the East Side there has come over there an epidemic of child crime of
meaner sort, but following the same principle of gang organization. It
is difficult to ascertain the exact extent of it, because of the
well-meant but, I am inclined to think, mistaken effort on the part of
the children's societies to suppress the record of it for the sake of
the boy. Enough testimony comes from the police and the courts, however,
to make it clear that thieving is largely on the increase among the East
Side boys. And it is amazing at what an early age it begins. When, in
the fight for a truant school, I had occasion to gather statistics upon
this subject, to meet the sneer of the educational authorities that the
"crimes" of street boys compassed at worst the theft of a top or a
marble. I found among 278 prisoners, of whom I had kept the run for ten
months, two boys, of four and eight years respectively, arrested for
breaking into a grocery, not to get candy or prunes, but to rob the
till. The little one was useful to "crawl through a small hole." There
were "burglars" of six and seven years, and five in a bunch, the whole
gang apparently, at the age of eight. "Wild" boys began to appear in
court at that age. At eleven, I had seven thieves, two of whom had a
record on the police blotter, and an "habitual liar;" at twelve, I had
four burglars, three ordinary thieves, two arrested for drunkenness,
three for assault, and three incendiaries; at thirteen, five burglars,
one with a "record," as many thieves, one "drunk," five charged with
assault and one with forgery; at fourteen, eleven thieves and
house-breakers, six highway robbers,--the gang on its unlucky day,
perhaps,--and ten arrested for fighting, not counting one who had
assaulted a policeman, in a state of drunken frenzy. One of the gangs
made a specialty of stealing baby carriages, when left unattended in
front of stores. They "drapped the kids in the hallway" and "sneaked"
the carriages. And so on. The recital was not a pleasant one, but it was
effective. We got our truant school, and one way that led to the jail
was blocked.
It may be that the leader is neither thief nor thug, but ambitious. In
that case the gang is headed for politics by the shortest route.
Likewise, sometimes, when he is both. In either case it carries the
situation by assault. When the gang wants a thing, the easiest way seems
to it always to take it. There was an explosion in a Fifth Street
tenement, one night last January, that threw twenty families into a wild
panic, and injured two of the tenants badly. There was much mystery
about it, until it came out that the housekeeper had had a "run in" with
the gang in the block. It wanted club-room in the house, and she would
not let it in. Beaten, it avenged itself in characteristic fashion by
leaving a package of gunpowder on the stairs, where she would be sure to
find it when she went the rounds with her candle to close up. That was a
gang of that kind, headed straight for Albany. And what is more, it
will get there, unless things change greatly. The gunpowder was just a
"bluff" to frighten the housekeeper, an installment of the kind of
politics it meant to play when it got its chance. There was "nothing
against this gang" except a probable row with the saloon keeper, since
it applied elsewhere for house-room. Not every gang has a police record
of theft and "slugging" beyond the early encounters of the street. "Our
honored leader" is not always the captain of a band of cutthroats. He is
the honorary president of the "social club" that bears his name, and he
counts for something in the ward. But the ethical standards do not
differ. "Do others, or they will do you," felicitously adapted from Holy
Writ for the use of the slum, and the classic war-cry, "To the victors
the spoils," made over locally to read, "I am not in politics for my
health," still interpret the creed of the political as of the "slugging"
gang. They drew their inspiration from the same source. Of what gang
politics means every large city in our country has had its experience.
New York is no exception. History on the subject is being made yet, in
the sight of us all.
Our business with the gang, however, is in the making of it. Take now
the showing of the reformatory,[4] to which I have before made
reference, and see what light it throws upon the matter: 71 per cent. of
prisoners with no moral sense, or next to none, yet more than that
proportion possessed of "natural mental capacity," which is to say that
they had the means of absorbing it from their environment, if there had
been any to absorb. Bad homes sent half of all prisoners there; bad
company 92 per cent. The reformatory repeats the prison chaplain's
verdict, "weakness, not wickedness," in its own way: "Malevolence does
not characterize the criminal, but aversion to continuous labor." If
"the street" had been written across it in capital letters, it could not
have been made plainer. Twelve per cent. only of the prisoners came
from good homes, and one in a hundred had kept good company; evidently
he was not of the mentally capable. They will tell you at the prison
that, under its discipline, 83 per cent. are set upon their feet and
make a fresh start. With due allowance for a friendly critic, there is
still room for the three fourths labeled normal. The Children's Aid
Society will give you even better news of the boys rescued from the slum
before it had branded them for its own. Scarce five per cent. are lost,
though they leave such a black mark that they make trouble for all the
good boys that are sent out from New York. Better than these was the
kindergarten record in San Francisco. New York has no monopoly of the
slum. Of nine thousand children from the slummiest quarters of that city
who had gone through the Golden Gate Association's kindergartens, just
one was said to have got into jail. The merchants who looked coldly on
the experiment before brought their gold to pay for keeping it up. They
were hard-headed men of business, and the demonstration that schools
were better than jails any day appealed to them as eminently sane and
practical.
[Footnote 4: Year-Book of Elmira State Reformatory, 1897. The statistics
deal with 8319 prisoners received there in twenty-three years. The
social stratum whence they came is sufficiently indicated by the
statement that 18.3 per cent. were illiterates, and 43.3 per cent. were
able to read and write with difficulty; 35.2 per cent. had an ordinary
common school education; 3.2 per cent. came out of high schools or
colleges.]
And well it might. The gang is a distemper of the slum that writes upon
the generation it plagues the recipe for its own corrective. It is not
the night stick, though in the acute stage that is not to be dispensed
with. Neither is it the jail. To put the gang behind iron bars affords
passing relief, but it is like treating a symptom without getting at the
root of the disease. Prophylactic treatment is clearly indicated. The
boy who flings mud and stones is entering his protest in his own way
against the purblind policy that gave him jails for schools and the
gutter for a playground, that gave him dummies for laws and the tenement
for a home. He is demanding his rights, of which he has been
cheated,--the right to his childhood, the right to know the true dignity
of labor that makes a self-respecting manhood. The gang, rightly
understood, is our ally, not our enemy. Like any ailment of the body, it
is a friend come to tell us of something that has gone amiss. The thing
for us to do is to find out what it is, and set it right.
That is the story of the gang. That we have read and grasped its lesson
at last, an item in my morning paper, which I read at the breakfast
table to-day, bears witness. It tells that the League for Political
Education has set about providing a playground for the children up on
the West Side, near the model tenements which I described. Just so! With
a decent home and a chance for the boy to grow into a healthy man, his
political education can proceed without much further hindrance. Now let
the League for Political Education trade off the policeman's club for a
boys' club, and it may consider its course fairly organized.
I spoke of the instinct for the crowd in the tenement house boy as
evidence that the slum had got its grip on him. And it is true of him.
The experience that the helpless poor will not leave their slum when a
chance of better things is offered is wearily familiar to most of us. I
recall the indignant amazement of my good friend, the president of the
Baron de Hirsch Fund, when, of a hundred of the neediest families chosen
to be the pioneers in the experiment of transplanting the crowds of the
Ghetto to the country, where homes and work were waiting for them, only
seven wanted to go. They preferred the excitement of the street. One
has to have resources to face the loneliness of the woods and the
fields. We have seen what resources the slum has at its command. In the
boy it laid hold of the instinct for organization, the desire to fall in
and march in line that belongs to all boys, and is not here, as abroad,
cloyed with military service in the young years,--and anyhow is stronger
in the American boy than in his European brother,--and perverted it to
its own use. That is the simple secret of the success of the club, the
brigade, in winning back the boy. It is fighting the street with its own
weapon. The gang is the club run wild.
How readily it owns the kinship was never better shown than by the
experience of the College Settlement girls, when they first went to make
friends in the East Side tenements. I have told it before, but it will
bear telling again, for it holds the key to the whole business. They
gathered in the drift, all the little embryo gangs that were tuning up
in the district, and made them into clubs,--Young Heroes, Knights of the
Round Table, and such like; all except one, the oldest, that had begun
to make a name for itself with the police. That one held aloof,
observing coldly what went on, to make sure it was "straight." They let
it be, keeping the while an anxious eye upon it; until one day there
came a delegation with the proposition, "If you will let us in, we will
change and have your kind of a gang." Needless to say it was let in. And
within a year, when, through a false rumor that the concern was moving
away, there was a run on the Settlement's penny provident bank, the
converted gang proved itself its stanchest friend by doing actually what
John Halifax did, in Miss Mulock's story: it brought all the pennies it
could raise in the neighborhood by hook or by crook and deposited them
as fast as the regular patrons--the gang had not yet risen to the
dignity of a bank account--drew them out, until the run ceased.
The cry "Get the boys off the street" that has been raised in our
cities, as the real gravity of the situation has been made clear, has
led to the adoption of curfew ordinances in many places. Any attempt to
fit such a scheme to metropolitan life would probably result simply in
adding one more dead-letter law, more dangerous than all the rest, to
those we have. Besides, the curfew rings at nine o'clock. The dangerous
hours, when the gang is made, are from seven to nine, between supper and
bedtime. This is the gap the club fills out. The boys take to the street
because the home has nothing to keep them there. To lock them up in the
house would only make them hate it more. The club follows the line of
least resistance. It has only to keep also on the line of common sense.
It must be a real club, not a reformatory. Its proper function is to
head off the jail. The gang must not run it. But rather that than have
it help train up a band of wretched young cads. The signs are not hard
to make out. When a boy has had his head swelled by his importance as a
member of the Junior Street-Cleaning Band to the point of reproving his
mother for throwing a banana peel in the street, the thing to be done is
to take him out and spank him, if it _is_ reverting to "the savagery" of
the street. Better a savage than a cad. The boys have the making of both
in them. Their vanity furnishes abundant material for the cad, but only
when unduly pampered. Left to itself, the gang can be trusted not to
develop that kink.
It comes down in the end to the personal influence that is always most
potent in dealing with these problems. We had a gang start up once when
my boys were of that age, out in the village on Long Island where we
lived. It had its headquarters in our barn, where it planned divers
raids that aimed at killing the cat and other like outrages; the central
fact being that the boys had an air rifle, with which it was necessary
to murder something. My wife discovered the conspiracy, and, with
woman's wit, defeated it by joining the gang. She "gave in wood" to the
election bonfires, and pulled the safety valve upon all the other plots
by entering into the true spirit of them,--which was adventure rather
than mischief,--and so keeping them within safe lines. She was elected
an honorary member, and became the counselor of the gang in all their
little scrapes. I can yet see her dear brow wrinkled in the study of
some knotty gang problem, which we discussed when the boys had been long
asleep. They did not dream of it, and the village never knew what small
tragedies it escaped, nor who it was that so skillfully averted them.
It is always the women who do those things. They are the law and the
gospel to the boy, both in one. It is the mother heart, I suppose, and
there is nothing better in all the world. I am reminded of the
conversion of "the Kid" by one who was in a very real sense the mother
of a social settlement uptown, in the latitude of Battle Row. The Kid
was driftwood. He had been cast off by a drunken father and mother, and
was living on what he could scrape out of ash barrels, and an occasional
dime for kindling-wood which he sold from a wheel-barrow, when the gang
found and adopted him. My friend adopted the gang in her turn, and
civilized it by slow stages. Easter Sunday came, when she was to redeem
her promise to take the boys to witness the services in a neighboring
church, where the liturgy was especially impressive. It found the larger
part of the gang at her door,--a minority, it was announced, were out
stealing potatoes, hence were excusable,--in a state of high
indignation.
"The Kid's been cussin' awful," explained the leader. The Kid showed in
the turbulent distance, red-eyed and raging.
"But why?" asked my friend, in amazement.
"'Cause he can't go to church!"
It appeared that the gang had shut him out, with a sense of what was due
to the occasion, because of his rags. Restored to grace, and choking
down reminiscent sobs, the Kid sat through the Easter service,
surrounded by the twenty-seven "proper" members of the gang.
Civilization had achieved a victory, and no doubt my friend remembered
it in her prayers with thanksgiving. The manner was of less account.
Battle Row has its own ways, even in its acceptance of means of grace.
I walked home from the office to-night. The street wore its normal
aspect of mingled dullness and the kind of expectancy that is always
waiting to turn any excitement, from a fallen horse to a fire, to
instant account. The early June heat had driven the multitudes from the
tenements into the street for a breath of air. The boys of the block
were holding a meeting at the hydrant. In some way they had turned the
water on, and were splashing in it with bare feet, reveling in the sense
that they were doing something that "went against" their enemy, the
policeman. Upon the quiet of the evening broke a bugle note and the
tramp of many feet keeping time. A military band came around the corner,
stepping briskly to the tune of "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Their
white duck trousers glimmered in the twilight, as the hundred legs moved
as one. Stoops and hydrant were deserted with a rush. The gang fell in
with joyous shouts. The young fellow linked arms with his sweetheart and
fell in too. The tired mother hurried with the baby carriage to catch
up. The butcher came, hot and wiping his hands on his apron, to the door
to see them pass.
"Yes," said my companion, guessing my thoughts,--we had been speaking of
the boys,--"but look at the other side. There is the military spirit. Do
you not fear danger from it in this country?"
No, my anxious friend, I do not. Let them march; and if with a gun,
better still. Often enough it is the choice of the gun on the shoulder,
or, by and by, the stripes on the back in the lockstep gang.
VI
LETTING IN THE LIGHT
I had been out of town and my way had not fallen through the Mulberry
Bend in weeks until that morning when I came suddenly upon the park that
had been made there in my absence. Sod had been laid, and men were going
over the lawn cutting the grass after the rain. The sun shone upon
flowers and the tender leaves of young shrubs, and the smell of new-mown
hay was in the air. Crowds of little Italian children shouted with
delight over the "garden," while their elders sat around upon the
benches with a look of contentment such as I had not seen before in that
place. I stood and looked at it all, and a lump came in my throat as I
thought of what it had been, and of all the weary years of battling for
this. It had been such a hard fight, and now at last it was won. To me
the whole battle with the slum had summed itself up in the struggle
with this dark spot. The whir of the lawn mower was as sweet a song in
my ear as that which the skylark sang when I was a boy, in Danish
fields, and which gray hairs do not make the man forget.
In my delight I walked upon the grass. It seemed as if I should never be
satisfied till I had felt the sod under my feet,--sod in the Mulberry
Bend! I did not see the gray-coated policeman hastening my way, nor the
wide-eyed youngsters awaiting with shuddering delight the catastrophe
that was coming, until I felt his cane laid smartly across my back and
heard his angry command:--
"Hey! Come off the grass! D' ye think it is made to walk on?"
So that was what I got for it. It is the way of the world. But it was
all right. The park was there, that was the thing. And I had my revenge.
I had just had a hand in marking five blocks of tenements for
destruction to let in more light, and in driving the slum from two other
strongholds. Where they were, parks are being made to-day in which the
sign "Keep off the grass!" will never be seen. The children may walk in
them from morning till night, and I too, if I want to, with no policeman
to drive us off. I tried to tell the policeman something about it. But
he was of the old dispensation. All the answer I got was a gruff:--
"G'wan now! I don't want none o' yer guff!"
It was all "guff" to the politicians, I suppose, from the day the
trouble began about the Mulberry Bend, but toward the end they woke up
nobly. When the park was finally dedicated to the people's use, they
took charge of the celebration with immense unction, and invited
themselves to sit in the high seats and glory in the achievement which
they had done little but hamper and delay from the first. They had not
reckoned with Colonel Waring, however. When they had had their say, the
colonel arose and, curtly reminding them that they had really had no
hand in the business, proposed three cheers for the citizen effort that
had struck the slum this staggering blow. There was rather a feeble
response on the platform, but rousing cheers from the crowd, with whom
the colonel was a prime favorite, and no wonder. Two years later he laid
down his life in the fight which he so valiantly and successfully waged.
It is the simple truth that he was killed by politics. The services
which he had rendered the city would have entitled him in any reputable
business to be retained in the employment that was his life and his
pride. Had he been so retained he would not have gone to Cuba, and would
in all human probability be now alive. But Tammany is not "in politics
for her health" and had no use for him, though no more grievous charge
could be laid at his door, even in the heat of the campaign, than that
he was a "foreigner," being from Rhode Island. Spoils politics never
craved a heavier sacrifice of any community.
It was Colonel Waring's broom that first let light into the slum. That
which had come to be considered an impossible task he did by the simple
formula of "putting a man instead of a voter behind every broom." The
words are his own. The man, from a political dummy who loathed his job
and himself in it with cause, became a self-respecting citizen, and the
streets that had been dirty were swept. The ash barrels which had
befouled the sidewalks disappeared, almost without any one knowing it
till they were gone. The trucks that obstructed the children's only
playground, the street, went with the dirt despite the opposition of the
truckman who had traded off his vote to Tammany in the past for stall
room at the curbstone. They did not go without a struggle. When appeal
to the alderman proved useless, the truckman resorted to strategy. He
took a wheel off, or kept a perishing nag, that could not walk, hitched
to the truck over night to make it appear that it was there for
business. But subterfuge availed as little as resistance. In the
Mulberry Bend he made his last stand. The old houses had been torn down,
leaving a three-acre lot full of dirt mounds and cellar holes. Into this
the truckmen of the Sixth Ward hauled their carts, and defied the street
cleaners. They were no longer in their way, and they were on the Park
Department's domain, where no Colonel Waring was in control. But while
their owners were triumphing, the children playing among the trucks set
one of them rolling down into a cellar, and three or four of the little
ones were crushed. That was the end. The trucks disappeared. Even
Tammany has not ventured to put them back, so great was the relief of
their going. They were not only a hindrance to the sweeper and the
skulking places of all manner of mischief at night, but I have
repeatedly seen the firemen baffled in their efforts to reach a burning
house, where they stood four and six deep in the wide "slips" at the
river.
Colonel Waring did more for the cause of labor than all the walking
delegates of the town together, by investing a despised but highly
important task with a dignity which won the hearty plaudits of a
grateful city. When he uniformed his men and announced that he was going
to parade with them so that we might all see what they were like, the
town laughed and poked fun at the "white wings;" but no one went to see
them who did not come away converted to an enthusiastic belief in the
man and his work. Public sentiment, that had been half reluctantly
suspending judgment, expecting every day to see the colonel "knuckle
down to politics" like his predecessors, turned in an hour, and after
that there was little trouble. The tenement house children organized
street cleaning bands to help along the work, and Colonel Waring
enlisted them as regular auxiliaries and made them useful.
They had no better friend. When the unhappy plight of the persecuted
pushcart men, all immigrant Jews, who were blackmailed, robbed, and
driven from pillar to post as a nuisance, though licensed to trade in
the street, appealed vainly for a remedy, Colonel Waring found a way out
in a great morning market in Hester Street that should be turned over to
the children for a playground in the afternoon. Though he proved that it
would pay interest on the investment in market fees, and many times in
the children's happiness, it was never built. It would have been a most
fitting monument to the man's memory. His broom saved more lives in the
crowded tenements than a squad of doctors. It did more: it swept the
cobwebs out of our civic brain and conscience, and set up a standard of
a citizen's duty which, however we may for the moment forget, will be
ours until we have dragged other things than our pavements out of the
mud.