Failure of emotional, sentimental and so-called idealistic efforts,
based on hysterical enthusiasm, to improve social conditions, is nowhere
better exemplified than in the undervaluation of child-life. A few years
ago, the scandal of children under fourteen working in cotton mills was
exposed. There was muckraking and agitation. A wave of moral indignation
swept over America. There arose a loud cry for immediate action. Then,
having more or less successfully settled this particular matter, the
American people heaved a sigh of relief, settled back, and complacently
congratulated itself that the problem of child labor had been settled
once and for all.
Conditions are worse to-day than before. Not only is there child labor
in practically every State in the Union, but we are now forced to
realize the evils that result from child labor, of child laborers
now grown into manhood and womanhood. But we wish here to point out a
neglected aspect of this problem. Child labor shows us how cheaply we
value childhood. And moreover, it shows us that cheap childhood is the
inevitable result of chance parenthood. Child labor is organically bound
up with the problem of uncontrolled breeding and the large family.
The selective draft of 1917--which was designed to choose for military
service only those fulfiling definite requirements of physical
and mental fitness--showed some of the results of child labor. It
established the fact that the majority of American children never got
beyond the sixth grade, because they were forced to leave school at that
time. Our over-advertised compulsory education does not compel--and does
not educate. The selective-draft, it is our duty to emphasize this fact,
revealed that 38 per cent. of the young men (more than a million) were
rejected because of physical ill-health and defects. And 25 per cent.
were illiterate.
These young men were the children of yesterday. Authorities tell us that
75 per cent. of the school-children are defective. This means that
no less than fifteen million schoolchildren, out of 22,000,000 in the
United States, are physically or mentally below par.
This is the soil in which all sorts of serious evils strike root. It is
a truism that children are the chief asset of a nation. Yet while the
United States government allotted 92.8 per cent. of its appropriations
for 1920 toward war expenses, three per cent. to public works, 3.2 per
cent. to "primary governmental functions," no more than one per cent.
is appropriated to education, research and development. Of this one
per cent., only a small proportion is devoted to public health. The
conservation of childhood is a minor consideration. While three cents
is spent for the more or less doubtful protection of women and
children, fifty cents is given to the Bureau of Animal Industry, for
the protection of domestic animals. In 1919, the State of Kansas
appropriated $25,000 to protect the health of pigs, and $4,000 to
protect the health of children. In four years our Federal Government
appropriated--roughly speaking--$81,000,000 for the improvement
of rivers; $13,000,000 for forest conservation; $8,000,000 for the
experimental plant industry; $7,000,000 for the experimental animal
industry; $4,000,000 to combat the foot and mouth disease; and less than
half a million for the protection of child life.
Competent authorities tell us that no less than 75 per cent. of American
children leave school between the ages of fourteen and sixteen to go
to work. This number is increasing. According to the recently published
report on "The Administration of the First Child Labor Law," in five
states in which it was necessary for the Children's Bureau to handle
directly the working certificates of children, one-fifth of the 25,000
children who applied for certificates left school when they were in the
fourth grade; nearly a tenth of them had never attended school at all or
had not gone beyond the first grade; and only one-twenty-fifth had gone
as far as the eighth grade. But their educational equipment was even
more limited than the grade they attended would indicate. Of the
children applying to go to work 1,803 had not advanced further than the
first grade even when they had gone to school at all; 3,379 could not
even sign their own names legibly, and nearly 2,000 of them could not
write at all. The report brings automatically into view the vicious
circle of child-labor, illiteracy, bodily and mental defect, poverty and
delinquency. And like all reports on child labor, the large family and
reckless breeding looms large in the background as one of the chief
factors in the problem.
Despite all our boasting of the American public school, of the equal
opportunity afforded to every child in America, we have the shortest
school-term, and the shortest school-day of any of the civilized
countries. In the United States of America, there are 106 illiterates to
every thousand people. In England there are 58 per thousand, Sweden and
Norway have one per thousand.
The United States is the most illiterate country in the world--that is,
of the so-called civilized countries. Of the 5,000,000 illiterates
in the United States, 58 per cent. are white and 28 per cent. native
whites. Illiteracy not only is the index of inequality of opportunity.
It speaks as well a lack of consideration for the children. It means
either that children have been forced out of school to go to work, or
that they are mentally and physically defective.(1)
One is tempted to ask why a society, which has failed so lamentably to
protect the already existing child life upon which its very perpetuation
depends, takes upon itself the reckless encouragement of indiscriminate
procreation. The United States Government has recently inaugurated a
policy of restricting immigration from foreign countries. Until it is
able to protect childhood from criminal exploitation, until it has made
possible a reasonable hope of life, liberty and growth for American
children, it should likewise recognize the wisdom of voluntary
restriction in the production of children.
Reports on child labor published by the National Child Labor Committee
only incidentally reveal the correlation of this evil with that of large
families. Yet this is evident throughout. The investigators are more
bent upon regarding child labor as a cause of illiteracy.
But it is no less a consequence of irresponsibility in breeding. A
sinister aspect of this is revealed by Theresa Wolfson's study of
child-labor in the beet-fields of Michigan.(2) As one weeder put it:
"Poor man make no money, make plenty children--plenty children good for
sugar-beet business." Further illuminating details are given by Miss
Wolfson:
"Why did they come to the beet-fields? Most frequently families with
large numbers of children said that they felt that the city was no place
to raise children--things too expensive and children ran wild--in the
country all the children could work." Living conditions are abominable
and unspeakably wretched. An old woodshed, a long-abandoned barn, and
occasionally a tottering, ramshackle farmer's house are the common
types. "One family of eleven, the youngest child two years, the oldest
sixteen years, lived in an old country store which had but one window;
the wind and rain came through the holes in the walls, the ceiling was
very low and the smoke from the stove filled the room. Here the family
ate, slept, cooked and washed."
"In Tuscola County a family of six was found living in a one-room shack
with no windows. Light and ventilation was secured through the open
doors. Little Charles, eight years of age, was left at home to take
care of Dan, Annie and Pete, whose ages were five years, four years, and
three months, respectively. In addition, he cooked the noonday meal and
brought it to his parents in the field. The filth and choking odors of
the shack made it almost unbearable, yet the baby was sleeping in a heap
of rags piled up in a corner."
Social philosophers of a certain school advocate the return to the
land--it is only in the overcrowded city, they claim, that the evils
resulting from the large family are possible. There is, according to
this philosophy, no overcrowding, no over-population in the country,
where in the open air and sunlight every child has an opportunity for
health and growth. This idyllic conception of American country life
does not correspond with the picture presented by this investigator, who
points out:
"To promote the physical and mental development of the child, we forbid
his employment in factories, shops and stores. On the other hand, we are
prone to believe that the right kind of farm-work is healthful and the
best thing for children. But for a child to crawl along the ground,
weeding beets in the hot sun for fourteen hours a day--the average
workday--is far from being the best thing. The law of compensation is
bound to work in some way, and the immediate result of this agricultural
work is interference with school attendance."
How closely related this form of child-slavery is to the over-large
family, is definitely illustrated: "In the one hundred and thirty-three
families visited, there were six hundred children. A conversation held
with a 'Rooshian-German' woman is indicative of the size of most of the
families:"
"How many children have you?" inquired the investigator.
"Eight--Julius, und Rose, und Martha, dey is mine; Gottlieb und Philip,
und Frieda, dey is my husband's;--und Otto und Charlie--dey are ours."
Families with ten and twelve children were frequently found, while those
of six and eight children are the general rule. The advantage of a large
family in the beet fields is that it does the most work. In the one
hundred thirty-three families interviewed, there were one hundred
eighty-six children under the age of six years, ranging from eight weeks
up; thirty-six children between the ages of six and eight, approximately
twenty-five of whom had never been to school, and eleven over sixteen
years of age who had never been to school. One ten-year-old boy had
never been to school because he was a mental defective; one child of
nine was practically blinded by cataracts. This child was found groping
his way down the beet-rows pulling out weeds and feeling for the
beet-plants--in the glare of the sun he had lost all sense of light and
dark. Of the three hundred and forty children who were not going or had
never gone to school, only four had reached the point of graduation, and
only one had gone to high school. These large families migrated to the
beet-fields in early spring. Seventy-two per cent. of them are retarded.
When we realize that feeble-mindedness is arrested development and
retardation, we see that these "beet children" are artificially retarded
in their growth, and that the tendency is to reduce their intelligence
to the level of the congenital imbecile.
Nor must it be concluded that these large "beet" families are always the
"ignorant foreigner" so despised by our respectable press. The following
case throws some light on this matter, reported in the same pamphlet:
"An American family, considered a prize by the agent because of the fact
that there were nine children, turned out to be a `flunk.' They could
not work in the beet-fields, they ran up a bill at the country-store,
and one day the father and the eldest son, a boy of nineteen, were seen
running through the railroad station to catch an out-going train. The
grocer thought they were `jumping' their bill. He telephoned ahead
to the sheriff of the next town. They were taken off the train by the
sheriff and given the option of going back to the farm or staying in
jail. They preferred to stay in jail, and remained there for two weeks.
Meanwhile, the mother and her eight children, ranging in ages form
seventeen years to nine months, had to manage the best way they could.
At the end of two weeks, father and son were set free.... During all of
this period the farmers of the community sent in provisions to keep
the wife and children from starving." Does this case not sum up in a
nutshell the typical American intelligence confronted with the
problem of the too-large family--industrial slavery tempered with
sentimentality!
Let us turn to a young, possibly a more progressive state. Consider the
case of "California, the Golden" as it is named by Emma Duke, in her
study of child-labor in the Imperial Valley, "as fertile as the Valley
of the Nile."(3) Here, cotton is king, and rich ranchers, absentee
landlords and others exploit it. Less than ten years ago ranchers
would bring in hordes of laboring families, but refuse to assume any
responsibility in housing them, merely permitting them to sleep on
the grounds of the ranch. Conditions have been somewhat improved, but,
sometimes, we read, "a one roomed straw house with an area of fifteen
by twenty feet will serve as a home for an entire family, which not
only cooks but sleeps in the same room." Here, as in Michigan among the
beets, children are "thick as bees." All kinds of children pick,
Miss Duke reports, "even those as young as three years! Five-year-old
children pick steadily all day.... Many white American children are
among them--pure American stock, who have gradually moved from the
Carolinas, Tennessee, and other southern states to Arkansas, Texas,
Oklahoma, Arizona, and on into the Imperial Valley." Some of these
children, it seems, wanted to attend school, but their fathers did not
want to work; so the children were forced to become bread-winners. One
man whose children were working with him in the fields said, "Please,
lady, don't send them to school; let them pick a while longer. I ain't
got my new auto paid for yet." The native white American mother of
children working in the fields proudly remarked: "No; they ain't
never been to school, nor me nor their poppy, nor their granddads and
grandmoms. We've always been pickers!"--and she spat her tobacco over
the field in expert fashion.
"In the Valley one hears from townspeople," writes the investigator,
"that pickers make ten dollars a day, working the whole family. With
that qualification, the statement is ambiguous. One Mexican in the
Imperial Valley was the father of thirty-three children--`about thirteen
or fourteen living,' he said. If they all worked at cotton-picking, they
would doubtless altogether make more than ten dollars a day."
One of the child laborers revealed the economic advantage--to the
parents--in numerous progeny: "Us kids most always drag from forty to
fifty pounds of cotton before we take it to be weighed. Three of us
pick. I'm twelve years old and my bag is twelve feet long. I can drag
nearly a hundred pounds. My sister is ten years old, and her bag is
eight feet long. My little brother is seven and his bag is five feet
long."
Evidence abounds in the publications of the National Child Labor
Committee of this type of fecund parenthood.(4) It is not merely a
question of the large family versus the small family. Even comparatively
small families among migratory workers of this sort have been large
families. The high infant mortality rate has carried off the weaker
children. Those who survive are merely those who have been strong enough
to survive the most unfavorable living conditions. No; it is a situation
not unique, nor even unusual in human history, of greed and stupidity
and cupidity encouraging the procreative instinct toward the manufacture
of slaves. We hear these days of the selfishness and the degradation
of healthy and well-educated women who refuse motherhood; but we hear
little of the more sinister selfishness of men and women who bring
babies into the world to become child-slaves of the kind described in
these reports of child labor.
The history of child labor in the English factories in the nineteenth
century throws a suggestive light on this situation. These child-workers
were really called into being by the industrial situation. The
population grew, as Dean Inge has described it, like crops in a newly
irrigated desert. During the nineteenth century, the numbers were nearly
quadrupled. "Let those who think that the population of a country can
be increased at will, consider whether it is likely that any physical,
moral, or psychological change came over the nation co-incidentally with
the inventions of the spinning jenny and the steam engine. It is too
obvious for dispute that it was the possession of capital wanting
employment, and of natural advantages for using it, that called those
multitudes of human beings into existence, to eat the food which they
paid for by their labor."(5)
But when child labor in the factories became such a scandal and such a
disgrace that child-labor was finally forbidden by laws that possessed
the advantage over our own that they were enforced, the proletariat
ceased to supply children. Almost by magic the birth rate among the
workers declined. Since children were no longer of economic value to
the factories, they were evidently a drug in the home. This movement, it
should not be forgotten however, was coincident with the agitation and
education in Birth Control stimulated by the Besant-Bradlaugh trial.
Large families among migratory agricultural laborers in our own country
are likewise brought into existence in response to an industrial demand.
The enforcement of the child labor laws and the extension of their
restrictions are therefore an urgent necessity, not so much, as some of
our child-labor authorities believe, to enable these children to go to
school, as to prevent the recruiting of our next generation from the
least intelligent and most unskilled classes in the community. As long
as we officially encourage and countenance the production of large
families, the evils of child labor will confront us. On the other hand,
the prohibition of child labor may help, as in the case of English
factories, in the decline of the birth rate.
UNCONTROLLED BREEDING AND CHILD LABOR GO HAND IN HAND. And to-day
when we are confronted with the evils of the latter, in the form of
widespread illiteracy and defect, we should seek causes more deeply
rooted than the enslavement of children. The cost to society is
incalculable, as the National Child Labor Committee points out. "It
is not only through the lowered power, the stunting and the moral
degeneration of its individual members, but in actual expense, through
the necessary provision for the human junk, created by premature
employment, in poor-houses, hospitals, police and courts, jails and by
charitable organizations."
To-day we are paying for the folly of the over-production--and its
consequences in permanent injury to plastic childhood--of yesterday.
To-morrow, we shall be forced to pay for our ruthless disregard of our
surplus children of to-day. The child-laborer of one or two decades
ago has become the shifting laborer of to-day, stunted, underfed,
illiterate, unskilled, unorganized and unorganizable. "He is the last
person to be hired and the first to be fired." Boys and girls under
fourteen years of age are no longer permitted to work in factories,
mills, canneries and establishments whose products are to be shipped out
of the particular state, and children under sixteen can no longer work
in mines and quarries. But this affects only one quarter of our army of
child labor--work in local industries, stores, and farms, homework
in dark and unsanitary tenements is still permitted. Children work in
"homes" on artificial flowers, finishing shoddy garments, sewing their
very life's blood and that of the race into tawdry clothes and gewgaws
that are the most unanswerable comments upon our vaunted "civilization."
And to-day, we must not forget, the child-laborer of yesterday is
becoming the father or the mother of the child-laborer of to-morrow.
"Any nation that works its women is damned," once wrote Woods
Hutchinson. The nation that works its children, one is tempted to add,
is committing suicide. Loud-mouthed defenders of American democracy pay
no attention to the strange fact that, although "the average education
among all American adults is only the sixth grade," every one of these
adults has an equal power at the polls. The American nation, with all
its worship of efficiency and thrift, complacently forgets that "every
child defective in body, education or character is a charge upon the
community," as Herbert Hoover declared in an address before the American
Child Hygiene Association (October, 1920): "The nation as a whole," he
added, "has the obligation of such measures toward its children... as
will yield to them an equal opportunity at their start in life. If we
could grapple with the whole child situation for one generation, our
public health, our economic efficiency, the moral character, sanity and
stability of our people would advance three generations in one."
The great irrefutable fact that is ignored or neglected is that the
American nation officially places a low value upon the lives of
its children. The brutal truth is that CHILDREN ARE CHEAP. When
over-production in this field is curtailed by voluntary restriction,
when the birth rate among the working classes takes a sharp decline, the
value of children will rise. Then only will the infant mortality rate
decline, and child labor vanish.
Investigations of child labor emphasize its evils by pointing out that
these children are kept out of school, and that they miss the advantages
of American public school education. They express the current confidence
in compulsory education and the magical benefits to be derived from
the public school. But we need to qualify our faith in education, and
particularly our faith in the American public school. Educators are just
beginning to wake up to the dangers inherent in the attempt to teach the
brightest child and the mentally defective child at the same time. They
are beginning to test the possibilities of a "vertical" classification
as well as a "horizontal" one. That is, each class must be divided into
what are termed Gifted, Bright, Average, Dull, Normal, and Defective. In
the past the helter-skelter crowding and over-crowding together of all
classes of children of approximately the same age, produced only a dull
leveling to mediocrity.(6)
An investigation of forty schools in New York City, typical of hundreds
of others, reveals deplorable conditions of overcrowding and lack of
sanitation.(7) The worst conditions are to be found in locations the
most densely populated. Thus of Public School No. 51, located almost in
the center of the notorious "Hell's Kitchen" section, we read: "The play
space which is provided is a mockery of the worst kind. The basement
play-room is dark, damp, poorly lighted, poorly ventilated, foul
smelling, unclean, and wholly unfit for children for purposes of play.
The drainpipes from the roof have decayed to such a degree that in some
instances as little as a quarter of the pipe remains. On rainy days,
water enters the classrooms, hallways, corridors, and is thrown
against windows because the pipes have rotted away. The narrow stairways
and halls are similar to those of jails and dungeons of a century ago.
The classrooms are poorly lighted, inadequately equipped, and in some
cases so small that the desks of pupils and teachers occupy almost all
of the floor-space."
Another school, located a short distance from Fifth Avenue, the
"wealthiest street in the world," is described as an "old shell of a
structure, erected decades ago as a modern school building. Nearly two
thousand children are crowded into class-rooms having a total seating
capacity of scarcely one thousand. Narrow doorways, intricate hallways
and antiquated stairways, dark and precipitous, keep ever alive the
danger of disaster from fire or panic. Only the eternal vigilance
of exceptional supervision has served to lessen the fear of such a
catastrophe. Artificial light is necessary, even on the brightest days,
in many of the class-rooms. In most of the classrooms, it is always
necessary when the sky is slightly overcast." There is no ventilating
system.
In the crowded East Side section conditions are reported to be no
better. The Public Education Association's report on Public School No.
130 points out that the site at the corner of Hester and Baxter Streets
was purchased by the city years ago as a school site, but that there
has been so much "tweedledeeing and tweedleduming" that the new building
which is to replace the old, has not even yet been planned! Meanwhile,
year after year, thousands of children are compelled to study daily in
dark and dingy class-rooms. "Artificial light is continually necessary,"
declares the report. "The ventilation is extremely poor. The fire hazard
is naturally great. There are no rest-rooms whatever for the teachers."
Other schools in the neighborhood reveal conditions even worse. In
two of them, for example; "In accordance with the requirements of
the syllabus in hygiene in the schools, the vision of the children is
regularly tested. In a recent test of this character, it was found in
Public School 108, the rate of defective vision in the various grades
ranged from 50 to 64 per cent.! In Public School 106, the rate ranged
from 43 to 94 per cent.!"
The conditions, we are assured, are no exceptions to the rule of
public schools in New York, where the fatal effects of overcrowding
in education may be observed in their most sinister but significant
aspects.
The forgotten fact in this case is that efforts for universal and
compulsory education cannot keep pace with the overproduction of
children. Even at the best, leaving out of consideration the public
school system as the inevitable prey and plundering-ground of the cheap
politician and job-hunter, present methods of wholesale and syndicated
"education" are not suited to compete with the unceasing, unthinking,
untiring procreative powers of our swarming, spawning populations.
Into such schools as described in the recent reports of the Public
Education Association, no intelligent parent would dare send his child.
They are not merely fire-traps and culture-grounds of infection, but of
moral and intellectual contamination as well. More and more are public
schools in America becoming institutions for subjecting children to
a narrow and reactionary orthodoxy, aiming to crush out all signs
of individuality, and to turn out boys and girls compressed into a
standardized pattern, with ready-made ideas on politics, religion,
morality, and economics. True education cannot grow out of such
compulsory herding of children in filthy fire-traps.
Character, ability, and reasoning power are not to be developed in
this fashion. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether even a completely
successful educational system could offset the evils of indiscriminate
breeding and compensate for the misfortune of being a superfluous child.
In recognizing the great need of education, we have failed to recognize
the greater need of inborn health and character. "If it were necessary
to choose between the task of getting children educated and getting them
well born and healthy," writes Havelock Ellis, "it would be better to
abandon education. There have been many great peoples who never dreamed
of national systems of education; there have been no great peoples
without the art of producing healthy and vigorous children. The matter
becomes of peculiar importance in great industrial states, like
England, the United States and Germany, because in such states, a tacit
conspiracy tends to grow up to subordinate national ends to individual
ends, and practically to work for the deterioration of the race."(8)
Much less can education solve the great problem of child labor. Rather,
under the conditions prevailing in modern society, child labor and the
failure of the public schools to educate are both indices of a more
deeply rooted evil. Both bespeak THE UNDERVALUATION OF THE CHILD. This
undervaluation, this cheapening of child life, is to speak crudely but
frankly the direct result of overproduction. "Restriction of output" is
an immediate necessity if we wish to regain control of the real values,
so that unimpeded, unhindered, and without danger of inner corruption,
humanity may protect its own health and powers.
(1) I am indebted to the National Child Labor Committee for
these statistics, as well as for many of the facts that
follow.
(2) "People Who Go to Beets" Pamphlet No. 299, National
Child Labor Committee.
(3) California the Golden, by Emma Duke. Reprinted from
The American Child, Vol. II, No. 3. November 1920.
(4) Cf. Child Welfare in Oklahoma; Child Welfare in
Alabama; Child Welfare in North Carolina; Child Welfare in
Kentucky; Child Welfare in Tennessee. Also, Children in
Agriculture, by Ruth McIntire, and other studies.
(5) W. R. Inge: Outspoken Essays: p. 92
(6) Cf. Tredgold: Inheritance and Educability. Eugenics
Review, Vol. Xiii, No. I, pp. 839 et seq.
(7) Cf. New York Times, June 4, 1921.
(8) "Studies in the Psychology of Sex," Vol. VI. p. 20.