THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND INDUSTRY
As it is possible to establish a connection between the lack of public
recreation and the vicious excitements and trivial amusements which
become their substitutes, so it may be illuminating to trace the
connection between the monotony and dullness of factory work and the
petty immoralities which are often the youth's protest against them.
There are many city neighborhoods in which practically every young
person who has attained the age of fourteen years enters a factory.
When the work itself offers nothing of interest, and when no public
provision is made for recreation, the situation becomes almost
insupportable to the youth whose ancestors have been rough-working and
hard-playing peasants.
In such neighborhoods the joy of youth is well nigh extinguished; and
in that long procession of factory workers, each morning and evening,
the young walk almost as wearily and listlessly as the old. Young
people working in modern factories situated in cities still dominated
by the ideals of Puritanism face a combination which tends almost
irresistably to overwhelm the spirit of youth. When the Puritan
repression of pleasure was in the ascendant in America the people it
dealt with lived on farms and villages where, although youthful
pleasures might be frowned upon and crushed out, the young people
still had a chance to find self-expression in their work. Plowing the
field and spinning the flax could be carried on with a certain
joyousness and vigor which the organization of modern industry too
often precludes. Present industry based upon the inventions of the
nineteenth century has little connection with the old patterns in
which men have worked for generations. The modern factory calls for an
expenditure of nervous energy almost more than it demands muscular
effort, or at least machinery so far performs the work of the massive
muscles, that greater stress is laid upon fine and exact movements
necessarily involving nervous strain. But these movements are exactly
of the type to which the muscles of a growing boy least readily
respond, quite as the admonition to be accurate and faithful is that
which appeals the least to his big primitive emotions. The demands
made upon his eyes are complicated and trivial, the use of his muscles
is fussy and monotonous, the relation between cause and effect is
remote and obscure. Apparently no one is concerned as to what may be
done to aid him in this process and to relieve it of its dullness and
difficulty, to mitigate its strain and harshness.
Perhaps never before have young people been expected to work from
motives so detached from direct emotional incentive. Never has the age
of marriage been so long delayed; never has the work of youth been so
separated from the family life and the public opinion of the
community. Education alone can repair these losses. It alone has the
power of organizing a child's activities with some reference to the
life he will later lead and of giving him a clue as to what to select
and what to eliminate when he comes into contact with contemporary
social and industrial conditions. And until educators take hold of
the situation, the rest of the community is powerless.
In vast regions of the city which are completely dominated by the
factory, it is as if the development of industry had outrun all the
educational and social arrangements.
The revolt of youth against uniformity and the necessity of following
careful directions laid down by some one else, many times results in
such nervous irritability that the youth, in spite of all sorts of
prudential reasons, "throws up his job," if only to get outside the
factory walls into the freer street, just as the narrowness of the
school inclosure induces many a boy to jump the fence.
When the boy is on the street, however, and is "standing around on the
corner" with the gang to which he mysteriously attaches himself, he
finds the difficulties of direct untrammeled action almost as great
there as they were in the factory, but for an entirely different set
of reasons. The necessity so strongly felt in the factory for an
outlet to his sudden and furious bursts of energy, his overmastering
desire to prove that he could do things "without being bossed all the
time," finds little chance for expression, for he discovers that in
whatever really active pursuit he tries to engage, he is promptly
suppressed by the police. After several futile attempts at
self-expression, he returns to his street corner subdued and so far
discouraged that when he has the next impulse to vigorous action he
concludes that it is of no use, and sullenly settles back into
inactivity. He thus learns to persuade himself that it is better to do
nothing, or, as the psychologist would say, "to inhibit his motor
impulses."
When the same boy, as an adult workman, finds himself confronted with
an unusual or an untoward condition in his work, he will fall back
into this habit of inhibition, of making no effort toward independent
action. When "slack times" come, he will be the workman of least
value, and the first to be dismissed, calmly accepting his position in
the ranks of the unemployed because it will not be so unlike the many
hours of idleness and vacuity to which he was accustomed as a boy. No
help having been extended to him in the moment of his first irritable
revolt against industry, his whole life has been given a twist toward
idleness and futility. He has not had the chance of recovery which the
school system gives a like rebellious boy in a truant school.
The unjustifiable lack of educational supervision during the first
years of factory work makes it quite impossible for the modern
educator to offer any real assistance to young people during that
trying transitional period between school and industry. The young
people themselves who fail to conform can do little but rebel against
the entire situation, and the expressions of revolt roughly divide
themselves into three classes. The first, resulting in idleness, may
be illustrated from many a sad story of a boy or a girl who has spent
in the first spurt of premature and uninteresting work, all the energy
which should have carried them through years of steady endeavor.
I recall a boy who had worked steadily for two years as a helper in a
smelting establishment, and had conscientiously brought home all his
wages, one night suddenly announcing to his family that he "was too
tired and too hot to go on." As no amount of persuasion could make
him alter his decision, the family finally threatened to bring him
into the Juvenile Court on a charge of incorrigibility, whereupon the
boy disappeared and such efforts as the family have been able to make
in the two years since, have failed to find him. They are convinced
that "he is trying a spell of tramping" and wish that they "had let
him have a vacation the first summer when he wanted it so bad." The
boy may find in the rough outdoor life the healing which a wise
physician would recommend for nervous exhaustion, although the tramp
experiment is a perilous one.
This revolt against factory monotony is sometimes closely allied to
that "moral fatigue" which results from assuming responsibility
prematurely. I recall the experience of a Scotch girl of eighteen who,
with her older sister, worked in a candy factory, their combined
earnings supporting a paralytic father. The older girl met with an
accident involving the loss of both eyes, and the financial support of
the whole family devolved upon the younger girl, who worked hard and
conscientiously for three years, supplementing her insufficient
factory wages by evening work at glove making. In the midst of this
devotion and monotonous existence she made the acquaintance of a girl
who was a chorus singer in a cheap theater and the contrast between
her monotonous drudgery and the glitter of the stage broke down her
allegiance to her helpless family. She left the city, absolutely
abandoning the kindred to whom she had been so long devoted, and
announced that if they all starved she would "never go into a factory
again." Every effort failed to find her after the concert troupe left
Milwaukee and although the pious Scotch father felt that "she had been
ensnared by the Devil," and had brought his "gray hairs in sorrow to
the grave," I could not quite dismiss the case with this simple
explanation, but was haunted by all sorts of social implications.
The second line of revolt manifests itself in an attempt to make up
for the monotony of the work by a constant change from one occupation
to another. This is an almost universal experience among thousands of
young people in their first impact with the industrial world.
The startling results of the investigation undertaken in Massachusetts
by the Douglas Commission showed how casual and demoralizing the first
few years of factory life become to thousands of unprepared boys and
girls; in their first restlessness and maladjustment they change from
one factory to another, working only for a few weeks or months in
each, and they exhibit no interest in any of them save for the amount
of wages paid. At the end of their second year of employment many of
them are less capable than when they left school and are actually
receiving less wages. The report of the commission made clear that
while the two years between fourteen and sixteen were most valuable
for educational purposes, they were almost useless for industrial
purposes, that no trade would receive as an apprentice a boy under
sixteen, that no industry requiring skill and workmanship could
utilize these untrained children and that they not only demoralized
themselves, but in a sense industry itself.
An investigation of one thousand tenement children in New York who
had taken out their "working papers" at the age of fourteen, reported
that during the first working year a third of them had averaged six
places each. These reports but confirm the experience of those of us
who live in an industrial neighborhood and who continually see these
restless young workers, in fact there are moments when this constant
changing seems to be all that saves them from the fate of those other
children who hold on to a monotonous task so long that they finally
incapacitate themselves for all work. It often seems to me an
expression of the instinct of self-preservation, as in the case of a
young Swedish boy who during a period of two years abandoned one piece
of factory work after another, saying "he could not stand it," until
in the chagrin following the loss of his ninth place he announced his
intention of leaving the city and allowing his mother and little
sisters to shift for themselves. At this critical juncture a place was
found for him as lineman in a telephone company; climbing telephone
poles and handling wires apparently supplied him with the elements of
outdoor activity and danger which were necessary to hold his
interest, and he became the steady support of his family.
But while we know the discouraging effect of idleness upon the boy who
has thrown up his job and refuses to work again, and we also know the
restlessness and lack of discipline resulting from the constant change
from one factory to another, there is still a third manifestation of
maladjustment of which one's memory and the Juvenile Court records
unfortunately furnish many examples. The spirit of revolt in these
cases has led to distinct disaster. Two stories will perhaps be
sufficient in illustration although they might be multiplied
indefinitely from my own experience.
A Russian girl who went to work at an early age in a factory, pasting
labels on mucilage bottles, was obliged to surrender all her wages to
her father who, in return, gave her only the barest necessities of
life. In a fit of revolt against the monotony of her work, and "that
nasty sticky stuff," she stole from her father $300 which he had
hidden away under the floor of his kitchen, and with this money she
ran away to a neighboring city for a spree, having first bought
herself the most gorgeous clothing a local department store could
supply. Of course, this preposterous beginning could have but one
ending and the child was sent to the reform school to expiate not only
her own sins but the sins of those who had failed to rescue her from a
life of grinding monotony which her spirit could not brook.
"I know the judge thinks I am a bad girl," sobbed a poor little
prisoner, put under bonds for threatening to kill her lover, "but I
have only been bad for one week and before that I was good for six
years. I worked every day in Blank's factory and took home all my
wages to keep the kids in school. I met this fellow in a dance hall. I
just had to go to dances sometimes after pushing down the lever of my
machine with my right foot and using both my arms feeding it for ten
hours a day--nobody knows how I felt some nights. I agreed to go away
with this man for a week but when I was ready to go home he tried to
drive me out on the street to earn money for him and, of course, I
threatened to kill him--any decent girl would," she concluded, as
unconscious of the irony of the reflection as she was of the
connection between her lurid week and her monotonous years.
Knowing as educators do that thousands of the city youth will enter
factory life at an age as early as the state law will permit;
instructed as the modern teacher is as to youth's requirements for a
normal mental and muscular development, it is hard to understand the
apathy in regard to youth's inevitable experience in modern industry.
Are the educators, like the rest of us, so caught in admiration of the
astonishing achievements of modern industry that they forget the
children themselves?
A Scotch educator who recently visited America considered it very
strange that with a remarkable industrial development all about us,
affording such amazing educational opportunities, our schools should
continually cling to a past which did not fit the American
temperament, was not adapted to our needs, and made no vigorous pull
upon our faculties. He concluded that our educators, overwhelmed by
the size and vigor of American industry, were too timid to seize upon
the industrial situation, and to extract its enormous educational
value. He lamented that this lack of courage and initiative failed not
only to fit the child for an intelligent and conscious participation
in industrial life, but that it was reflected in the industrial
development itself; that industry had fallen back into old habits, and
repeated traditional mistakes until American cities exhibited
stupendous extensions of the medievalisms in the traditional Ghetto,
and of the hideousness in the Black Country of Lancashire.
He contended that this condition is the inevitable result of
separating education from contemporary life. Education becomes unreal
and far fetched, while industry becomes ruthless and materialistic. In
spite of the severity of the indictment, one much more severe and well
deserved might have been brought against us. He might have accused us
not only of wasting, but of misusing and of trampling under foot the
first tender instincts and impulses which are the source of all charm
and beauty and art, because we fail to realize that by premature
factory work, for which the youth is unprepared, society perpetually
extinguishes that variety and promise, that bloom of life, which is
the unique possession of the young. He might have told us that our
cities would continue to be traditionally cramped and dreary until we
comprehend that youth alone has the power to bring to reality the
vision of the "Coming City of Mankind, full of life, full of the
spirit of creation."
A few educational experiments are carried on in Cincinnati, in Boston
and in Chicago, in which the leaders of education and industry unite
in a common aim and purpose. A few more are carried on by trade
unionists, who in at least two of the trades are anxious to give to
their apprentices and journeymen the wider culture afforded by the
"capitalistic trade schools" which they suspect of preparing
strike-breakers; still a few other schools have been founded by public
spirited citizens to whom the situation has become unendurable, and
one or two more such experiments are attached to the public school
system itself. All of these schools are still blundering in method and
unsatisfactory in their results, but a certain trade school for
girls, in New York, which is preparing young girls of fourteen for the
sewing trade, already so overcrowded and subdivided that there remains
very little education for the worker, is conquering this difficult
industrial situation by equipping each apprentice with "the informing
mind." If a child goes into a sewing factory with a knowledge of the
work she is doing in relation to the finished product; if she is
informed concerning the material she is manipulating and the processes
to which it is subjected; if she understands the design she is
elaborating in its historic relation to art and decoration, her daily
life is lifted from drudgery to one of self-conscious activity, and
her pleasure and intelligence is registered in her product.
I remember a little colored girl in this New York school who was
drawing for the pattern she was about to embroider, a carefully
elaborated acanthus leaf. Upon my inquiry as to the design, she
replied: "It is what the Egyptians used to put on everything, because
they saw it so much growing in the Nile; and then the Greeks copied
it, and sometimes you can find it now on the buildings downtown." She
added, shyly: "Of course, I like it awfully well because it was first
used by people living in Africa where the colored folks come from."
Such a reasonable interest in work not only reacts upon the worker,
but is, of course, registered in the product itself. Such genuine
pleasure is in pitiful contrast to the usual manifestation of the play
spirit as it is found in the factories, where, at the best, its
expression is illicit and often is attended with great danger.
There are many touching stories by which this might be illustrated.
One of them comes from a large steel mill of a boy of fifteen whose
business it was to throw a lever when a small tank became filled with
molton metal. During the few moments when the tank was filling it was
his foolish custom to catch the reflection of the metal upon a piece
of looking-glass, and to throw the bit of light into the eyes of his
fellow workmen. Although an exasperated foreman had twice dispossessed
him of his mirror, with a third fragment he was one day flicking the
gloom of the shop when the neglected tank overflowed, almost instantly
burning off both his legs. Boys working in the stock yards, during
their moments of wrestling and rough play, often slash each other
painfully with the short knives which they use in their work, but in
spite of this the play impulse is too irrepressible to be denied.
If educators could go upon a voyage of discovery into that army of
boys and girls who enter industry each year, what values might they
not discover; what treasures might they not conserve and develop if
they would direct the play instinct into the art impulse and utilize
that power of variation which industry so sadly needs. No force will
be sufficiently powerful and widespread to redeem industry from its
mechanism and materialism save the freed power in every single
individual.
In order to do this, however, we must go back a little over the
educational road to a training of the child's imagination, as well as
to his careful equipment with a technique. A little child makes a very
tottering house of cardboard and calls it a castle. The important
feature there lies in the fact that he has expressed a castle, and it
is not for his teacher to draw undue attention to the fact that the
corners are not well put together, but rather to listen to and to
direct the story which centers about this effort at creative
expression. A little later, however, it is clearly the business of the
teacher to call attention to the quality of the dovetailing in which
the boy at the manual training bench is engaged, for there is no value
in dovetailing a box unless it is accurately done. At one point the
child's imagination is to be emphasized, and at another point his
technique is important--and he will need both in the industrial life
ahead of him.
There is no doubt that there is a third period, when the boy is not
interested in the making of a castle, or a box, or anything else,
unless it appears to him to bear a direct relation to the future;
unless it has something to do with earning a living. At this later
moment he is chiefly anxious to play the part of a man and to take his
place in the world. The fact that a boy at fourteen wants to go out
and earn his living makes that the moment when he should be educated
with reference to that interest, and the records of many high schools
show that if he is not thus educated, he bluntly refuses to be
educated at all. The forces pulling him to "work" are not only the
overmastering desire to earn money and be a man, but, if the family
purse is small and empty, include also his family loyalty and
affection, and over against them, we at present place nothing but a
vague belief on the part of his family and himself that education is a
desirable thing and may eventually help him "on in the world." It is
of course difficult to adapt education to this need; it means that
education must be planned so seriously and definitely for those two
years between fourteen and sixteen that it will be actual trade
training so far as it goes, with attention given to the condition
under which money will be actually paid for industrial skill; but at
the same time, that the implications, the connections, the relations
to the industrial world, will be made clear. A man who makes, year
after year, but one small wheel in a modern watch factory, may, if his
education has properly prepared him, have a fuller life than did the
old watchmaker who made a watch from beginning to end. It takes
thirty-nine people to make a coat in a modern tailoring establishment,
yet those same thirty-nine people might produce a coat in a spirit of
"team work" which would make the entire process as much more
exhilarating than the work of the old solitary tailor, as playing in a
baseball nine gives more pleasure to a boy than that afforded by a
solitary game of hand ball on the side of the barn. But it is quite
impossible to imagine a successful game of baseball in which each
player should be drilled only in his own part, and should know nothing
of the relation of that part to the whole game. In order to make the
watch wheel, or the coat collar interesting, they must be connected
with the entire product--must include fellowship as well as the
pleasures arising from skilled workmanship and a cultivated
imagination.
When all the young people working in factories shall come to use their
faculties intelligently, and as a matter of course to be interested in
what they do, then our manufactured products may at last meet the
demands of a cultivated nation, because they will be produced by
cultivated workmen. The machine will not be abandoned by any means,
but will be subordinated to the intelligence of the man who
manipulates it, and will be used as a tool. It may come about in time
that an educated public will become inexpressibly bored by
manufactured objects which reflect absolutely nothing of the minds of
the men who made them, that they may come to dislike an object made by
twelve unrelated men, even as we do not care for a picture which has
been painted by a dozen different men, not because we have enunciated
a theory in regard to it, but because such a picture loses all its
significance and has no meaning or message. We need to apply the same
principle but very little further until we shall refuse to be
surrounded by manufactured objects which do not represent some gleam
of intelligence on the part of the producer. Hundreds of people have
already taken that step so far as all decoration and ornament are
concerned, and it would require but one short step more. In the
meantime we are surrounded by stupid articles which give us no
pleasure, and the young people producing them are driven into all
sorts of expedients in order to escape work which has been made
impossible because all human interest has been extracted from it. That
this is not mere theory may be demonstrated by the fact that many
times the young people may be spared the disastrous effects of this
third revolt against the monotony of industry if work can be found for
them in a place where the daily round is less grinding and presents
more variety. Fortunately, in every city there are places outside of
factories where occupation of a more normal type of labor may be
secured, and often a restless boy can be tided over this period if he
is put into one of these occupations. The experience in every boys'
club can furnish illustrations of this.
A factory boy who had been brought into the Juvenile Court many times
because of his persistent habit of borrowing the vehicles of
physicians as they stood in front of houses of patients, always
meaning to "get back before the doctor came out," led a contented and
orderly life after a place had been found for him as a stable boy in
a large livery establishment where his love for horses could be
legitimately gratified.
Still another boy made the readjustment for himself in spite of the
great physical suffering involved. He had lost both legs at the age of
seven, "flipping cars." When he went to work at fourteen with two good
cork legs, which he vainly imagined disguised his disability, his
employer kindly placed him where he might sit throughout the entire
day, and his task was to keep tally on the boxes constantly hoisted
from the warehouse into cars. The boy found this work so dull that he
insisted upon working in the yards, where the cars were being loaded
and switched. He would come home at night utterly exhausted, more from
the extreme nervous tension involved in avoiding accidents than from
the tremendous exertion, and although he would weep bitterly from
sheer fatigue, nothing could induce him to go back to the duller and
safer job. Fortunately he belonged to a less passionate race than the
poor little Italian girl in the Hull-House neighborhood who recently
battered her head against the wall so long and so vigorously that she
had to be taken to a hospital because of her serious injuries. So
nearly as dull "grown-ups" could understand, it had been an hysterical
revolt against factory work by day and "no fun in the evening."
America perhaps more than any other country in the world can
demonstrate what applied science has accomplished for industry; it has
not only made possible the utilization of all sorts of unpromising raw
material, but it has tremendously increased the invention and
elaboration of machinery. The time must come, however, if indeed the
moment has not already arrived, when applied science will have done
all that it can do for the development of machinery. It may be that
machines cannot be speeded up any further without putting unwarranted
strain upon the nervous system of the worker; it may be that further
elaboration will so sacrifice the workman who feeds the machine that
industrial advance will lie not in the direction of improvement in
machinery, but in the recovery and education of the workman. This
refusal to apply "the art of life" to industry continually drives out
of it many promising young people. Some of them, impelled by a
creative impulse which will not be denied, avoid industry altogether
and demand that their ambitious parents give them lessons in "china
painting" and "art work," which clutters the overcrowded parlor of the
more prosperous workingman's home with useless decorated plates, and
handpainted "drapes," whereas the plates upon the table and the rugs
upon the floor used daily by thousands of weary housewives are totally
untouched by the beauty and variety which this ill-directed art
instinct might have given them had it been incorporated into industry.
I could cite many instances of high-spirited young people who suffer a
veritable martyrdom in order to satisfy their artistic impulse.
A young girl of fourteen whose family had for years displayed a
certain artistic aptitude, the mother having been a singer and the
grandmother, with whom the young girl lived, a clever worker in
artificial flowers, had her first experience of wage earning in a box
factory. She endured it only for three months, and then gave up her
increasing wage in exchange for $1.50 a week which she earns by making
sketches of dresses, cloaks and hats for the advertisements of a
large department store.
A young Russian girl of my acquaintance starves on the irregular pay
which she receives for her occasional contributions to the Sunday
newspapers--meanwhile writing her novel--rather than return to the
comparatively prosperous wages of a necktie factory which she regards
with horror. Another girl washes dishes every evening in a cheap
boarding house in order to secure the leisure in which to practise her
singing lessons, rather than to give them up and return to her former
twelve-dollar-a-week job in an electrical factory.
The artistic expression in all these cases is crude, but the young
people are still conscious of that old sacrifice of material interest
which art has ever demanded of those who serve her and which doubtless
brings its own reward. That the sacrifice is in vain makes it all the
more touching and is an indictment of the educator who has failed to
utilize the art instinct in industry.
Something of the same sort takes place among many lads who find little
opportunity in the ordinary factories to utilize the "instinct for
workmanship"; or, among those more prosperous young people who
establish "studios" and "art shops," in which, with a vast expenditure
of energy, they manufacture luxurious articles.
The educational system in Germany is deliberately planned to sift out
and to retain in the service of industry, all such promising young
people. The method is as yet experimental, and open to many
objections, but it is so far successful that "Made in Germany" means
made by a trained artisan and in many cases by a man working with the
freed impulse of the artist.
The London County Council is constantly urging plans which may secure
for the gifted children in the Board Schools support in Technological
institutes. Educators are thus gradually developing the courage and
initiative to conserve for industry the young worker himself so that
his mind, his power of variation, his art instinct, his intelligent
skill, may ultimately be reflected in the industrial product. That
would imply that industry must be seized upon and conquered by those
educators, who now either avoid it altogether by taking refuge in the
caves of classic learning or beg the question by teaching the tool
industry advocated by Ruskin and Morris in their first reaction
against the present industrial system. It would mean that educators
must bring industry into "the kingdom of the mind"; and pervade it
with the human spirit.
The discovery of the labor power of youth was to our age like the
discovery of a new natural resource, although it was merely incidental
to the invention of modern machinery and the consequent subdivision of
labor. In utilizing it thus ruthlessly we are not only in danger of
quenching the divine fire of youth, but we are imperiling industry
itself when we venture to ignore these very sources of beauty, of
variety and of suggestion.