Children of the City

by David Nasaw

  It was easy to poke fun at the girls for their devotion to fashion and the fashionable. The Polish-language newspapers in Chicago ridiculed the girls for their shoes as big as sleds and the incongruity between the “silks and satins” they dressed in and the “shack[s] bending to the ground” they called home.13 Yet the girls, while devoting a large percentage of their spending money to their clothing, were not acting unreasonably. Fashionable clothing was not an affectation or frivolity. Girls had to dress properly not because the right outfit would lead to better jobs or transport them from dreary, congested flats to suburban cottages: they had to dress properly because out on the streets they would be judged by their appearance and nothing else. In the eyes of others, they were what they wore.14

  The cities were socially stratified—with an escape clause. Working girls could, if they properly distinguished themselves, avoid the opprobrium visited upon the poor, the immigrant, and the outsider. The proper outfit covered a multitude of social sins. On Manhattan’s West Side, the manager of a large pattern factory, as cognizant as the girls of the hat’s social significance, urged his young workers “to wear their hats to and from work so as to avoid being taken for factory girls.”15 As Mary Simkhovitch, director of Greenwich House (a New York City social settlement) and author of The City Worker’s World in America, wrote in 1917, the girl whose hat and shoes were in fashion carried “with her as she goes to church, to the theater or to work, no outward mark that betrays the meanness of her tiny room, nor the slenderness of her daily fare. She will be judged by her appearance, and that to her means her clothes.”16

  Like their street trading brothers, the girls who worked full-time had to lie and cheat to get the money they needed—and then lie again to buy what they wanted without divulging the true price to their mothers. It was easier on everyone involved to lie than to argue, whine, and plead for extra spending money. A working girl on Manhattan’s West Side explained to Ruth True, an investigator for the Russell Sage Foundation, how most of the girls she worked with got the money they needed. “Oh sure, there’s a lot of girls that ‘knock down.’ You take this week in our place,—we all made good overtime. I know I got two forty-nine. Well, I guess there wasn’t a single girl but me that didn’t change her [pay] envelope, on our floor. Whatever you make is written outside in pencil, you know. That’s easy to fix—you have only to rub it out, put on whatever it usually is, and pocket the change.”17

  St. Louis, 1910. Three young working girls, probably no more than fourteen years old and just out of school, wearing hats probably paid for with their own earnings. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)

  The children did not enjoy cheating their parents. They took no pleasure in lying, especially when they suspected that their parents recognized the lie. And yet they could find no other way to get the funds they needed. It cost money to have fun, money to belong, money to join in the life of the city. The children were not spendthrifts, thrill seekers, or bums. They took only what they had to have and surrendered the rest to their parents. The loyalty and sacrifice of teenage girls to their families was legendary. Even the newsies, who were considered much less reliable and responsible, turned over the bulk of their earnings to their parents. Harry Bremer, in his detailed study of New York City newboys, found that though most cheated their parents, almost all held back less than they handed in. Similar studies in Cincinnati (1919), Milwaukee (1911), and selected Connecticut cities (1921) confirmed these findings.18

  The parents would not have been comforted by this bit of information. They demanded—and were convinced that it was their right to demand—all, not some of their children’s earnings. There was no solution to this conflict, no compromise that would have left both sides content. The parents saw work as the core activity in life, with entertainment an infrequent break from routine. Adults were not in principle opposed to spending money for a good time, but they lacked the funds—and the financial security—to do it on a regular or casual basis. Even when times were good, there was tomorrow to worry about. Slack times, short weeks, pay cuts, and layoffs were facts of life. So were sickness in the family and workplace accidents.

  Had the children had the responsibility of providing food, shelter, and clothing for large families, they might have agreed with their parents that money was too valuable to be spent on fun and games in the afternoon. But the circumstances of their daily lives militated against such conclusions. Here they were, only children, but children with money in their pockets in a city full of wonders. If the movies had cost a dollar or been located deep within the bowels of the fancy hotels, if pie à la mode at a lunch counter had cost more than a nickel, or a gallery seat for the vaudeville show more than a dime, the attraction would not have been as great. But the fact that pennies could buy a good time made that good time irresistible and those pennies a necessary part of life.

  The Children and the Child-Savers

  The eleven- to fifteen-year-olds who worked and played on the streets of the city lived, as Samuel Ornitz put it, “several kinds of lives, traveling from planet to planet.”1 There were no magical moments of transition from childhood to adult life; one assumed adult responsibilities and shed childish roles over an extended period of years. Young teenagers had no choice but to live in two worlds at once: as children at home and in the classroom, as quasi-adult workers and consumers outside on the city streets. They and their parents regarded their alternating status as an unattractive but inescapable fact of urban life. Only the child labor reformers and their supporters refused to accept it as immutable. It was their belief, buttressed by theoretical concoctions based on G. Stanley Hall’s work, that children under sixteen were not prepared to assume adult work roles and responsibilities, even part-time after school. Children forced into the workplace before they were constitutionally able would, it was argued, grow up morally, intellectually, and physically stunted.2

  The argument was not without merit when applied to the reformers’ primary targets: the textile mills, coal mines, canneries, and berry fields that employed children full-time. In each of these workplaces, youngsters were forced to sit, stand, stoop, or lie on their bellies, hour after hour, day after day. They emerged in the end with twisted bodies, damaged eyesight, and senses numbed by inactivity and lack of stimulation. They had, as the reformers argued, been deprived not only of their childhoods but of any reasonable chance of leading normal adult lives.

  When the reformers turned their attention from the mill, mine, and cannery children to the street traders, their arguments lost their force and much of their validity. The street traders were not physically confined or constrained, nor were they deprived of sensory stimulation for the better part of the day. They were, on the contrary, freer to move on the streets than in the classrooms and no less stimulated. The street, as a workplace, was not without its dangers, especially vehicular, but these paled beside those that faced the children who carried molten glass in tongs from the furnace, shucked oysters with sharp knives in ice water that numbed the fingers, or picked through coal fragments sharp enough to slice fingers in light too dim to see.

  The child labor reformers and their allies feared for the street traders not because they were exposed to physical danger or deprived of sensory stimulation or physically confined during the daylight hours. They set out to save them from a different order of evils: from too much, not too little freedom, stimulation, and excitement.

  Paso Christian, Mississippi, February 1911. “All of these children shuck oysters and tend babies at the Pass Packing Company. I saw them all at work long before daybreak. Photos taken at noon in the absence of the superintendent who refused me permission because of Child Labor agitation.” The knives held up by the boys to the left were sharp enough to slice fingers to the bone. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)

  To the untrained eye, the crowded downtown streets might not appear particularly dangerous. But for the reformers, the sources of danger to unformed morals and awakening libidos were ubiquitous. Primary among the
m were the signs, symbols, and displays of sexuality. As Current Opinion magazine reported in the summer of 1913, echoing the unspoken fears of many child-savers, “It has struck ‘Sex O’Clock in America:’ A wave of sex hysteria and sex discussion seems to have invaded this country.” The invasion had first struck in the downtown sections of the city, where young middle-class women were for the first time seeking amusement after dark in public places “where neither the activities of the entertainers nor the behavior of the customers could be considered entirely respectable or predictable by nineteenth century standards.” They dined in lobster palaces with unmarried men, attended the vaudeville show, danced the turkey trot in public, watched and applauded scantily clad chorus girls in girlie shows, smoked, drank, used “powder, rouge, lipstick, eyelash and eyebrow stain,” and appeared to be practicing birth control to such an extent that President Roosevelt felt obliged to warn the nation of the dangers of “race suicide.”3

  Sex had reared its head in the tenement and working-class districts as well, and there was no way to hide the sight from the children. Reformers had always been worried about the effect on maturing children of growing up in overcrowded tenement flats with unrelated boarders sharing sleeping quarters and privies. This danger from inside the dwelling was now magnified a hundredfold by the explosion of sexuality on the street and in public. There were lewd posters outside the movie theaters and suggestive images on the screens. Even in cities where the movies were censored, dangers lurked inside. The Chicago Vice Commission, composed of reformers from organized religion, law, medicine, education, and the business community, warned the public about the darkened theaters where “boys and men slyly embrace the girls and offer cheap indignities.” According to the commission, danger stalked the children not only in the movie theaters and cheap burlesque halls, but in the back rooms of confectionery and ice-cream parlors, in the amusement parks, dance halls, and lake steamers where corrupt young males waited to pounce on unsuspecting virgins, and even in the schools, where young girls had been spotted studying and “passing to one another” pornographic literature, pictures, and poems “describing in a most suggestive and obscene manner the experience of lovers.”4

  There was no way to shield the children from the sights they should not see. Prostitutes lived and worked in their neighborhoods, where rents were cheapest and neighbors least able to call for police or politicians to get rid of them. “They occupied vacant stores,” wrote Mike Gold of his Lower East Side block. “They crowded into flats and apartments in all the tenements. The pious Jews hated the traffic. But they were pauper strangers here; they could do nothing.…

  “They tried to shut their eyes. We children did not shut our eyes. We saw and knew.”5

  Prostitutes were a part of the life of the streets. The children played with them, teased them, and ran errands for them. There were no secrets—and very little shame—between the groups. They shared the same public space and had little choice but to get to know one another. The Chicago Vice Commission reported having discovered “a man [being] solicited by a prostitute standing on the porch of her home … while a number of young boys were playing in the street in front of this house.” The commission was shocked; the children took it all in stride.6

  Young teenagers were, the reformers feared, at risk on the streets of the city. Newly awakened to the passions and pressures of sexuality, they had to be protected from the city and from themselves. The boys especially seemed not to understand the gravity of the situation. They regarded neither the bums who gathered in the newspaper alleys nor the older men with money who solicited them after hours as true threats to their virtue. They did not often succumb to the adults’ entreaties, but neither, to the reformers’ distress, did they always flee in horror. The reformers were no doubt correct about the dangers, but they refused to understand that the boys were, most of the time, capable of taking care of themselves. Seldom did they venture into dark alleys by themselves—one did not sell very many papers in such places. There were some street gamins who sold themselves, but they too knew what they were doing: poverty as much as desire led them to accept the older men’s offers.

  The boys who sold themselves or gave themselves to men were few and far between. The danger, as the reformers presented it, was potential rather than actual. Far more real was the “threat” to the boys’ “virtue” posed by easy women and prostitutes. The boys who sold papers late into the evenings or delivered messages to whorehouses could not help but come into contact with ladies of the night. Stories of messenger boys who had contracted venereal diseases from prostitutes were commonplace in the street trader tracts.7

  The girls were, from the reformers’ perspective, even more vulnerable. No matter how much the boys tomcatted about, they were not going to get pregnant. This was, of course, a major reason for the parents’ differential treatment of their boys and girls. Though they might have disagreed with the reformers about the dangers posed to teenage boys, they seemed to accept the warnings about their daughters. As one Irish mother confided to Ruth True in 1914, “ ‘You’ve got t’keep your eye on a girl. Now it’s different with a boy. He can take care of himself But you never can tell, if don’t keep a watch, when a girl’s going to come back an’ bring disgrace on you.’ ”8

  Norfolk, Virginia, June 1911. “Raymond Bykes, Western Union No. 23, Norfolk, Va. Said he was fourteen years old. Works until after 1 A.M. every night. He is precocious and not a little ‘tough.’ Has been here at this office for only three months, but he already knows the Red Light district thoroughly and goes there constantly. He told me he often sleeps down at the Bay Line boat decks all night. Several times, I saw his mother hanging around the office, but she seemed more concerned about getting his pay envelope than anything else.” (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)

  The streets were unhealthy and unwholesome for girls—with saloons on every corner, brothels within walking distance, and men and boys lurking nearby with their winks, their flattery, their coy invitations and rude remarks.9 These first decades of the twentieth century brought a virtual avalanche of novels, first-person narratives, pamphlets, newspaper articles, and official Vice Commission reports on the perils that awaited young girls on city streets from young blades acting on their own, pimps who made a living corrupting innocent young girls, and the notorious white slavers. Much of it, especially the white-slavery reports and tracts, was exaggerated or just plain fictitious. But the public read the novels, and the newspapers reported on the Vice Commission findings—because, true or not, they articulated an anxiety that would not go away. Parents of young girls did not sleep easily at night, not because they feared turbaned white slavers would abduct their daughters, but because they knew how easy it was to get pregnant and what the consequences were for girls who were not married (or could not marry the prospective father).10

  Every block had its “fallen girls.” Every settlement-house worker had horror stories to tell about pregnant girls who had been thrown out of their homes or locked in basements by parents who wanted nothing more to do with the “soiled” creatures. For unmarried mothers and girls “in trouble” or suspected of sexual misconduct, there were few places to hide and fewer to turn for help. Not even the juvenile courts, the most “progressive” of legal institutions, showed mercy or understanding. While “delinquent” boys were routinely placed on probation, girls accused and convicted of sexual misconduct or precocity were sent away to reformatories or country workhouses. In The Lost Sisterhood, a history of prostitution in America, Ruth Rosen recounts the story of fifteen-year-old Deborah Horwitz, who “was brought into court for staying out with boys and ‘flaunting’ her sexual activities. Her probation officer, after ransacking her belongings, found a racy letter that the girl had written to a sailor, along with photos showing her with the top button of her blouse undone and her hat off.… Deborah, for her part, defiantly insisted that she had never coaxed or invited anyone’s sexual attention. Nevertheless she was committed to the state reformatory for
girls.”11

  Few girls landed in such difficulties, but such were the risks that had to be considered. The parents and reformers who spent time worrying about the girls’ morals did so not because they were especially prudish or mistrustful but because they thought they knew the city and its dangers better than the girls did.

  The adults should not have worried as much as they did. City kids were not nearly as naïve or as easily corrupted as they believed. Within their own circle of friends, they probed the mysteries and learned of the dangers—and the delights—that awaited them. Sex, though a forbidden topic of discussion with adults, was a constant one among the children. “There was a great curiosity about sex among the adolescent children of Williamsburg,” wrote Betty Smith in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. “There was a lot of talk about it. Among the younger children there was some exhibitionism (You show me and I’ll show you). A few hypocrites devised such evasive games as ‘playing house’ or ‘doctor.’ A few uninhibited ones did what they called ‘play dirty.’ ” In the Bronx, Kate Simon, who discovered at age ten that she was “lost” when it came to the important topics of discussion—“things, breasts, love”—quickly sought out the “older girls who knew everything.” By age twelve, she too believed she knew everything.12

  Neither boys nor girls sought information or advice from their parents. Sex was something you discussed with your friends but didn’t mention to adults. Children kept quiet because they did not want to confess that they thought about such things and because they knew no adult would answer their questions.

  The more one reads in the autobiographies of the children who grew up in this era and in the reports of the Vice Commissions, the settlement-house workers, the child labor reformers, and Juvenile Court officials, the more apparent it becomes that it was the adults, not the children, who were most obsessed with juvenile sexuality. While some girls “played dirty,” and some boys visited whorehouses, few ventured into areas they could not extricate themselves from. The reformers and parents were too worried by the potential dangers of city life to notice how well the children handled their environment.