Soon after the foregoing investigations were made, Dr. H. M.
Lechstrecker, of the New York State Board of Charities, conducted an
examination of 10,707 children in the Industrial Schools of New York
City. He found that 439, or 4.10 per cent, had had no breakfast on the
date of the inquiry, while 998, or 9.32 per cent, exhibited anæmic
conditions apparently due to lack of proper nourishment. Upon
investigation the teachers found that the breakfasts of each of the 998
consisted either of coffee only, or of coffee with bread only. Only
1855, or 17.32 per cent, started the day with what Dr. Lechstrecker
considered to be an adequate meal.[48] Other independent inquiries in
several cities show that the problem is by no means peculiar to New
York.
In Buffalo the principal of one large school, Mr. Charles L. Ryan, is
reported as saying that of the 1500 children in his school at least
one-tenth come to school in the morning without breakfast. In 8 schools
in Buffalo, having a total average attendance of 7500 pupils, the
principals estimated that 350, or 4.46 per cent, have no breakfasts at
all, and that 800 more have too little to insure effective work. No less
than 5105 of the 7500 children were reported as having tea or coffee
with bread only.[49] It is rather difficult to analyze these figures
satisfactorily, but it would appear that no less than 17.33 per cent of
the total number of children in these 8 schools are believed by the
principals and teachers to be appreciably handicapped by defective
nutrition, and that only 16.80 per cent are adequately and
satisfactorily fed.
In Chicago several independent investigations have been made. Mr.
William Hornbaker, principal of the Oliver Goldsmith school, says: “We
have here 1100 children in a district which is so crowded that all our
pupils come from an area comprising only about twenty acres. When I
began work here, I discovered that many of the pupils remained all day
without food. A great majority of the parents in this district, as well
as the older children, are at work from dawn to dusk, and have no time
to care for the little ones. Such children have no place to go when
dismissed at noon.”[50] At this school a lunch room has been
established, and two meals a day are provided for about 50 of the most
necessitous children. At first these meals were sold at a penny per
meal, but it was found that even pennies were too hard to obtain. Mr.
Hornbaker points out that the pride of the larger children restrains
them, and it is most difficult to get them to admit their hunger, but
the younger children are not so sensitive. He says that “unquestionably
a majority of the children are improperly fed, especially in the lower
grades.” Out of a total attendance of 5150 children in 5 Chicago schools
122 were reported as breakfastless, 1464 as having only bread with
coffee or tea, a total of 30.79 per cent.[51]
In Philadelphia several inquiries were made, with the result that of
4589 children 189 were reported as going generally or often without
breakfast of any kind, while 2504 began the day on coffee or tea and
bread, a total of 58.52 per cent.[52] In Cleveland, Boston, and Los
Angeles, among many other cities, teachers and others declare that the
evil is quite as extensive.
Massing the figures given from New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and
Chicago, we get a total of 40,746 children examined, of which number
14,121, or 34.65 per cent, either went breakfastless to school or got
miserably poor breakfasts of bread and tea or coffee. At least bread and
tea must prove to be a poor diet, wholly insufficient to meet the
demands of a growing human body, and the difficulty of obtaining good,
wholesome bread in our cities intensifies the evil. The wholesale
adulteration of food is indeed a most serious menace to life and health
to which the poor are constantly subjected.
These figures are not put forward as being in any sense a statistical
measure of the problem. The investigations described, and others of a
like nature, afford no adequate basis for scientific estimates. They are
all confined to the one morning meal, and the standard adopted for
judging of the adequateness of the meals given to the children is
necessarily crude and lacking in scientific precision. It cannot be too
strongly emphasized that it is not a question of whether so many
children go without breakfast occasionally, but whether they are
_underfed_, either through missing meals more or less frequently or
through feeding day by day and week by week upon food that is poor in
quality, unsuitable, and of small nutritive value, and whether in
consequence the children suffer physically or mentally, or both. Only a
comprehensive examination by experts of a large number of children in
different parts of the country, a careful inquiry into their diet and
their physical and mental development, would afford a satisfactory basis
for any statistical measure of the problem which could be accepted as
even approximately correct. Yet such inquiries as those described cannot
be ignored; in the absence of more comprehensive and scientific
investigations they are of great value, on account of the mass of
observed facts which they give; and the results certainly tend to show
that the estimate that fully 2,000,000 children of school age in the
United States are badly underfed is not exaggerated.