
P. M. in a given occupation.
When the new case comes up for argument it is reasonable to hope that
the New York court will follow the lead of the Supreme Court of the
United States in taking “judicial cognizance” of those ascertained facts
which go far beyond the single case at bar, and present to the court the
world’s experience as to legislation of this character.
CALIFORNIA WOMEN AND THE VICE SITUATION
A red light injunction and abatement bill, not essentially different
from the law now in effect in Iowa and Nebraska, passed both houses of
the California Legislature with good majorities and was signed by
Governor Hiram W. Johnson on April 7. The law declares houses of
prostitution and assignation to be nuisances and holds responsible both
the proprietor of the house and the owner of the building. It enables
any citizen, whether personally damaged or not, to bring action; and it
levies a fine against the property itself and forbids its use at any
future time for such purpose.[2]
The bill has had a somewhat dramatic history. In 1911 it was introduced
at the request of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union by Assemblyman
Wyllie, but though favorably reported from the Public Morals Committee
it was killed by re-reference to the Judiciary Committee too late to be
returned to the floor.
The tremendous general awakening since then on the subject of the social
evil and the exposure in San Francisco of the enormous sums reaped by
organized vice under the Schmitz-Ruef regime, led to the formation of a
society of social hygiene. The efforts of the United States Department
of Justice to suppress the traffic in girls led to the establishment of
an anti-slavery society; and the State Board of Health, under the
leadership of Dr. William F. Snow, made venereal, like other contagious
diseases, reportable, though only by case numbers.
Attention has been gradually focussed upon the question of the
desirability of segregation of vice or “red light” districts which exist
in nearly all the cities of California except Los Angeles, and in most
of the larger towns. San Francisco is the only city to make an attempt
at systematic regulation and medical examination and this city has been
the object of repeated criticism on the part of those who do not believe
in the European system of regimentation. It has also done its part in
preparing the public mind for a more intelligent discussion of such
measures as the injunction and abatement bill, the requirement of a
health certificate for marriage, and the several bills limiting the
liquor traffic which were offered in the present Legislature.
The bill as passed was sponsored by the Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union and endorsed by the State Federation of Women’s Clubs and the
California Civic League, thus rallying to its support the many thousands
of women who were given the vote by last year’s suffrage amendment. It
is a significant fact that the measure, though approved by many men, was
formally endorsed only by ministerial bodies. The large property
interests involved and the subterranean coercion of liquor and certain
real estate interests, made it impossible to obtain the formal support
of commercial organizations.
The campaign on behalf of the measure was, therefore, necessarily a
woman’s movement. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union which, as
Franklin Hichborn has pointed out, has “the largest single block of
votes in the state,” educated their own membership and their men folk.
The California Civic League—chiefly composed of those who had been
active in the suffrage campaign and whose motto is “study and
service”—undertook the systematic work of educating the public on the
general subject of the social evil. For four successive months it
published syllabi to be studied by its three thousand members in thirty
centers. Beginning in January, the union carried on a publicity campaign
in the newspapers and during the last two months kept several women
speakers in the field talking on the “red light” bill before church
congregations, mass meetings, conferences and clubs.
The California Legislature met for the first time under the new law of a
divided session, bills being received in January, a recess taken in
February, and measures then being discussed and voted upon. During the
recess most of the legislators were invited to speak at mass meetings in
their own district and to put themselves on record on this particular
bill. It soon became known that the delegations from San Francisco and
from Alameda County were, with the exception of a very few men, against
the bill, while the members of the delegation from southern California
were almost unanimously for it.
A picturesque episode of the campaign lay in the selection of Edwin D.
Grant of San Francisco to introduce the bill in the senate, for Senator
Grant is the successor of a well-known politician, Eddie Wolf, who had
misrepresented San Francisco for sixteen years in the Legislature. The
replacing of Wolf by Grant was one of the first political results of
woman suffrage in the city. Although young and relatively inexperienced,
Mr. Grant stood the ridicule of the reactionary press that constantly
heckled him as “the boy reformer” and, with the support of older men on
the floor, got his bill through without any weakening amendments.
DEBATE BEFORE THE LEGISLATURE
The debates in both houses over this bill brought clearly into view the
high political and social ideals of the younger and more recently
elected members of the Legislature; and it proved that the women of
California, though wholly inexperienced in politics, knew what they
wanted and would stand solidly for it. They won, not by lobbying, but by
systematic education of the constituencies of the legislators. It is
reported that one legislator asked a doubtful colleague if he intended
to vote for the bill and the other replied: “Don’t I have to go home?”
The floor leader of the senate complained publicly of the “threats” of
his constituents who had urged him to vote for the bill and said that
they would remember their enemies as well as their friends. Assemblyman
Nelson, chairman of the Assembly Public Morals Committee, said that he
received 1,800 letters on this subject during the recess.
Although the debate in the assembly was sickening at times, in its
revelation of the attitude of certain men toward the whole matter of
vice, the measure passed by a vote of 62 to 17. In the senate a strong
effort was made by Senator Beban of San Francisco to sidetrack it by
substituting an investigation into the relation of women’s wages and
vice. But the senate refused to postpone the injunction bill until this
special committee should report, and in spite of a five-hour debate,
chiefly carried on by those who were trying to explain plausibly why
they were going to vote against it, the measure passed by a vote of 29
to 11. Thus, out of a legislature of 120 members, only 28 voted against
the bill and of these a majority were from San Francisco and from
Alameda County.
After the bill had passed, a final dramatic touch was given by the
demand of certain so-called “real estate” interests in San Francisco for
a hearing before the governor. The governor announced a public hearing
to which came about forty persons, both men and women, representing all
the more important protective, civic and moral associations of northern
California. The opponents, who perhaps had hoped to get a private
hearing, did not appear; whereupon the governor signed the bill.
Meanwhile, even before the bill was signed, money had been raised and
tentative plans made for taking care of the women and girls who should
be thrown out of the segregated districts. These plans are now being
extended to cover the whole state. It is expected that the companion
measure, a state training home for girls which carries an appropriation
of $200,000, will also pass and this will ultimately provide for minors
and those who go through the probation courts. As fast as the injunction
measure is enforced the women’s organizations intend to offer a home,
medical attendance and employment, if possible, to all refugees who will
accept them.
CALIFORNIA WOMEN RECALL A JUDGE
The first recall of a judge under California’s new law took place on
April 22 and was accomplished by the women voters of San Francisco. When
a police magistrate, C. L. Weller, reduced the bail set by another
police judge in the case of a prisoner accused of attacking a young
girl, and the prisoner at once fled when released on bail, the women of
the city secured 10,000 names to petition for recall. In the recall
election Judge Weller was opposed by Wiley F. Crist, who is said to be
an enthusiastic young lawyer of strong reform tendencies. Mr. Crist won
by a margin of only a few hundred votes in a total of 61,000.
ORGANIZING TO FIGHT CANCER
For some time medical associations have put on record their conviction
of the need of systematic work for the prevention of cancer, by the
appointment, at congresses and conventions, of committees charged to
work upon this subject. These many local efforts came to a head on April
22, when at a meeting in New York under the chairmanship of Dr. Clement
Cleveland, the first steps were taken toward the formation of National
Anti-Cancer Association.
The need and practicability of work for cancer prevention was pointed
out by Dr. LeRoy Broun, chairman of a committee of the American
Gynecological Society. Dr. Broun also gave practical suggestions for
work among work women, who are the most frequent victims of cancer.
The work of the new association will be along the lines followed by the
National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, whose methods
were described at this meeting by its secretary, Livingston Farrand.
This will include magazine articles—the _Delineator_ has indeed already
gone into this field—leaflets, instruction by nurses, and lectures
before womens clubs and other associations.
A committee of organization, consisting of Leroy Broun, James Speyer, V.
Everit Macy, George C. Clark and Frederick L. Hoffman was appointed to
report to the Congress of Physicians to be held at Washington next
month.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
FINGER PRINTS
PROBLEMS[3]
HELEN R. GUTMANN
A method of teaching arithmetic was in vogue some years ago by which the
answer to each problem was printed in the back of the book. Sometimes a
problem was stated wrongly or the answer given was incorrect. Of course,
that complicated matters. I believe they teach arithmetic differently
now.
Mildred worked unceasingly at her problem. She worked at it quite
cheerfully as she set out briskly in the morning for her two mile walk
from her home to the shop where she was employed as a cash girl. She
worked at it wearily as she crept home on tired swollen feet, when every
automobile as it whizzed past her seemed to scream “cash!” with its
shrill siren.
The problem dealt with figures so small it would seem a child in the
third grade could solve it. Mildred knew it to be so difficult that no
professor of mathematics could have brought her nearer the answer.
This was the problem, though Mildred did not state it in quite the same
way. Let _x_ equal $3.50, her earnings. From _x_, plus the very small
and uncertain earnings of her mother, take food for five plus rent and
leave enough for a neat black dress. She had multiplied the earnings by
many weeks but she had to multiply the food and rent by an equal number
and the answer never came right.
Sometimes, just to keep up her spirits, she would pretend she had solved
it—then what a pleasant array of problems presented themselves! The
black dress meant a clerk’s position and added salary. With that as a
beginning one might figure up to a buyer’s position. Somewhere between
lay the possibilities of some problems like this:
Let _x_ equal Mildred’s salary: _x_ minus rent, minus food, minus
clothes equals _y_, which is enough left over to permit the tired mother
to hire a woman for the washing.
One must be half starved and insufficiently clad to realize the
magnitude of that problem, rightly solved. The storms of early spring in
New York solve many problems by eliminating the mathematician. In
Mildred’s case they only postponed the solving.
Shoes have no hopes nor dreams, nor even problems, to keep them from
wearing out in miles of daily walking over cobblestones, and miles of
walking back and forth in the store. Mildred’s shoes developed gaps and
fissures, and were useless to keep out the wet. Rent was due. There was
no money to be spared even for carfare. So huge a sum as new shoes meant
was impossible.
Mildred developed pneumonia.
There are people in every city who put aside their own problems to help
solve those of others. To one in Mildred’s straits these became, no
longer dreaded agents of charity, to be avoided, but friends. It was due
to one of these friends that Mildred recovered. But with convalescence
returned her problem, its weary repetition standing between her and
health.
It was then the kindly agent went to her former employer. His sympathy
was sincere. There were tears in his eyes when the story was finished.
“That must never happen again,” he declared. “Tell her to come to me
if she is ever in trouble again. She shall have shoes, or whatever she
needs for comfort.”
Charity, however, was not what Mildred required, but adequate pay for
service. That could not be granted. It would establish that terrifying
thing, a precedent!
Elsewhere the agent met with better success, Mildred has employment
again and better pay: And with _x_ as a known and more satisfactory
basis, she forms her problems now.
But her old arithmetic remains the lesson book of how many other girls?
EDITORIAL GRIST
HOLDING FAST TO THE TWELVE-HOUR DAY
JOHN A. FITCH
The United States Steel Corporation, in the annual meeting of its
stockholders, held in Hoboken, N. J., April 21, took a step which may
tend to cause a reaction among that part of the public which had come to
believe, on account of the frequent pronouncements by the corporation of
its kindly intent toward its employes, that it would take any reasonable
and logical step that it might to improve labor conditions.
To make this clear it is not necessary to go back to the addresses in
this vein that have been delivered from time to time by executive
officers of the corporation before the American Iron and Steel Institute
and elsewhere. It is sufficient to refer to the committee of
stockholders, appointed by Judge Gary in the fall of 1911, who made a
report on labor conditions to the stockholders meeting of 1912. Their
report declared that 25¾ per cent of the employes of the corporation
were working twelve hours a day. This figure included all employes in
mines and quarries, as well as in mills and furnaces. The committee made
it clear that “this schedule of work was found in the largest proportion
in its departments which are more or less continuous, such as rolling
mills, open hearths, and blast furnaces, where the percentage of work
for the twelve hours varies from 50 to 60.”
Speaking of the effects of the twelve-hour day, the committee said:
“We are of the opinion that a twelve-hour day of labor, followed
continuously by any group of men for any considerable number of years
means a decreasing of the efficiency and lessening of the vigor and
virility of such men.
“The question should be considered from a social as well as a physical
point of view. When it is remembered that the twelve hours a day to
the man in the mills means approximately thirteen hours away from his
home and family—not for one day, but for all working days—it leaves
but scant time for self improvement, for companionship with his
family, for recreation and leisure. It is important that any industry
be considered in its relation to the home life of those engaged in it,
as to whether it tends to weaken or strengthen the normalness and
stability of family life. By a reasonable conserving of the strength
of the working population of today may we be best assured of a
healthy, intelligent, productive citizenship in the future....
“That steps should be taken now that shall have for their purpose and
end a reasonable and just arrangement to all concerned, of the
problems involved in this question—_that of reducing the long hours of
labor_—we would respectfully recommend to the intelligent and
thoughtful consideration of the proper officers of the Corporation.”
As a result of this recommendation, the finance committee of the
Corporation appointed a subcommittee of its members, “to consider what,
if any, arrangement with a view to reducing the twelve-hour day, in so
far as it now exists among the employes of the subsidiary companies, is
reasonable, just and practicable.” Their findings are published in the
annual report of the corporation for the year 1912, which has recently
been issued. The committee calls attention to the fact that the
stockholders’ committee found that “only about 25 per cent of the total
number of employes” were working twelve hours a day. This, in spite of
the fact that the committee distinctly reported that 50 to 60 per cent
of actual steel workers were twelve-hour men. But as to relieving the
situation, the report reads “it is believed that unless competing iron
and steel manufacturers will also enforce a less than twelve-hour day,
the effort to reduce the twelve hours per day at all our works will
result in losing a large number of our employes, many of them preferring
to take positions requiring more hours of work per day.”
The report then points out that a considerable number of men during the
past year have left the employ of the Steel Corporation because they
have enforced the six day week, and have gone to the employ of other
companies where they could work seven days, and expresses the fear that
the same thing would happen if an eight-hour day were adopted by the
corporation.
Of course, nothing is said in this report, nor was anything said at the
stockholders’ meeting of April 21, as to the real reason why workers
leave their positions when hours of labor are shortened. The inference
to be drawn from the report is that steel workers are so consumed with a
passion for work that they do not desire to leave it, even for one day
in seven.
The facts are that the cost of this reform was borne by the men. The
Steel Corporation did not pay its men their old earnings for their new
six day stint. It would be interesting to know the actual wages received
by the larger proportion of those who left the employ of the Corporation
in order that they might work seven days a week for other companies. We
should then be able to draw our own conclusions as to whether it was a
passion for work or a desire to support their families in decency and
comfort that led them to look elsewhere for work when their earnings
were reduced by one-seventh.
But the Steel Corporation found itself, according to its own testimony,
in a quandary. A committee of its own stockholders had recommended an
abolition of the twelve-hour day. The finance committee had considered
the matter carefully and reported back that because its competitors had
not changed from the twelve-hour day, they could not. It was a practical
difficulty and they intimated that they were unable to solve it. It was
to cut this Gordian knot that Charles M. Cabot, the Boston stockholder
who was responsible for the investigation conducted last year by the
stockholders’ committee headed by Stuyvesant Fish, went to the meeting
on April 21 with this resolution:
“Voted, that in view of the Finance Committee’s report that the change
from the twelve to the eight-hour day in continuous twenty-four hour
processes in our mills and plants is impracticable unless similar
action is taken by our competitors; and, further, in view of the
fruitful results which followed the appointment by the American Iron
and Steel Institute at the instigation of officers of our Corporation
of a committee on seven-day labor, which action has led to the very
general establishment of the six day week in the steel industry of the
United States; that the stockholders request the directors to enlist
the co-operation of the steel manufacturers of the United States in
establishing the eight-hour day in continuous twenty-four hour
processes.”
The purpose of this resolution was to provide the quickest, most
efficient manner of solving the dilemma in which the Corporation found
itself, and to provide a way whereby there could be restored to the
workers such a working schedule, as would not sap their vitality or
prevent them from having what the stockholders’ committee thought was
necessary time for relaxation and for association with their families.
That this resolution was tabled with the consent of the officials of the
Corporation, will undoubtedly be interpreted by many as an indication
that the Corporation was not sincere in its plea that its hands were
tied in trying to meet the demand of the Fish committee for a reduction
in hours.
Yet Mr. Cabot performed in offering this resolution possibly his
greatest service since he began his campaign to improve the labor
conditions in the steel industry even though it was an achievement that
he did not have in mind. He forced the Corporation to show its hand; he
gave it an opportunity to prove whether or not it really desired, as it
was on record as desiring, a fundamental reform. The Corporation gave
him an unmistakable answer.
It would have been better if they had not forgotten the wise counsel of
William B. Dickson, their former vice-president, when he said, in a
speech advocating one day of rest in seven, that if the steel companies
themselves did not institute this reform, they would be compelled by law
to institute it, and that the law would be far more drastic than the
manufacturers of steel would find comfortable.
BEDFORD REFORMATORY
W. J. LAMPTON, in the _New York Times_
[_Bedford Reformatory, a State institution doing invaluable service in
the reclamation of wayward girls, is overcrowded and asks $700,000
from the state for extension purposes._]
Behold, she stands
And stretches out her hands
For aid.
Those firm, strong hands,
Those gentle, helpful hands,
Whose spirit unafraid
Of sin and shame and loss
Have borne the burden of the cross
For girls unnamable, whose feet
Have trod the open street,
The market-place
Of body and of soul,
In search of toll
From any man who gave
To own a common slave,
The chattel of the street.
These Bedford comes to meet,
But not as shameless things;
To them she brings
Love, courage, hope, the better way,
The clean, new day
Whose morning sun awakes
Another world to those half gone
And hopeless ones
To whom there was no other dawn.
And now she stands
With outstretched hands
For aid; the means to lift
Out of the ghastly drift
These girl-souls crying in the night
For kindly light.
And shall she be denied?
Shall men who buy
Deny?
Shall any man, in whom his pride
In his own womankind is strong,
Go wrong
And say
To Bedford: “Nay”?
May 3, 1913.
[Illustration]
THE OYSTERMAN
BALTIMORE TO BILOXI AND BACK
THE CHILD’S BURDEN IN OYSTER AND SHRIMP CANNERIES
Investigation and Photographs by
LEWIS W. HINE
FOR THE NATIONAL CHILD LABOR COMMITTEE
[_Mr. Hine’s photographs and the equally vivid impressions he sets
down in the text, tell a story of child labor along the South Atlantic
and the Gulf. In an especial sense these are conditions which public
opinion can bring to the door of the Democratic Party to remedy. For
in these states that party is dominant, as it is in the nation._
_First lies the channel of state action, which has thus far been
laggard, and has been obstructed by the child employing interests of
the South. At the present time, a child labor bill which would reach
this shore work, is pending in Florida. In Mississippi shucking is
prohibited but there is no enforcing agency and the work is going on
as before._
_If the channel of state action fails, child labor reformers point to
such national legislation as would prohibit interstate commerce in
canned oysters and shrimps which are so humanly costly. The recent
decision of the United Stores Supreme Court in the white slave case
would seem to indicate that legislation could be drafted which would
hold in the courts, and several bills along the lines of the much
controverted Beveridge bill of 1907 are now before Congress._
_It is for the Democratic Party in state and nation to proceed through
one channel or the other._—Ed.]
When we speak of child labor in oyster canning, we refer to the cooked
or “cove” oysters, not to the raw ones. Children are not used in opening
raw oysters for the sole reason that their fingers are not strong
enough. Occasionally one finds young boys at work on the boats dredging
for the oysters, but not many children work on the boats, for that is a
man’s job.
The two chief sections engaged in the work of canning oysters and
shrimps are the Gulf Coast, from New Orleans eastward to Florida, and
the Atlantic Coast of Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Maryland was
the pioneer state, but it has already been outstripped by Mississippi,
and several other states follow close in amount of annual output.
[Illustration:
A TYPICAL OYSTER AND SHRIMP CANNERY
]
[Illustration:
WORKING UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYE OF THE BOSS
]
Every year about October, hundreds of Polish and Bohemian people (some
authorities say thousands) are herded together by various bosses or
“padrones” in Baltimore and other centers of the South shipped over to
the coasts by train and by boat and set up in shacks provided by the
canning companies. We are told by one of the canners, “We give these
people all the modern conveniences.” The modern conveniences appear to
be summed up in artesian wells. If there were no cold or wet weather in
these parts, if waste and sewage were carried off, and if there were no
crowding, these temporary quarters would be endurable; but in cold, or
hot, or wet weather they are positively dangerous, especially to
children. One row of dilapidated shacks that I found in South Carolina
housed fifty workers in a single room house. One room sheltered eight
persons, and the shacks were located on an old shell pile within a few
rods of the factory, a few feet from the tidal marsh where odors,
mosquitoes, and sand flies made life intolerable, especially in hot
weather.
There is a prevailing impression that in the matter of child labor the
emphasis on the labor must be very slight, but let me tell you right
here that these processes involve work, hard work, deadening in its
monotony, exhausting physically, irregular, the workers’ only joy the
closing hour. We might even say of these children that they are
condemned to work.
[Illustration:
RAMSHACKLE SHEDS HOUSING NEARLY FIFTY WORKERS PORT ROYAL, S. C.
]
[Illustration:
THREE-YEAR-OLD ALMA WHOSE MOTHER IS “LEARNIN’ HER THE TRADE”
]
Come out with me to one of these canneries at three o’clock some
morning. Here is the crude shed-like building, with a long dock at which
the oyster boats unload their cargoes. Near the dock is the ever present
shell pile, a monument of mute testimony to the patient toil of little
fingers. It is cold, damp, dark. The whistle blew some time ago, and the
young workers slipped into their meager garments, snatched a bite to eat
and hurried to the shucking shed. The padrone told me “Ef dey don’t git
up, I go and _git ’em up_.” See those little ones over there stumbling
through the dark over the shell piles, munching a piece of bread, and
rubbing their heavy eyes. Boys and girls, six seven and eight years of
age, take their places with the adults and work all day.
The cars are ready for them with their loads of dirty, rough clusters of
shells, and as these shells accumulate under foot in irregular piles,
they soon make the mere matter of standing one of physical strain.
Notice the uncertain footing, and the dilapidated foot-wear of that
little girl, and opposite is one with cloth fingers to protect herself
from the jagged shells—they call them “finger-stalls.” Their fingers are
often sore in spite of this precaution.
When they are picking shrimps, their fingers and even their shoes are
attacked by a corrosive substance in the shrimp that is strong enough to
eat the tin cans into which they are put. The day’s work on shrimp is
much shorter than on oysters as the fingers of the worker give out in
spite of the fact that they are compelled to harden them in an alum
solution at the end of the day. Moreover, the shrimp are packed in ice,
and a few hours handling of these icy things is dangerous for any child.
Then, too, the mornings, and many of the days, are cold, foggy and damp.
The workers are thinly clad, but, like the fabled ostrich, cover their
heads and imagine they are warm. If a child is sick, it gets a vacation,
and wanders around to kill time.
The youngest of all shift for themselves at a very early age. One father
told me that they brought their baby, two months old, down to the
shucking shed at four o’clock every morning and kept it there all day.
Another told me that they locked a baby of six months in the shack when
they went away in the morning, and left it until noon, then left it
alone again all the afternoon. A baby carriage with its occupant half
smothered under piles of blankets is a common sight. Snuggled up against
a steam box you find many a youngster asleep on a cold morning. As soon
as they can toddle, they hang around the older members of the family,
something of a nuisance, of course, and very early they learn to amuse
themselves. For hours at a time, they play with the dirty shells,
imitating the work of the grown-ups. They toddle around the shed, and
out on to the docks at the risk of their lives.
A little older and they learn to “tend the baby.” As a substitute for
real recreation, this baby tending is pathetic.
Mary said, “I shucks six pots if I don’t got the baby; two pots if I got
him.”
As soon as they can handle the oysters and shrimps, they are “allowed to
help.”
The mother often says, “Sure. I’m learnin’ her de trade,” and you see
many youngsters beginning to help at a very early age. Standing on a box
in order to reach the table, little Olga, five years old, was picking
shrimps for her mother at the cannery I visited. Later in the day, I
found her at home worn out with the work she had been doing, but the
mother complained that Olga was “ugly.” Little sympathy they get when
they most need it! Four-year-old Mary was working irregularly through
the day shucking about two pots of oysters. The mother is the fastest
shucker in the place, and the boss said,
“Mary will work _steady_ next year.” The most excitement that many of
them get from one month to another is that of being dressed up in their
Sunday best to spend the day seeing the sights of the settlement.
Now we all know that the amount of work these little ones can do is not
much, and yet I have been surprised and horrified at the number of hours
a day a six or a seven year old will stay at work, and this with the
willing and eager consent of the parents. “Freckled Bill,” a bright lad
of five years, told me that he worked, and his mother added
reproachfully,
“He kin make fifteen cents any day he wants to work, but he won’t do it
steady.”
Annie, seven years old, is a steady worker. The mother said, for her
benefit, of course, “She kin beat me shuckin’, an’ she’s mighty good at
housework too, but I mustn’t praise her too much right before her.”
This is only one of the means used to keep the children at work. Another
method is to tell the neighbors that Annie can shuck eight pots a day.
Then some other child beats the record, and so the interest is kept up,
and incidentally the work is done and the family income enlarged. Can we
call that motherhood? Compared with real maternity, it is a distorted
perversion, a travesty. The baby at Ellis Island little dreams what is
in store for him.
Hundreds of these children from four to twelve years of age are
regularly employed, often as helpers, for the greater part of the six
months if it is a good season. At three and four years of age they play
around and help a little, “learnin’ de trade.” At five and six years of
age they work more regularly, and at seven and eight years, they put in
long hours every working day. This is the regular program for these
children day after day, week after week for the six months of their
alleged—“outing down South.”
I remarked to one of the village people, “It’s a wonder that these
youngsters live through it all.”
“Yes,” she replied, “and when they _don’t_ live through it, there is a
corner over in a little cemetery waiting for them, and _many of them go
there_.”
You see, “They’re only Hickeys.”
I suppose the cemetery is one of the “conveniences” that the company
does not boast about.
[Illustration:
CHILDREN OF THE OYSTER CANNERIES
A young girl who has been shucking six years and earns a dollar a day;
a little mother who alternates baby tending and oyster shucking; a
ten-year-old worker has no time for school.
]
The wages of these workers vary according to their locality, and the
kind of season they find. The work on the shrimp is better paid than
oyster shucking, but it is much more irregular. On the latter families
frequently earn ten and fifteen or twenty dollars a week so when there
are several children, and the work is steady, there is a great
temptation to make them all help. Children of seven years earn about
twenty-five cents a day, and at eight and ten years of age often fifty
cents a day or more. At twelve and fourteen years they frequently earn
as high as a dollar a day and this is adult pay. The fastest adult
shucker seldom earns much more than a dollar a day after years of
experience. What then is the outlook for children beginning this
industry?
“What is your name, little girl?”
“Dunno.”
“How old are you?”
“Dunno.”
“How many pots do you shuck in a day?”
“Dunno.”
And the pity of it is that _they do not know_.
What then do they know? Enough to stand patiently with the rest picking
up one hard, dirty cluster of shells, deftly prying them open, dropping
the meat into the pot; and then go through this process with another and
another and another, until after many minutes the pot is full—a relief,
for they carry it over to the weigher and rest doing nothing a minute,
and walk back,—such a change from the dreary standing, reaching, prying
and dropping—minute upon minute, hour upon hour, day upon day, month
after month. Or perchance, for variety, the catch may have been shrimp,
and then the hours of work are shorter, but the shrimp are icy cold, and
the blood in one’s fingers congeals, and the fingers become so sore that
she welcomes the oysters again.
Are you surprised then to find that many children seem dumb and can not
understand our language?
“But we educate them” some canners tell us.
This is the way they do it. In the few places where I found any pretense
to education the children shucked oysters for four hours before school.
Then they went to school for half a day, returning at one o’clock for a
hurried lunch. They worked for four hours more, five days in the week.
On Saturday they put in an alleged half day consisting of eight or nine
hours work. Is it any marvel that the school principal told me “It isn’t
satisfactory, but at least we are giving them some help in learning the
language.” They need the help. At another place, with two canneries, but
two children were going to school, and the illiteracy of both adults and
children was appalling.
“There is no compulsion about schooling here,” the principal said.
The “vocational guidance” which most of them receive, year in and year
out, is seen in the sheds where under the eagle eye of the boss, who
watches to see that they do not shirk, and under the pressure of
parental authority, they put in their time where it will bring tangible
returns. One padrone told me:
“I keep ’em a-working all the year. In the winter, bring ’em down here
to the gulf. In Summer, take ’em to the berry fields of Maryland and
Delaware. They don’t lose many weeks’ time, but I have a hard time to
get ’em sometimes. Have to tell ’em all kinds of lies.”
So here we have a certain kind of “scientific management” of child labor
by means of which even the vacation time of the children is utilized.
“Why do they do it?”—that question comes to one over and over; what
keeps these little ones at their uninteresting task? In the first place,
their immigrant parents are frugal, even parsimonious, and every little
helps. Then they think it keeps the children out of trouble, little
realizing that they are storing up trouble when they grow up,
handicapped by lack of education, broken physically, and with a distaste
for work. Small wonder if they drift into the industrial maelstrom of
cheap, inefficient labor, and float on as industrial misfits.
If we look at it from the employer’s point of view, we find his chief
justification is that children are needed because the goods are
perishable, and must be put up immediately. You ask him if the children
are not perishable, and he says he can’t see that they are spoiled. “It
doesn’t hurt ’em. They’re tough. I began myself at their age,” and so
on. It will be long years before these employers will be looking at this
children’s labor with a long-range finder, a problem to be met along
with that of improved machinery. The children themselves are docile;
they do as they are told; they are imitative, like to do what the rest
are doing; they are easily stimulated by the idea of competing with
other children; and they are very sensitive to criticism and ridicule. I
do not, however, recall a single case of a child being whipped for not
working. It can easily be seen that with the parents, or employers, and
children against it, the task of liberation from this commercialized
family peonage of immature workers is not an easy one.
On the Atlantic Coast more Negroes are employed, than on the Gulf Coast,
and they do not work the children very much, except where they have come
under the influence of the immigrant workers. In almost every case, the
bosses and padrones agree that the Baltimore workers are much more
satisfactory than the Negroes. They say:
“There is no comparing them. The whites work harder, longer hours, are
more easily driven, and use the children much more.”
The chief advantage of Negro help is that it saves the cost of
transportation. Where it is necessary to get the work done promptly the
immigrants are imported.
That this exploitation of the children is absolutely unnecessary is
proven by the canneries that get along without them. It needs merely
more efficient planning on the part of the managers, and better
supervision on the part of the state. It is certainly a condition not to
be endured when we consider the hardships involved—the long hours, the
monotonous and tiring work, the irregular conditions of work and of
life, the exposure, the unsanitary surroundings, the moral dangers, the
lack of education, and the double exploitation of summer and winter.
One morning I found a little cannery worker setting about her endless
job. At the end of the day as I passed near, human nature asserted
itself. She asked me to photograph her dolly too, this oyster shucker.
[Illustration:
SHE SHUCKS OYSTERS
For twenty-five cents a day. Seven-year-old Gulf Coast worker.
]
_M’AMS AND SUPERM’AMS_
How the public school, responding to the trend of the twentieth century,
is developing new staff and personality to link up the classroom with
the individual aptitudes of children and with their life outside of
school hours, with home-making, workmanship and community life.
_THE VISITING TEACHER_
_THE VOCATIONAL COUNSELOR_
_THE HOUSEHOLD ADMINISTRATOR_
SOCIAL SERVICE AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
ELEANOR HOPE JOHNSON
SECRETARY COMMITTEE ON THE HYGIENE OF SCHOOL CHILDREN, PUBLIC EDUCATION
ASSOCIATION
Kate Douglas Wiggin, in one of her most appealing stories, tells of a
child who was walking in a garden with his mother when they came upon a
misshapen tree. In reply to the mother’s question as to why the tree was
crooked the child replied that he guessed someone had stepped on it when
it was little. So it is with many of the children in our larger
cities—they get stepped on physically, intellectually and spiritually
when they are young.
Little Ivan, whose mother had come here from Russia after passing
through we know not how many scenes of terror and suffering, bore the
stamp of her misery on his face and in his soul. When he came to a New
York public school at eight years of age it seemed impossible that
teacher and textbook should be able to do anything for him. He was
ragged and dirty and could not speak. But after patient effort the
teacher of the special class, where he had been put, found that he was
not a mute and that he did understand English. Next, his mother was
seen, and she became so interested in her boy’s welfare that his ragged
days were brought to an end. A new suit of clothes and a clean face
transformed him into an intelligent and alert looking youngster. Now he
is struggling with the words, “boy and ran, dog and book,” and is
attacking the other branches with some notion of what they are all
about. His destructive tendency is being dealt with firmly and
patiently, and there are great hopes that some day Ivan may develop into
a normal and sturdy boy.
[Illustration:
NELLO, THE “UTTERLY BAD”
Until a visiting teacher went to his home and found his mother dying
of cancer, Nello nursing her and the three younger children, and the
father sharing his morning beer with the undersized boy. The
schoolroom tantrum was understood then. Nello was sent to the
country.
]
This story of Ivan is a good illustration of what the school can do to
help prevent the little trees from being so harshly trodden upon. It is
also a good illustration of the manner in which they can do it. For it
is one of the most promising signs of our times that our conception of
the process called education is a constantly broadening one. It is no
longer enough to teach children to read, write and cipher, even to draw,
cook and sew. We have been in the past contented with the dictum that
the public schools exist in order to abolish illiteracy, but now we are
inclined to take the fuller meaning which, surprisingly enough, the
dictionary gives: “to educate is to qualify for the business and duties
of life.” Up to now, unfortunately, the dictionary has not been followed
with too great care. Much time has been lost and from the results of
this loss we are now suffering. In our new vision, the schools must not
only train children toward constructive citizenship, but must do what
they can to prevent the development of destructive citizens, must help
in overcoming completely the original anti-social condition into which
psychologists tell us children are born.
Industrial teaching and vocational guidance through the public schools
should do much to bring about this training toward constructive
citizenship. But for the equally important task of prevention some
preliminary work must be done. Obstacles must be removed. Those who can
profit by such training must be sifted out from those who cannot, and
through the schools we must fit by some preliminary process, those who
at first sight seem unfit. For in the schools are often found the
beginning of all the bitter problems with which our strongest
philanthropic organizations are struggling so manfully. “Millions for
cure, nothing for prevention” sometimes seems to express pretty clearly
where the emphasis has been placed in the past. The schools can help
greatly if they would get back behind the present situation, and
discuss, point out, and if necessary, perform these acts of prevention.
What does all this mean? It means that social service must come to be
regarded as a justifiable function of the schools, as justifiable as it
has already become in the case of at least two other institutions.
Upwards of twenty years ago a militant clergyman in New York is quoted
as having said: “It is all very well to talk of saving souls, but I
never yet have seen a soul that was not connected with a body.” At that
time religious work was confined much more closely than it now is within
certain traditional limits, and these ringing words did much to turn the
attention of the churches toward their old ideal of social service.
A later grafting of the spirit of social service on long established
practices is shown in the progress of hospital social service. What
first opened the eyes of the medical profession is not recorded, but it
was soon proven that the assurance given to a woman at the hospital that
her children were being well cared for in her absence hastened her
recovery, and that the visits of a wise and sympathetic nurse or trained
social worker to the home of a discharged patient almost always
succeeded in preventing that patient’s return because of a relapse due
to carelessness or ignorance. A physician in a large Boston hospital
where the social service is famous for its completeness and efficiency
has said that a good social service nurse saves her salary twice over by
the cures she hastens and the returns she prevents.
There is a tradition in this country on which we greatly pride
ourselves, that education, at least in certain of its fundamental
branches, is free to all who wish to avail themselves of the opportunity
afforded by the state. Indeed, we go so far in most of our states as to
make it not only free but compulsory between certain ages. But look
carefully through any large school and many a small one, and you will
find children who would gladly partake of this free education but who
for many reasons, and through no fault of their own, are unable to do
so. Children who sit idly in school or stumble blindly through a grade
or two, and children whose names are finally taken from the register
because for them no place in school can be made. And so we come to see
that our free education is for those fortunate ones who are fitted for
it, while for others it is practically non-existent. You can compel a
child to go to school, but you cannot compel him to profit by his stay
there.
The story of Nello is a pathetic illustration of this. Here was a boy of
eleven, pitifully small for his age, who had been placed in an ungraded
class, and was disturbing the class and distracting the teacher by his
utter badness. A visitor was asked to investigate the home conditions
and find out a possible explanation for his incorrigibility. She found
ample cause. Nello’s mother was dying of cancer. His father was a heavy
drinker, often out of work, who shared his beer with the small boy
instead of getting proper food for him each morning. Nello was the only
nurse his mother and the three younger children had, and his burden of
responsibility gave him no other outlet except the schoolroom tantrum. A
nurse and proper food were secured. The two youngest children were
placed temporarily in an institution. Nello was taken to a doctor who
said that the boy was permanently dwarfed because of his alcoholic diet,
and the father was induced to discontinue this and give him milk
instead. With better food and some time in the country it may be proved
that Nello is only temporarily dwarfed mentally, even if his physical
state is permanent. In any event, with the burden, too great for his
narrow shoulders, finally removed the boy is now doing well in school
and his future is not hopeless.
[Illustration:
CLASS FOR ANAEMIC CHILDREN IN A NEW YORK PUBLIC SCHOOL
When the room is in a building the windows are so arranged that the
largest amount of air is taken into the room. The windows are never
closed.
]
Happily certain phases of the situation are now being remedied. Through
the increase in the differentiation of special classes within the
schools our educational systems are making education more nearly free to
all, and so taking a most important part in the great work of
prevention. We are ceasing to think quite so exclusively of the
ambulances at the foot of the precipice and are building our fence, foot
by foot, across its top. By means of these special classes, the
different demands which differently constituted minds and bodies make
are in great part met, the fact that certain obstacles prevent many
minds from attaining full development is recognized; and due allowance
is made for the effect physical and mental handicaps have on individual
education.
To give an instance: In the public schools of New York these special
classes are carried out to an admirable extent. Physical handicaps are
recognized and provided for in the classes for cripples, for blind,
anaemic and tubercular children, and in the School for the Deaf. The
teachers of these classes come to know a great deal about the homes and
the individual difficulties of their pupils, and what home or medical
care will be of the greatest assistance to them educationally. Bodies
are cared for, lunches even are furnished, that the mind may have a
chance to grow strong and keen—for the school lunch is more and more
recognized as a real factor in education.
For the backward children and for those who are mentally rather than
physically defective, there are other special classes; those for the
over-age children, for foreigners who come to school before they have
learned to speak English, for children who are trying to get their
working papers, and the so-called Ungraded Class for those who are
apparently or really backward to a hopeless extent. Often members of
this latter group find their way into the classes for foreign children
or those who are trying for working papers, so limiting the best
usefulness of those classes.
But one step further must be taken, and in some places and in some
connections is being taken in this work of prevention, and of bringing
together the incomplete little being and his opportunity for becoming
more complete. This step is the adaptation of the ideal of social
service to our educational work and through it we shall finally come to
see, I believe, the supremely important part the schools must play in
the solution of our most perplexing social problems. Often this part
will be not to take the actual steps themselves, but to point out to
other especially equipped agencies the steps that must be taken by them
in order to prevent future misery and crime. From the schools must come
our most valuable information and advice concerning the treatment of
various groups of dependent children. They constitute the great dragnet
and the natural clearing house.
The day is fast coming when just as surely as social service is an
inseparable and honored part of both religious and medical institutions,
so it shall be of our educational work. Phases of this service or
movements closely allied to it, are already being slowly introduced into
the public school systems of some cities, volunteer agencies are
carrying on a more definite social service in close connection with the
schools, and always a good teacher, interested to learn of the home
surroundings of her pupils, is the most effective social service worker
the schools can have.
But when the effort is made to introduce direct social service into the
school system itself a suspicion has often been felt on the part of the
governing body, or on that of the taxpayer, that here is an attempt to
turn the schools into charitable centers. They do not seem to realize
nor take to heart the message of that minister of twenty years ago that
while it is all very well to talk about training the mind, no one has
ever yet seen a mind that was not connected with a body. The obstacles
which often prevent the mind’s full development must be discovered and
removed before the education the schools offer can be taken full
advantage of. The same close relationship which hospital social service
bring about with a patient’s home must be established by the school with
the homes of its pupils—as in the case of Nello—so that any hindrance to
a child’s education existing there may be ascertained and as far as
possible overcome. Much social service of a valuable kind has been
carried on in connection with some of the special classes in the New
York city schools by outside agencies devoted to the care of particular
forms of physical defect, and their assistance to both teachers and
pupils has been generous and effective. In some cases the closest
relation has existed between these organizations and the school system,
as in the case of the classes for cripples. But as yet none of this work
has been made an actual part of the system, though its value is
recognized and the volunteer service used to the fullest extent.
[Illustration:
CLASS FOR CRIPPLED CHILDREN IN A NEW YORK PUBLIC SCHOOL
Note the adjustable chairs which can be suited to the particular
difficulty of the child occupying it. Much manual work is done in
these classes.
]
Last year the social worker who was supplied to the department of
ungraded classes of the New York public schools by the Public Education
Association proved abundantly the need for such work in connection with
all the special classes for children who are backward from any cause
whatever. Children who appeared to be hopelessly defective were taken by
this worker to hospitals or clinics and found to be far more nearly
normal than had been at first supposed. Children who seemed to be in
immediate danger of getting into evil ways because of their mental
defect and whose parents were unequal to the task of keeping them from
harming themselves or others, were placed in institutions where they
could be taught and cared for. Out of a hundred cases investigated the
visitor succeeded in placing nineteen in institutions. Unwillingness on
the part of parents or lack of room in the institutions prevented
putting the others there also. On the other hand, the child who could
not remain in the regular grades because of mental weakness was visited
at home, his difficulties explained to the parents, who were ignorantly
and often cruelly blaming him for a fault not his own, and he was
finally placed, with the parents’ full understanding and consent, in an
ungraded class. Adjustments have been made which will affect many a
child’s whole career for good, advice has been given at home which has
in some cases changed the status of an entire family.
[Illustration:
GROUP FROM A CLASS FOR FOREIGN CHILDREN IN A NEW YORK PUBLIC SCHOOL
These children of immigrant parents enter the class immediately on
landing. The average stay is three months, when they go out into the
regular grades for which they are fitted, according to the previous
education they have had in their own countries. One teacher says:
“They absorb just like little sponges. They are so eager to learn.”
]
Because of the work done by this visitor and the effective way in which
the inspector of ungraded classes has incorporated her work into the
general plan for these classes; and also on account of the
recommendation made by the State Charities Aid Association that more
knowledge should be secured by the schools of the atypical children
there, the New York Board of Education has decided to install two such
visitors in the Department of Ungraded Classes. This is the first time,
so far as I know, that an appropriation has been made by a school system
for such a purpose. It is a step towards fulfilling this newer ideal of
education of which New York city may well be proud.
It is impossible to measure the good that would result if this service
were widened to include the other classes for backward children I have
mentioned, particularly the working paper classes. At the Board of
Health the other day a pretty Italian girl of fifteen was examined for
her working paper. Her writing of the simplest English sentence was so
poor that her paper was refused, and she was told she must stay in
school until she was sixteen. The girl and her father came in despair to
appeal to the head of the department. It was not a case of poverty; the
father had work, and so had older brothers and sisters. On the girl’s
side it was discontent and restlessness—“I do not want to go to school
any more; they scold me all the time.” She had been in a special working
paper class and had undoubtedly been dull and unambitious. The father
had a more serious story. His English was halting, they talked only
Italian at home, he told me, which accounted somewhat for the girl’s
curious mistakes. But the mother was dead, the older sister working, and
there was no one at home to look after the girl in her hours after
school. The father’s distressed face showed clearly his perplexity as to
the chaperonage of his daughter according to the Italian ideas. It was
not safe or proper that she should be at home alone or wandering about
the streets; she was better off at work. Whether the father’s statement
was true or not, without much question the girl will never go regularly
to school again, if she goes at all—in spite of attendance officers and
all—and for another year she cannot go legally to work. It is not hard
to guess the sequel, and the remedy is equally easy to see. How long
will it take us to learn that when we take something from young people
which they must not have, we must at the same moment supply its place
with something desirable but safe. Social service directly connected
with the school would solve the future of the pretty little Italian and
of many others in the same evil case. They want not only the careful
schooling that will correct the lack which prevents them from going to
work, but, more than that, the home visiting which shall explain the
need for this further training and arouse interest in the connection
between school and work.
The best example of volunteer social service in connection with the
public schools is that which for several years has been carried on by
various outside agencies interested in linking more closely the school
and the home, but always limited to work with the regular grades.
The Home and School League of Philadelphia has done valuable work in
arousing interest in this direction, and now a number of such visitors
are at work in the city supported by various private organizations. They
are doing the same sort of work as that done by the visitors in New York
and Boston, although from the reports it would seem that both in
Philadelphia and Boston special attention is given by them to vocational
guidance. A particularly valuable piece of work has been done by the
home visitor appointed by the Armstrong Association to work among the
colored pupils of Philadelphia; the Friend’s Preventive Association, the
Juvenile Protective Association, and the Children’s Aid Societies, also
support visitors. These are being used to an increasing degree by the
Bureau of Compulsory Education of Philadelphia in carrying on the
preventive work connected with that bureau.
In Boston there are now five full-time and seven or eight part time
school visitors. Each visitor is engaged by some private organization,
such as the Women’s Educational Association, the Home and School
Association, a group of settlements, or by some individual. She is
attached to a special school or district and does all her work there.
This is the arrangement in all three cities. The work has been
supervised by a committee of the Women’s Educational Association, and
this committee represents settlements and other social agencies. Work of
this sort, but on a smaller scale, is being done both in Worcester,
Mass., and in Rochester, N. Y., the visiting teachers working under the
Public Education Association of New York have been increasingly
effective in their efforts to solve for the often overburdened teacher
problems connected with individual children.
Efforts have been made from time to time by the supervising force to
instruct teachers to visit the homes of the children in their classrooms
and ascertain the conditions under which they were living, but with the
present large size of classes in most public schools this has been found
to be quite impracticable. Besides this, to overcome the difficulties in
the way of a child’s education much visiting of an expert sort and many
efforts for outside co-operation are often necessary, for which the
teachers could not possibly find time. Separate visitors are therefore
needed. There are so many illustrations of the sort of work they do,
that it is hard to select one that is more telling than the rest.
From the report of a Boston visitor we learn of Angelina Conti, who was
constantly tardy, frequently absent, and never alert or quick in her
recitations. “She seems to lack ambition,” says the report, “and must be
dropped into a lower grade unless something can be done to brace her
up.” The visitor is sent to the home. She finds that Angelina is the
oldest of nine children and that the family lives in three rooms. The
burden of the family seems to rest on Angelina, who must wash the
clothes every afternoon when she comes from school, and go for the
baby’s milk before school in the morning. Angelina is a perfectly
compliant, patient little soul. She has a headache most of the time, but
expects to do all that her mother asks of her. She hopes that the
teacher won’t “degrade” her.
The visitor urges Mrs. Conti to send a younger child for milk in the
morning so that Angelina can come promptly to school. The headaches are
reported to the school nurse, who sends Angelina to the hospital for
much needed treatment. The whole situation is explained to the teacher,
who gladly promises to send Angelina home promptly in the afternoon so
that she may have time for her housework. There is a much better
understanding between Angelina and her teacher, her health improves, she
comes more regularly and keeps her class. Thus is the first step in
preventing dependency taken.
An interesting part of the work of these social service workers has been
to bring to bear on the lives of these “difficult children” all the
agencies which might be of assistance. This same Boston visitor states
in her report that “this new work of visiting the homes of the school
children is one of continual co-operation with principals, teachers,
truant officers, janitors and the children themselves, also with
hospitals, dispensaries, employment agencies, the Associated Charities,
or whatever the emergency may demand.” Too often this sort of effort is
scattered and ineffective because of the lack of connection between
agencies. With a visitor working from the school as a starting point and
not from any private organization, the connection is quickly made and
the influence of each helping agency is strengthened by the added
influence of every other. This has proved to be just as true in the case
of medical social service, particularly that of public hospitals and
institutions, and one might almost prophesy that some day the relief
work of philanthropic agencies will come only in response to calls from
the social service departments of church, hospital, public institution
and school, and that a great clearing house for these agencies, public
and private, will be the best way of organizing charity.
Be that as it may, social service is as surely needed in connection with
training people’s minds as it is with saving their souls and curing
their bodies. It is easier to train our vines to grow straight and sure
and to cling to the lattices we choose for them, if at the same time the
soil is watered and enriched that the roots may be strong, and all
things harmful to the plant’s health are carefully kept from it. “As the
twig is bent the tree’s inclined,” but the twig must be strong and
healthy as well as straight, if the tree is to do its part in forming
the forests our country must have if it would be prosperous. Surely
anything that will make more effective the mental training and
development of our country’s future citizens is as fully justified.
THE VISITING TEACHER IN ACTION
MARY FLEXNER
VISITING TEACHER, PUBLIC EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, NEW YORK CITY
Walter preferred to play ball under the kindly protection of the
Queensborough Bridge to attending school where he had no chance to show
his ability as a leader. He had successfully evaded all the visits of
the truant officer, and when his teacher asked me, a visiting teacher,
to try my luck, I wondered what I should find. I called first upon his
mother at her place of business and found her in thorough sympathy with
the school, but apparently powerless to make her son attend. Walter took
advantage of the fact that she left the house before he did, and as they
alone comprised the family, he could disobey her and go to school or not
as he saw fit. There was no one but himself to report to her in the
evening just how he had spent his day.
I chose supper time for my first visit, and found him, as I hoped, at
home, a little tired from his day’s play and hungry, of course. His
mother was there too. She was surprised when I told her that her son had
not attended school that day, nor indeed for many days previously. We
talked of many things, and just before leaving, I ventured to ask Walter
what he wanted to be when he was a man. He was then twelve years old. He
did not hesitate an instant. He wanted, he said, to be an architect. And
then his mother showed me a little calendar he had painted which adorned
the closet door. We struck a bargain. If he went to school regularly, I
was to arrange with his teacher to give him a palette and brushes so
that he could paint. It was possible to do this as he was in a special
class in which the course of study is more easily adapted to the child’s
needs.
The next morning, when I opened the classroom door, two pairs of smiling
eyes greeted me—the teacher’s and Walter’s. At once the teacher and I
planned our campaign. Walter was to learn that at school he could get a
chance at leadership too, for could he not play games there? At first,
perhaps, they seemed tame compared with those under the bridge, for the
classroom or the school-yard, even when given over to ball or bean-bag,
does not easily associate itself in the child’s mind with scenes of
adventure. However, the chance of some time being captain of the team
had charms even for him. The proof is to be found in the fact that he
attended school regularly, earning, in so doing, his palette and brushes
and at the end of the term promotion to a regular class.
The work of the visiting teacher has passed the experimental stage. The
position was created to bridge a gap in the existing school machinery.
The visiting teacher’s province lies outside that of the regular
teacher, the attendance officer and the school nurse, though like the
attendance officer and the school nurse, she goes into the child’s home.
To her is assigned the group called the “difficult” children, and it is
her aim to discover, if possible, the cause of the difficulty which
manifests itself in poor scholarship, annoying conduct, irregular
attendance, or the need of or desire for advice on some important phase
of life. It is too much to expect the regular teacher, handicapped as
she is by her large class, to cope with such situations. Nor is it to be
expected that those qualified to act as attendance officer or school
nurse, were they not already overburdened, should do the work of the
visiting teacher. In her is united the training that makes a teacher and
a social service worker, and it is because of this combination that she
is able to widen the regular teacher’s reach and help her interpret and
solve the problems as they present themselves.
From the school she learns that the child is apparently making little
effort; that his work is “C” or worse; that he is perpetually making
trouble in the class room and is never attentive: that he seems
lifeless, unable to keep pace with the class; that he attends so
irregularly that it is impossible to teach him anything, or that he has
no time to study and the situation at home is such that he must leave
school and go to work. With these facts as clues she sets to work; it is
impossible to define her methods, for they vary with her tact and
resourcefulness and with the specific character of the problem before
her. Briefly, they are the methods that spring from a friendly interest,
an intimate personal relation.
Between the home and the school the visiting teacher vibrates, carrying
to the former the school’s picture of the child and returning to the
school to reinforce that impression or to shed new light upon the
problem. There is no fixed number of times that she is expected to
travel this path, as there is no fixed hour of the day for her visits.
The urgency and complexity of a situation alone determine her movements.
Nor is there any regular routine of action that she follows. Whatever in
her judgment seems imperative, she endeavors to effect, using to this
end everything the ingenuity of man has devised to make smooth the rough
places of life.
It is a focussing of interests that she demands. The child is the
pivotal point on which she hopes to bring all her knowledge and
experience to bear. Sometimes it is the expert teacher’s training that
she invokes; sometimes the psychologist or the physician, general or
special, that she consults; or again it is the social worker to whom she
appeals. Before these she lays the facts, the reasons why her services
have been sought and from them she asks co-operation. To the adult, she
is the visiting teacher; to the child, she is simply the “lady cop.”
The results achieved do not always show a complete cure. In some cases
there has been a marked improvement in scholarship, conduct or
attendance,—at least a good start in the right direction has been made.
In other cases the child has been transferred to a different class,
regular, special or ungraded, or to a trade school, where his chances at
succeeding in making a place for himself are increased. Again, the
information the visiting teacher shares with the regular teacher has
resulted in a change of attitude toward the child, in an expansion or
contraction of the course of study, or in her giving the child extra
instruction in study periods or out of school hours. Finally, he has
been helped to promotion, even to graduation.
Last year 1,157 cases were handled by the seven visiting teachers
maintained in New York by the Public Education Association. The majority
of these came directly through the school, but in a few instances the
visiting teacher was called in by the child’s mother, a neighbor, or the
child himself, all of whom, looking to her for help, show not only an
appreciation of the fact that something is wrong, but also an
understanding of what the visiting teacher is trying to accomplish.
Their appeal emphasizes the necessity for just such a connection as she
makes. Other cases came through settlements, charity organizations,
churches, or the visiting teacher herself, whose attention had been
attracted to some child on her rounds through the classrooms. In every
instance, however, before the child technically becomes a case, the
principal and teacher are conferred with. His school record must show
him to be below standard in either scholarship, conduct or attendance,
or in need of such advice or information as will, if followed, enhance
his general well being.
Five hundred and five of the children visited were below standard in
scholarship. This deficiency might be due to any one of a number of
causes directly traceable to “home conditions,” such as congested or
unsanitary living quarters, child labor, “overburdened childhood,” and
ignorance of or indifference to the school’s claims. Or it might be that
some school adjustment was necessary; for example, de-moting the child
that is mentally and physically unequal to the grade’s requirements; or
drawing him out in recitations, should he be nervous or timid; or
helping him in the preparation of the studies that trouble him.
Three hundred and thirteen children were below standard in conduct; that
is, they were either out of sympathy with the school environment or they
were guilty of some offence, such as stealing, lying, cheating, or
sexual irregularity.
Four hundred and sixty-five children were irregular in attendance. Since
the same child is sometimes below standard in scholarship and irregular
in attendance, or in need of advice and information, the groups here
mentioned often overlap and the numbers total more than 1,157.
Six hundred and seventy-five needed advice or information. In all of
these cases the child needed someone to plead his cause either at home
or at school, that he might be the more thoroughly understood and that
his special need, whether it be recreational, physical, or vocational,
might be satisfied.
The task of the visiting teacher is plain. She must get at the facts.
This she does by studying closely the child’s environment, realizing
that he is the product of varied associations and influences. There are
circles within circles—the home, the school, the immediate neighborhood,
and what at times seems almost “beyond his ken,” the great wide world
itself. No analysis of the forces that in their play and interplay tend
to shape this young life would be complete that did not include the
shifting, kaleidoscopic scenes amid which so often his plastic years are
spent; nor would the picture be lifelike did it not show upon its face
the changes that are wrought through that remoter contact with men and
things.
The action followed depends naturally upon what the investigation
reveals. Should the home be at fault, then an effort is made to remove
the “trouble maker,” and, should this be impossible, then effort is made
at least to effect some compromise, the benefit of which the child will
reap both in the home and in the school.
Margaret had many times struck a discordant note in the classroom. At
home she had always had her own way. Small wonder, then, that she played
the prank she did in the assembly. In the midst of the gathering of some
five hundred children when the morning exercises were being held, she
spoke loud enough to be disturbing, and when reprimanded and told to
leave the hall, she walked its full length on her heels, thus creating a
greater disturbance and openly defying the principal’s authority. She
was sent home and the matter was explained to her parents. The child
felt that she had been insulted because ordered from the room, and the
mother, unfortunately, took her side. At first she could not be made to
see that if her child saw fit to leave the hall as she chose, the other
499 might use their wits to the same end and pandemonium result. Only
after repeated interviews with the visiting teacher and after the child
had lost fully a month of school did the mother allow her to return.
Sometimes it happens that the child has neither time nor place to study.
“The noise, it gets me all mixed up,” is her pathetic comment. The
neighborhood is scoured till a quiet room is found, either in a
settlement, a sisterhood, or a public library, and then the mother’s
co-operation is enlisted and many times secured when she understands
that noise, interruptions and general disorder are not conducive to the
formation of good habits of study.
Should it happen that the child’s work is seriously impaired because his
sleep is interfered with, either because the mother’s work is carried
late into the night and goes on in the child’s so-called bedroom, or
because he is allowed to partake too freely of tea and coffee, the
injurious effects of this way of living are demonstrated and the family
is, in the one case, urged to move to better rooms, and in the other,
plead with until milk and cocoa are substituted for tea and coffee. If
then, the longed-for change sets in, showing itself in the child’s
ability to make normal responses at school, word is carried to the home
and thereby is strengthened the bond that makes these two centers one in
their desire to promote the child’s well being.
But there are times when the cause is not so obvious and does not lend
itself so easily to a simple solution. It happens often that what to the
school appears a lack of co-operation on the part of the home means only
that the parents have tried and failed. Again and again the visiting
teacher is besought “Use your influence,” “Come and advise us,” “Robert”
or “Alice,” “pays attention to you,”—all of which reduced to its lowest
terms means that somewhere there is failure to understand. “It is
because we are treated as we are at home that we run the streets,” is
the way one girl of fourteen sums up the situation.
On the other hand it may happen that the source of the difficulty is to
be found in the school itself, in the conditions that surround the child
there, which, in the light of the information gathered in the home,
expose to view some serious maladjustment. Perhaps it is a case of
simple misunderstanding between teacher and pupil, the former holding
the latter to a sort of rule-of-thumb scale of measurement when,
mentally and physically, the child is incapable of following.
Handicapped by nature, perhaps one of a long line similarly affected, is
it to be expected that his reactions will be what in age and grade they
should be? For such as he the hope lies in a curriculum so elastic that
at some point the spark of interest cannot fail to be struck.
In the class room Lillian, a frail girl of thirteen, had apparently made
only the impression of being a slow, sleepy, listless child. The first
interviews showed her ill at ease. She studied hard every evening, she
insisted; but when she was questioned in the class all the carefully
memorized facts flew to the winds, she was so afraid. History was her
Waterloo. Try as she would, she could not conquer. The outlook was not
promising. The visit to the home revealed that she loved to draw. Tony,
the black and white spaniel, and Nellie, his fox-terrier companion, had
up to that time been her only models. In her leisure moments she
sketched them lying before the kitchen stove, or curled up, asleep,
under the table.
When her teacher was told how she was found occupying her time at home,
her reply was prompt: “Yes, I remember now, she does seem fond of
drawing.” A conference was arranged with the principal and a way was
found of giving Lillian a chance to develop further this gift, her one
excellency. Her fifth grade work was so re-arranged as to allow her to
take drawing with the seventh grade, where she found greater variety and
a teacher eager to let her express herself. At the same time she was
introduced to a volunteer worker, a woman to whom history was an
unending joy and with her she spent evening after evening making friends
with facts, people, and dates that up to that moment had been total
strangers to her. Later she was transferred to a trade school in which
she was given an opportunity to specialize in designing.
In some pupils what appears as indifference or inattention may in truth
be only a temperamental peculiarity which, if individual attention were
possible, would in time be modified. The relation of pupil and teacher
is at bottom one of sympathetic understanding. This is why sometimes,
where one fails, the other succeeds, and herein lies the advantage of
having several teachers to a grade. It makes possible a shifting about
and increases the child’s chances of being understood. The desirability
of this cannot be overestimated.
Another way in which the need of unusual children is met is the
so-called “rapid progress class,” into which are put those children who
are capable of making more than two grades in a year. Strange as it may
on the surface appear, some of the children entrusted to the charge of
the visiting teacher prove in the end to be just this type. For one
reason or another, the routine of the regular class does not hold the
child’s interest, and, as we all know, in such instances energy like
that will not remain pent up. It is in its determination to find an
outlet that it comes into conflict with established order.
Sometimes it is best to give the child a training wholly different from
that offered by the school he is attending. Not all minds respond alike
to the same stimuli. It often seems an utter waste to insist upon
children plodding doggedly at subjects which make no appeal to them.
Here lies the opportunity for vocational training. More than one case of
apathy on the part of a child has been dispelled when a chance was given
him to express himself in some sort of manual or industrial activity.
Occasionally it is found that at neither the door of the home nor at
that of the school can the whole blame for the child’s failure to live
up to his best moments be laid. There are times when he is under the
kindly influence, if such it be, of neither one nor the other. It is at
such times that his energies should be given a chance at wholesome
expression, so that they may not be tempted to seek the baser kinds, in
which the streets of a large city abound. It is interesting to note how
a beneficient “wider view” reacts upon the school and home environment,
making of what was once a listless, joyless, or obstinate, untractable,
child one that gives out in “measure brimful and overflowing” the
happiness that was but his birthright.
The question that naturally suggests itself is What is the result of the
action taken? What outcome can be expected from having secured active
co-operation in 568 homes; from having changed the class of 92 children,
the school of 56, and made other school adjustments for 125; from having
called into play 288 outside agencies in the shape of clubs, classes,
and excursions and 604 agencies such as hospitals, relief societies, day
nurseries, scholarship funds, reformatories, settlements, public
libraries, etc., and from having sent 208 children to the country on
extended visits?
A statistical reply is not always feasible. Certain stages in the
child’s school career are marked: certain data about it definite enough;
but whether in the final summing up these shall be given precedence over
the subtler, more elusive changes that have come about, that is the real
question. Just as in the matter of method employed, so in the matter of
result achieved, it must be remembered that the numerical reckoning does
not tell the whole story.
To the casual observer it might appear that the test to be applied to
the visiting teacher’s work is embraced in the single word “promotion.”
The greater the number of promotions, therefore, the greater her measure
of success. In a measure this is true and the work stands it. But this
is not all. Our object is to find for each child his suitable niche, and
if to achieve this means a de-motion instead of a promotion, it must not
on that account be reckoned as a failure. To the child it may mean a new
birth. In his changed surroundings he may gain self-confidence and no
longer be a laggard and a drag upon his class. To his teacher and his
classmates little by little he will present a different front. The magic
door has been opened. Into what lies beyond he can enter and with the
rest can follow, and because of this there springs up between him and
them a new relation, one that satisfies his human craving for friendship
and sympathy. In which column, the debit or the credit, of our yearly
ledger, are such items to be placed?
With final judgments tempered by such considerations, the following
possibilities may be offered:
Promoted, including graduates, 568.
Left back, 237.
Graduated, 39.
Transferred to
(a) Trade school, 38.
(b) Other public and parochial schools, 133.
Employment certificate or equivalent, i. e., sixteenth year, 118.
Improvement in
(a) Scholarship, 328[4].
(b) Conduct, 252[4].
(c) Attendance, 310[4].
Left city, 39.
Difficulty adjusted, 531.
Cases in which some change that gives promise of permanency has been
effected.
Proved unsuitable or unnecessary, 108.
Cases which, as a result of the initial investigation, are placed in the
hands of the school nurse or attendance officer, as well as those which
are dropped because the suspicion that inspired the inquiry has proved
to be false.
WHAT DO YOU CARE?
WILLIAM EDWARD ROSS IN _PEARSON’S_
Out to the mines in the chill of the morn,
Stunted, ill nourished comes the forlorn
Stream of humanity—undersized men,
Slaving and toiling for life blood; but then,
Dressed warm and cosy, with slate, book, and rule,
George and your Nellie have started to school;
They are _your_ children, _their_ cheeks warm and fair,
While Tony’s a hunky, so—What do you care?
Over the bridges, the hills, and the fen,
Streams the procession of undersized men
Climbing the stairs to the waiting machines:
Lowered in cages to death-marked ravines.
Look at their faces; sad, pinched and worn!
Look at their garments; threadbare and torn!
Look at their swagger, their precocious air,
Some mother’s babies, but—What do you care?
[Illustration:
_Courtesy Massachusetts Child Labor Committee._
CHOSE HIS LIFE WORK AT FOURTEEN
Already a child laborer, this chap is typical of the class for whom
vocational guidance is being introduced in Boston and elsewhere.
]
THE VOCATIONAL COUNSELOR IN ACTION
MEYER BLOOMFIELD
DIRECTOR VOCATION BUREAU, BOSTON
LAURA F. WENTWORTH
SECRETARY VOCATIONAL INFORMATION DEPARTMENT, BOSTON PUBLIC SCHOOLS
[_The philosophy of vocational guidance has been often written.
But it is from the actual cases of boys and girls, influenced to
this course of conduct or that, that the general public can best
get an intimate notion of how this new function of the schools
counts in the life of youth. The stories in the following
article represent typical experiences and services of such
teacher-counselors as Miss Wentworth, who was formerly
vocational counselor in the High School of Practical Arts, and
Eleanor M. Colleton, whose work among the Italians and other
children of the North End in Boston has had merit of a high
order._
_The latter part of the article is a digest, telling of past
performances and future plans, of a report which the Vocation
Bureau will shortly make public, covering its work for the last
three years._—Ed.]
In the morning mail of the Boston Vocation Bureau appeared, not
long ago, an interesting letter. It came from a sixteen-year-old
boy who had heard of the bureau, but was prevented by his job from
coming to it for help. He wrote asking for a special appointment,
which was granted.
At the interview following, the boy, Charles Lee, told of his
position and of his home conditions. He was an only son, living
with a widowed mother in Cambridge, and had been obliged to leave
school and go to work, taking whatever place he could find. This
was a position as assistant shipper in the sub-basement of a
clothing store in Boston. The employer in the beginning had
promised him promotion or transfer, but had failed to do anything
for so long a time that it became clear nothing would be done as
long as the boy was content to remain in the sub-basement at $3.00
a week.
Young Lee was a boy of attractive appearance, earnest manner, and
evidently of more than average ability. He seemed well equipped
for a business position and desired one with a good line of
advancement.
The Vocation Bureau had just completed the investigation of a
large and well known dry goods store in the city, and now sent Lee
with a letter to its employment manager, who took him into the
office at $6.00 a week. The boy has been followed up by the
bureau, and has shown marked business ability in his new position.
He is now in line for promotion to an executive position in the
firm. The help given him was based upon his home and employment
conditions, apparent abilities, and desire to find the right place
in a mercantile occupation.
Mary Schenck confided to her teacher that she wanted to take up
stenography and typewriting because she “knew a girl who had a
good job in that line.” A vocational counselor called at her home
and talked with her mother. During the visit it developed that
Mary’s mother and grandmother were both successful dressmakers and
that the girl herself had obtained very good marks in her sewing
in the grammar school. In fact, she had made the dresses for her
two little sisters for the past two years. As a result of this
information the counselor talked again with Mary and suggested
that she take up sewing in the school. Mary did so, even going out
to work in a shop for a while. Then she started in business for
herself. Today she is employing two assistants. Thus by a little
common sense and thought a girl was prevented from entering the
overcrowded field of stenography in which she probably would not
have been very successful and started in a line of work for which
she possessed natural ability and real love.
What is a vocational counselor? There are over a hundred of them
in the public schools of Boston. They are regular teachers,
designated by the school principals to advise and co-operate with
boys and girls leaving school for work. Two years ago an agreement
between the Boston School Committee and the Vocation Bureau called
for their appointment and they have been meeting twice a month
ever since to discuss the educational opportunities of the city,
the vocational problems of the children and to confer with
employers and others interested. Let us see just how their
influence is made to count in the lives of children.
Vocational guidance in a school involves three definite objects:
Guiding the child while in the school.
Guiding the child after leaving school.
Following up the child, i.e., ascertaining what becomes of him
after he goes into work.
[Illustration:
_Courtesy Massachusetts Child Labor Committee._
THEY NEVER KNEW A VOCATIONAL COUNSELOR.
There is a growing belief among those who are exploring the twilight
zone between education and industry that what youngsters like these
need is not more help in finding jobs but more and better training
before they find them.
]
In the first place the ordinary high or vocational school offers a
choice of several lines of work, and it is highly advisable to
have the child make a wise choice as to the line he is to pursue.
The best way is to have a general course offered at the beginning
during the pursuit of which the vocational counselor studies the
child and confers with the parents as to the child’s natural
ability, etc. This combined judgment of counselor and parent is
sure to result in a much wiser choice of work in the school than
if the matter had been left to the discretion of the child, who is
too immature to see the various occupations in their true
relationship. Parents and counselor may meet at the school, or the
counselor may go to the home. By going into the home discoveries
are often made which could not have come from only seeing the
child and parent at school.
During the school course it is often advisable to change a pupil
from one course to another. For example, Clara Bartlett had been
taking the millinery course with the intention of entering the
trade on graduation. Owing to her mother’s death, she found that
she must become her father’s housekeeper at the end of the school
year. Accordingly, after talking the matter over with the
vocational counselor, Clara changed from the millinery to the
domestic science course and obtained a very good training in
cooking and housewifery. The result was that when her school life
was over she was able to enter upon her new work as housekeeper
with a marked degree of success.
Sometimes it is necessary for a child to change from one school to
another in order that he or she may receive the best training for
a particular need. This implies a very close and cordial
relationship between the various kinds of vocational schools in
the city. Thus a girl who can give only one year to the
preparation for a trade should spend that year in a school where
she will get intensive work in that trade. If she is not advised,
there is danger that she will spend her year in a school which
offers a general course in preparation for the trade course, which
will then follow in the next two or three years. In other words,
it is necessary to take into consideration the girl’s outside
obligations and adapt her school life to them as closely as
possible.
Again, it is the duty of the vocational counselor to see that the
graduates of the school are given the most auspicious start on
life’s journey. This may imply definitely organized placement work
or it may mean simply making recommendations. If the work of
placement is definitely organized it should be done on a broad
social basis, for it may mean finding a position for one girl in a
millinery establishment and guiding another into a higher
institution of learning.
[Illustration:
_Courtesy Massachusetts Child Labor Committee._
HE LEAPED BLINDLY
And his only school now is the school of hard knocks, his only teacher
a factory boss.
]
If the work of placement is to be done by the vocational school,
great insight into the true ability of the girl under actual
business conditions may be obtained by “part time” work. For
instance, Susan Williams, who is taking the course in dressmaking,
was placed by the school in a near-by establishment where she
spent her afternoons and Saturdays. Here she obtained a very
definite idea of trade conditions, also earned a little money to
help with her expenses and secured for herself by her own
desirable personality and excellent workmanship a permanent
position on graduation. In the same way Josephine Riley, who was
taking a course in designing, was placed by the school in an
embroidery shop where she did work in designing on Saturdays
during the latter part of her course. She too worked herself into
a permanent position for which she had demonstrated her
qualifications.
Occasion often arises to provide a girl with an opportunity to
earn enough money to keep her in school until graduation.
Sometimes the work found is similar to that pursued by the girl in
the school. Often it is not, however, for many times the girl can
earn more money in some other kind of work. Frances Newton, who is
taking designing, can earn more money by acting as assistant in an
office on Saturdays than she possibly could in any designing
establishment owing to her present limited knowledge of her trade.
Thus she is tided over a financial crisis without being deprived
of her school work.
[Illustration:
_Courtesy Massachusetts Child Labor Committee_
ONE OF THE “BLIND ALLEY” TRADES
This group is declared to be typical of every city and town in
Massachusetts.
]
The third line of work for the vocational counselor in a
vocational school is that of “following up.” This is the only way
of ascertaining whether schools are fitting the children for those
walks of life for which they are attempting to train them. If the
school is doing this satisfactorily _we want_ to know it, and if
it is not doing it _we ought_ to know it. The child may be
followed up by a regular system of reporting by mail, by visits to
employes and by alumni meetings. Alumni meetings are particularly
profitable when turned into experience meetings at which the
children tell what they have been doing with especial emphasis on
the relation of their training in the school and their work in the
world. In this way schools can keep in touch with their graduates
and create a spirit of friendly intercourse even after they leave.
The best advertisement a school can have is an enthusiastic body
of loyal graduates.
The work of the vocational assistant in a vocational or other
school is thus one of adjustment; adjusting children to the right
course in school; adjusting them to the right course after they
leave school; and adjusting the relationship between the school
and the home, and that between the school and the business life.
If this work is needed in a vocational school how much more it
must be needed in a regular school! For it is an adjustment which
tends always toward keeping the children in school, but if they
must leave, insists upon seeing that they are at least given a
helping hand toward that new life which is so different from
school life and so bewildering to the youthful mind.
There is plentiful testimony that fathers and mothers now turn to
the Boston schools as never before for advice and help in their
perplexities concerning their children’s future. It has been most
pathetic in the past to see how little parents knew of real
industrial conditions, and of what educational and vocational
opportunities existed in Boston, entirely within their reach. Our
experience has been that the vast majority of parents have
heretofore known nothing about the various high schools and their
specialties, except what they have learned through the vocational
work of the school itself. The attitude of the parents when
visited in the homes, makes it appear only too clear that
practically all welcome such guidance and are anxious to avail
themselves of it.
These, then, are pictures of the vocational counselor at work.
What is the machinery behind her? Every school in the city has at
least one teacher who has given her time freely to this service.
In some schools committees of teachers have formed voluntarily to
take thought over the dropping out of boys and girls, and to
organize that assistance which a school can give to parents and
children in administering to the life-career motive. The work of
the vocational counselors has been a labor of love. Nobody has
expected that the occupational talks to which they have listened
twice a month would equip them for effective vocational guidance.
But no group of persons can listen to intimate discussions of the
shoe industry, department stores, machine industries, stenography
and typewriting, mechanical and civil engineering, building trades
and needle trades—which have been actual subjects in these
meetings—without being better fitted than before to advise and
guide those who are making hit-or-miss guesses at work in the fond
hope that it will pay well and that it is suited to their
particular capacities.
The Vocation Bureau, through whose influence the Boston schools
were induced to introduce vocational guidance, does not aim at the
placing of individual boys and girls in particular jobs. It
endeavors to study the causes of the waste which attends the
passing of unguided and untrained young people from school to
work, and to assist by experiments to prevent this waste. It aims
to work out the problem of co-operation between schools and
occupations, for the purpose of enabling both to make a more
socially profitable use of human talents and opportunities. It
publishes studies of vocations from the viewpoint of their
educational and other efficiency requirements. It conducts a
training course for qualified men and women who desire to prepare
themselves for vocational guidance in the public school system,
philanthropic institutions, and business establishments. Its
interests therefore lie both in the direction of personal service
to the individual and of constructive experiment and research in
the field of education and employment.
A capable investigator spends his entire time in studying
occupations open to boys and young men, what these occupations
require, and what they lead to. From three months to a year is
devoted to each study. The result of these inquiries is published
in tentative pamphlet form. Such pamphlets have already been
published on the machinist, banking, the baker, confectionery
manufacture, the architect, the landscape architect, the grocer,
the department store, and the profession of law.
In each of these studies it is sought to supply parents, teachers
and others interested with the material necessary to an
intelligent conception of the occupation, its needs, demands,
opportunities, relative desirability and its training,
requirements and possibilities. It is further sought to analyze
the relation of aptitudes, interests and habits to modern
industrial demands, and thus to lay an adequate foundation for a
system of training that regards social as well as economic needs.
The Vocation Bureau has constantly borne in mind that a sound
development of vocational guidance requires that contact with the
employments be more than mere onlooking. To leave the employer out
of such a plan, to fail to profit by his criticism and point of
view, is to omit one of the most important elements in such
guidance. The bureau has therefore been in close touch with a
large number of industrial and commercial concerns in sympathy
with its purposes. Manufacturers have approved its methods, and
have even supported its demands for more thorough-going protection
and opportunity for the young worker.
To understand better the employer’s relation to vocational
guidance, the bureau organized last year a conference of
employment managers. Men representing a score or more of important
manufacturing and business establishments have met regularly for
informal discussions. In December an employment managers’
association was formed. One of the most important fruits of this
close contact is the possibility of formulating plans for
organizing the generally chaotic entrance into occupations. It is
now planned to undertake some experiments in placement work in
co-operation with several social agencies and a group of
employers. The bureau believes that the country is ready to
undertake through responsible agencies, having in mind primarily
the needs of young workers, experiments to point the way to some
less wasteful and costly method of bringing together what has been
called “the manless job and the jobless man.”
Persons of constructive imagination throughout the country, alert
to the needs of coming generations of workers, and interested in
the reforms which must succeed if our future citizens are to enter
into their inheritance, have come to recognize that a new
co-ordinating agency is needed—an agency which shall secure team
play in home, school and occupation, to the end that a richer
vocational life of all the workers may be realized. It is likely
that in the near future there will not only be for the work in the
public schools a specially trained vocational counselor, but that
there will also be in business and manufacturing establishments a
new type of employment manager, especially trained and empowered
to develop in the worker not only the efficiency which the
employer requires, but also that efficiency which society
requires. Through the working together of such employment managers
and school counselors, society will gain an important factor in
making for its progress.
HOUSEKEEPING CENTERS IN SETTLEMENTS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS
MABEL HYDE KITTREDGE
[Illustration:
THE HOME OF A GRADUATE
]
Home-making has not kept pace with our great industrial
advancement. The average home-maker of today is less thoroughly
prepared for her business in life than the woman of a generation
ago. It would seem that she considers the home-making profession
of much less importance than such occupations as curling feathers
and making shirtwaists. The latter has a commercial value, the
former has not; and we have learned to weigh things by their money
value. Then, again, competition has become the one incentive to
work. Tie badly the million little knots in the willow plume and
the next girl in the line gets the job. Feed the baby with poor
milk, let the air in the room become polluted, ignorantly buy and
ignorantly cook, and no one takes the work from you. Why worry
over the way it is done?
There are many reasons why the woman of a generation or two ago
was a better home-maker than the woman of today. The home duties
today often are only part of the daily work of a woman’s life. The
housekeeper today is (in millions of cases) a wage earner as well.
She cannot be as single-minded as the old-fashioned mother whose
only thought was the home. Schools, newspapers, settlements, the
trend of the times, all fill the mind with outside interests.
These things are important, but they have a tendency to crowd out
domestic responsibilities and make women restless under the homely
tasks. Suffrage we will have, and we must interest and educate
women until we do have it; but, at the same time, the dishes have
to be washed clean, the beds have to be aired and made well, and
the babies have to eat nourishing food, or we’ll have an anaemic,
poor race to govern when we get the suffrage.
Is it the fault of the home-maker of today if weakness instead of
strength is the inheritance of her children, and will it be the
fault of the home-maker of tomorrow if she bears and rears a weak
race? If household administration is to take its place in the
front rank with the other professions of the day, educators as
well as women must wake up and realize that the whole housekeeping
question is dependent upon scientific management, efficiency,
skilled labor, and effective tools.
There are those who say that this training should be taught at
home, and in many cases our school children, whether foreign or
American, do come from homes where the mothers are good
housekeepers according to their light; but the last generation
cannot teach the coming one everything. As Samuel Merwin says in a
recent book, “the accumulated experience of the ages is the
grandmothers, and yet she is authority no longer; since her day
science has stepped in. To her mind the gulf between herself and
her daughter is nothing but the old gulf between age and youth.
She is wrong. It is a million miles wide and if the mother keeps
to the old way she risks the life of her child.”
Again, home-making must be made interesting. The man regards his
business as a pleasure. He plays it as he plays a game, and he
plays to win. And so housekeeping has become a “game, not a duty.”
In a natural, enjoyable way our girls should be taught to play the
game of household administration. Home duties are not mere duties
any longer; the old way of “doing up the housework” made every act
an end in itself. Now every act is simply a means to an end; every
move is important,—the way the dishes are washed, the beds made,
the cooking done, may win or lose the game. In the child’s mind
must be a perfect plan; to work out that plan correctly will bring
health, order and happiness as the prize.
The world must stop trying to make progress by walking backward.
We must make room for a vaster scheme of household economics than
the last generation ever dreamed of. The home must be made to
catch up with the factory, the store and the office, and we know
that in comparison with these industries home-making has lagged
behind. Now—suddenly—we realize that feeble-minded children are
becoming more numerous, that malnutrition in school children is
becoming so great that the highest standard of study is impossible
and that street life is taking the place of home life. We wake up
and ask what we can do to make the home-maker realize that she is
responsible for these things.
But is she?
Educators who admit that life and health are absolutely dependent
on the home have failed to find room in the educational scheme to
provide this home knowledge. There were in the elementary schools
in New York city last year 388,000 girls. Only 43,500 of them were
in cooking classes. That means that 344,500 girls in this one year
never had a suggestion given them that home-making was a
profession worth studying. Only seventh and eighth grade girls are
permitted to have cooking lessons, and that means that during the
entire grammar school course a few fortunate girls received nine
full days of domestic science instruction. I say a few, for out of
560 elementary schools only 170 are equipped for cooking; and for
these 170 schools, there are only 135 domestic science
teachers—some cooking rooms are closed altogether and others
running on half time. A girl is fortunate if she happens not to be
in one of the 390 schools where no instruction in domestic science
is given, and still more fortunate if she stays in one of the few
selected schools until she reaches the seventh grade. There she
first learns that home-making is worth studying. But 20,000 left
school last year before this grade was reached.
Our public school children may be cash girls, or sales women, or
factory hands. These things may or may not be; but one thing is
certain, and that is that every girl must live in a home and take
her part in home responsibilities.
[Illustration:
A MODEL FLAT
The little children of the neighborhood come in to play before lesson
time.
]
The New York board of education would be the first to admit that
it is the home more than anything else that gives, to children
health or feebleness, life or death, happiness or wretchedness and
yet they and we calmly let this neglect go on.
The school lunch committee made an investigation a short time ago
to ascertain whether malnutrition was as great an evil as we
feared. Two thousand and fifty-one children were thoroughly
examined. Half of these from an Irish neighborhood, half from an
Italian. They were selected at random from the four lower grades.
Two hundred and eighty-three or 13 per cent were found to be
suffering from pronounced malnutrition. Their homes were visited.
With the exception of eighteen tea and coffee was a part of the
daily diet. Sixty families had no prepared luncheon or dinner at
home. One hundred and fifty-seven were supplying the wrong or
insufficient food and it was found to be more ignorance than
poverty that was the cause of this condition.
If we take 13 per cent of 388,000 children we have 29,846 poorly
nourished girls who are not even taught that the heavy, dull, sick
feeling is due to the wrong kind of food. How can we place other
knowledge ahead of this? When we watch this large, half fed army
of children marching on to take up a woman’s battle with life it
does seem as if we had been asleep to our responsibilities.
We must establish an adequate twentieth century theory of
household economics and then we must put this within the reach of
every girl in our public schools.
My desk is covered always with pamphlets entitled The Profession
of Home-making, Food Values, Freehand Cooking on Scientific
Principles, and so on, but does this knowledge reach the people?
Does it reach the 388,000 school girls? Recently I heard an hour’s
talk by a member of the Board of Health on how we ought to know
good milk from bad, how careful we should be about canned
vegetables, and the horrors of buying tainted meat: but when I
asked how the common people could know these facts I could get no
satisfaction other than that the way to know whether the milk was
good or not was to examine the barns where the cows were milked or
have the milk tested; but the people I know are ignorant as to how
to wash milk bottles, or why it is wrong to leave the milk
uncovered, or why the nipple from the milk bottle can’t be played
with, fall on the floor and then be used. This representative from
the Board of Health told startling facts about candies and ice
cream, sold on push carts, but the audience at this lecture were
land owners along the Hudson River, and I doubt if one of them had
ever seen an East Side push cart, and I know that not one was ever
tempted to buy. Why can’t these facts reach the thousands of
children who do buy dyed ice cream and varnished candy, and whose
fathers sell these very things?
[Illustration:
A COOKING LESSON
]
We not only have to establish an up-to-date, scientific way to
live, but we cannot do this without the help of the tenement house
woman. We contribute the ideals, the theories and the science; she
must contribute experience. We are up in the air with our castles,
she is down in the thick of the fight where the smallness of the
tenement room presses upon her, where every day she faces the high
price of food and an insufficient income, where a gentle love for
her children is constantly at war with a nervous irritability, the
product of disorder, noise and confusion.
Do you think this woman does not want a real home? Look at the
energy and thought she puts into furnishing her house, the
scrimping that preceded the buying of the ugly red carpet and the
plush chairs. There were hours of work given to hemming and
hanging the ruffles over every door, around every shelf and even
around the bath tub. Look at the tarletan festooned around the
chandelier and over the pictures; see the dozens of calendars
collected and pinned on the wall. Isn’t this a reaching out with
all the power that is in a woman to express to her family and her
neighbors what, in her ignorance, she believes to be a home? We
need the energy and the courage and the experience of these
tenement housekeepers, but we must add education; and do we?
Take the daily life of any one of our thousands of little school
girls and see how much chance she has to know the science of
home-making or even to acquire respect for housework. She is born
with the controlling desire to copy. She sees high-heeled shoes on
another’s foot; she longs for and saves until she gets shoes like
them. Her tight skirt, her big hat, her very walk, are seen first
and admired somewhere else, and so the home, whether it is perfect
or imperfect, and the school, and the teacher, and what the
teacher stands for, make the same vivid pictures in her mind; and
some day she is going to grow up and copy as nearly as she can.
This little girl wakes in the morning in one of our crowded
tenement houses, wakes to the vivid blue walls, to rooms filled
with feather beds which have been thrown all over the floor the
night before for the family and the possible boarders to occupy.
The dusty carpets, stuffed furniture, long lace curtains and
draped mantle meet her eye, and in this home of unrest there is
always the crying baby, the naturally cross father and the demand
(so well known to every little girl) to hurry up and go to the
store and buy breakfast. Poor little tenement girl, she does not
even know that in well-managed homes breakfast is bought the day
before. She may learn to respect the energy in her home, but she
will never forget the disorder, the picture of congestion and
confusion and of overwrought, tired nerves that has been stamped
forever upon her mind. And no right idea of home is given her to
correct this wrong impression.
Everyone knows the way work is done in our tenement homes; how the
beds are so large that it is impossible to move them out in the
small rooms and make them properly, and how the bed clothes are
pushed across, often with a broom handle kept for the purpose; how
often the small income makes it necessary to rent out the beds in
the day time to night workers, so they are always occupied and
never aired. And every one knows how all these things make a girl
lose respect for her home, then for her family and, finally, for
herself; and how the street seems a peaceful place in comparison.
Ideals of right home-making should in the school correct the home
mistakes, but as it is now, not until she reaches the seventh
grade does this little tenement girl get her first idea that
making a home is a part of education. After she leaves home in the
morning she gets only a picture of a schoolroom with forty or
fifty desks; of a teacher who in no way is associated in her mind
with any house, who, as I heard Mrs. Kelley say not long ago,
often brings her lunch in a music roll so that no one will suspect
that it is food.
The windows in the schoolroom are washed after school hours (and
at that only once or twice a year) by the janitor, the floors are
swept by men, swept badly, and always after school. And if this
pupil happens to be one of the twenty thousand who leave school
each year before reaching the seventh grade, she goes into
business not knowing that there is such a thing as scientific
knowledge regarding food and air and sun and cleanliness.
And yet this girl is going to marry, bear children and rear them,
and you and I are going to hold her responsible if those children
are not good citizens. Surely this is not a fair placing of
responsibility.
Eleven years ago I started the first housekeeping center in New
York. These centers are ordinary tenement flats which find their
motive power and are successful by means of the universal love in
every little girl to play at keeping house, and the universal
desire in every one to copy that which is just above her.
A girl wants her kitchen messes, her dishes, her make-believe baby
and her tiny bed or broom just as every boy wants his bat and
ball. A housekeeping center takes these natural desires and
cultivates them. It is furnished as a home should be furnished,
and such questions are answered there as: What shall be done with
the floors to insure health and save labor; what with the walls?
What curtains are the best to admit light, give beauty to the room
and wash easily? What proportion of the sum laid aside for
furnishing should go into the buying of pots and pans, what part
into mattresses, and is there any reason to spend money for
ruffles? What are the proper and necessary tools to work with?
In the housekeeping center the neighbors and the scientifically
trained teacher work out these problems together. The teacher’s
training in chemistry has taught her that a certain quality of
water and a certain kind of soap are necessary for perfect laundry
work. The tenement house woman adds what she has learned from
bitter experience; that it is hard to heat enough of any kind of
water on the stove with coal at ten cents a pail and the stove
crowded with pots and pans.
[Illustration:
A LESSON IN BED-MAKING
]
Regular lessons are given in these housekeeping centers morning,
afternoon and evening, and as the flat is like the home from which
the pupils come (only perfected) its lesson is not dissociated
with the daily home duties but is performed under home conditions
and, therefore, easy of imitation. Do the pupils want this
instruction? The answer is that every class is full and there is a
waiting list, and every girl pays for the lessons.
I find it often difficult in selling luncheons in the public
schools to persuade the children to give up three cents for a full
meal, and yet the children under fourteen in the housekeeping
centers are ready always to pay three cents a lesson, and the
working girls five cents. And what do they pay for? To learn to
clean the sink so that the pipes will not get clogged, to learn to
cook substitutes for meat (for meat is too high for many of them),
to scrub closets and floors, to make and clean beds. Only last
week a class of working girls came to one of the centers and asked
for a bedbug lesson. “The people above us are moving out” they
said, “and we want to prevent the bugs getting into our house.” A
bedbug lesson is not a lecture, it means to roll up one’s sleeves,
put on a big apron, get on your knees and scrub, this after
working hard all day in a factory or shop. The desire for this
knowledge must be very real to make a girl willing to do this
extra labor, and to pay for the privilege of doing it out of her
scanty wages.
In a housekeeping center it is easy and natural to borrow a baby
from the neighbor across the hall when the lesson is “how to bathe
and dress a baby.” There is nothing embarrassing about being the
patient when the lesson is “how to give a bath in bed and how to
change the sheets without disturbing the patient.” Then there are
the dinner classes where the pupils make out the menu, do the
marketing and cook the meat, and there are lessons in food values.
What I feel that we need today is a housekeeping center in every
settlement, so that every girl who is a part of the settlement
will feel it almost compulsory upon her to take the course before
she marries, and if she is enjoying the intellectual life of the
settlement, or the play side, or the social side, she must be
learning the home-making side too. We must make our settlement
girl feel that the home-making training is more important than
mere recreation. The public school will follow the settlement and
then, not for one-ninth of our girls will home-making instruction
be given, but for every one.
[Illustration:
A KITCHEN-CLEANING LESSON
]
Then there will be in every school the cooking-room, with its
individual equipment (necessary, but nothing in it to suggest the
kitchen at home). Next to this will be the model flat or center,
this to resemble the homes from which the children come, but
furnished on scientific lines. For eight years every school girl
will see this home, this home made right, and she will work in it.
It will be no smattering of cooking at the end of the school
course,—but in the beginning, when the love of playing house is
strong, then the training will begin. Even in the lowest school
grade a child could dust her desk with a damp duster and be told
why it should be damp; she could wash her own cup, if milk is
served; learn to handle dishes carefully; and train the eye to see
things straight and the hand to steadiness.
From these small tasks, the children would graduate to larger
duties in the housekeeping center; making beds and washing many
dishes. From dusting one desk, the pupil would soon be able to
give the flat a thorough cleaning. We find in our center that the
love of playing house disappears if it is not cultivated, and the
girl of fourteen never drops entirely the wrong way of doing
housework, which she need never have acquired if the domestic
science teacher could be in her training early enough.
Scientific management means more than “having system.” You may be
ever so systematic in the way you do things, but if you happen to
be doing them the wrong way, you are doing the way that is
unnecessarily expensive in time, energy, money, comfort and
beauty.
I believe that the labor in the kitchen will become more and more
professionalized. It is too serious a work to be handled by
unskilled hands, and we must lose the nervous, irritable,
overtired slave of housework and make woman more of a
child-trainer and cheerful home-maker. She must guide her home
with the quiet and skill and delight with which the engineer
drives his engine or the chauffeur his car. This, some day, will
be brought about by centralizing the work and by an army of
trained workers who will expeditiously and noiselessly do a large
part of what each woman is now trying to do herself. But that day
can come only when women through universal home-making education
push forward and demand this better management of the home.
We must have restlessness and dissatisfaction first. This comes
from a realization of the right way and a disgust with the wrong
way, and then will come the push from the home-maker herself, not
from a few outside reformers. The tenement house occupant now is
too ready to accept the fallen plaster, the dish-water that leaks
through from the flat above and the dirty and dark halls. Her own
senses are dull and she does not see or think about these things,
and the tenement house reformer sometimes feels his work has been
accomplished by a few bath tubs and a little more light, and then
wonders at the indifference with which these gifts are received
and blames the abuse of them. Train a girl to know a home of order
from one of unrest. Teach a woman to be miserable at the thought
of a close room or an unaired bed for her baby, and the social
worker can go off and do something else. The power of action is
where it ought to be, in the awakened tenement house mother. She
will not be content to crowd her family into dark rooms; she will
work until she gets space enough and light enough for her
children. She will be driven to action because she knows the value
of what she has to fight for. When the suffrage comes to women,
how naturally then these intelligent, orderly home-makers will
take their part in municipal housecleaning!
Let us not be satisfied to force through bills at Albany that
improve our tenements; at the same time the tenement girl must be
receiving her scientific home training, so that she too, can take
her part in this great home-making profession.
A YIDDISH POET
MARY BROWN SUMNER
Whither, whither, pretty child? The world is not yet open. Oh,
see how quiet is all around! ’Tis before daybreak, the streets
are mute, whither, whither, do you hurry? ’Tis now good to
sleep, and do you see, the flowers are still dreaming; every
bird’s nest is still silent? Whither pray are you driven now?
Whither do you hurry, tell me, and what to do?
To earn a living.
Whither, whither, pretty child walking so late at night? Alone
through the darkness and cold? And everything is at rest, the
world is silent. Whither does the wind carry you? You will yet
lose your way. Scarcely has day smiled on you, how can the night
help you? For it is mute and deaf and blind. Whither, whither,
with easy mind?
To earn a living.[5]
Thus, ten year before vice commissions began to probe into the
connection between white slavery and low pay, wrote Morris
Rosenfeld, the Yiddish poet. In March the fiftieth anniversary of
his birth was celebrated in Carnegie Hall by a great gathering of
the Jewish East Side, under the auspices of the Jewish _Daily
Forwards_, to which he is a contributor.
Morris Rosenfeld, as a boy a fisherman on the shores of a Polish
lake, early an emigrant from home, and until his health broke down
a few years ago a worker in the sweatshops of London and New York,
expresses in verse the cry of suffering from persecuted and broken
Jew and from exploited and broken worker.
He is no pitiful East Sider struggling for expression, “found” by
a Harvard scholar. He is a poet offering no halting rhymes for
which apologies are necessary. Yiddish literature has many poets
of real genius, but the major part of Rosenfeld’s verse alone, in
his Songs from the Ghetto, has been presented to us in English
prose, in the translation of Leo Wiener, instructor in Slavonic
literature in Harvard.
Through the medium of a language in which, in the expression of
Mr. Wiener, German, Polish, Russian and English—the tongues of all
countries through which the Jew has passed—contend with Hebrew for
the possession of each word, Rosenfeld expresses his meaning with
the note of inevitableness and the adaptation of form to thought
that is seen only in the work of a great poet.
[Illustration:
MORRIS ROSENFELD
_From an etching by Herman Struck_
]
His poems are cries of pain out of his own life interpreted in
terms of the life of his class. He is always lyric, he is always
personal, but he is never egotistical. The story runs that at his
machine in the midday hour he would write a lyric of the workshop
instead of eating his meager lunch. The song to the working-girl
prostitute is one of these workshop poems which like a flash
reveal working and living conditions such as in less revealing
form have been put before us by investigators.
The twelve-hour day may be said to be the subject of My Boy. The
tailor’s baby was always asleep when his father got home from
work:
MY BOY
I have a little boy, a fine little fellow is he! When I see him
it appears to me the whole world is mine.
Only rarely, rarely I see him, my pretty little son, when he is
awake; I find him always asleep, I see him only at night.
My work drives me out early and brings me home late; oh, my own
flesh is a stranger to me; oh, strange to me the glances of my
child!
I come home in anguish and shrouded in darkness—my pale wife
tells how nicely the child plays.
* * * * *
I stand by the cradle.
I stand in pain and anguish and bitterness, and I think: “When
you awake some day, my child, you will find me no more.”
Seven-day labor is the burden of the song Despair:
DESPAIR
Is it not allowed to rest even one day in the week and to be at
least one day free from the angry growl of the boss, his gloomy
mien, his terrible looks; to forget the shop and the cries of
the foreman; to forget slavery, to forget woe? You wish to
forget yourself and be rested? Never mind, you will soon go to
your rest!
Soon the trees and flowers will have withered; the last bird is
already ending his song; soon there will be cemeteries all
around! Oh, how I should like to smell a flower and feel, before
the grass is dead, the breath of zephyr in the green fields! You
wish to be in the fields where it is airy and green? Never mind
you will be carried there soon enough!
The brook is silvery and glistens beautifully; the waves are
covered with a heavenly grace. Oh, how good it is to bathe
there! How I should enjoy leaping into it! My body is weakened
from the dreadful work,—how they both would refresh me! Oh, you
wish to make your ablution in the brooks? Be not frightened, you
will soon receive your ablution!
The sweatshop is dark and smoky and small. How can my white
blouse be clean there? In the dirty shop cleanliness is unknown
to me. How a pure white shirt adorns a man! How proper for a
noble body it is, in order to be free to work humanely and be
clean withal! You wish now to dress yourself in white? They will
dress you, and dress you quickly enough!
The woods are breezy, in the woods it is cool. How good to dream
there quietly! The little birds sing pleasantly; but in the shop
there is noise, and the air is suffocating! Oh, you wish to be
cool?
Of what avail is a forest to you? It will not be long before you
will be cold.
’Tis good to have a dear companion. In adversity he gives hope,
in misery—courage. A dear companion sweetens your being, and he
gives you a zest for life. And I am orphaned alone like a stone,
there are no companions, I am all by myself—you will soon have
companions without end; they swarm already and are waiting for
you!
The Pale Operator gives a hint of the ravages of tuberculosis in
the garment trade:
THE PALE OPERATOR
I see there a pale operator all absorbed in his work. Ever since
I remember him, he has been sewing and using up his strength.
Months fly, and years pass away, and the pale faced one still
bends over his work and struggles with the unfeeling machine.
I stand and look at his face; his face is besmutted and covered
with sweat. I feel that it is not bodily strength that works in
him but the incitement of the spirit.
And the tears fall in succession from day break until fall of
night and water the clothes and enter into the seams.
Pray how long will the weak one drive the bloody wheel? Who can
tell his end? Who knows the terrible secret?
Hard, very hard to answer that! But one thing is certain: when
the work will have killed him another will be sitting in his
place and sewing.
A desire for life—if it is a feast, he would sit at it; if it is a
dream he would have it a beautiful one—a love of the outdoor
country life which he knew as a boy and which he believed all
should enjoy, mingled with a sense of impotence and despair,
varying with outbursts of wailing and outbursts of hate, these
things characterize the poetry of Morris Rosenfeld. For all his
power to vizualize and voice the world about him, he is never
constructive, never militant, and seldom even virile.[6] In few
poems does he express any hope for the future. In a mood of
despair he writes the beautiful workshop poem:
A TEAR ON THE IRON
I groan and cough and press, and think
My eye grows damp, a tear falls; the iron is hot,
My little tear it seethes and seethes and will not dry up.
I feel no strength, it is all used up; the iron falls from my
hand, and yet the tear, the silent tear, the tear, the tear
boils more and more.
My head whirls, my heart breaks. I ask in woe: “Oh, tell me, my
friend in adversity and pain, O tear, why not dry up in
seething.”
“Are you perhaps a messenger and announce that other tears are
coming? I should like to know it; say, when will the great woe
be ended?”
I should have asked more of the turbulent tear; but suddenly
there began to flow more tears, tears without measure, and I at
once understood that the river of tears is very deep.
In a mood of mingled longing and hate, he writes the Flowers of
Autumn, whose splendor is only for the well-to-do—
Therefore I do not care if I see you dying now.
There is more virility, though nothing really purposeful in the
Garden of the Dead, where the dead worker rises up to claim the
flowers on the rich man’s grave:
Not only the flowers are mine, nay, even the boards of the
coffin are mine!
And not only the boards of the coffin—you shrouds, you, too, are
mine! He has it all through my work, my poor work—oh, all and
all is mine!
Then the dead one passed away in the air with cries:
“You will pay for it yet! And he clenched his fist and
threatened the world.”
The poet’s love for nature, the human longing of the worker
imprisoned in the city for the country, which he has known but
which is now beyond his reach, is expressed in the nightingale’s
challenge to the laborer:
“Summer is here, summer is here! I shall not sing to you
eternally, for finally my hour too will strike—a dark crow will
occupy my branch, the holy song will cease. How long must I sing
to you from the tree of the golden dream of freedom and love?
Rise and let me not urge you any longer! The heaven will not
remain eternally blue! Summer is here, summer is here! Now one
can pass a merry time, for just like you who are fading at your
machine, everything will in the end wither and be carried away.”
The Nightingale illustrates, as Professor Wiener points out, the
poet’s command over poetic form as well as poetic thought. Even in
the English prose translation we can feel the repetition of notes,
the intricate weaving of melody in the bird’s song.
Another poem which is an example of the same power of combining
matter and manner is that drama of the garment worker’s lift, The
Sweatshop, which deserves to be quoted in full:
THE SWEAT SHOP
The machines in the shop roar so wildly that often I forget in
the roar that I am; I am lost in the terrible tumult, my ego
disappears, I am a machine. I work and work and work without
end. I am busy and busy and busy at all time. For what and for
when? I know not, I ask not! How should a machine ever come to
think?
There are no feelings, no thoughts, no reason; the bitter bloody
work kills the noblest, the most beautiful and best, the
richest, the deepest, the highest, which life possesses. The
seconds, minutes and hours fly; the nights like the days pass as
swiftly as sails; I drive the machine just as if I wished to
catch them; I chase without avail, I chase without end.
The clock in the workshop does not rest; it keeps on pointing
and ticking and waking in succession. A man once told me the
meaning of its pointing and waking—that there was a reason in
it; as if through a dream I remember it all; the clock awakens
life and sense in me, and something else—I forget what; ask me
not, I know not, I know not, I am a machine!
And at times, when I hear the clock, I understand quite
differently its pointing, its language; it seems to me as if the
unrest[7] egged me on so that I should work more, more, much
more. In its sound I hear only the angry words of the boss; in
the two hands I see his gloomy look. The clock, I shudder—it
seems to me it drives me and calls me machine, and cries out to
me “sew”!
Only when the wild tumult subsides, and the master is away for
the midday hour, day begins to dawn in my head, and a pain
passes through my heart; I feel my wound, and bitter tears and
boiling tears wet my meager meal, my bread; it chokes me, I can
eat no more, I cannot! O, horrible toil! O, bitter necessity.
The shop at the midday hour appears to me like a bloody
battlefield where all are at rest; about me I see lying the
dead, and the blood that has been spilled cries from the earth.
A minute later—the tocsin is sounded, the dead arise, the battle
is renewed. The corpses fight for strangers, for strangers, and
they battle and fall and disappear into night.
I look at the battlefield in bitter anger, in terror, with a
feeling of revenge, with a hellish pain. The clock now I hear it
aright. It is calling: “An end to slavery, an end shall it be”!
It vivifies my reason, my feelings and shows how the hours fly;
miserable I shall be as long as I am silent, lost, as long as I
remain what I am.
The man that sleeps in me begins to waken—the slave that wakens
in me is put to sleep. Now the right hour has come, an end to
misery, an end let it be! But suddenly—the whistle, the boss, an
alarm! I lose my reason, forget where I am; there is a tumult,
the battle. Oh, my ego is lost! I know not, I care not, I am a
machine!
The prose translation reproduces the thought alone; the Yiddish
original reproduces also the loud insistent stitching of the
machines, and the persistent nagging of the hateful clock. The
machine beats out these lines:
Ich arbeit, un’ arbeit, un’ arbeit ohn’ Cheschben.
Es schafft sich, un schafft sich, un schafft sich ohn’ Zahl.[8]
To what he feels to be the hopeless tragedy of the worker is added
in Rosenfeld’s verse the hopeless tragedy of the Jew—the wanderer
who has lost the power to laugh. In Sephira[9] as well as in other
poems, he brings out the fact that the Jew has set his Passover
and the period of mourning following it, in the happiest time of
the year. This poem, which has been really adequately translated
into verse by Alice Stone Blackwell, is one of his saddest and
most beautiful:
SEPHIRA
Methinks I fain would call upon my lyre
To laugh a little, but in vain the call!
For to begin with, ’tis Sephira now.
Tell me, besides, can a Jew laugh at all.
Oh, God, you laugh? A wail is in the laugh!
Brothers, what is there of reality
In a Jew’s pleasures? Is his laughter real?
’Tis but the mingling of a sob and sigh.
No savor now has Jewish life, no grace
Has Jewish Joy! Above, in heaven’s deep
The silvery clouds are floating; and the woods
Are full of life, but we sit down and weep.
Spicy the forest is, the garden green;
How fresh and cool spring’s breezes blowing by!
But what concern is that of yours, O Jew?
’Tis now Sephira; you are mute and sigh.
The lovely summer, comfort of men’s lives,
Passes in sobbing and in sighs away.
What hopes into the Hebrew can it give?
To him what comfort summer or the May?
A mendicant who has no place to rest
With whom all men make sport—each day, each week, each hour,
Oh, is it meet for him to think of joys,
Of gardens with their balm, of tree or flower?
And if the Jew at times break forth in song,
Does his song seem to breathe of mirth to you?
I, in his music hear but “Roam and Roam!”
In every note I recognize the Jew.
If one who is well versed in music’s art
Should chance to listen to a Jewish song,
His eyes against his will would gush with tears,
Each note would shake him with emotion strong.
The ram’s-horn call to penitence and grief,
Oh, that is now the Hebrew’s favorite strain—
A strain that makes but feelings for the tomb,
A strain to break a heart of steel with pain.
The song of the Atonement, and the Dirge
For the great temple and the Suppliant’s Psalm;
These are his sweetest music, since his joy
Was shattered in his holy land of balm.
Since his foe broke the sweetest instruments
Of music in his Temple, ever dear,
Only the plaintive ram’s-horn to the Jew
Is left, on which he sobs but once a year.
Of drums and cymbals, organs, harps and lyres,
Flutes and guitars, all with their dulcet strains,
The gloomy ram’s-horn, withered, sad and dry,
Is all that now to the poor Jew remains.
Whate’er he sing, however he may laugh
However gay he seeks to make the strain,
There suddenly awakens in his song
The suppliant’s psalm that rends the heart with pain.
Me thinks I fain would call upon my lyre
To laugh a little, but in vain the call!
For to begin with, ’tis Sephira now,
Tell me, besides, can a Jew laugh at all?
For the Rosenfeld of the Songs from the Ghetto, the present is
terrible and the future hopeless; there is always an aching desire
for beauty and happiness, but to him beauty and happiness
themselves wait upon toil and suffering and death—the nightingale
groans “upon the great cemetery of the world.”
But Songs from the Ghetto was written some fifteen years ago. Some
of his later poetry is lighter—some hope and the joy of living
appear to have crept into it. Of these, a hitherto unpublished
poem in English called “If,” has but a gentle melancholy:
IF
If hope would fly and sorrow stay,
If stars were dark and days were gray,
If love would vanish like a breath,
What would be life? What would be death?
If songs would die out in the nests,
And pleasure to the human breasts,
If flowers were to lose their hue,—
Oh! What would be I, What would be you?
Stealings is full of personal joy:
STEALINGS
I steal a smile from thy fair face
And hide it deep within my heart;
I steal a shadow of thy grace
And hide it deep within my soul;
I steal a ray from thy bright eyes
And hide it deep within my mind;
I steal the echo of thy sighs
And weave them softly in my dreams;
A word from thy sweet lips I steal
And hide it deep within my thoughts;
I steal the rapture of thy thrill
And drown it deep within my blood;
And from these thefts, these sacred stealings
Are born the bright flames of my love,
And the fountain of all sweet feelings,
And the stream of my life’s joy.
But even if he can for a time forget the toil and trouble of the
world in a personal joy, his first love is with the workers and
with them he asks to have his Resting Place—
Seek me not ’mid blooming meadows,
Not there my spirit you can trace,
Where workers toil like spectral shadows,
’Tis there you’ll find my resting place.
Seek me not where birds are singing,
Not there my spirit you can trace;
A slave am I—where chains are ringing,
’Tis there you’ll find my resting place.
Seek me not ’mid fountains dashing,
Not there my spirit you can trace,
Where tears are falling, teeth are gnashing,
’Tis there you’ll find my resting place.
And lov’st thou me with love’s true passion,
Thy steps unto my spirit trace,
Bring joy with thee; in love’s true fashion,
Make sweet to me my resting place.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
NEW BOTTLES FOR NEW WINE
THE WORK OF ABASTENIA ST. LEGER EBERLE
CHRISTINA MERRIMAN
The recent International Exhibition of Art in New York was, from
one angle, at least, a protest against certain set standards of
art generally accepted today as inevitably right because they have
“always been.” Some of the by-products of that stimulating
movement toward freedom have been variously characterized as
“courageous” “self-expressive” and “insolent.” Certainly much of
it was a serious effort toward individual expression—a revolt
against academic rules—partaking in some instances of a defiance
which was a law unto itself, a frank disregard of what impression
the mystified public carried away.
Such, however, was not the attitude or feeling of at least one
exhibitor whose work aroused much interest and comment, and who
was one of the first artists of standing to reflect in her work
the spirit of awakened social consciousness so apparent today.
Abastenia St. Leger Eberle showed two groups, the more striking of
which was The White Slave, reproduced on the cover of this issue
of THE SURVEY. They are the work of a sculptor who has strongly
defined views as to the part the artist should play in the common
life.
“The artist should be _the_ ‘socialist,’” says Miss Eberle. “He
has no right to work as an individualist without responsibility to
others. He is the specialized eye of society, just as the artisan
is the hand, and the thinker the brain. More than almost any other
one sort of work is art dependent on society for inspiration,
material, life itself; and in that same measure does it owe
society a debt. The artist must see for the people—reveal them to
themselves and to each other.”
This is a far cry from “art for art’s sake.” That it is the
viewpoint of an artist of high standing is attested by the early
and generous recognition accorded Miss Eberle’s work from
conservative and radical alike.
Most of her training was received from George Gray Barnard, with
whom she studied for three years. In 1904, she was awarded a
bronze medal at the St. Louis Exposition; the Girl on Roller Skate
was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in 1907; the Windy
Doorstep was awarded the Helen Foster Barnett prize at the exhibit
of the New York Academy in 1910; her figure of the veiled Salome
was bought by an Italian Art Society in Venice; and she is one of
the ten women who belong to the National Sculpture Society.
Miss Eberle is best known, perhaps, for her dancing figures, and
her depiction of the everyday picturesque life on the lower East
Side in New York, where she lived for years. Her people live for
us, and speak for themselves,—from the placid, necessitous hunt of
the Rag Picker to the tremulous wistfulness of the loving Little
Mother; from the tender feeling of The Bath Hour to the intense,
joyous absorption of the Rag-time dancer and the exultant balance
of that flying little figure on the Roller Skate—and please notice
that, characteristically, there is only one—borrowed, no doubt for
a precious three-minute “coast.”
[Illustration:
THE WINDY DOORSTEP
]
The qualities which art critics first look for—the sure touch and
line of her modelling, the line composition and massing—are
especially apparent in The Windy Doorstep, in which Miss Eberle
touches the high-water mark of her more objective figures.
Here it will be more interesting to note the steps by which social
values have crept into her work.
First of all, her deep and instinctive love for children, and her
appreciation of human values, led her to select types that until
recently have been almost entirely disregarded.
To this keen observer and lover of human nature, the many years of
contact with this vivid, arduous East Side life—reinforced and
interpreted by constant reading and thinking—brought an
ever-increasing sense of social interrelation and interdependence.
Jane Addams’ books have, more than anything else, she says, helped
to clarify and mould her vision of the constructive part the
sculptor may play in social readjustment.
This growth of social consciousness has been reflected in her
work.
[Illustration:
THE LITTLE MOTHER
]
Just as The Windy Doorstep, with its fine feeling for the dignity
of everyday homely tasks, outranks the Roller Skater which, she
says, was done in a purely objective spirit, so the White Slave
records a forward step which is a difference of kind even more
than degree.
[Illustration:
_THE RAG PICKER_
]
Here she has turned from her more objective work to the graphic
interpretation of a social menace; and it is here, perhaps, that
she finds herself with surest touch. Her conception of white
slavery is as searching in its indictment, as ruthless, cruel and
scourging as the fact itself. One visitor who saw those haunting
figures at the International Exhibition said afterward:
“I was passing through that room of the exhibit when suddenly I
faced it—I could not go on. I had vaguely realized that this
horrible thing was in the world, but it had never touched _me_. I
sat there for perhaps an hour, thinking—and thinking—”
This woman was one who has led what is called a “sheltered”
existence, whose instinct would be to turn from any discussion or
writing on this subject. It is this thought-compelling quality in
such work which links it as a social force with, say, the
dispassionate but terrible report of the Chicago Vice Commission,
or with Elizabeth Robins’ My Little Sister.
It is interesting to know that Miss Eberle worked out the
composition for the White Slave four years ago; but the actual
work of modelling was done in the four weeks’ interval between the
time she was invited to send some of her work to last winter’s
International Art Exhibition and its opening. Until then, she had
felt that the time had perhaps not come when such a group would be
received except as an unwelcome effort toward sensationalism. It
is the first of several such interpretative subjects which she has
in mind, and which, if worked out in an equally sincere spirit,
should be big in social significance.
But after all is said, Miss Eberle consistently holds with the
many who believe that the first function of art is not didactic.
Much of her work besides that shown here is conceived in a spirit
of sheer joy in beauty of form and line, and one may go far to
find a more exquisitely modelled figure than that of the utterly
submissive, despairful child-victim of the white slaver. To use
her own words:
“It is the beauty that is in the world _today_ that appeals to
me—not what may have existed centuries ago in Greece. Though I
love that, too, I will not shut my eyes to the present and
continue to echo the past. No matter how ugly the present might
be, I would rather live in it. After all, ugliness, as well as
beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,—and the present _isn’t_
ugly at all, but full of a wonderful interest, as a few of us
are beginning to find out. We are trying to find new bottles for
new wine—Greek vases are about worn out.”
[Illustration:
_THE BATH HOUR_
]
And so we may, as she asks, leave her work to make its own
eloquent plea for what Emerson calls “the eternal picture that
nature paints in the street, with moving men and children, beggars
and fine ladies, ... capped and based by heaven, earth and sea.”
“MY LITTLE SISTER”
HARRIET BURTON LAIDLAW
[_Mrs. Laidlaw is chairman of Manhattan Borough of the Woman
Suffrage Party. Her special interest in the subject of this
review is due, among other things, to her friendship with Rose
Livingston, the rescue worker in Chinatown whose unique
experience gives her understanding sympathy with unfortunate
girls, and who has suffered persecution, unchecked by the
police, on account of her revelations in regard to the white
slave trade._—Ed.]
In My Little Sister[10] Elizabeth Robins has let us hear a great
cry out of the depths—an actual human cry.
True, many snug, comfortable people, shaken for a moment out of
their apathy, dismiss it all carelessly, even contemptuously. Many
who are gripped to the heart as they read brush away the tears
with a sign of relief and say, “Well, it’s only a story.” But what
a “story!”
It is told in a tense, staccato style which hurries the reader
on—on even through the idealistic descriptions of the English
country and the stretching moor, across which, in its little
garden planted by loving hands, stands the “dear home” of the
officer’s gentle widow and her two daughters, the Elder Sister in
whose words the story is told and whose name is never mentioned,
and the Little Sister, Bettina, all golden and bright, a creature
so touchingly exquisite, so like a flower.
Through the sweet, lightly sketched scenes of the childhood,
girlhood and dawning womanhood of these two fair young creatures
there is woven a dark thread of fear, dread, tragedy. Some
experience of brutality this dainty, tenderly devoted mother has
had, an experience which is never more than darkly hinted at. She
forgets the terror of it only in those happy memories that cluster
about her lover-husband. His body was brought home to her from a
fatal tiger hunt. Her only consolation in his loss, she tells the
Elder Sister, was that she knew that there are worse dangers than
those of the jungle! She had the joy of knowing that he died while
all was “bright and untarnished.”
The narrative hastens on, always with a hovering sense of doom.
The innocent, tender love stories of the sisters develop. They are
but seventeen and nineteen, but they are women. It is impossible
to do justice to the telling of this story, so we will pass to the
main event, the invitation of the London aunt, the failing health
and fortune of the mother, which nerves her to accept an offer
that will separate her from her children, and the almost happy
bustle of preparation for the first visit from home, and for that
wonder of wonders—a London season! The sinister part played by
Madame Aurore, the little London dressmaker who, while working for
them in their country home lays the plans that are to decoy them
to their ruin in London, is worked out with sure, rapid touch.
Then comes the arrival in London, the meeting of the girls by the
pseudo “aunt,” who has been dressed for the part by the aid of a
photograph sent on to the procurers by Madame Aurore. Then follows
the terrible scene in the house with the barred windows and the
strange overwhelming scent, the escape of the Elder Sister, the
heart-breaking search for the younger—the madness, the despair!
One of the most pathetic things in the book is the heart-broken
young lover who traces Bettina from London to “their house in
Paris”—thence from one place to another “always too late.” The
merciful death of the mother, and the fixed conviction, the
subliminal inspiration, that comes toward the end to the tortured
brain of the elder sister that Bettina has found her release in
death, alleviate and spiritualize the misery of it all.
Now as to the truth of this tremendous story. I suppose that
having put the very soul of truth and reality into the narrative
itself, having written it from the very depths of her own pitying
heart, the author has not reckoned with the callous incredulity
which the book often meets, or she might well have added an
introductory note in regard to the actual facts in this case from
real life. The story, she told me subsequent to its publication,
was absolutely true, but much softened at many points. In the true
story, for instance, the mother is not dead, but is in a state of
dementia on the continent, whither the family have moved, being
unable to endure England and its memories.
Moreover, although Miss Robins’ experience in working for women
and the woman’s cause in England had brought to her knowledge many
life histories more unspeakable than this, after she had finished
this book she said to herself, “Now here is a story that I know to
be absolutely true, but how valuable is it to give to the world an
individual instance of this kind; how far can it be generalized?”
To test this she went, with that sincerity of spirit that
characterizes all she does, to a noted police justice in London
and laid the story before him, asking him what he would do if a
person came to him with such a story. He answered sadly, with no
show of being at all roused by anything unusual, that he would
begin to take evidence immediately and see what he could do about
it. He added that the story was really a commonplace.
Such is the reticence of the English press, and such is the stern
family pride concerning the “blot on the scutcheon,” and all those
traditions which grow out of the double moral standard whereby the
escapade of the son of the house can even be repeated lightly
while the slightest shadow on the name of the daughter is an
unspeakable disgrace, that no one knows how many tragedies of this
kind are hidden from sight in the records of numerous respectable
families.
To satisfy herself more completely that the story was susceptible
of extensive application, Miss Robins took it to several London
police inspectors. No one for a moment stopped to doubt or
question the facts. The most horrible stories that the human mind
can conceive are old stories to them. When the Home Secretary was
asked a question on this subject in the House of Commons only a
few weeks ago, he answered that in London city alone, to his
knowledge, there had been reported fifty-three girls lost and
never heard of within a few months. Such facts as this explain the
tragic intensity with which the book is written.
Danger! Danger! Danger! That is the dominant note that sounds
throughout the narrative. How pathetically the mother’s poignant
fears contrast with her ineffectiveness. Ever this haunting
danger, whether mother and daughters are walking in the sunset, or
planting in the garden, or sitting by the hearth. What a wonderful
picture Miss Robins gives of the mother’s desperate dependence on
the four walls of her home—“Soon home, now, little girl, soon safe
in our dear home.” The danger signal of the night-bird’s note is
introduced with inimitable art—a subtle suggestion, even in those
early days, of the gray hawk whose shadow hovers over bright young
lives.
The unutterable sadness of it all and the stern warning to mothers
that children’s homes are not just in four walls, but are in towns
and cities and nations! How utterly ineffectual seem an individual
mother’s effort for the safety of her child. How evident is it
that a mother’s care must have back of it power—power in council
and legislative hall. How strongly the lack of social sympathy is
brought out; the mother’s indifference to the great crying needs
of the world. This mother’s “place was the home,” and to what did
all her negative efforts avail in shutting the danger away from
her cherished daughters in a nation, in a world, which holds a
traffic system of such Machiavellian adroitness, a system which
can afford, so great are its profits, to reach into the inner
recesses of a home, to work with endless patience and
resourcefulness and which can enlist on its side such power that
even the London police, perhaps the least corrupt in the world,
can answer evasively to the frantic cry, “Do you know such a
house?”—“We have a great many on the list, but not many such as
you describe;” and follow this statement with the maddening
inactivity which Miss Robins describes with vivid accuracy.
Her book is a terrific arraignment of the conditions which make
such a tragedy possible. Respectability and indifference are
personified scathingly in the monumental aunt, deaf to the world
voices of agony. All society is arraigned as the Elder Sister
storms at her aunt, “sitting massive, calm, with a power of inert
resistance.” Her bewildered answer to the mad cry for help,—“It
isn’t possible, this is England,”—sounds strangely natural to us.
It is the burden of so many recent New York editorials, “such
things don’t happen”!—and that in our land where the record of the
Chicago Immigration League tells of 1,700 girls between the
railroad terminals of New York and Chicago alone, reported lost in
one year. Thus wails the Elder Sister,—“So old and unbelieving, I
felt she had looked on unmoved at evil since the world began....
She rose, O! but slowly;—slow, stiff and ponderous. I felt in her
all the heaviness of acquiescence since time began.”
Thus is the unbelievable apathy of society pictured! Thus Miss
Robins touches lightly, pitifully on the problem of a girl’s
handicap in the lack of preparation for life. What a picture she
gives of the sheltered girl—“Such a little thing, my not knowing
how to telephone, yet it might cost my mother her life.” Again
this motive is sounded when the daughter is begging her mother for
knowledge about her experiences, and the great gray danger—“It is
not the kind of thing you need ever know,” answers the mother with
fatuous finality.
Nor does she make our heart bleed for girlhood alone, but for
manhood, as that blood-curdling conversation, unparalleled in
literature, is gasped out between the Man and the Elder Sister as
they crouch in the shadow in that ghastly room in what he himself
tells her is “one of the most terrible houses in Europe.” Here we
see manhood disfigured, draggled beyond recognition, sitting in
the dust and ashes of a charnel house. How sodden the words fall
from his lips as depraved and perverted manhood defends itself.
“This is a commonplace in the world, in every capital of every
nation on earth. Bishops, old ladies, imagine you could alter
these things.” “Human nature—human nature,” muses the Elder
Sister, “like the tolling of a muffled bell.” Thus are the
wickedest, most deadly of the world’s platitudes on this subject
uttered in this glaring scene of abnormality, so that
automatically they are given the lie.
The unbelieving will say, “But how is it possible that we do not
hear oftener of such cases?” Two elements especially conspire to
suppress such knowledge, both based on a false attitude towards
women. First the double standard of morals which holds men’s
purity so much lower than woman’s; second, the unjust attitude
towards women reflected in the press which is more likely to seize
upon a disappearance story in such a way as to make it reflect
upon the girls’ character rather than to acknowledge it a possible
case of abduction or white slavery.
As I write, Miss Robins sends me letters which she has recently
received from people interested in her book. One speaking of the
“awful traffic that is going on” tells how two girls, daughters of
a clergyman, have disappeared on their journey home from school
and have never been heard of since.
A letter from Miss Robins herself adds the following to her
remarks on her book. “Of all the official people I consulted, not
one of these experts doubted my story, _and all had known similar
cases_. We do not need to be told that the people to whom these
things happen, if they are refined and sensitive, are not eager to
make known their ruin. The natural impulse is to cover the horror
from every eye, even to deny it.”
“If you will consult the findings of your own commissions you will
see that in America ‘no girl of any class is safe.’”
I myself know at first hand an appalling number of cases—wives,
women of standing, college girls on journeys, young girls on their
way to boarding school, and working girls trapped and sold. In
Rose Livingston’s mail in the last few weeks have come
heartrending letters from parents for help in finding their lost
daughters. A letter I read yesterday from a doctor’s wife in
Indiana was so terrible in the lingering pathos with which the
mother dwelt on the beauty and sweetness of this lost daughter
that I handed it back without reading to the end.
In connection with Miss Robins’ letter, I offer the following
quotation from a paper by Stanley Finch of the Federal Department
of Justice where he speaks of the operation of the Federal White
Slave Traffic Act. “The number of complaints and prosecutions is
rapidly increasing.... Such crimes are more numerous than was
first believed possible.... It has become evident that thousands
of people[11] in practically all parts of the country were
violating the law.... [We found] girls were being transported in
such interstate and foreign commerce solely for the purpose of
prostitution and were being treated as mere articles of
merchandise for the profit of those who handled them and who were
willing for the profit involved to sacrifice both the bodies and
the souls of their victims.... As we extend this work [of federal
prosecution] throughout the country the awful interstate trade in
women and girls for immoral purposes which for years has been
going on almost without let or hindrance, has now become a very
dangerous occupation.... The practices of people engaged in the
white slave traffic involves in a considerable number of cases the
actual physical detention of women and girls against their will in
this vilest form of involuntary servitude.”
Would that there were space to reinforce these remarks by New York
newspaper headlines dealing with such cases for the month of March
15 to April 15.
How many fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and
lovers throughout this country, have lived through the agony
endured by the Elder Sister and the lover in Miss Robins’ book?
That which had been their greatest care and burden, the frail
health of Bettina, becomes the Elder Sister’s one comfort and
hope. How many a bereft father and mother today not only cling in
anguish to that hope, but desperately refuse to believe but that
their girl is dead! And with reliable students estimating the life
of the white slave in this country at five years, we know that
many a flower-like highly organized Little Sister has met
mercifully her release in a few weeks—a few months.
To those who know how considerable a factor in the whole problem
of the white slave traffic is the girl who is taken, not the girl
who goes, the girl who is under compulsion, not the girl who
stays, this book is a great contribution. THE SURVEY printed some
time since a poster that has been used in this country from ocean
to ocean: “Danger! Mothers, beware! 60,000 innocent girls wanted
to take the place of 60,000 white slaves who will die this year in
the United States.” If My Little Sister will only make the truth
of this warning more real, more individual more poignant, then, in
the pain-soothing words that close this book, “She will not have
suffered in vain, and others will thank her too.”
Such a book is not merely a literary production, an exquisite work
of art: it is a high, sincere human service. Front a literary
point of view it is a great book. One is reminded of the
Aeschylean definition of tragedy: “That which purifies the heart
through pity and terror.” But this book not only reaches great
tragic and dramatic heights, but its subtle art is such that it
blends with the tragedy in an almost eerie way a lyric chord which
echoes throughout, an unbroken strain of hope and pity, of the
essential dignity and sanity and rightness of life.
MOTHERHOOD
ISABEL KIMBALL WHITING
_I see them come crowding, crowding,
Children of want and pain,
Dark sorrow their eyes enshrouding
Where joy’s touch should have lain._
_They stand in silence beseeching,
Gaunt faces lifted up
And wan little hands outreaching
For Love’s forbidden cup._
_Their hearts are restless with yearning.
The hearts of my own are stilled,
Their lips are parched and burning
The cups of my own are filled!_
_I cry in love unsatisfied
For these without the fold,
My mother’s arms are open wide
These weary ones to hold._
_What though my arms are open wide,
Only mine own lie near.
Without still stand those long denied,
Compassed in want and fear._
_Bowed with the crown of Motherhood,
I seek that Shepherd of old;
“How can mine own receive the good
With some left out of the fold?”_
IN THE HANDS OF THE POLICE
A PLEA FOR A NEW LEGISLATURE TO MAKE AND ENFORCE LAWS AGAINST VICE
A. LEO WEIL
[_Mr. Weil, one of the best known attorneys of western
Pennsylvania, is known outside of his profession as the militant
President of the Pittsburgh Voters’ League, the organization
which exposed the graft scandals of three years ago, sent
councilmen and bankers to jail and brought new and invigorating
spirit into Pittsburgh municipal life. Last Year the Voters’
League successfully brought charges against the head of the
Department of Public Safety, and provoked a situation which led
to the creation of the Pittsburgh Morals Commission, a
semi-official body without governmental authority, and the
cleaning-up of the big numbered district._
_It is on the basis of this experience that Mr. Weil reaches the
conclusions here set forth. He was a witness before the Wagner
commission which has recommended legislation now pending in New
York (with every prospect of passage) that will create a
separate public welfare department, largely divorce it from the
city administration and entrust its commissioners, appointed by
the mayor, with powers with respect to vice somewhat similar to
those held by the Board of Health with respect to sanitary
conditions._—Ed.]
The police, a body of men selected primarily to preserve order,
protect life, prevent crime, apprehend the criminal, and perform
other administrative duties—men perhaps wholly unfitted as a body
for anything else—have been expected to solve, by legislation,
problems which have confounded the wisest from the time whereof
the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.
That the police have failed could not be otherwise.
That they have aggravated the evil was to be expected.
That ultimately legislation must be placed in competent, qualified
hands, must be apparent.
That it will require the greatest minds, the best thought, the
highest statesmanship, and almost a divine perception, to
apprehend and deal with those complex, involved, intricate
questions having to do with the passions of men and the strongest
laws of nature, urging defiance of human laws, seems to be
axiomatic.
Nevertheless, on the subject of vice as generally understood in
our cities, the police are expected not only to administer the
laws, but to make them; not only to enforce enactments, but to
frame them. And herein lies, in my judgment, the root of the evil
in present day conditions which has brought our police into
disrepute.
All countries, from the most despotic to the most liberal, from
the most conservative to the most radical, have left this question
of the social evil to the police, and have not dared, through
their legislative bodies, to thoroughly consider and pass laws to
eradicate it. Such meager legislation as has been passed has been
ignored in the congested centers of population, and generally such
legislation has not been supported by the public sentiment of
those communities. Legislation has been generally of a merely
prohibitive character, ignoring existing conditions, together with
the army of human beings living upon vice, for whom some provision
must be made.
Even if the legislatures could be induced to take up this question
and pass general laws, it would necessarily follow that such laws
in their generality must look to the future, rather than to the
present, and existing conditions would have to be left to some
other authority.
In every large city there are thousands engaged in prostitution.
They can neither be exterminated by the fiat of law nor reformed
by the passage of proclamations. Public morals, like private
morals, can be improved only gradually. It is not so much the
theoretical question of to be or not to be, but the practical
situation summed up in such phrases as: It is—it will for a time
remain. The future—what is it to be?
Would it not be wise to ask the legislature to pass a law
requiring every city to appoint a body of men to draft, and from
time to time revise, a code of laws to regulate, suppress,
exterminate, and generally to deal with, this problem of
prostitution? To it must be given authority. It must be vested
with legislative power. It should have its own employes—call it a
morals police force, if you wilt—to carry into effect the rules,
regulations and laws passed by this commission. That men could be
obtained to act upon such a commission, public-spirited,
representative students of social questions, I fully believe. No
one would accept a place on such a board who was not interested in
the welfare of his community. The responsibilities would be
fearful; the criticism would be severe. No one without a blameless
life would dare to act. Whether or not ultimately the regular
police force could be used by such a commission would be a
question of policy. At any rate, for the present, I believe it
would be unwise.
Such a commission would collect data of inestimable value, data
that was reliable, and of which there is now none worth while.
Such a commission would doubtless make mistake after mistake,
perhaps would depart from all its preconceived notions at the
start. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that step by step
it would gradually and slowly work out a solution. Looking the
country over, we see that voluntary organizations have
accomplished temporary good, but their effort has never been
persistent, continuous, permanent, authoritative, legal.
The adoption of the plan suggested would take out of the hands of
those wholly unfitted for so great an undertaking this momentous
question, and place it in the hands of others who we would have
the right to assume would ultimately be found to deal with it, so
far as human intelligence, study, observation and experiment can
enable and qualify men to deal with it.
Another and a greatly to be desired result would also be
accomplished. It would remove from the police that which today
contaminates the organization, so that in every city they have
been brought under a suspicion unfortunately too frequently
deserved, an opprobrium too justly applied.
The casting of this burden upon the police, more than any other
cause, sows the seed of corruption, furnishes the opportunity for
profit, brings into alliance the law officers and the
law-breakers, disgraces the police force, and keeps off of it many
men who would otherwise be glad to serve their communities in a
position that should command the respect and consideration of the
people.
This police burden has in turn been the biggest rock upon which
self-government has capsized in our American cities.
THE BELGIAN STRIKE
[_The mass strike of the Belgian workers was carried to an issue
last week. The motion of the Liberal member which brought the
strike to a close, while it does not specifically grant the
reform asked for by the Socialists, is considered such a lien on
government action as to amount to a victory for them. These
interpretations of the larger significance of the strike from
different angles were, of course, written while the struggle was
going on._
_Mr. Walling, who is a member of the radical wing of the
Socialist party, is a student of international Socialism, his
most recent book being The Larger Aspects of Socialism. He was
in Russia during the Revolution, and knew intimately the details
of the great Russian general strike of 1905._—Ed.]
I.
GRAHAM TAYLOR
The nation-wide strike for manhood suffrage in Belgium which
paralyzed the industries and almost suspended the normal life of
the people was foreshadowed in a spectacular demonstration in
Brussels two years ago.
On August 15, 1911, the streets of that gay, medieval capital
witnessed scenes which every American who looked on knew were
making history. Over 60,000 men, from larger and smaller places
throughout Belgium, took a day off without wages and paid their
way to the capital of their country, in order to voice their
protest against the unjust inequalities of the suffrage. The show
of force by the extraordinary police and military precautions
betrayed the furtive apprehension of both the municipal and
national governments as to what might happen. With no sign of
timidity or intimation of being overawed, this vast industrial
army marched ten abreast for hours—silent, grim, determined,
united, unarmed—between long files of armed soldiery which lined
the curbs, and past stronger detachments of all arms of the
service massed at strategic centers.
The great procession assembled at the Socialist headquarters, a
large and impressive building bearing the significant name _Maison
de Peuple_, the House of the People. The permanent background of
the stage in the assembly hall of that building is a colossal head
of Jesus of Nazareth, the reverent work of a Belgian Socialist.
This House of the People is the most practical expression, or
perhaps demonstration, of the co-operative commonwealth in
miniature, which is to be found anywhere in the world. Starting
with a sack of potatoes and a bag of flour, these wage-workers in
ten years erected a building costing $250,000. Of this sum, which
was loaned by the national bank, they had then paid $100,000 and
had assets worth three times as much as the balance due on the
mortgage, which they continue to reduce by annual payments.
In this four-story semi-circular building, at one of the principal
business centers, ample accomodations are provided for a great
variety of practical agencies. A café, which paid a profit of
$2,400 in three months, shares the front of the ground floor with
a large co-operative department store, where dry goods, house
furnishings, clothing, meats, groceries, butter and milk, hats,
hosiery and shoes are sold. A bakery, with a capacity of 125,000
loaves of bread a week; a coal depot, with twenty-nine delivery
carts; a laundry, and a clothing manufactory are among the
business enterprises conducted here.
The 19,000 co-operating families receive as their share of the
profits 12 per cent of the money they pay for bread, 6 per cent of
what their groceries cost them and 5 per cent of the purchase
price of their clothing. Among the protective features are an
employment bureau for men and women, a pharmacy and a corps of
thirteen physicians rendering free service to all members of one
year’s standing, and a sick benefit society with 8,000 members.
Singing and ethical classes are maintained for children and a
well-trained orchestra and choral club for adults. Small halls
adequately provide for the meetings of the trade sections, and a
great auditorium, seating 2,436 persons, rallies the festival
gatherings and supplies room for political mass meetings.
From this national center the procession of mid August took up its
line of march, carrying banners which took the keynote of their
inscriptions from the following figures emblazoned everywhere:
993,070 have 1 vote;
395,866 have 2 votes;
704,549 voters, having two, three or four votes, cast 1,717,871
votes, a majority of 88,523 over those having one vote;
One man one vote!
In Belgium a man over twenty-five years of age gets an extra vote
if he owns property. He is granted another vote if he has a
university diploma. He casts a fourth vote if he is over
thirty-five years of age, is the father of a family and pays taxes
on more than a certain amount of property. The majority of the
industrial population thus have only one vote, while the rural,
well-to-do and richer people outvote each wage earner by two,
three or even four votes. The rural population thus controls the
city industrial population and the church is charged by the
Socialists with controlling the rural vote.
Against this rule of the minority, this great demonstration of
1911 was a protest. But to the onlooker from abroad it then seemed
to be a patriotic proclamation of Belgium’s one great hope of
national evolution without revolution. The primary cause of the
movement which has culminated in the present national strike was
the defeat of the liberal and Socialist coalition in parliament by
a combination of the government and clerical forces in the
elections of 1912. The Socialist congress summoned to meet the
issue brought to a crisis by that event decided upon a general
strike as a last resort if all other means of obtaining manhood
suffrage failed. But before resorting to that measure a general
suffrage bill was introduced into parliament by the Socialists and
supported by the liberals. As serious consideration of it was
refused by the clerical and government authorities, a general
strike was voted on April 14.
Whatever the full effect of this national political strike may be,
those who are the keenest observers concede that the making of
history is in the movement of Belgian labor for one man one vote
suffrage.
Certain it is that a movement of the people capable of maintaining
and increasing for so many years a labor vote in parliament until
it numbers more than one-third of the total must be reckoned with.
If now the tolerance of this Belgian Socialist Party toward those
who honestly oppose its principles and methods, at this supreme
crisis in its history and the national development, grows with its
strength and equals its determination, it will improve the
greatest opportunity the Socialist cause has ever had in the
sphere of practical politics to demonstrate and promote its
co-operative commonwealth.
II.
WILLIAM ENGLISH WALLING
If the Belgian strike is a world-event of the first magnitude for
the general public, it has a still greater significance for the
world’s ten or twenty million Socialists. The two wings of the
Socialist movement are equally interested; the reformers and
conciliators, because the strike aims at a purely political
reform, and involves co-operation with a part of the capitalists,
both in order to win success now and in order to get immediate use
out of the suffrage after it is won; the revolutionists and
advocates of class struggle because the strike forces a large loss
on many unwilling employers and gives training for later and more
aggressive strikes for the purpose of raising wages, cutting down
profits, and paving the way to social revolution.
These essential facts are being widely understood. Take, for
example, the following editorial paragraphs from the influential
and progressive, but by no means radical, _Chicago Tribune_:
“For years the thinkers of the movement in Europe were building
up theories about the ‘political mass strike.’ These theories
have now been put into practice in Belgium with remarkable
precision.
“The strike in Belgium is not a precipitated strike. For months
the Socialists of that country have been making preparations for
it. They have been collecting money, storing provisions, and,
what is even more important, educating the workingmen to their
theories, training them to respond to the strike call like
drilled soldiers. It is not an emotional, not an impulsive
strike, therefore, but a coolly thought out, shrewdly calculated
battle....
“As a result of this careful planning and training by the
leaders 400,000 workingmen responded to Socialist colors with
the precision of a trained army. The strike is both a battle and
military review. The Socialists now have a clear and adequate
view of their strength and numbers. The issue involved in this
strike, which is uniform as opposed to plural voting, may be
lost. The strike may even be called off by the Socialists
themselves after a week or so if the government does not yield
by that time. But the advantages which Socialism has gained by
this census of its army is incalculable. It knows how much of
the Belgian public is behind it and to what extent. This time
the general strike is used to combat a single abuse of the
government. In the future the same working masses may be
directed against the present régime as a whole. It is a strike
now. It may be a civil war or revolution the next time.”
But while the capitalistic _Tribune_ is so sympathetic and
optimistic, the leading labor union paper of this country, the
_United Mine Workers’ Journal_ has been highly sceptical and
pessimistic:
“The strikers say they are ready and have the means to hold out
six weeks.
“What if the other class should elect to hold out for twelve
weeks; that is, if the strike should become a ‘lock-out?’
“There is no doubt but that the class against whom they are
striking, the propertied class, who hold the unfair political
advantage over them, could store more per member than the
workers.
“We wish our brothers every success. Hope they will obtain what
is undoubtedly theirs by right. But, in our opinion, unless the
strike results in a test of force instead of passive endurance
(and this same is more than probable) the workers’ needs will
drive them back to their tasks before those who have been
enriched by their labor will consent to give up the political
advantages on which their economic advantages are based.”
Why this remarkable reversal of the opinions that might have been
expected? Why have some of the richest Liberals in Belgium
supported the strike?
The Belgians are striking for a right the French obtained in
1876—equal suffrage. Yet who are the chief beneficiaries of the
political democracy of France? The condition of the laborers is
about the same as in Belgium. The only difference is that in
France the industrial and urban capitalists now hold the balance
of power between the laborers on the one hand and the reactionary
agrarians, landlords and employing peasants on the other; while in
Belgium the latter classes, which control the Catholic Party, have
a Parliamentary majority over the laborers and urban middle
classes combined. The Belgium Liberals then have had everything to
win by a strike, which aims at establishing the French situation
in that country. As for the Socialists, equal suffrage would
undoubtedly have the effect of driving the Liberals and Catholics
together into the same government, as in Germany, thus making the
Socialists _the_ opposition party. It would also result ultimately
in whatever social and labor reforms the Liberals might feel it to
their interest to grant. But this is all.
This is why thoughtful Socialists the world over, including
several of the Belgian leaders (Vandervelde, Huysmans, De
Brouckère and Bertrand) have been so dubious about the strike.
They have seen that the burden of the contest will fall about
equally on employers and employes. But the Liberal employers are
playing for a splendid stake—Belgium; while the Socialists are
playing only for such incidental and secondary benefits as will
accrue to them from Liberal control of the country. Naturally they
have had far more dread of the costs and risks which the strike
involves.
But whether the strike was to be lost or won it has been clear
that it would interest the world’s millions of Socialists more
deeply than ever in the possibilities and the limitations of the
general strike.
All Socialists favor the political general strike, most Socialists
favor the general strike against war—including the conservatives
like Keir Hardie and Jean Jaurès. The moderate Swedes had an
economic general strike a few years ago and this form is favored
also by the majority of French and Italian labor unionists. And
now the British unionists are voting on the question whether they
will all quit work each day after eight hours—which would mean a
general lock-out, or practically a general strike.
Whether the Belgians win or lose will not affect the momentum of
the movement. If they win, general strikes for a few years will
take a predominantly political character, and we shall see the
general political strike resumed in Hungary within a few months
and doubtless declared in Prussia before many years. If they lose
these British, French and Italian movements toward economic
general strikes will have the field.
The historian of the future when writing of our generation will
have to give a central position—perhaps _the_ central position—to
the general strike.
-----
Footnote 1:
See THE SURVEY for October 5, 1912.
Footnote 2:
It is now reported that the opponents of the law, which goes
into effect August 1, have started an effort to secure the
19,535 signatures necessary for a petition to have the law
submitted to a referendum vote.
Footnote 3:
Drawn from a case record of the New York Charity Organization
Society.
Footnote 4:
Number based not on total number of cases but on scholarship,
conduct and attendance cases, respectively.
Footnote 5:
Most of the quotations here given are taken from Songs from the
Ghetto. By Morris Rosenfeld. Translated into prose by Leo
Wiener. Copeland & Day, Boston. 1898. Price $1.00.
Footnote 6:
Rosenfeld’s poetry in this respect is the antithesis of that of
Arturo Giovannitti. See THE SURVEY of November 2, 1912.
Footnote 7:
Pendulum.
Footnote 8:
I work and work and work—without end; I am busy and busy and
busy at all times.
Footnote 9:
The Counting—the forty-nine days of the Feast of the Seven
Weeks.
Footnote 10:
My Little Sister. By Elizabeth Robins. Dodd, Mead and Co. 344
pp. Price $1.25. By mail of THE SURVEY $1.37.
Footnote 11:
Of 478 defendants, fifty-three women are involved or implicated.
Of those, eighteen are found not guilty, are dismissed, or cases
are pending.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the
last chapter.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
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