The Bitter Cry of the Children

by John Spargo

V

Of course, not all teachers are so tactless. A very large number are merely unobservant, possibly because they have become inured to the pitiful appearance of the children and their painfully low physical development. It is common to hear teachers in poor districts say: “When I first came to this school my heart used to ache with pity on account of the poverty-stricken appearance of many of the children and the sad tales they sometimes tell. But now I have grown used to it all.” That, in many cases, tells the whole secret—they have grown accustomed to the sight of stunted bodies and wan, pinched faces. There are teachers, earnest men and women devoted to their profession, and consecrating it by an almost religious passion, who study the home life and social environment of the children intrusted to their care; but they are, unhappily, exceptions. The number of teachers having no idea of how a healthy child should look is astonishingly large. The hectic flush of disease is often mistaken by teachers and principals for the bloom of health.

In one large school the principal, in the course of a personally conducted visit to the different classrooms, singled out a little Italian girl, and asked with a note of pride in his voice: “Wouldn’t you call this a healthy child? I do. Look at her round, full face.” There were a great many signs of ill health in that little girl’s appearance which the good principal did not recognize. I pointed out some of the signs of grave nervous disorder, due, as I afterward learned, almost beyond question, to malnutrition. Her cheeks were well rounded, but her pitifully thin arms indicated a very ill-developed body. I pointed out her nervous hand, the baggy fulness under her eyes, and the abrasions at the corners of her twitching mouth,[^[46]] and asked that the teacher might be consulted as to the girl’s school record. “She is not a very bright child,” said the teacher, “and what to do with her is a problem. She is very nervous, irritable, and excitable. She seems to get exhausted very soon, and it is impossible for her to apply herself properly to her work. I think very likely that she is underfed, for she comes from a very poor home.” Subsequent investigation at her home, on Mott Street, showed that her father, who is a consumptive, earns from sixty cents to a dollar a day peddling laces, needles, and other small articles, the rest of the income supporting the family of seven persons being derived from the mother’s labor. They occupy one small room, and the only means of cooking they have is a small gas “ring” such as is sold for ten cents in the cheap stores.

Where principals and teachers declined to assist, it was impossible to make inquiries in the schools, and it was useless to make them in schools where the children had already been openly questioned. Wherever it was possible to secure the coöperation of principals or teachers, I got them to question the children privately and sympathetically. In 16 schools, 12,800 children were thus privately examined, and of that number 987, or 7.71 per cent, were reported as having had no breakfast upon the day of the inquiry, and 1963, or 15.32 per cent, as having had altogether too little. Teachers were asked to exclude as far as possible all cases of an obviously accidental nature from the returns, as, for instance, when a child known to be in fairly comfortable circumstances had come to school without breakfast merely because of lack of appetite. They were also requested to regard as having had inadequate breakfasts only children who had had bread only (with or without tea or coffee), or such things as crackers or crullers in place of bread, but without milk, cereals, cake, butter, jam, eggs, fruit, fish, or meat of any kind. That this standard was altogether too low will probably be admitted without question, but there was no way of examining the actual meals of the children, and some sort of arbitrary rule was necessary. The figures given are therefore based on a very low standard, and most certainly do not include all cases either of the unfed or underfed. It is more than probable that some children who had gone without breakfasts refused to admit the fact, and there were several instances in which children known to be desperately poor, and who, the teachers felt, were certainly underfed, gave the most surprising accounts—which must have been drawn from their imaginations[^[47]]—of elaborate breakfasts. Out of 12,800 children, then, 2950, or more than 23 per cent, were found either wholly breakfastless or having had such miserably poor breakfasts as described. And that is certainly an understatement of the evil of underfeeding in those schools.

One of the most notable of these school investigations was undertaken by the principal of a large school to “prove conclusively that really there is no such thing as a serious problem of underfeeding among our school children.” The principal is a devoted believer in the theory of the survival of the fittest, and in the elimination of the weak by competition and struggle. “If you attempt to take hardship and suffering out of their lives by smoothing the pathway of life for these children, you weaken their character, and, by so doing, you sin against the children themselves and, through them, against society,” he said. With the view of Huxley and others that the real interest and duty of society is to make as many as possible fit to survive, he expressed himself as having no sympathy, on the ground that it conflicts with nature’s immutable law of struggle. But, as often happens, his deeds frequently run counter to his merciless creed, and he is one of the most generous and compassionate of men. The children trust him, and the sense of an intimate friendship between him and them is the most delightful impression the visitor receives. There is no absence of real, effective discipline, but it is discipline based upon sympathy, friendship, and trust. The principal declared that he did not believe that 5 children could be found in the whole school of 1500 who could be described as badly underfed, or who came to school breakfastless.

The district in which this school is situated is one of the poorest in the city, the population consisting almost exclusively of Italians. Most of the men are unskilled laborers working for very low wages and irregularly employed. Many of them are recent immigrants and subject to the vicious padrone system. Every fresh batch of immigrants intensifies the already keen and brutal competition, and to maintain even the low standard of living to which they are accustomed, the wives frequently work as wage-earners. The people are housed in vile tenements, and the crowding of two families into one small room is by no means uncommon. “Little mothers” and their rickety infant charges crowd the pavements. In the early morning, even during the winter months, groups of shivering children gather outside the school waiting for admission hours before the time of opening, and at lunch time instead of going to their homes they hasten away with their pennies and nickels to buy ice cream, pickles, peppers, or cream puffs for their midday meal. Knowing these to be the conditions existing in the neighborhood, it was impossible to accept the optimistic views of the principal without serious questioning, and it was to convince me that he was right that he undertook to have the investigation made while we went over the school.

The teachers were requested to examine every child privately, and to report the number of children having had no breakfast that morning and the number having had inadequate breakfasts. Some of the teachers absolutely refused to ask the children “such questions,” and two or three sent in obstinately stupid reports such as “nobody underfed but the teacher.” Reports were received from 19 classes with an actual attendance of 865 children, of which number 104 were reported as having had no breakfast and 54 as having had too little. Not all the reports were of equal value, I afterward found, some of the teachers having ignored the rule and regarded coffee and bread as sufficient. In one case there were three children who declared that they had only cold coffee without any food. They should have been reported as breakfastless, but in fact they were not reported in either column. So that it is probable that in this case also the figures given are an understatement of actual conditions. In one class of 43 children 13 were reported as having had no breakfast and 12 as having had insufficient, and when the report was sent back with instructions that the teacher try to find out why the 13 children had no breakfast, it was returned with the postscript in the teacher’s handwriting, “There was no food for them to eat.” In another class out of 65 children no less than 30 were reported as having had no breakfast, but of these 12 had had either tea or coffee. As they did not have food of any kind other than the tea or coffee, the teacher reported them as breakfastless. Making all allowances for discrepancies and differences of value in the teachers’ reports, it is surely most serious that no less than 17.81 per cent of the children examined should be reported as either breakfastless or very inadequately fed that day. It should be said that this inquiry took place in the winter, the season when there is most unemployment among unskilled laborers, and it is not probable that the same amount of poverty would be found all the year round.

One incident in connection with the investigation in this school is worthy of record. A lad of about 13 or 14 years of age in one of the highest grades, who had been reported as having had no breakfast, was seen in the principal’s office at noon. He seemed to be quite rugged and healthy, and the principal said that he was “the brightest boy in the school, and a good lad, too.” He showed us his lunch—a roll of bread and two small pieces of almost transparent cheese. “Isn’t that enough for a boy?” asked the principal, laughingly. The boy responded: “Yes, but I had no breakfast, and this has to do me all day. I don’t have any breakfast most times, and sometimes no lunch or supper. You know that Mr. B—— used to give me some very often.” And the principal confirmed this part of the lad’s story with a tender, “Yes, I know, sonny.” The boy told us a saddening story of a mother cowed down by a brutal husband, and of the latter’s vice. He is a cook and has often beaten his wife, who works in an embroidery factory. A year or so ago he went to Italy, leaving his wife here. Soon afterward he wrote to her for money to pay his passage back. She was penniless, but, the lad quaintly said, “she made a debt of a hundred dollars” to send to him. “Then she had to pay every week, and there wasn’t much food.” The rest of his tale of shame—shame of a father’s sin—need not be told. It is too horrible. “Why doesn’t your mother leave him and just take you with her? You are the only child, aren’t you?” asked the principal. “Yes, I’m the only one, but there are ten dead,” was the boy’s startling reply. It was, unconsciously, a significant comment upon the good principal’s theory of the survival of the fittest.

In another school the principal told me that she had reported to the District Superintendent that of 1000 children on the register at least 100 were badly underfed. She told of children fainting in school or in the yard from lack of food, and of others suffering from disorders of the bowels due to the same cause. Many of these children were pointed out in the course of several visits to the school. “Ignorance plays a large part in the problem,” said the principal, “but I think it is mostly poverty. When work is hard to get, or there is sickness in the family, or when there is a strike, then the children suffer most, and that shows that it is poverty in most cases.” Upon one of my visits to this school, I encountered one of those pathetic incidents of which I have gathered so many in the course of these investigations. Little Patsey, the American-born child of Irish parents, had for some days been ailing and unable to attend properly to his lessons. The teacher suspected that improper food was the cause, and Patsey’s account of his diet confirmed her in that opinion. So she advised Patsey to tell his mother that oatmeal would be better for him. “Get oatmeal, Patsey, it’s better—and very cheap, too.” There were tears in the principal’s eyes as she told how, that very morning, the teacher had found what she supposed to be powdered chalk upon the floor and was about to scold the culprit, when she discovered that it was Patsey’s oatmeal! Poor little Patsey had for three days been spending his daily lunch allowance of three cents upon oatmeal and eating it dry. Teacher had said that it was better! Only the thought of the teacher’s influence, and the hope that through the medium of such influence as hers it may be possible to dispel much of the ignorance of which so many children are the victims, relieves the pathos of the incident and brightens it.