Fighting for Life

by S. Josephine Baker

  We selected groups of children of all racial types and social backgrounds and of related ages, carefully controlled, in rooms of three different classes : (a) those mechanically ventilated and kept at 68 degrees Fahrenheit; (b) those ventilated by open windows and kept at 50 degrees Fahrenheit (in these the children were supplied with warm clothing); and (c) classes ventilated by open windows with the heat kept at 68 degrees Fahrenheit. The results were unanswerable: the rate of absence from school on account of respiratory diseases (which means bronchitis and pneumonia) was 32 percent higher in the mechanically ventilated 68-degree rooms than in the open-window rooms kept at the same temperature, and 40 percent higher than in the open-window rooms kept at 50 degrees. In the mechanically ventilated, 68-degree classrooms the incidence of common colds was 98 percent higher than in open-window 68-degree rooms and about 70 percent higher than in the 50-degree rooms. That knowledge is just as useful in the home as it is in the school. And, when people objected that the cost of coal would be prohibitive in keeping rooms at 68 degrees with the windows open in zero weather, I had figures on that too, showing that the cost of the additional coal was no more than the depreciation and upkeep on a ventilating system, estimating that it would be replaced in twenty years. Much to my delight, this idea did seem productive of some good. Giving every child a chance at fresh air, instead of allowing only a picked few to have this privilege, attracted attention. A number of western cities built all of their new schools without any ventilating apparatus and relied solely on open window ventilation. At least two large private schools in New York City followed this example. But the New York City Public Schools continue to keep their windows closed and breed applicants for “Open-Air Classes.”

  CHAPTER IX

  IT MAY SEEM LIKE A COLD-BLOODED THING TO say, but someone ought to point out that the World War was a backhanded break for children—a break originating in the world’s dismay at the appalling waste of human life, both at the front and behind the lines. As more and more thousands of men were slaughtered every day, the belligerent nations, on whatever side, began to see that new human lives, which could grow up to replace brutally extinguished adult lives, were extremely valuable national assets. When father had been torn apart by shrapnel or smothered by poison gas, his small sons and daughters, the parents of the future, took the spotlight as the hope of the nation. That is the handsomest way to put it. The ugliest way—and, I suspect, the truer—is to say flatly that it was the military usefulness of human life that wrought the change. When a nation is fighting a war or preparing for another, and the European nations have been doing one of those two things ever since 1914, it must look to its future supplies of cannon fodder. Particularly when supplies run short and unproductive militarism begins to lower the standard of living, rulers and governments begin to think hard about how best to conserve future citizens.

  The child-conservation impulse was evidenced in America even before we entered the World War. In 1916 we had 8,914 cases of poliomyelitis, a disease that had been mildly epidemic on several previous occasions. But, to a world newly conscious of the importance of its children, the popular name for poliomyelitis, “infantile paralysis,” conveyed an unbearable picture that, coupled with fear of infection, stirred up a mass emotion out of all proportion to the danger. Poliomyelitis had been made a reportable disease in 1910, but few cases had been reported and practically no precautions taken. It was not until this epidemic of 1916 that it was actually considered infectious. As a matter of fact the danger of infection was relatively slight. There were cases of infantile paralysis in 8,287 families, but 96 percent of these families had only one case. 16,500 children in these same families were intimately exposed to the infection and did not contract the disease. Nevertheless, it could be contracted, and the public accepted it as occasion for marked hysteria. General terror was fomented by the action taken by the New York City Department of Health and the resultant publicity. There were 21,603 cases of measles reported in 1916, 19,297 cases of tuberculosis, 13,521 cases of diphtheria—but the 8,900 children suffering from poliomyelitis formed the basis for a degree of panic that has never been equalled in the history of the New York City Health Department. All theatres, moving-picture houses, playgrounds and play streets were closed— all public gatherings prohibited. In September the opening of all schools was delayed for two weeks. The isolation period of all cases was extended to eight weeks. Large warning signs were placarded on the street walls of houses where cases occurred—even apartment houses were placarded at the main entrance as well as on the apartment-door of the afflicted family. There were even more startling rules: no child was allowed to leave the city or to enter it or to travel from one Borough to another, without an official certificate issued by the Department of Health stating that he lived in a house which had been free from poliomyelitis for at least two weeks. Hundreds of medical inspectors and twenty-five officials from the United States Public Health Service were stationed at railroad stations, boat piers, ferry piers, and roads leading out of the city to enforce this regulation. The newspapers, of course, announced these steps and treated them as the news they undoubtedly were, and added their bit to the general air of catastrophe by publishing daily lists of cases, giving the name and address of each individual patient. Poliomyelitis is a serious and terrifying disease. It should receive all of the calm attention that is now being given it. But there should be no hysteria. The hope and promise of its prevention does not lie in the methods I have outlined; it lies in the orderly campaign that is now being waged. The first note of sanity was sounded in the establishment of the Warm Springs Foundation in Georgia, the second has come with the widespread interest shown in the President’s Birthday Balls given throughout the country and now large groups of our citizens are giving largely of their interest and enthusiasm to make this one of our triumphs in the overcoming of disease.

  I believe that the spreading war-psychology had something to do with this over-dramatization. Nations already in the thick of actual war were more direct and reasonable in their efforts to preserve the younger generation. That point was made very clear to me shortly after the United States entered the war. I was walking down Fifth Avenue, already labelled “The Avenue of the Allies,” on a bright spring day when all the flags were snapping and the uniform on every other person I met looking handsomer than ever. Presently I met a woman I knew who was wearing a bright new khaki uniform, loaded down with all the leather and metal gadgets it would hold. She was sailing for London, she said, to supervise the work of feeding school-lunches to undernourished children in the London schools. Wasn’t it horrible, she said, that on account of the war 12 percent of them were undernourished?

  “That is horrible,” I said, “but what would you say if I told you that, in New York, 21 percent of the school children are undernourished, and largely on account of that same war?”

  I was not trying to stop her from going to London. Perhaps it was my own lack of a uniform that made me so sharp about it. For I never got to France and I never buttoned a khaki coat around myself, even though I held a high military rank. I have never been able to understand just why the office of the Surgeon-General of the United States proceeded as it did in my case. Almost as soon as the United States declared war, a large international organization asked me to give up my New York post and go to France to take charge of all its work with refugee and homeless children. A huge and important and intoxicatingly useful job which I accepted with joy. And then, not twenty-four hours later, a telegram came from Washington. The powers there knew all about my offer—and disapproved. I was needed at home more than in France, they said, when I went to Washington to see about it. I would be good enough to tell these people that I had changed my mind and give no reason for my refusal.

  It was a desperate position to force anybody into, for it made me look both impolite and yellow, which is not a palatable combination. But it had to be done, so I did it, and trailed back to pick up the exacting routine of the Bureau of Child Hygi
ene again. Presently I received a confidential communication from the office of the Surgeon-General of the United States Public Health Service: an elaborately engraved certificate informing me I had been appointed an Assistant Surgeon-General with the rank of Major in this branch of our government. I liked that, all the more because I am pretty sure I was the first woman ever to receive so high-ranking a commission. But I would have felt a good deal better about the whole thing if that envelope had instead contained permission for me to go to France in almost any capacity.

  My statement that 21 percent of New York’s school children were undernourished was no exaggeration. War prices were largely responsible. The war boom had raised prices to high points, for one thing, and for another, so much of the teeming American supply of various food-stuffs was being shipped to Europe that, although there was enough to keep all from starving, the markets seldom had a chance to level off with increases in available supplies. So, all through the war, we had to add a widespread malnutrition program to our already overloaded schedules. We fed the children lunches; we campaigned to get each child an extra spoonful of oil, even if butter was economically out of the question; we fought to conserve the milk supply so as to divert more of it to children’s use. It was a long hard pull but, by the time the war was over, the percentage of undernourishment among New York children was almost as low as that in London and we could tell ourselves that, in general, we were looking after our own children almost as well as if they had been poor little Belgians. It was during this period that I coined a rhetorical contrast which, I think, made more people think about child welfare than anything else I ever said or wrote: the simple statement that “It’s six times safer to be a soldier in the trenches of France than to be born a baby in the United States.”

  Long after the war was over, the American people kept on with this queer insistence on doing better by one’s neighbors’ children than by one’s own. It will be remembered how large a part children played in the advertisement of American post-war relief activities. The starving Belgian and Armenian and, immediately after the war, starving Russian and German and Austrian children appealed far more successfully to the American pocketbook than the equally miserable and rickety little people on Washington Street, Manhattan Island. Yet I should not be too disturbed about that, I suppose. It was a long time happening, but eventually it was true that all this agitation about other people’s small unfortunates produced a psychological effect which made things much better for the American child. Although the New York Bureau of Child Hygiene had had plenty of publicity before the war, its example had been followed in only five states by 1914. During and after the war the landslide began, however. State after state wanted to start a Bureau of Child Hygiene. City after city was inspired with the same hope, and in each case someone was sent to my office to “see how it could be done.” The idea was growing. It was to grow still more rapidly later and I could see the day in the future when it would pervade the country. I think it was about this time that I made up my mind that my term of office should be limited by this growth. I promised myself that when the forty-eighth state should have organized a Bureau of Child Hygiene, I would retire. By 1923 all forty-eight states had such bureaus, and I kept my promise. It is a rare privilege to have been present at the birth of a great and new idea and see it grow to maturity, even though some of its growth must be credited to a world disaster.

  America furnished not only most of the supplies for the European children, but also a great deal of the technical experience for the people in charge. Almost as soon as the war began to look like a long and serious business, dignitaries came flocking from Europe to New York to find out how New York’s Bureau of Child Hygiene worked and how much of its procedure was applicable to their problem. From all countries on both sides—enthusiastic Frenchmen; peering, solemn and intelligent Germans; voluble Russians; close-mouthed and sharp-eyed Englishmen; smiling delegations from China and Japan. It was extraordinarily flattering. We knew, of course, that our Bureau was the only one of its kind in the world, but we had not realized that it had become internationally famous. We showed them everything and went far out of our way to work out answers to their different problems and then back they went to report and set up organizations.

  But the more I thought it over, the more disturbed I became. Our heart-warming progress in revolutionizing child care had been possible only because the American public had learned to consider it intolerable that babies and children should die needlessly or grow up needlessly handicapped. But it had taken the sinister stimulus of mass-murder to make the fighting nations see the necessity for saving children. The French had anticipated some of our developments years before the Bureau of Child Hygiene was founded; baby health stations, for instance. But they did nothing on any large scale with the idea until the piling up of corpses in the trenches of the western front forced them to speculate, subconsciously perhaps, as to how many recruits would be available for conscription in 1939.

  The various European dictatorships, red and black alike, are still carrying on that tradition, probably for the same uncomfortable reason. Only a few years ago I met at dinner a certain foreign dignitary high in power in a famous dictatorship. When he had the opportunity he spoke to me, and reminded me that he and I had met during the war, when he was on a special mission to the United States.

  “You must remember,” he said, “that I asked you to draw up a scheme for child welfare in my country. You spent two or three weeks doing it in great detail.” I asked how the scheme had worked out. “Very well,” he said, “and especially well for me. They neglected it until recently; but then one day the Chief suddenly summoned me”—he didn’t say Chief, but I’d rather not use the word that would make it possible to identify him—“and told me that he wanted me to draw up plans for a national child welfare scheme, at once. So I went back to my office and got out of my file the copy of your plan almost twenty years old, had it translated and sent to the Chief as my own work and,” he said, patting himself on a particularly gorgeous medal, “this is what I got for it.”

  Such grim general considerations did not, however, keep me from realizing that these inquisitive visitors were fine people almost without exception, as they should have been in that kind of work. There were dozens of them coming day after day not only during these years but all through the years both before and after the war. Dr. Armand de Lille and Dr. René Sand, the French and Belgian inquirers respectively, were a joy to meet. The English contingent, numerous and highly pleasant, were all titled somehow, no doubt on the principle that there was nothing like a handle to your name for making a good impression on those Americans. The Duchess of Marlborough, a very simple, charming person, came over to buy equipment for a new English children’s hospital. I helped her plan out what she needed and showed her where to buy it. Lady Aberdeen made several trips on one and another kind of war-work. She was a grand person. Her husband, an extremely august old gentleman who was then Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, if I remember correctly, and had been Governor-General of Canada, was even more certain of that than I was. He accompanied her on one of her trips and always sat on the platform behind her when she was making a speech. Lady Aberdeen was an excellent speaker and, every time she scored a hit, Lord Aberdeen would thump on the crown of his silk topper which he held decorously between his knees, tomtom-fashion, and give tongue as if he had been in the House of Lords: “Hear, hear! . . . Hear, hear!” Only, since he pronounced it in true parliamentary fashion: “Hyah, hyah!” I doubt if a good half of the audience had any notion of what this peculiar English custom of saying “Yah, yah!” in the middle of a speech was all about.

  The late Sir Leslie MacKenzie, Sir Arthur Newsholme and the late Sir George Newman were other charming and competent English welfare people who came to see us. Sir George was then Medical Officer of Health in the English Health Ministry. I spent many days in the field with him examining minutely the various branches of the New York City Bureau of Child Hygiene. In the end he
tried to persuade me to go back to London with him where he said he could guarantee me the position of Health Director for the whole London school system. It was a tempting offer. I have always been fond of the English and possess more respect for their ways of doing things than Americans are supposed to have. But something Sir George himself had said when he was going through our own New York schools with me had already shown me why I would have to refuse this offer. We were talking with the principal of an East Side school of some 2,000 girls. At that time immigration was still at a high flow. Sir George expressed surprise at the fact that they all spoke quite good English. Weren’t New York school-children in the poorer districts largely immigrants’ children? Or were this lot all born in New York?

  “Oh, no,” said the principal, “very few. Practically all born abroad, I should say.”

  “Good heavens!” said Sir George. “How do you people do this sort of thing? We’ve no problem to match it at all. In Berlin the poor are German, are thoroughly fitted for the German environment. In London, they are all English and fitted to be Englishmen. But here—you have the poor of every country on earth to contend with. It’s deeply impressive, I assure you.”

  So it struck me that, by the same token, a New Yorker would be most ill advised to try to fit herself into an English situation. I was, after all, doing the same work in New York, and it was still urgent and important. I wondered whether we would welcome an Englishman at the head of our school health work. Such jobs abroad, I decided, belonged to citizens or subjects of the countries concerned. I would lay out programs, give advice, work myself hard to show these people what we did and why. But I should never have been able to be happy as an expatriate expert.