THE BAND BEGINS TO PLAY
"Nothing in this world of ours is settled until it is settled right."
From the moment we began the fight for the children's play there was but
one ending to that battle; but it did seem sometimes a long way off,
never farther than when, just four months ago, the particular phase of
it that had seemed to promise most was officially stamped as nonsense.
The playgrounds on top of the big schoolhouses, which were to be the
neighborhood roof-gardens of our fond imaginings, were "of little use,"
said the school committee that had them in charge. The people wouldn't
go there. So, then, let them be given up. And a school commissioner with
whom I argued the case on the way home responded indulgently that some
of my notions "were regarded as Utopian," however sincerely held.
Let me see, that was in May. The resolution I speak of had passed the
Committee on Care of Buildings on April 18.[41] To-day is the 20th of
August, and I have just come home from an evening spent on one of those
identical school-roofs under the electric lamps, a veritable fairyland
of delight. The music and the song and laughter of three thousand happy
children ring in my ears yet. It was a long, laborious journey up all
the flights of stairs to that roof, for I am not as young as I was and
sometimes scant of breath; but none sweeter did I ever take save the one
under the wild-rose hedge I told of in "The Making of an American" when
I went to claim my bride. Ah! brethren, what are we that we should ever
give up, or doubt the justice of His fight who bade us let the little
ones come unto Him and to clear the briers and thorns, that choked the
path, from their way?
[Footnote 41: On the day it was published the newspapers reported
the killing in the streets of three children by trucks.]
Seven years we hacked away at the briers in that path. It is so long
since the state made it law that a playground should go with every
public school, five since as secretary of the Small Parks Committee I
pleaded with the Board of Education to give the roof playground to the
neighborhood after school hours. I remember that the question was asked
who would keep order, and the answer, "The police will be glad to." I
recalled without trouble the time when they had to establish patrol
posts on the tenement roofs in defence against the roughs whom the
street had trained to rebellion against law and order. But I was a
police reporter; they were not. They didn't understand. The playschool
came; the indoor playgrounds were thrown open evenings under the
pressure they brought in their train. And at that point we took a day
off, as it were, to congratulate one another on how wondrous smart and
progressive we had been. The machinery we had started we let be, to run
itself.
It ran into the old rut. The janitor got it in tow, and presently we
heard from the "play centres" that "the children didn't avail
themselves" of their privileges. On the roof playground the janitor had
turned the key. The Committee on Care of Buildings spoke his mind: "They
were of little use; too hot in summer and too cold in winter." We were
invited to quit our fooling and resume business at the old stand of the
three R's, and let it go with that. That was what schools were for. It
takes time, you see, to grow an idea, as to grow a colt or a boy, to its
full size.
President Burlingham, who in his day drew the bill that made it lawful
to use the schools for neighborhood purposes other than the worship of
those same three R's, went around with me one night to see what ailed
the children who would not play.
In the Mulberry Bend school the janitor had carefully removed the
gymnastic apparatus the boys were aching for, and substituted four
tables, around which they sat playing cards under the eye of a
policeman. They were "educational" cards, with pictures of Europe and
Asia and Africa and America on, but it required only half a minute's
observation to tell us that they were gambling--betting on which
educational card would turn up next. What the city had provided was a
course in scientific gambling with the policeman to see that it was done
right. And over at Market and Monroe streets, where they have an acre or
more of splendid asphalted floor--such a ball room!--and a matchless
yard, the best in the city, twoscore little girls were pitifully cooped
up in a corner, being _taught_ something, while outside a hundred
clamored to get in, making periodic rushes at the door, only to
encounter there a janitor's assistant with a big club and a roar like a
bull to frighten them away. "Orders," he told us. The yard was dark and
dismal. That was the school by the way, whence the report came that they
"hadn't availed themselves" of the opportunity to play.
It helped, when that story was told. There is nothing in our day like
the facts, and they came out that time. There was the roof-garden on the
Educational Alliance Building with its average of more than five
thousand a day, young and old, last summer (a total of 344,424 for the
season), in flat contradiction of the claim that the children "wouldn't
go up on the roof." Not, surely, if it was only to encounter a janitor
with a club there. But a brass band now? There were a few professional
shivers at that, but our experience with the one we set playing in the
park on Sunday, years ago, came to the rescue. When it had played its
last piece to end and there burst forth as with one voice from the
mighty throng, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow!" some doubts
were set at rest for all time. They were never sensible, but after that
they were silly.
So the janitor was bidden bring out his key. Electric lights were
strung. "We will save the money somewhere else," said Mayor Low. The
experiment was made with five schools, all on the crowded East Side.
I was at dinner with friends at the University Settlement, directly
across from which, on the other corner, is one of the great new schools,
No. 20, I think. We had got to the salad when through the open window
there came a yell of exultation and triumph that made me fairly jump in
my chair. Below in the street a mighty mob of children and mothers had
been for half an hour besieging the door of the schoolhouse. The yell
signalized the opening of it by the policeman in charge. Up the stairs
surged the multitude. We could see them racing, climbing, toiling,
according to their years, for the goal above where the band was tuning
up. One little fellow with a trousers leg and a half, and a pair of
suspenders and an undershirt as his only other garments, labored up the
long flight, carrying his baby brother on his back. I watched them go
clear up, catching glimpses of them at every turn, and then I went up
after.
I found them in a corner, propped against the wall, a look of the
serenest bliss on their faces as they drank it all in. It was _their_
show at last. The band was playing "Alabama," and fifteen hundred boys
and girls were dancing, hopping, prancing to the tune, circling about
and about while they sang and kept time to the music. When the chorus
was reached, every voice was raised to its shrillest pitch:
"Way--down--yonder--in--the--cornfield." And for once in my life the
suggestion of the fields and the woods did not seem hopelessly out of
place in the Tenth Ward crowds. Baby in its tired mother's lap looked on
wide-eyed, out of the sweep of the human current.
The band ceased playing, and the boys took up some game, dodging hither
and thither in pursuit of a ball. How they did it will ever be a mystery
to me. There did not seem to be room for another child, but they managed
as if they had it all to themselves. There was no disorder; no one was
hurt, or even knocked down, unless in the game, and that _was_ the game,
so it was as it should be. Right in the middle of it, the strains of
"Sunday Afternoon," all East Side children's favorite, burst forth, and
out of the seeming confusion came rhythmic order as the whole body of
children moved, singing, along the floor.
Down below, the deserted street--deserted for once in the day--had grown
strangely still. The policeman nodded contentedly: "good business,
indeed." This was a kind of roof patrol he could appreciate. Nothing to
do; less for to-morrow, for here they were not planning raids on the
grocer's stock. They were happy, and when children are happy, they are
safe, and so are the rest of us. It is the policeman's philosophy, and
it is worth taking serious note of.
A warning blast on a trumpet and the "Star-spangled Banner" floated out
over the house-tops. The children ceased dancing: every boy's cap came
off, and the chorus swelled loud and clear:
"--in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave."
The light shone upon the thousand upturned faces. Scarce one in a
hundred of them all that did not bear silent witness to persecution
which had driven a whole people over the sea, without home, without
flag. And now--my eyes filled with tears. I said it: I am getting old
and silly.
[Illustration: The Fellows and Papa and Mamma shall be invited in yet.]
It was so at the still bigger school at Hester and Orchard streets. At
the biggest of them all, and the finest, the same No. 177 where the
janitor's assistant "shooed" the children away with his club, the once
dismal yard had been festooned with electric lamps that turned night
into day, and about the band-stand danced nearly three thousand boys and
girls to the strains of "Money Musk," glad to be alive and there. A
ball-room forsooth! And it is going to be better still; for once the ice
has been broken, there are new kinks coming in this dancing programme
that is the dear dissipation of the East Side. What is to hinder the
girls, when the long winter days come, from inviting in the fellows, and
papa and mamma, for a real dance that shall take the wind out of the
sails of the dance-halls? Nothing in all the world. Nor even will there
be anything to stop Superintendent Maxwell from taking a turn himself,
as he said he would, or me either, if I haven't danced in thirty years.
I just dare him to try.
The man in charge of the ball-room at No. 177--I shall flatly refuse to
call it a yard--said that he didn't believe in any other rule than
order, and nearly took my breath away, for just then I had a vision of
the club in the doorway; but it was only a vision. The club was not
there. As he said it, he mounted the band-stand and waved the crowd to
order with his speaking-trumpet.
"A young lady has just lost her gold watch on the floor," he said. "It
is here under your feet. Bring it to me, the one who finds it." There
was a curious movement of the crowd, as if every unit in it turned once
about itself and bowed, and presently a shout of discovery went up. A
little girl with a poor shawl pinned about her throat came forward with
the watch. The manager waved his trumpet at me with a bright smile.
"You see it works."
The entire crowd fell in behind him in an ecstatic cake-walk, expressive
of its joy and satisfaction, and so they went, around and around.
On that very corner, just across the way, a dozen years ago, I gave a
stockbroker a good blowing up for hammering his cellar door full of
envious nails to prevent the children using it as a slide. It was all
the playground they had.
[Illustration: The "Slide" that was the Children's only Playground
once.]
On the way home I stopped at the first of all the public schools to
acquire a roof playground, to see how they did it there. The janitor had
been vanquished, but the pedagogue was in charge, and he had organized
the life out of it all. The children sat around listless, and made
little or no attempt to dance. A harassed teacher was vainly trying to
form the girls into ranks for exercises of some kind. They held up
their hands in desperate endeavor to get her ear, only to have them
struck down impatiently, or to be summarily put out if they tried again.
They did not want to exercise. They wanted to play. I tried to voice
their grievance to the "doctor" who presided.
"Not at all," he said decisively; "there must be system, system!"
"Tommyrot!" said my Chicago friend at my elbow, and I felt like saying
"thank you!" I don't know but I did. They have good sense in Chicago.
Jane Addams is there.
The doctor resumed his efforts to teach the boys something, having
explained to me that downstairs, where they are when it rains, there
were seven distinct echoes to bother the band. Two girls "spieled" in
the corner, a kind of dancing that is not favored in the playground.
There had been none of that at the other places. The policeman eyed the
show with a frown.
So there was a fly in our ointment, after all. But for all that, the
janitor is downed, his day dead. This of all things at last has been
"settled right," and the path cleared for the children's feet, not in
New York only, but everywhere and for all time. I, too, am glad to be
alive in the time that saw it done.