by David Nasaw
Junking provided poor kids with luxuries they could not otherwise have enjoyed. Junk could be turned into cash and then used to buy movie tickets, treats from the candy shop, or special items at the “five and ten.” It could be remodeled into toys, games, and sporting goods: pushcarts, pull-wagons, bats, and footballs. It could be swiped from local shops, pushcarts, and open-air markets and consumed on the spot. The older boys built and furnished their dugouts, shanties, forts, and clubhouses with junked materials. They built bonfires with scavenged wood and cooked sweet potatoes or fresh ears of corn swiped from peddlers and open markets. Leonard Covello and his gang stole sweet potatoes to “cook in our ‘mickey cans’ [in our] hide-out under the tenement rubble.”21 Hy Kraft “stole the first slice of watermelon [he] ever ate.” It was hot as hell, the pushcart overflowed with juicy slices, and Kraft, too poor to purchase one, could not help himself. “For days I cased the fruit stand on East Broadway and watched every move made by the old man with the beard and funny cap on his head; he wasn’t very agile, and he’d leave the stand unguarded every so often to go inside. I can remember rehearsing the raid and then the actual performance, walking in back of an adult, suddenly stepping away, making my quick snatch, the spring around the corner, the dash to the safety of my own block, then hiding in a doorway, making certain that I wasn’t followed and enjoying every dripping bit.”22
Working-class families expected their children to contribute to the family’s income any way they could. Those too young to bring home a steady wage could bring home scavenged food and fuel instead. Few families were going to starve or freeze in winter without the children’s contribution, but the fact that the children could supply free fruit, vegetables, coal, and wood meant that the family’s paychecks could be stretched a bit further.
The amount of material the children brought home was astounding. According to John Madro, a participant in the Chicago-Polonia oral history project, no one in his neighborhood ever “had to buy any fuel, any oil, or any wood.” With the help of freight car switchmen and brakemen, the boys collected coal and wood from the tracks. On Saturdays, the men and boys on the block cut up the railroad ties and hauled them into their basements.23 Marie Arendt, another participant in the Chicago-Polonia project, collected unburned, discarded coke from a nearby coke oven and “broken up bread or day old bread and pie” from the bakery down the block.24 On the Middle West Side of Manhattan, Katherine Anthony, an investigator for the Russell Sage Foundation, found families “almost [living] on waste. The children forage for wood, coal, and ice along the railroad tracks and among the warehouses.… It is surprising how large a part of the minimum necessary to support life on the West Side can be picked up from the street by boys and girls whose hunting instincts have been sharpened by necessity.”25
New York City, early 1890s. “What boys learn on street playgrounds.” A photograph by Jacob Riis, purporting to show street kids pilfering fruit from a pushcart. Riis believed that the solution to this particular problem was removing the kids from the streets to supervised playgrounds. (Jacob Riis Collection, LC)
Children had no trouble at all finding plentiful sources of food and fuel. The Middle West Side kids went scavenging at the “produce depots on Eleventh Avenue for refuse fruit and vegetables.”26 In every city there were similar open-air food markets where the children gathered early in the mornings and late in the afternoons.27 Philip Davis, who in Street-land described the work of Boston’s youthful scavengers, found that the children were always one step “ahead of the street cleaner.” Their “ ‘red-letter’ nights” were Saturday nights and nights preceding holidays, when the food markets, pushcarts, fruit stands, and grocery wagons were only too ready to discharge their refuse. “Specked fruits, tomatoes and cucumbers are either devoured on the spot or taken home. Chicken heads, pigs’ feet, and the like, are regarded as spoils of war worth scrambling for every Saturday night.”28
In Chicago, according to the Juvenile Protective Association, and in Boston, according to the Massachusetts Child Labor Committee, the children were without shame or taste when it came to picking through the discarded, spoiled, overripe, and ruined meat and produce. “These children,” reported the JPA, “have been found carrying fruit in every stage of decomposition, and on several occasions dead fowls.” The investigators in Boston were just as startled—and disgusted—to find children carrying off in their canvas bags “fruit, vegetables, pieces of meat, fish heads, almost anything which can be eaten or which can be made into soup.”29
The reformers were a lot more squeamish than the children and their families could afford to be. Food was food. Had the children had the money to shop in the better markets or choose the pick of the pushcarts, they would have. But, as the proverb goes, beggars can’t be choosers. A spoiled tomato for free was better than a perfect one too expensive to buy.
While the children scoured the city’s dumps, alleyways, and open-air markets for food, fuel, and items to sell to the junkman, the reformers followed at a distance, engrossed in their own collection activities. In this dawning age of scientific social work, the child welfare experts were determined to back up their assumptions with hard, cold data and descriptions. They surveyed the inmates of juvenile reformatories and discovered that most, if not all, had been junkers at one time or another. The Juvenile Protective Agency of Chicago went a step further and sent questionnaires to juvenile justice experts and officials in various cities. The response from Baltimore, Brooklyn, Colorado Springs, Detroit, Indianapolis, Janesville (Wisconsin), Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York City, New Orleans, Omaha, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and St. Louis confirmed their supposition that junking was not only a “moral hazard,” but a significant cause of juvenile delinquency.30
Boston, October 1909. “Carrying home decayed refuse from market.” (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)
The reformers were, in this as in so much else, only half-right. Junking did lead to petty theft. The line between the two was a fine one, often crossed and seldom recognized. What the reformers and the law considered a crime, however, the children considered just another part of the life of the city. If they had learned anything on the streets, it was that one had to seize one’s opportunities. The streets were not paved with gold, but they were littered with junk that could be converted into nickels and dimes. If the children didn’t do the work and collect the spoils, someone else would.
The children knew the difference between petty theft and grand larceny. Those who were successful in swiping watermelon slices from pushcarts were not about to commit armed robbery. They were petty thieves because they were allowed to be—indeed, even encouraged by the adults around them. Had the railroad guards and the switchmen been less cooperative and the junkyards, streets, and alleyways less stocked with recyclable items, the children might have been able to grow to adulthood with attitudes toward theft as pure as the reformers’. But as long as there was so much “stuff” to rescue, so many junkmen to buy it for cash, and so many families making good use of it, the children would continue to take what they needed and ask no further questions. To have done anything else would have defied common sense and violated the logic of the streets.
Harpo Marx was one of those for whom junking, scavenging, and petty theft were daily experiences. With junkmen and hockshops on every corner, Harpo and his brother Chico made more “mazuma” from scavenging than from any of their other business ventures. There was, nonetheless, another side to the experience. Because, as Harpo knew so well, anything and everything could be ripped off and quickly sold for cash, nothing was safe.
Harpo’s childhood memories are replete with stories of loss: from the dishpans he hustled to go sledding in Central Park to his genuine dollar Ingersoll bar mitzvah watch. The dishpans were, within hours of his locating them, “swiped out from under me by bigger kids” who sold them to the junkman for five cents cash. The watch was stolen and pawned by his brother Chico.
“I was pretty damn sore. A presen
t was not the same as something you hustled. I tracked down Chico to a crap game and asked him what about it. He handed me the pawn ticket. I gave the ticket to Minnie [Harpo and Chico’s mother] and she reclaimed the watch for me. Then a brilliant idea occurred to me. I would show Chico. I would make my watch Chico-proof, so he couldn’t possibly hock it again. I removed its hands.
“Now the watch was mine forever. I wound it faithfully each morning and carried it with me at all times. When I wanted to know what time it was I looked at the Ehret Brewery clock and held my watch to my ear. It ran like a charm, and its ticking was a constant reminder that I had, for once, outsmarted Chico.”31
The Little Mothers
We have, to this point, spoken less of girls than of boys—and for good reason. Though girls hawked papers and peddled fruit on the street and went junking in the dumps and alleyways, they were never as numerous as the boys at these work locations. Unfortunately and unfairly, the conditions that made street trading so attractive for the boys made it off-limits for the girls. Young girls were not supposed to be brash, aggressive, and loud. They were not supposed to chase customers they did not know up and down the city’s most congested avenues.
Street trading was not only unladylike, it was considered positively dangerous for the young girls of the city. On this, there was as near a consensus as one could get on most subjects in early twentieth-century urban America. From Melvin, a Covington, Kentucky, newsie (“It ain’t right for girls to sell papers.… They get tough and heaps o’ things”1), to the middle-class reformers and the parents themselves, it was agreed that girls did not belong on the streets.
The child labor reformers were the most adamant on the subject. Even Elbridge Gerry, President of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, who supported the boys’ right to peddle their papers without state interference, argued vociferously against “the employment of girls selling newspapers.” Hawking papers, a wholesome and salutary occupation for boys, was, he proclaimed, “one of the most iniquitous practices” city girls could engage in.2
Wilmington, Delaware, May 1910. Two girl newsies and their customer. Girl newsies, though not nearly as numerous as the boys, were not as rare as the reformers would have wished. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)
Newspaper publishers and editors, usually uncompromising champions of the children’s right to work, surrendered when it came to girls. In what appears to be the draft of a rebuttal to a 1905 Juvenile Protective Association pamphlet, an employee of the Chicago Daily News, though disagreeing with everything else the association had to say, agreed that neither the public nor the newspapers were well served by newsgirls. “We [the Chicago Daily News] do everything we can to discourage them. I see no good reason why the girl should not be prohibited by law from selling on the streets.”3
With opposition to their street trading almost unanimous, the child labor reformers had an easy time convincing state legislators to draft special measures to “protect” the girls. In twenty of the thirty states with minimum age requirements for street traders, the ages set for girls were significantly higher than for boys. In six states, boys ten and over could work on the streets, while girls under sixteen were barred. In fourteen other states, the girls had to be from two to nine years older than the boys to trade on the streets.4
The laws did not, of course, clear all the girls off the streets. A 1905 Chicago study of one thousand newsies reported that investigators had “seen” twenty newsgirls—though, it added, “a moderate estimate puts them at three times that number.” Mary McDowell told a gathering at the 1909 National Child Labor Committee convention that she had, on a recent visit to St. Louis, seen several young girls hawking papers in the vicinity of her hotel and near the railroad station. At the same meeting, a Mrs. E. Gaylord Hunt of Grand Rapids, Michigan, admitted that in her home town there were “a few little newsgirls, perhaps a dozen,” loose on the streets.5
Though girls could be found trading on the streets of most cities, in only a few could they do so with the protection of the law. The Connecticut legislature, to the consternation of reformers everywhere, expressly forbade the city of Hartford to deny licenses to children “solely on the ground of sex.” The lawmakers, reported Survey magazine, had found no evidence at all that the newsgirls were “demoralized by the work.… The evidence gathered [on the contrary] has shown that ‘the Hartford newsgirls are a pretty good sort of girl after all.’ ”6
In Bennington, Vermont, the editor of the Banner was also pleased with the work of his newsgirls. As he told Lewis Hine—at the time a field investigator for the National Child Labor Committee—he would have liked to have had more girls on the street, as he thought “they [were] more honest than the boys generally.”7
These reports from Bennington and Hartford show us that girl street traders were every bit as competent as boys. But competence was not the issue. Propriety and decency were. The only females who had any business being on the streets were “street walkers.” Girls under the age of ten might, if properly supervised, hustle flowers or baskets in front of their parents’ stands. But those a bit older could not do so without projecting an image of indecency.
Hartford, Connecticut, March 1909. A Lewis Hine photograph of newsgirls in one of the cities that permitted girls to trade on the streets. From the way these children are dressed it is clear that they were from homes that were able to provide for their necessities. These children’s earnings were probably put towards the family’s savings or luxuries like a piano in the parlor or a new icebox for the kitchen. (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)
The streets bred tough, self-reliant, self-confident young adults. Their lessons were appropriately learned by boys who would grow up to join the world of work and wages. Working-class girls were destined for different futures. Though many would, before marriage or between marriage and motherhood, work for wages in factories, offices, or retail stores, these were considered but temporary detours on the road to motherhood and housekeeping. There was little the girls could learn on the streets that would prepare them to be mothers and wives. On the contrary, it was feared that the streets—with their excitement and adventure—could cause irreparable harm to young girls who, as adults, would have to content themselves with spending the greater portion of every day inside their own homes.
Children who grow up in a society with strictly defined gender roles learn early what will be expected of them. The girls of the early twentieth-century city were no exception. They watched as their brothers were sent out to play while they did their chores. Because the boys were basically useless at home (aside, that is, from fetching the wood and filling the coal bin) and, until they approached ten or eleven, unable to earn much elsewhere, they were free to play in the afternoons. The girls were too useful to be given the same kind of freedom. Six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds were big enough to watch the babies and help their mothers with the lighter household tasks. Ten- and eleven-year-olds could be entrusted with enough responsibilities to fill their afternoons.
Had their mothers had other resources, they might have allowed the girls to stay out at play until they were a bit older. But lacking the money for servants or labor-saving devices, they had to look to their daughters for assistance. It took considerable labor to care for a household and earn money on the side. Household chores required hours of preparation and involved dozens of separate steps. The laundry had to be done by hand from beginning to end: sorted, soaked, rubbed against the washboard, rinsed, boiled, rinsed again, wrung out, starched, hung to dry, ironed with irons heated on the stove, folded, and put away. Cooking involved not only preparing the food and cooking it but hauling coal for the fire, dumping the ashes afterwards, and keeping the cast-iron stove cleaned, blacked, and rust-free. Housecleaning was complicated by the soot, grime, and ashes released by coal-burning stoves and kerosene and gas lamps. Shopping had to be done daily and in several different shops: there were no refrigerators to store food purchased earlier in the week and no super
markets for one-stop marketing.8
Little girls, lacking their mothers’ experience, strength, and skills, could not do the cooking, the laundry, or the heavy cleaning by themselves. But they could “help out.” Adelia Marsik, who grew up in an Italian immigrant household in Chicago, recalled in her oral history that she began helping with the dishes at five or six years of age. “I started out very early.… They would put a chair by the sink and I would kneel there on the chair to do the dishes.” Other little girls helped out by sorting and folding the laundry or, like eight-year-old Elizabeth Stern, chopping the “farfel.” (According to Stern, farfel was made by “chopping stiff dough into little bits [which were then] cooked with meat as a vegetable.”) In families that celebrated the Sabbath, the girls were put to work immediately after school on Friday sweeping the front rooms, dusting the furniture, and preparing the kitchen for the Sabbath meal and celebration. Many young girls did the daily marketing for mothers who had so much to do at home they could not spare the time to shop. They learned how to pick over produce, buy day-old bread (if it were still soft), and bargain with the butcher for a fatter piece of meat and an extra soup bone or two. Investigators in a Polish neighborhood in Chicago found that the children there did “practically all the buying of groceries and staples.” From butcher to baker to grocer for canned goods and crackers to the vegetable wagons parked in the street, they traveled each afternoon, their baskets slung over their arms.9
The girls’ help with the shopping, cooking, and cleaning was important to the proper running of the household, but secondary in comparison with their major responsibility as “little mothers.” Elizabeth Stern recalled in her autobiography that she had been put to work rocking the babies and “taking them out for the ‘fresh air’ ” when she was still too young to go to school. Girls old enough to attend school took over caring for the babies when they returned home in the afternoon. Catharine Brody, who grew up in what she called a lower middle-class family in Manhattan, recalled in an article for The American Mercury that all the girls on her block minded babies after school. “The babies came in baby carriages. We parked the carriages, generally at the edge of the sidewalk and placed kitchen chairs or footstools together.” For Catharine and her friends, baby-tending was not a chore, but something that little girls did in the afternoon, like embroidering or jumping rope.10