THE BOYS' CLUBS
But it is by the boys' club that the street is hardest hit. In the fight
for the lad it is that which knocks out the "gang," and with its own
weapon--the weapon of organization. That this has seemed heretofore so
little understood, even by some who have wielded the weapon valiantly, is
to me the strongest argument for the University Settlement plan, which
sends those who would be of service to the poor out to live among them, to
study their ways and their needs. Very soon they discover why the gang has
such a grip on the boy. It is because it responds to a real need of his
nature. The distinguishing characteristic of the American city boy is his
genius for organization. Whether it be in the air, in the soil, or in an
aptitude for self-government that springs naturally from the street, where
every little heathen is a law unto himself--one of them surely, for the
children of foreigners, who never learn to speak the language in which
their sons vote, exhibit it, if anything, more plainly than the
native-born--he has it, undeniably. Unbridled, allowed to run riot, it
results in the gang. Thwarted, it defeats all attempts to manage the boy.
Accepted as a friend, an ally, it is the indispensable key to his nature
in all efforts to reclaim him _en bloc_. Individuals may require different
methods of treatment. To the boys as a class the club is the pass-key.
There are many boys' clubs in New York now, and room for more. Some have
had great success; a few have failed. I venture the guess that the real
failure in a good many instances--most of them perhaps--was the failure to
trust the boys to rule themselves. I say _rule_. Rule there must be; boss
rule at that. That is the kind their fathers own, the fashion of the
slums. It is a case of rule or ruin, order or anarchy. To let the boys
have full swing would merely be to invite the street in to take charge of
the house, and only trouble would come of it. But the boss must be a
benevolent and very politic despot. The boy must have a fair chance. To
enlist him heart and soul, the opportunity must be given him to show that
he _can_ rule himself. And he will show it. He must be allowed to choose
his own leaders. His freedom of speech must not be abridged in debate by
any rule but that of parliamentary law. Ten to one he will not abuse it,
but will enforce that rule and submit to it as scrupulously as the most
punctilious of his elders. Let him be sure that his right to
self-government will not be interfered with, and he will voluntarily give
up the street and his gang. Three boys' clubs had been started by the
ladies of the College Settlement, on the principle of non-interference
within the few and simple rules of the house. The boys wrote their own
laws and maintained order with success. The street looked on, observant.
To the policeman it had opposed secret hostility or open war. But a social
order with the policeman eliminated was something worthy of approval. Its
offer of surrender was brought in form by a committee representing the
"Pleasure Club" in the toughest block of the neighborhood. "We will change
and have your kind of a club," was its message. Thus the fourth boys' club
of the Settlement was launched.
They have not all had so peaceful a beginning. Storm and stress of weather
have ushered in most of them. Each new one has cost something for
window-glass, and the mud of the neighborhood has had its inning before it
was forced to abdicate in favor of the club. It was so with the first that
was started, fourteen years ago, in Tompkins Square, that was then pretty
much all mud and given over to anarchy and disorder. In fact, it was the
mud that started the club. It flew so thick about the Wilson Mission, and
bespattered those who went out and in so freely that on a particularly
boisterous night the good missionary's wife decided that something must be
done. She did not send for a policeman. She had tried that before, but the
relief he brought lasted only while he was in sight. She went out and
confronted the mob herself. When it had yelled itself hoarse at her, she
sweetly asked it in to have some coffee and cakes. The mob stared,
breathless. Coffee and cakes for stones and mud! This was the Gospel in a
shape that was new and bewildering to Tompkins Square. The boys took
counsel among themselves. Visions of a big policeman behind the door
troubled the timid; but the more courageous were in favor of taking
chances. When they had sidled through the open door and no yell of
distress had betrayed treason within, the rest followed to find the coffee
and the cakes a solid and reassuring fact. No awkward questions were asked
about the broken windows, and the boys came out voting the "missionary
people" trumps, with a tinge of remorse, let us hope, for the reception
they had given them. There was no more mud-slinging after that, but the
boys fell naturally into neighborly ways with the house and its occupants,
and the proposition to be allowed to come in and "play games," came from
them when the occasional misunderstandings with the policeman on the post
made the street a ticklish play-ground. They were let in, and when certain
good people heard of what was going on in Tompkins Square, they sent down
chairs and tables and games, so that they might be made to feel at home.
Thus kindness conquered the street, and that winter was founded the first
boys' club here, or, for aught I know, anywhere. It is still the Boys'
Club of St. Mark's Place, and has grown more popular with the boys as the
years have passed. The record of last winter's doings over there show no
less than 2,757 boys on its roll of membership. The total attendance for
the year was 42,118, and the nightly average 218 boys, everyone of whom,
but for the coffee and cakes of that memorable night, might have been in
the streets slinging mud.
These doings include, nowadays, more than amusements and games. They made
the beginning, and they are yet the means of bringing the boys in. Once
there, as many as choose may join classes in writing, in book-keeping,
singing, and modelling; those who come merely for fun can have all they
want, on condition that they pay their respects to the wash-room and keep
within the bounds of the house. This they do with the aid of the
Superintendent and his assistants, who are chosen from among the bigger
boys and manage to preserve order marvellously well with very little show
of authority, all considered. The present Superintendent, Mr. Tyrrell,
still nurses the memory of a pair of black eyes he achieved in the
management of a "tough" club in Macdougal Street, where the boys came with
"billies" and pistols in their hip-pockets and taught him the secret of
club management in their own way. He puts it briefly this way: "It is just
a question of who is to be boss." That settled, things run smoothly
enough if the right party is on top.
In justice to the Tompkins Square boys, it should be said that the
question with them once for all was decided by the missionary's coffee and
cakes. If there was ever a passing disposition to forget it, "Pop's"
blighting eye helped the club to recall it in no time. Pop was the
doorkeeper, and a cripple, with a single mind. His one conscious purpose
in life was to keep order in the club, and he was blessed beyond most
mortals in attaining his ambition, if blessed in nothing else. Under
different auspices Pop might have been a rare bruiser, for, cripple that
he was, he was as strong as he was determined. Under the humanizing
influences that had conquered Tompkins Square he became one of the jewels
of the Boys' Club. If a round in the boxing-room threatened to wind up in
a "slugging match;" if luck had gone against a boy at the game of
"pot-cheese" until he felt that he must avenge his defeat by thumping his
adversary, or burst--Pop's stern glance transfixed the offender and
pointed him to the street, silent and meek, all the fight taken out of him
on the spot. The boys liked him for all that, perhaps just because they
were a little afraid of him, and when Pop died last summer, at the age of
twenty-two, after ten years of faithful attendance upon the basement-door
in St. Mark's Place, many an honest sob was gulped down at his funeral
behind a dirty and tattered cap. It is not the style for boys to cry in
Tompkins Square, but it _is_ the style to honor the memory of a dead
friend, and the Square never saw such a funeral as poor Pop's. The boys
chipped in and bought a gorgeous floral pillow for his coffin. So soft a
pillow Pop never knew in life.
Many a little account in the club's penny savings-bank was wiped out to
do Pop that last good turn; but the Superintendent cashed all demands
without a remonstrance. It is not often the money is drawn with so lofty a
purpose. Most of the depositors earn a few pennies selling newspapers or
doing errands. Their accounts are seldom large. In the aggregate they make
up quite a little sum, however. On a certain night last June, when I was
there, the bank contained almost a hundred dollars, in deposits ranging
from ten cents up to nearly five dollars. That week the Superintendent had
cashed sixteen books; the smallest had eleven cents to the credit of its
owner, who had been greatly taken with a mouth-organ and had withdrawn his
capital to buy it. Another had been saving up for a pair of boots. There
were a few capitalists in the club, who, when they got a dollar and a half
or two dollars together, transferred them to the Bowery Bank, where they
kept an account. It was easy to predict a successful business career for
these; not so with the general run, who were anything but steady
depositors, though the Superintendent gave them the credit that "very few
drew out their money till they had fifty cents in bank."
If the club has developed no great financiers, it has at least brought out
one latent genius in a young sculptor who has graduated from the modelling
class into an art museum, and was at last accounts preparing to go abroad
and spend his accumulated savings in the pursuit of further knowledge. A
short time before the visit of which I speak, a sudden crisis had made the
old class in "First Aid to the Injured" come out strong under
difficulties. A man had fallen down the basement-stairs into the
club-room, in an epileptic fit. It was three years since the boys had been
taught how to manage till the doctor came, in case of accident, but they
rose to the emergency with a jump. One unbuttoned the man's collar,
another slapped his hands, while a third yelled for a dollar to put
between his teeth. It had not occurred to the young surgeon who taught the
boys the first principles of his profession that dollars are rather
scarcer about Tompkins Square than on the Avenue, and this oversight came
near upsetting the good done by the rest of his teaching. There was no
dollar, not even a quarter, in the crowd, and the man lay gritting his
teeth until one of the rescuers, less literal but more practical than the
rest, suggested a pencil or a pocket-knife and broke the spell.
The mass of the boys come in nightly just to have a good time, and they
have it. They play at parchesi and messenger-boy with an ardor that leaves
them no time to care what visitors come and go. Like street boys
everywhere, they have a special fondness for games that admit the dice as
an element. Gambling is in the very air of the street, and is encouraged
in a hundred hidden ways the police rarely discover. Small candy stores
and grocery back-rooms harbor policy shops, lotteries, and regular
gambling hells, where the boys are taught how to buck the tiger on a penny
scale. In the club games the dice are robbed of their power for evil. It
is the environment here again that makes the difference. It has made a
vast difference in the boy who once stalked in, hat on the back of his
head, and grimy fists in his breeches' pockets until Pop's stony eye
caught his. Now he hangs up his hat upon entering, and goes to the
wash-room without waiting to be asked by the Superintendent if there is no
soap and water where he comes from. Then he gets the game or the book he
wants, surrendering his card as a check upon him until it is returned. It
is a precaution intended to identify the borrower in case of any damage
being done to the club's property. Such a thing as theft of book or game
is not known. In his business meetings the boy debates a point of order
with the skill and persistence of a trained politician. The aptitude for
politics sticks out all over him; but he has some lessons of that trade to
learn yet, to his harm. He has not mastered the trick of betraying a
friend. Any member of his club, the Superintendent feels sure, would stand
up for him and take a thrashing, if need be, should he be found in trouble
on his "beat." The "beats" that converge at St. Mark's Place and Avenue A
cover a good deal of ground. The lads come from a mile around to the Boys'
Club. Occasionally "the gang" calls in a body. One evening it is the
Thirteenth Street gang, the next the Eighth Street gang, and again a
detachment from Avenue A. By the first-comers it is sometimes possible to
foretell the particular complexion of the _clientele_ of the night; but
the business character of the gang is left outside on the sidewalk. Within
it is amiability itself, and gradually the rough corners are rubbed off,
old quarrels made up, feuds forgotten in the new companionship; the gang
is merged in the club, the victory over the street won.
[Illustration: A BOYS' CLUB READING-ROOM.]
At Christmas and at odd seasons, when the necessary talent can be secured,
entertainments are given in the club-room. Sometimes the boys themselves
furnish the entertainment, and then there is never a lack of critics in
the audience. There never is, for that matter. Mr. Evert Jansen Wendell,
who has been one of the boys' best friends, tells some amusing things
about his experience at such gatherings. Ice-cream is always intensely
popular as a side issue. Some of the boys never fail to wrap a piece up in
paper, or put it in the pocket without wrapping, to take home to the baby
sister or brother. Only one, to Mr. Wendell's knowledge, ever refused
ice-cream at an entertainment, and he explained, by way of apology, that
he had had the colic all day and his mother had told him "she'd lick him
if he took any." For a dignified missionary, who in telling the boys about
the spread of the Gospel in the Far East, proposed to illustrate heathen
customs by arraying himself in native costumes, brought along for the
purpose, it must have been embarrassing to a degree to be cautioned by the
audience to "keep his shirt on." But his mishap was as nothing to what
befell a young lady, the daughter of a wealthy and distinguished
financier, who with infinite trouble had persuaded her father to assist at
a certain festive occasion in her favorite club. He was an amateur with
the magic lantern, the boys' dear delight, and took it down to amuse them.
Mr. Wendell tells what followed:
The show was progressing famously, and the daughter was beaming with
pride, when one of the boys suddenly beckoned to her, and pointing to the
distinguished financier remarked:
"What der yer call dat bloke?"
"Whom do you mean?" asked the proud daughter, in a tone of much surprise,
being quite unaccustomed to hearing the distinguished financier described
as a "bloke."
"I mean dat bloke over dere, settin' off dem picturs!" replied the boy.
"What do you desire to know about him?" inquired the proud daughter, with
freezing dignity.
"I want ter know what yer call one of them fellers dat sets off picturs?"
persisted the boy.
"That gentleman," said the proud daughter, in her most impressive tone,
"is my father."
"Well!" said the boy, surveying her with supreme contempt, "don't yer know
yer own father's trade?"
The Boys' Club has had many followers. Some aim at teaching the lads
trades; others content themselves with trying to mend their manners, while
weaning them from the street and its coarse ways. Still others keep the
moral improvement in view as the immediate object, as it is the ultimate
end. Some follow the precedent of the Boys' Club in charging nothing for
admission; other club-organizers, like the managers of the College
Settlement, have found the weekly fee as necessary as home rule to
encourage self-help and self-respect in the boy, and to bring out the best
that is in him. Most of them have libraries suited to the children. The
College Settlement has a very excellent one of more than a thousand
volumes, which is in constant use. The managers report that the boys
clamor for history and science, popularly presented, as boys do
everywhere, while the girls mainly read fiction. The success of different
plans demonstrates the futility of some pet theories on this phase of
social economics at least, in the present state of knowledge on the
subject. The Boys' Club in St. Mark's Place, for instance, is kept
entirely free from religious influence of any sort, and their experience
has led many of its friends to believe that success is possible only in
that way. Probably in that particular case it might not have been possible
on anything like such a scale in any other way. The mud of Tompkins Square
testified loudly enough to that. On the other hand, the managers of some
very successful and active boys' clubs that have sprouted under Church
influence and with a strong Sunday-school bias, maintain with conviction
that theirs is the true and only plan. One holds that only in leaving
religion out is there hope of success; the other, that there can be none
without letting it in and keeping it ever in the foreground. Each sees
only half the truth. It is not the profession, or lack of profession, of a
principle, but the principle itself that is the condition of success--the
real sympathy and interest in the children that bids them come and be
welcome, that seeks to understand their needs and help them for their own
sake, a religion that "beats preaching" among the poor any day. It is a
question of men and of hearts, not of faith. And the poorer the children,
the more friendless and forsaken, the more readily do they respond to
approaches in that spirit. The testimony of a teacher in the Poverty Gap
play-ground, who went up town to take charge of one where the children
were better dressed and correspondingly "stuck up," was that in all their
rags and dirt the little toughs of the Gap were much the more approachable
and more promising to work with.
[Illustration: THE CARPENTER SHOP IN THE AVENUE C WORKING BOYS' CLUB.]
Naturally the Church might be expected to have found this out and to be
turning the knowledge to use. And it is so. All sects are reaching now for
the children in a healthy rivalry, in which the old cry about empty pews
is being smothered and forgotten. Of the twenty-six boys' clubs that are
down in the Charity Organization Society's directory, nineteen are under
church roofs or patronage, and of the remaining seven I know two at least
to have been founded by churches. The proportion is more than preserved, I
think, in the larger number not registered there, as in all the
philanthropic work of many kinds that is now going on among the children.
The Roman Catholics never lost sight of the fact that the little ones were
the life of the Church, which the Protestants have had, in a measure, to
rediscover. Their grip upon the children was never relaxed. The parochial
school has enabled them to maintain it without need of recourse to the
social shifts the Protestants are adopting to regain lost prestige.
Nevertheless, they have not let lie unused the best grappling-hook by
which the boy might be caught and held. Their schools and churches abound
with clubs and societies, organized upon a plan of absolute home-rule,
under the spiritual directorship of the parish priest. Among Protestant
denominations the Episcopal Church especially shows this evidence of a
strong life stirring within it. The Boys' Clubs of Calvary Parish, of St.
George's, and of many other churches, are powerful moral agents in their
own neighborhoods. Everywhere some strong sympathetic personality is found
to be the centre and the life of the work. It may be that the pastor
himself is the moving force; or he has the faculty of stirring it in
others. His young men are at work in the parish. It is a hopeful sign to
find young men, to whom the sacrifice meant the loss of much that makes
life beautiful, giving their time and services freely to the poor night
schools and rough boys' clubs--hopeful alike for the Church, for the boys,
and for their teachers. The women have had the missionary work of the
Church, as well as the pews, long enough to themselves. I am not speaking
now of the college-bred men and women, who in their University Settlements
pursue the plan that has proven so beneficent in England, but of another
class, young business men, bank clerks, and professional men--sometimes of
large means and of high social standing--whom night after night I have
found thus unostentatiously working among the children with more patience
than I could muster, and with the genuine love for their work that
overcame all obstacles. They were not always going the errand of a church
there, but that they were doing the work of the Church there could be no
doubt, and doing it in a way to make it once more a living issue among the
poor.
The rector of old St. George's, which under his pastorate has grown from a
forgotten temple with empty pews to be one of the strong factors in life
on the crowded East Side, with Sunday congregations the great building can
hardly contain, roughly outlines his plans for work among the children
this way, which with variations of detail is the plan of all the churches:
"Get as many of the very little children as possible into our
kindergartens, and there let them have the advantage of Christian
kindergarten training, before they are old enough to go to the public
schools. Keep touch of those same children and get them into the infant
departments of the Sunday-school. Then take the little fellows from these,
and see that in one or two nights in the week we reach them in our boys'
clubs; and then, when they are fourteen years old, they are eligible for
admission to our battalion. There, by drills, exercises, etc., we hold
them till they can enter our Men's Club."
The Sunday-school commands the approach to the club, but does not obstruct
it. It stands at the door and takes the tickets. Anyone may enter, but
through that door only. Once he has passed in, he is his own master. The
church is content with claiming only his Sundays when the club is not in
session. The experience at St. George's on the home-rule question has been
eminently characteristic. The boys could not be made to take a live
interest in the club except on condition that they must run it themselves.
That point yielded, they promptly boomed it to high-water mark. At present
they elect their officers twice a year, to give them full swing, and one
set is no sooner installed than wire-pulling begins for the next election.
Once, when some trouble in the Athletic Club caused the clergy to take it
in hand and appoint a president of their own choice, the membership fell
off so rapidly that it was on the point of collapse when the tide was
turned by a bold stroke. The managers announced a free election. The boys
returned with a rush, put opposition tickets in the field, and amid
intense enthusiasm over three hundred and fifty out of a total of four
hundred votes were cast. The club was saved. It has been popular ever
since.
The payment of monthly dues was found at St. George's to be equally
essential to success. "The boys know that they have to pay," said the
young clergyman, who quietly superintends their doings; "if they didn't,
it wouldn't be a right club." So they pay their pennies and enjoy the
independence of it. The result has been a transformation in which the
entire neighborhood rejoices. "Four years ago," said their friend, the
clergyman, "these same boys stoned us and carried on like the toughs they
were. Now we have got here a lot of young gentlemen and loyal friends."
Every week-day night the Parish House in East Sixteenth Street resounds
with their merriment; on Saturday, with the roll of drums and crash of
martial music. Then the Battalion Club meets for drill under the
instruction of a former officer in the United States Army. In their natty
uniforms the lads are good to look upon, and thoroughly enjoy the
exercises, as any boy of spirit would.
The Little Boys' Club languished somewhat for want of a definite programme
until the happy idea of a series of talks on elementary chemistry and
physics was hit upon. An eminently practical turn was given to the talks
by taking the boys to the gas-house, for instance, when gas was up for
discussion; to the ship-yard, when boat-building was the topic; to the
water-works, when it was water; and to see the great dynamos at work, when
they were grappling with the subject of electricity. Afterward the boys
were made to tell in writing what they had seen, and some of them told it
surprisingly well, showing that they had made excellent use of their eyes
and their brains. There is a limit, unfortunately, to the range of
subjects that can be illustrated to advantage in that way; the managers
had come to the end of their tether, and were puzzling over the question
what to do next, when a friend of the club gave it several thousand
dollars with which to fit up a manual training-school. Since then it has
been in clover. A house was hired in East Eleventh Street and transformed
into a carpenter-shop, and preparations to open it were in progress when
these pages were sent to the printer. The club then had over two hundred
members. It will probably have twice as many before the winter is over.
[Illustration: TYPE-SETTING AT THE AVENUE C WORKING BOYS' CLUB.]
The carpenter-shop of the Avenue C Working Boys' Club has been a distinct
success for several seasons. The work done by the boys after a few months'
instruction compares often well with that of the majority of apprentices
who have been years learning the trade in the regular way. The shop is
fitted out with benches and all the necessary tools. A class in
type-setting vies with the young carpenters in excellence of workmanship
and devotion to business. The printers have ambitious designs upon the
reading public. They intend to start a monthly "organ" of their club, an
experiment that was tried once but frustrated by a change of base from
Twenty-first Street to the present quarters at No. 650 East Fourteenth
Street. The club grew up under the eaves of St. George's Church eight
years ago, and was known by the name of the St. George's Boys' Club after
it had been forced to move away to make room for the erection of the
Parish House. Some of the boys work in the daytime at the trades which
they are taught at the club in the evening, and the instruction thus
received has helped them to earn better salaries in many cases. One of the
managers keeps a bank account for those who can save money and want to
invest it, and more than one of them has a snug little sum to his credit.
There are fifty boys in each class, and always plenty waiting for
vacancies to occur. The best pupils receive medals at the end of the year,
and once every summer the managers, who are young men of position and
character, take them out in the country for an outing, and are boys with
them in their games and in their delight over the new sights they see
there.
Mr. Wendell tells of one of these trips down to see "Buffalo Bill" on
Staten Island. There was a big crowd of excursionists on the boat going
down, and the captain took a fatherly interest in the boys, who were
gathered together in the bow of the boat, quiet as lambs. The return trip
was not so peaceful, though the captain good-naturedly delayed the boat
beyond the starting time for fear some of "our boys" would get left, as
indeed proved to be the fate of several. But by the time this was
discovered it was no longer a source of regret to him. The Indians and the
bucking broncos had made the boys restless. They stood around the brass
band, and one of them attempted to relieve his pent-up feelings by
sticking a button into the big trombone, with the effect of nearly
strangling the stout gentleman who was playing on it. The enraged musician
made a wild dive for the boy, who dodged around the smokestack and caught
up a chair to defend himself with. In a moment a first-class riot was in
progress, chairs flying, the band men swearing, and the boys yelling like
Comanches. When quiet had been finally restored, the boys banished to the
after-deck, and the button fished out of the trombone, the perspiring
captain swore with a round oath that he "wouldn't take those d----d boys
down to Staten Island again for ten dollars a head."
The trade-school feature of the Working Boys' Club may soon be reproduced
in the Calvary Parish Boys' Club in East Twenty-third Street. They have
already a useful type-setting class there, and they have that which their
neighbors in Fourteenth Street have yet to get: their own handsome
building, bought for the club by wealthy members of Calvary Church, in
which it had its birth four years ago. More than that, they have a
gymnasium that is the chief attraction of all that neighborhood,
particularly the boxing-gloves in it. There were some serious doubts about
these, and long and grave discussion before they were added to the general
outfit. The street was rather too partial to fisticuffs, it was thought,
and there were too many outstanding grudges among the boys to make their
introduction safe. However, another view prevailed and the choice proved
to be a wise one. The gloves are popular--very, and under the firm
management of the experienced superintendent, who knows where to draw the
safe line, the boys work off their superabundant spirits and sundry other
little accounts very successfully in their nightly bouts. The feeling of
fellowship and neighborly interest thus encouraged has even led to the
establishment of a mutual benefit fund, through which the boys help each
other in sickness or distress, and which they manage themselves, electing
their own officers.
For anyone who knows the boys of the East Side it is not hard to
understand that the Calvary Parish Boys' Club has registered more than
twenty-eight thousand callers since it was opened, only four years ago. It
has four hundred enrolled members, who pay monthly dues of ten cents, so
that they may feel that the club is theirs by right, not by charity.
Though church and temperance stood at the cradle of the club--it was
organized at a meeting of the Calvary branch of the Church Temperance
Society--there is no preaching to the boys. The only sermons they hear at
the club are the sermons of brotherly love and kindness, which the
cheerful rooms, the games, the books, and the gymnasium--even the
boxing-gloves--preach to them every night, and which the contrast of it
all with the street, that was their all only a little while ago, is not
apt to let them forget.
[Illustration: A BOUT WITH THE GLOVES IN THE BOYS' CLUB OF CALVARY
PARISH.]
A small sign, with the words "Wayside Boys' Club," hung for a while over
the Third Avenue door of the Bible House. Two years ago it was taken down;
the club had been merged in the Boys' Club of Grace Mission, in East
Thirteenth Street. The members were all little fellows. They were soon
made aware that they had fallen among strangers who, boylike, proposed to
investigate them and to test their prowess before letting them in on
equal terms. Within a week, says Mr. Wendell, this note came to their
patroness in the Bible House:
"DEAR MRS. ----:
"Would you please come and see to our Wayside Boys' Club; that the
first time it was open it was very nice, and after that near every
boy in that neighborhood came walking in. And if you would be so kind
to come and put them out it would be a great pleasure to us.
"Mrs. ----, the club is not nice any more, and when we want to go
home, the boys would wait for us outside, and hit you.
"Mrs. ----, since them boys are in the club we don't have any games
to play with, and if we do play with the games, they come over to us
and take it off us.
"And by so doing please oblige,
----, _President_,
----, _Vice-President_,
----, _Treasurer_,
----, _Secretary_,
----, _Floor Manager_.
"Please excuse the writing. I was in haste.
"----, _Treasurer_."
The appeal had its effect. The Wayside boys were rescued and there has
been quiet in Thirteenth Street since. They have got a new house now, and
are looking hopefully forward to the day when "near every boy in that
neighborhood," shall "come walking in" upon an errand of peace.
Most of the clubs close in the summer months, when it has heretofore been
supposed that few of the boys would attend. The experience of the Boys'
Club in St. Mark's Place, which this past summer was kept open a full
month later than usual and experienced no such collapse, although the park
across the street might be supposed to be an extra attraction on warm
evenings, suggests that there is some mistake about this which it would be
worth while to find out. The street is no less dangerous to the boy in
summer because it is more crowded. The Free Reading-Room for boys in West
Fourteenth Street is open all the year round, and though the attendance in
summer decreases one-half, yet the rooms are never empty.
The wish expressed by the President of the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Children, in a public utterance a year ago, that there might be
a boys' club for every ward in the city, has been more than fulfilled.
There are more boys' clubs nowadays than there are wards, though I am not
sure that they are so distributed that each has one. There are some wards
in which twenty might not come amiss. A directory of the local gangs,
which might be obtained by consultation with the corner-grocers and with
the policeman on the beat after a "scrap" with the boys, would be a good
guide to the right spots and also in the choice of managers. Something
over a year ago a club was opened in Bleecker Street that forthwith took
on the character of a poultice upon a rather turbulent neighborhood. In
the second week more than a hundred boys crowded to its meetings. It
"drew" entirely too well. When I looked for it this fall, it was
gone--"thank goodness!" said the owner of the tenement, a little woman who
kept a shop across the street, with a sigh of relief that spoke volumes.
Yet she had no more definite complaint to make than what might be inferred
from the emphasis she put on the words "them boys!" A friend of the club,
or of some of the boys belonging to it, whom I hunted up, interpreted the
sigh and the emphasis. The boys got the upper hand, he said. They had just
then made a fresh start under another roof and with a new manager.
Such experiences have not been uncommon, and, as it often happens when
inquiry is pursued in the right spirit, the mistakes they buoyed have been
the greatest successes of the cause. There has been enough of the other
kind too. Any club manager can tell of cases, lots of them, in which the
club has been the stepping-stone of the boy to a useful career. In some
cases the boys, having outgrown their club, have carried on the work
unaided and organized young men's societies on a plane of in-door
respectability that has raised an effectual barrier against the gang and
its club-room, the saloon. These things show what a hold the idea has upon
the boy and how much more might be made of it. So far, private benevolence
has had the field to itself, properly so; but there is a way in which the
municipality might help without departing from safe moorings, so it seems
to me. Why not lend such schools or class-rooms as are not used at night
to boys' clubs that can show a responsible management, for their meetings?
In England the Recreative Evening Schools Association has accomplished
something very like this by simply demonstrating its justice and
usefulness. "Its object," says Robert Archey Woods, in his work on English
social movements, "is to carry on through voluntary workers evening
classes in the board schools, combining instruction and recreation for
boys and girls who have passed through the elementary required course. Its
plan includes also the use of the schools for social clubs, and the use of
school play-grounds for gymnastics and out-door games. This simple
programme, as carried out, has shown how much may be accomplished through
means which are close at hand. There are in London three hundred and
forty-five such classes, combining manual training with entertainment, and
their average attendance is ten thousand. Schools of the same kind are
carried on in a hundred other places outside of London. Beside their
immediate success under private efforts, these schools are bringing
Parliament to see the importance of their object. Of late the Government
has been assuming the care of recreative evening classes, little by
little, and it looks as if ultimately all the work of the Evening Schools
Association would be undertaken by the school boards." I am not advocating
the surrender of the boys' club to our New York School Board. I am afraid
it would gain little by it and lose too much. But they might be trusted as
landlords, if not as managers. The rent is always the heaviest item in the
expense account of a boys' club, for the lads must have room. If cramped,
they will boil over and make trouble. If this item were eliminated, the
cause might experience a boom that would more than repay the community for
the wear and tear of the school-rooms, by a reduction in the outlay for
jails and police courts. There would be another advantage in the
introduction of the school to the boy in the _role_ of a friend, which
might speed the work of the truant officer. I cannot see any serious
objection to such a proposition. I have no doubt there are school trustees
who can see a whole string of them; but I should not be surprised if they
all came to this, that the schools are not for any such purpose. To this
it would be a sufficient answer that the schools belong to the people.
[Illustration: LINING UP FOR THE GYMNASIUM.]
Another suggestion came home to me with force while watching the drill of
the Battalion Club at St. George's one night recently. It has long been
the favorite idea of a friend and neighbor of mine, who is an old army
officer and has seen service in the field, that a summer camp for boys
from the city tenements could be established somewhere in the mountains at
a safe distance from tempting orchards, where an army of them might be
drilled with immense profit to themselves and to everybody. He will have
it that they could be managed as easily as an equal number of men, with
the right sort of organization and officers, and as in his business he
runs along smoothly with four or five hundred girls under his command, I
am bound to defer to his judgment, however much my own may rebel,
particularly as he would be acting out my own convictions, after all, in
his wholesale way. In any event the experiment might be tried with a
regiment if not with an army, and it would be a very interesting one. The
boys would have lots of chance for wholesome play as well as drill, and
would get no end of fun out of it. The possible hardships of camping out
would have no existence for them. As for any lasting good to come of it,
outside of physical benefits, I think the discipline alone, with what it
stands for, would cover that. In the reform schools, where they have
military drill, they have found it their most useful ally in dealing with
the worst and wildest class of the boys. It is the bump of organization
that is touched again there. Resistance ceases of itself and the boys fall
into line. Too much can be made of discipline, of course. The body may be
drilled until it is a mere machine and the real boy is dead. But that has
nothing to do with such an experiment as I spoke of. That is the concern
of reform schools, and I do not think they are in any danger of overdoing
it.
I spoke of managing the girls. It is just the same with them. I have had
the "gang" in mind as the alternative of the club, and therefore have
dealt so far only with their brothers. Girls do not go in gangs, thank
goodness, at least not yet in New York. They flock, until the boys scatter
them and drive them off one by one. But the same instinct of
self-government is in them. They take just as kindly to the club. The
Neighborhood Guild, the College Settlement, and various church and
philanthropic societies, carry on such clubs with great success. The girls
sew, darn stockings, cook, make their own dresses, and run their own
meetings with spirit when the boys are made to keep their profaning hands
off. On occasion they develop the same rugged independence with an extra
feminine touch to it, that is, a mixture of dash and spite. I recall the
experience of a band of early philanthropists, who, a score of years ago
or more, bought the Big Flat in the Sixth Ward and fitted it up as a
boarding-house for working girls. They filled it without any trouble,
though with a rather better grade of boarders than they had expected. No
sooner were the girls in possession than they promptly organized and
"resolved" that the management should make no rules for the house without
first submitting them to their body for approval. Philanthropy chose the
least pointed horn of the dilemma, and retired from the field. The Big
Flat, from a model boarding-house became a very bad tenement, and the
boarders' club dissolved, to the loss and injury of a posterity that was
distinctly poorer and duller, no less for the want of the club than for
the possession of the tenement.
The boys' club was born of the struggle of the community with the street,
as a measure of self-defence. It has proven a useful war-club too, but its
conquests have been the conquests of peace. It has been the kernel of
success in many a philanthropic undertaking, secular and religious alike.
In the plan of the Free Reading-Room for Working Boys, of which I made
mention, it is used as a battering-ram in an attack upon the saloon. The
Free Reading-Room was organized some nine or ten years ago by the Loyal
Legion Temperance Society. It has been popular with lads of all ages from
the very start, not least on account of the club or clubs which they were
encouraged to found--literary societies they call them there. The
Superintendent found them helpful, too, as a means of interesting the
boys, by debate and otherwise, in the cause of temperance which he had at
heart. The first thing a boys' club casts about for after the offices have
been manned and the by-laws made hard and fast, is a cause. One of young
boys, that had been in existence a month or less at the College
Settlement, almost took the ladies' breath away by announcing one day that
it had decided to expel any boy who smoked or got drunk. The Free
Reading-Room gives ample opportunity for the exercise of this spirit of
convert zeal, when it manifests itself. The average nightly attendance
last year was seventy-one, and a good deal larger than that in winter. The
boys came from as far south as Houston Street, nearly a mile below, and
from Forty-second Street, a mile and half to the north, in all kinds of
weather.
The doors of the reading-room stand wide open on Sunday as on week-day
nights. With singing, and talks on serious or religious subjects in a vein
the boys can follow, they try to give to the proceedings a Sabbath turn of
which the impression may abide with them. The regular Sunday-School
exercises have, I am told by the Superintendent, been abandoned, and the
present less formal, but more effective, programme substituted. One has
need of being wiser than the serpent if he would build effectually in this
field among the poor of many races and faiths that swarm in New York's
tenements, and he must make his foundation very broad. The great thing for
the boys is that the room is not closed against them on the very night in
all the week when they need it most. I think we are coming at last to
understand what a trap we have been digging for the young in our great
cities, when we thought to save them from temptation, by shutting every
door but that of the church against them on the day when the devil was
busiest finding mischief for their idle hands to do, while narrowing that
down to the size of a wicket-gate with our creeds and confessions. The
poor bury their dead on Sunday to save the loss of a day's pay. Poverty
has given over their one day of rest to their sorrows. Is it likely that
any attempt to rob it of its few harmless joys should win them over? It is
the shadow of bigotry and intolerance falling across it that has turned
healthy play into rioting and moral ruin. Open the museums, the libraries,
and the clubs on Sunday, and the church that draws the bolt will find the
tide of reawakened interest that will set in strong enough to fill its own
pews, too, to overflowing.