WHAT IT IS THAT MAKES BOYS BAD
I am reminded, in trying to show up the causes that go to make children
bad, of the experience of a certain sanitary inspector who was laboring
with the proprietor of a seven-cent lodging-house to make him whitewash
and clean up. The man had reluctantly given in to several of the
inspector's demands; but, as they kept piling up, his irritation grew,
until at the mention of clean sheets he lost all patience and said, with
bitter contempt, "Well! you needn't tink dem's angels!"
They were not--those lodgers of his--they were tramps. Neither are the
children of the street angels. If, once in a while, they act more like
little devils the opportunities we have afforded them, as I have tried to
show, hardly give us the right to reproach them. They are not the kind of
opportunities to make angels. And yet, looking the hundreds of boys in the
Juvenile Asylum over, all of whom were supposed to be there because they
were bad (though, as I had occasion to ascertain, that was a mistake--it
was the parents that were bad in some cases), I was struck by the fact
that they were anything but a depraved lot. Except as to their clothes and
their manners, which were the manners of the street, they did not seem to
be very different in looks from a like number of boys in any public
school. Fourth of July was just then at hand, and when I asked the
official who accompanied me how they proposed to celebrate it, he said
that they were in the habit of marching in procession up Eleventh Avenue
to Fort George, across to Washington Bridge, and all about the
neighborhood, to a grove where speeches were made. Remembering the iron
bars and high fences I had seen, I said something about it being unsafe to
let a thousand young prisoners go at large in that way. The man looked at
me in some bewilderment before he understood.
"Bless you, no!" he said, when my meaning dawned upon him. "If any one of
them was to run away that day he would be in eternal disgrace with all the
rest. It is a point of honor with them to deserve it when they are
trusted. Often we put a boy on duty outside, when he could walk off, if he
chose, just as well as not; but he will come in in the evening, as
straight as a string, only, perhaps, to twist his bed-clothes into a rope
that very night and let himself down from a third-story window, at the
risk of breaking his neck. Boys will be boys, you know."
But it struck me that boys whose honor could be successfully appealed to
in that way were rather the victims than the doers of a grievous wrong,
being in that place, no matter if they _had_ stolen. It was a case of
misdirection, or no direction at all, of their youthful energies. There
was one little fellow in the Asylum band who was a living illustration of
this. I watched him blow his horn with a supreme effort to be heard above
the rest, growing redder and redder in the face, until the perspiration
rolled off him in perfect sheets, the veins stood out swollen and blue and
it seemed as if he must burst the next minute. He was a tremendous
trumpeter. I was glad when it was over, and patted him on the head,
telling him that if he put as much vim into all he had to do, as he did
into his horn, he would come to something great yet. Then it occurred to
me to ask him what he was there for.
"'Cause I was lazy and played hookey," he said, and joined in the laugh
his answer raised. The idea of that little body, that fairly throbbed with
energy, being sent to prison for laziness was too absurd for anything.
The report that comes from the Western Agency of the Asylum, through which
the boys are placed out on farms, that the proportion of troublesome
children is growing larger does not agree with the idea of laziness
either, but well enough with the idleness of the street, which is what
sends nine-tenths of the boys to the Asylum. Satan finds plenty of
mischief for the idle hands of these lads to do. The one great point is to
give them something to do--something they can see the end of, yet that
will keep them busy right along. The more ignorant the child, the more
urgent this rule, the shorter and simpler the lesson must be. Over in the
Catholic Protectory, where they get the most ignorant boys, they
appreciate this to the extent of encouraging the boys to a game of Sunday
base-ball rather than see them idle even for the briefest spell. Of the
practical wisdom of their course there can be no question.
"I have come to the conclusion," said a well-known educator on a recent
occasion, "that much of crime is a question of athletics." From over the
sea the Earl of Meath adds his testimony: "Three fourths of the youthful
rowdyism of large towns is owing to the stupidity, and, I may add,
cruelty, of the ruling powers in not finding some safety-valve for the
exuberant energies of the boys and girls of their respective cities." For
our neglect to do so in New York we are paying heavily in the maintenance
of these costly reform schools. I spoke of the chance for romping and
play where the poor children crowd. In a Cherry Street hall-way I came
across this sign in letters a foot long: "No ball-playing, dancing,
card-playing, and no persons but tenants allowed in the yard." It was a
five-story tenement, swarming with children, and there was another just as
big across that yard. Out in the street the policeman saw to it that the
ball-playing at least was stopped, and as for the dancing, that, of
course, was bound to collect a crowd, the most heinous offence known to
him as a preserver of the peace. How the peace was preserved by such means
I saw on the occasion of my discovering that sign. The business that took
me down there was a murder in another tenement just like it. A young man,
hardly more than a boy, was killed in the course of a midnight
"can-racket" on the roof, in which half the young people in the block had
a hand night after night. It was _their_ outlet for the "exuberant
energies" of their natures. The safety-valve was shut, with the landlord
and the policeman holding it down.
It is when the wrong outlet has thus been forced that the right and
natural one has to be reopened with an effort as the first condition of
reclaiming the boy. The play in him has all run to "toughness," and has
first to be restored. "We have no great hope of a boy's reformation,"
writes Mr. William F. Round, of the Burnham Industrial Farm, to a friend
who has shown me his letter, "till he takes an active part and interest in
out-door amusements. Plead with all your might for play-grounds for the
city waifs and school-children. When the lungs are freely expanded, the
blood coursing with a bound through all veins and arteries, the whole mind
and body in a state of high emulation in wholesome play, there is no time
or place for wicked thought or consequent wicked action and the body is
growing every moment more able to help in the battle against temptation
when it shall come at other times and places. Next time another transit
company asks a franchise make them furnish tickets to the parks and
suburbs to all school-children on all holidays and Saturdays, the same to
be given out in school for regular attendance, as a method of health
promotion and a preventive of truancy." Excellent scheme! If we could only
make them. It is five years and over now since we made them pass a law at
Albany appropriating a million dollars a year for the laying out of small
parks in the most crowded tenement districts, in the Mulberry Street Bend
for instance, and practically we stand to-day where we stood then. The
Mulberry Street Bend is still there, with no sign of a park or play-ground
other than in the gutter. When I asked, a year ago, why this was so, I was
told by the Counsel to the Corporation that it was because "not much
interest had been taken" by the previous administration in the matter. Is
it likely that a corporation that runs a railroad to make money could be
prevailed upon to take more interest in a proposition to make it surrender
part of its profits than the city's sworn officers in their bounden duty?
Yet let anyone go and see for himself what effect such a park has in a
crowded tenement district. Let him look at Tompkins Square Park as it is
to-day and compare the children that skip among the trees and lawns and
around the band-stand with those that root in the gutters only a few
blocks off. That was the way they looked in Tompkins Square twenty years
ago when the square was a sand-lot given up to rioting and disorder. The
police had their hands full then. I remember being present when they had
to take the square by storm more than once, and there is at least one
captain on the force to-day who owes his promotion to the part he took and
the injuries he suffered in one of those battles. To-day it is as quiet
and orderly a neighborhood as any in the city. Not a squeak has been heard
about "bread or blood" since those trees were planted and the lawns and
flower-beds laid out. It is not all the work of the missions, the
kindergartens, and Boys' clubs and lodging-houses, of which more anon; nor
even the larger share. The park did it, exactly as the managers of the
Juvenile Asylum appealed to the sense of honor in their prisoners. It
appealed with its trees and its grass and its birds to the sense of
decency and of beauty, undeveloped but not smothered, in the children, and
the whole neighborhood responded. One can go around the whole square that
covers two big blocks, nowadays, and not come upon a single fight. I
should like to see anyone walk that distance in Mulberry Street without
running across half a dozen.
Thus far the street and its idleness as factors in making criminals of the
boys. Of the factory I have spoken. Certainly it is to be preferred to the
street, if the choice must be between the two. Its offence is that it
makes a liar of the boy and keeps him in ignorance, even of a useful
trade, thus blazing a wide path for him straight to the prison gate. The
school does not come to the rescue; the child must come to the school, and
even then is not sure of a welcome. The trades' unions do their worst for
the boy by robbing him of the slim chance to learn a trade which the
factory left him. Of the tenement I have said enough. Apart from all other
considerations and influences, as the destroyer of character and
individuality everywhere, it is the wickedest of all the forces that
attack the defenceless child. The tenements are increasing in number, and
so is "the element that becomes criminal because of lack of individuality
and the self-respect that comes with it."[17]
I am always made to think in connection with this subject of a story told
me by a bright little woman of her friend's kittens. There was a litter of
them in the house and a jealous terrier dog to boot, whose one aim in life
was to get rid of its mewing rivals. Out in the garden where the children
played there was a sand-heap and the terrier's trick was to bury alive in
the sand any kitten it caught unawares. The children were constantly
rushing to the rescue and unearthing their pets; on the day when my friend
was there on a visit they were too late. The first warning of the tragedy
in the garden came to the ladies when one of the children rushed in, all
red and excited, with bulging eyes. "There," she said, dropping the dead
kitten out of her apron before them, "a perfectly good cat spoiled!"
Perfectly good children, as good as any on the Avenue, are spoiled every
day by the tenement; only we have not done with them then, as the terrier
had with the kitten. There is still posterity to reckon with.
What this question of heredity amounts to, whether in the past or in the
future, I do not know. I have not had opportunity enough of observing. No
one has that I know of. Those who have had the most disagree in their
conclusions, or have come to none. I have known numerous instances of
criminality, running apparently in families for generations, but there was
always the desperate environment as the unknown factor in the make-up.
Whether that bore the greatest share of the blame, or whether the
reformation of the criminal to be effective should have begun with his
grandfather, I could not tell. Besides, there was always the chance that
the great-grandfather, or some one still farther back, of whom all trace
was lost, might have been a paragon of virtue, even if his descendant was
a thief, and so there was no telling just where to begin. In general I am
inclined to think with such practical philanthropists as Superintendent
Barnard, of the Five Points House of Industry, the Manager of the
Children's Aid Society, Superintendent E. Fellows Jenkins, of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and Mr. Israel C. Jones, who
for more than thirty years was in charge of the House of Refuge, that the
bugbear of heredity is not nearly as formidable as we have half taught
ourselves to think. It is rather a question of getting hold of the child
early enough before the evil influences surrounding him have got a firm
grip on him. Among a mass of evidence quoted in support of this belief,
perhaps this instance, related by Superintendent Jones in _The
Independent_ last March, is as convincing as any:
Thirty years ago there was a depraved family living adjacent to what
is now a part of the city of New York. The mother was not only
dishonest, but exceedingly intemperate, wholly neglectful of her
duties as a mother, and frequently served terms in jail until she
finally died. The father was also dissipated and neglectful. It was a
miserable existence for the children.
Two of the little boys, in connection with two other boys in the
neighborhood, were arrested, tried, and found guilty of entering a
house in the daytime and stealing. In course of time both of these
boys were indentured. One remained in his place and the other left
for another part of the country, where he died. He was a reputable
lad.
The first boy, in one way and another, got a few pennies together
with which he purchased books. After a time he proposed to his master
that he be allowed to present himself for examination as a teacher.
The necessary consent was given, he presented himself, and was
awarded a "grade A" certificate.
Two years from that time he came to the House of Refuge, as proud as
a man could be, and exhibited to me his certificate. He then entered
a law office, diligently pursued his studies, and was admitted to the
bar. He was made a judge, and is now chief magistrate of the court in
the city where he lives.
His sister, a little girl, used to come to the Refuge with her
mother, wearing nothing but a thin cloak in very cold weather, almost
perishing with the cold. As soon as this young man got on his feet he
rescued the little girl. He placed her in a school; she finally
graduated from the Normal School, and to-day holds an excellent
position in the schools in the State where she lives.
The records of the three reformatory institutions before mentioned throw
their own light upon the question of what makes criminals of the young. At
the Elmira Reformatory, of more than five thousand prisoners only a little
over one per cent. were shown to have kept good company prior to their
coming there. One and a half per cent. are put down under this head as
"doubtful," while the character of association is recorded for 41.2 per
cent. as "not good," and for 55.9 per cent. as "positively bad."
Three-fourths possessed no culture or only the slightest. As to moral
sense, 42.6 per cent. had absolutely none, 35 per cent. "possibly some."
Only 7.6 per cent. came from good homes. Of the rest 39.8 per cent. had
homes that are recorded as "fair only," and 52.6 per cent. downright bad
homes; 4.8 per cent. had pauper, and 76.8 per cent. poor parents; 38.4 per
cent. of the prisoners had drunken parents, and 13 per cent. parents of
doubtful sobriety. Of more than twenty-two thousand inmates of the
Juvenile Asylum in thirty-nine years one-fourth had either a drunken
father or mother, or both. At the Protectory the percentage of drunkenness
in parents was not quite one-fifth among over three thousand children
cared for in the institution last year.
There is never any lack of trashy novels and cheap shows in New York, and
the children who earn money selling newspapers or otherwise take to them
as ducks do to water. They fall in well with the ways of the street that
are showy always, however threadbare may be the cloth. As for that, it is
simply the cheap side of our national extravagance.
The cigarette, if not a cause, is at least the mean accessory of half the
mischief of the street. And I am not sure it is not a cause too. It is an
inexorable creditor that has goaded many a boy to stealing; for cigarettes
cost money, and they do not encourage industry. Of course there is a law
against the cigarette, or rather against the boy smoking it who is not old
enough to work--there is law in plenty, usually, if that would only make
people good. It don't in the matter of the cigarette. It helps make the
boy bad by adding the relish of law-breaking to his enjoyment of the
smoke. Nobody stops him.
The mania for gambling is all but universal. Every street child is a born
gambler; he has nothing to lose and all to win. He begins by "shooting
craps" in the street and ends by "chucking dice" in the saloon, two names
for the same thing, sure to lead to the same goal. By the time he has
acquired individual standing in the saloon, his long apprenticeship has
left little or nothing for him to learn of the bad it has to teach. Never
for his own sake is he turned away with the growler when he comes to have
it filled; once in a while for the saloon-keeper's, if that worthy
suspects in him a decoy and a "job." Just for the sake of the experiment,
not because I expected it to develop anything new, I chose at random,
while writing this chapter, a saloon in a tenement house district on the
East Side and posted a man, whom I could trust implicitly, at the door
with orders to count the children under age who went out and in with
beer-jugs in open defiance of law. Neither he nor I had ever been in or
even seen the saloon before. He reported as the result of three and a half
hours' watch at noon and in the evening a total of fourteen--ten boys and
a girl under ten years of age, and three girls between ten and fourteen
years, not counting a little boy who bought a bottle of ginger. It was a
cool, damp day; not a thirsty day, or the number would probably have been
twice as great. There was not the least concealment about the transaction
in any of the fourteen cases. The children were evidently old customers.
The law that failed to save the boy while there was time yet to make a
useful citizen of him provides the means of catching him when his training
begins to bear fruit that threatens the public peace. Then it is with the
same blundering disregard of common sense and common decency that marked
his prosecution as a truant that the half grown lad is dragged into a
police court and thrust into a prison-pen with hardened thieves and
criminals to learn the lessons they have to teach him. The one thing New
York needs most after a truant home is a special court for the trial of
youthful offenders only. I am glad to say that this want seems at last in
a way to be supplied. The last Legislature authorized the establishment of
such a court, and it may be that even as these pages see the light this
blot upon our city is about to be wiped out.
Lastly, but not least, the Church is to blame for deserting the poor in
their need. It is an old story that the churches have moved uptown with
the wealth and fashion, leaving the poor crowds to find their way to
heaven as best they could, and that the crowds have paid them back in
their own coin by denying that they, the churches, knew the way at all.
The Church has something to answer for; but it is a healthy sign at least
that it is accepting the responsibility and professing anxiety to meet it.
In much of the best work done among the poor and for the poor it has
lately taken the lead, and it is not likely that any more of the churches
will desert the downtown field, with the approval of Christian men and
women at least.
* * * * *
Little enough of the light I promised in the opening chapter has struggled
through these pages so far. We have looked upon the dark side of the
picture; but there is a brighter. If the battle with ignorance, with
misery, and with vice has but just begun, if the army that confronts us is
strong, too strong, in numbers still and in malice--the gauntlet has been
thrown down, the war waged, and blows struck that tell. They augur
victory, for we have cut off the enemy's supplies and turned his flank. As
I showed in the case of the immigrant Jews and the Italians, we have
captured his recruits. With a firm grip on these, we may hope to win, for
the rest of the problem ought to be and _can_ be solved. With our own we
should be able to settle, if there is any virtue in our school and our
system of government. In this, as in all things, the public conscience
must be stirred before the community's machinery for securing justice can
move. That it has been stirred, profoundly and to useful purpose, the
multiplication in our day of charities for attaining the ends the law has
failed to reach, gives evidence. Their number is so great that mention can
be made here merely of a few of the most important and typical efforts
along the line. A register of all those that deal with the children
especially, as compiled by the Charity Organization Society, will be found
in an appendix to this book. Before we proceed to look at the results
achieved through endeavors to stop the waste down at the bottom by private
reinforcement of the public school, we will glance briefly at two of the
charities that have a plainer purpose--if I may so put it without
disparagement to the rest--that look upon the child merely as a child
worth saving for its own sake, because it is helpless and poor and
wretched. Both of them represent distinct departures in charitable work.
Both, to the everlasting credit of our city be it said, had their birth
here, and in this generation, and from New York their blessings have been
carried to the farthest lands. One is the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, known far and near now as the Children's Society,
whose strong and beneficent plan has been embodied in the structure of law
of half the civilized nations of the world. The other, always spoken of as
the "Fresh Air Fund," never had law or structural organization of any
kind, save the law of love, laid down on the Mount for all time; but the
life of that divine command throbs in it and has touched the heart of
mankind wherever its story has been told.