The Survey, Volume 30, Number 5, May 3, 1913
Date: 2024-06-26T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Charities -- Periodicals; Social problems -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals

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Title: The Survey, Volume 30, Number 5, May 3, 1913

Author: Various

Editor: Paul Underwood Kellogg

Release date: June 26, 2024 [eBook #73922]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Survey Associates, 1913

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A TYPICAL OYSTER AND SHRIMP CANNERY

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.

RAMSHACKLE SHEDS HOUSING NEARLY FIFTY WORKERS PORT ROYAL, S. C.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

1. See The Survey for October 5, 1912.

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.

3. Drawn from a case record of the New York Charity Organization Society.

4. Number based not on total number of cases but on scholarship, conduct and attendance cases, respectively.

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.

6. Rosenfeld’s poetry in this respect is the antithesis of that of Arturo Giovannitti. See The Survey of November 2, 1912.

7. Pendulum.

8. I work and work and work—without end; I am busy and busy and busy at all times.

9. The Counting—the forty-nine days of the Feast of the Seven Weeks.

10. My Little Sister. By Elizabeth Robins. Dodd, Mead and Co. 344 pp. Price $1.25. By mail of The Survey $1.37.

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.

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Table of Contents

- The Survey Volume XXX No. 5

- THE COMMON WELFARE

- SPREAD OF THE SURVEY IDEA
- PATH-FINDER SURVEYING
- PROSTITUTION BANISHED IN ONE NEW YORK TOWN
- THE DEAD MAN AT MAMARONECK
- WHAT THE ARBITRATION BOARD HEARING REVEALED
- SOME NEW STATE LAWS AFFECTING WOMEN’S WORK
- CALIFORNIA WOMEN AND THE VICE SITUATION
- DEBATE BEFORE THE LEGISLATURE
- CALIFORNIA WOMEN RECALL A JUDGE
- ORGANIZING TO FIGHT CANCER

- FINGER PRINTS

- PROBLEMS[3]

- EDITORIAL GRIST

- HOLDING FAST TO THE TWELVE-HOUR DAY

- BEDFORD REFORMATORY

- THE OYSTERMAN BALTIMORE TO BILOXI AND BACK THE CHILD’S BURDEN IN OYSTER AND SHRIMP CANNERIES

- M’AMS AND SUPERM’AMS
- SOCIAL SERVICE AND THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
- THE VISITING TEACHER IN ACTION
- WHAT DO YOU CARE?
- THE VOCATIONAL COUNSELOR IN ACTION

- HOUSEKEEPING CENTERS IN SETTLEMENTS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS

- A YIDDISH POET

- MY BOY
- DESPAIR
- THE PALE OPERATOR
- A TEAR ON THE IRON
- THE SWEAT SHOP
- SEPHIRA
- IF
- STEALINGS

- NEW BOTTLES FOR NEW WINE
- “MY LITTLE SISTER”
- MOTHERHOOD
- IN THE HANDS OF THE POLICE

- THE BELGIAN STRIKE

- I. GRAHAM TAYLOR

- II. WILLIAM ENGLISH WALLING

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE