Address, Miss Julia Clifford Lathrop
Miss Lathrop—Madam President, Ladies and Gentlemen: I need not explain to a Congress interested in Conservation why the representative of this new Bureau should be here and should wish to speak about the Bureau itself.
When I was first honored with this appointment it was suggested that the Bureau should be staffed with women alone, and I was asked what I thought about it. I said I should be very much embarrassed; that I had never known any children who had not two parents, and that I felt that if there had been intended a division of that sort the Lord would have communicated it long ago. I thought it would be presumptious for me to begin, so the Children’s Bureau has on its staff both men and women and, perhaps, I may as well begin by saying something about that staff, and about the organization of this new Bureau. And, first of all, perhaps I may forestall a criticism which is likely to come before very long that we are rather dilatory and are not accomplishing very much, by reminding you that the Bureau did not go into operation last April, when the President approved the bill, but only on the 23d of August, when the appropriation became available, so that really the Bureau is just forty-one days old. It has a staff of fifteen persons, and it has to spend for this first year a sum aggregating about thirty thousand dollars. Its province, as the law says, is to inquire into and report upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life. You can see for yourselves whether that is a big job and whether the army really seems adequate for immediate performance of the contract.
It is, of course, enormously important that a Bureau of this kind, undertaking a sort of work which, after all, is in some respects new, should be composed of people who have very much at heart the welfare of children; who have, even as much as that, the scientific training and wisdom which is necessary if we are to make an appeal to people’s emotions and sentiment. So the staff of the Bureau is composed of people who have been selected from various departments of the Federal Civil Service as having, particularly, acquirements in science, as statisticians, and in other respects particularly fitted, as we believe and as my superiors believe, to do the work of this growing Bureau.
The Bureau has this great general object. Now, it is a question how to take hold of this great task, where to begin, but the law itself does give some hint—it enumerates certain objects which we shall discuss in detail as time goes on.
The first of these is infant mortality and the birth rate, and after that follows various subjects, such as juvenile courts, or the care of children in regard to diseases and accidents which may befall them, the regulation of their labor, legislation affecting children and all matters pertaining to their welfare.
It is all very well for those of us who are doing all sorts of volunteer work, as most of us are, to begin on the problem of helping people at any point where we can take hold. We do not have to know any great fundamental facts; to know that babies need care, and that children ought not to go to work when they are too young, to know that children need to go to school, need to be healthy, need to be happy, and that they need recreation just as much as they do education and that the two are part of the one same great sort of development—all these things we have a right to begin on anywhere we can. But when the Federal Government takes hold, I think it somehow promises a sort of basis to all the rest of us, and it seems as if it were its business to see where there was the most fundamental point to begin its work. When we come to look at the question of dealing with children, we are constantly faced by the fact that we do not know how many children there are; we do not know how many children are born and die in this country. We do know once in ten years how many children exist at a particular moment, and by that decennial information we know that the Bureau has to deal with about thirty-six per cent. of the total population of this country directly, that between thirty-five and forty per cent. of the population of this country is under sixteen years of age, which seems to be the age of the end of childhood, just by common acceptation; at least, at that age in many of our States children are permitted to become independent workmen. So you see we have a very large number of children with whom we have the right to deal directly, and, as I tried to show a moment ago, we think we have a right to deal indirectly with all their parents. We think the whole country is a good deal our province in prospect, but we cannot be satisfied with this decennial knowledge of how many people there are in this country. What we want is a great, democratic continuing public edition of “Who’s Who in America.” We want to know day by day the advent of every citizen into this country. We want, in fact, in a phrase which is not particularly exciting, “birth registration.”
First of all, we want it because we want to know, and we want to know for various reasons, which I think do not occur to most of us every day. In the first place, we want to know because, unfortunately, a great many babies come into this world under circumstances which do not give them the best chance in the world. If the advent of a little child could be at once communicated to doctors and nurses where doctors and nurses are not taken for granted, it would be possible to prevent the risk of that blindness which sometimes overtakes newly-born children; it is possible to establish the health of the mother and child together, so that it may have the best chance in the world; and you all know how throughout this country, even in our remoter counties, there is coming to be a great and splendid health service. I think we cannot be too delighted with what the Red Cross Society, with what many similar societies are doing in the way of rural nursing. I think if Florence Nightingale could look out over America now, she would think we are beginning to realize her noble words about health and nurses.
Now, those are perhaps the most important reasons why we want to know the advent of every child, so that we can help that little child, and help his mother and keep her alive, because it is a very terrible thing that out of all the children who are born into this country a very large number—two hundred thousand, some people say, and three hundred thousand, some people say—die before they are twelve months old, and more, a third of them die before they have been in the world a month. I want us to consider this for a minute, not as an economic problem, but what it means in the old fashioned terms of human suffering, the agony and loss of family happiness and joy, that two hundred thousand little babies should die and leave the hearths to which they come every single year of the world in this country. And when we think that already, doctors tell us, we know enough so that that waste is very largely the fault of our carelessness and selfishness and greed, it makes us blush to think we are not all working hard to save the lives of these children.
Now, there are great efforts already undertaken to save the lives of these little babies, in which many of you are already engaged, and we may well hope that such societies as this Conservation Congress and the Congress for the Prevention of Infant Mortality will before the next decennial census occurs have made a great difference in the number of children who are born, only to die.
But, suppose that a child lives, is there any real sense in his having a birth certificate, or is that just some abstract notion of the statisticians, who get all the certificates and have punching machines and a great many mechanical contrivances for numbering and making computations out of figures? I think you will be surprised to find how much human connection it has.
In the first place, as to this very Bureau for which I am venturing to speak, we are told to find out about the diseases of children and about the birth rate of children. How can we know about the birth rate unless we know how many children are born and die? In Washington, there was set up a wonderful placard on the wall to show the birth rate in that city, and there were columns of red and green and other colors, and you just knew, humanly speaking, that the birth rate was fluctuating that way, and you talked with somebody and you discovered that this birth rate was fluctuating as one set of gentlemen or another was electing the health officer.
So now we want to have some authoritative way of truly finding out how many children come into the world in order to know what the birth rate is, in order to know how to study the diseases of children, and then, when children grow a little older, we want to have a public record of their births so that we may know when they are entitled to go into the schools to begin on that system of care and culture for which the public schools stand, and then beyond that, when they are older and the time comes for their advent into the army of work to which we hope we all belong, then we want to know that those who are less favored are not hurried into that army unduly. How much it would simplify the problem if we had not to trust to all sorts of chance ways of proving a child’s birth and if we had a public record of it.
Have you ever thought that we are the only great nation which does not know how many children are born into it, and which does not do its children the dignity of putting their names down in a public record? All Europe has a public registry, and why? Because it has a standing army and wants the names of its boys for conscription. Now, in a country of peace, aren’t we to have any victories for peace? Are not we to recognize a child as having any dignity to be a peaceable citizen and not either a target for a gun, or the man behind the gun?
I think you will, perhaps, be interested if I venture to tell a story of a neighborhood in which I have lived long, an illustration of how a birth certificate is a good thing. A little while ago, a family came over to Hull House for some help. They were awfully poor. The oldest girl, who was at that time the breadwinner of that family, was out of work on account of the garment workers’ strike. There were eight children. They had come over at the time of the earthquake in Messina. The father had been entombed and his mind had almost succumbed to the fearful experience. He was always thinking the walls were coming on him and he was not in a very good frame of mind to be a successful breadwinner. So they got into difficulties and asked the Charities Board to help them. There was another younger girl and they thought they had better get a work certificate for Giovanna, but the truant officer said she looked too young and couldn’t have it, and she was sent back to school. And then they got a little more desperate and they tried again to have poor little Giovanna go to work. The Charities Board, who were helping the case, thought they had a right to dictate a little as to how they should help, and they just wrote to the City Hall in Messina, and the City Hall in Messina sent back a very prompt letter showing how old the children were, and showing that the daughter who had been at work for two years was really about fourteen years old and had been working that time illegally, had been cheated of two years of school, where she might have learned good English and learned American housekeeping and had a better chance to earn more money the next two years. The other little girl was still younger. So the people in Hull House and the people in the Associated Charities and the factory inspector made a veritable cordon around this helpless family and demanded they be sent back to school. The oldest girl went back very unwillingly. She said indignantly, “Me go back to school, me big enough to be married.” She was very hurt and humiliated. I am not sure we did right about it. Giovanna was confiscated and sent back to school for two years. This family did not have a fair chance over here just because the factory inspector and school authorities, not having any birth reports over here for children, followed the usual system of guessing and did not think to take advantage of what Messina, notwithstanding the earthquake, had to offer from her very responsible records.
Has it ever occurred to you that to very many of our foreign residents a birth certificate for a child would be an absolute asset?
In Chicago is a very prosperous and highly respected man. He came from Germany when he was a baby of four years, with the family. His father was never naturalized and the man himself never was challenged in his right to vote. He grew up and attended our public schools, and all that. He accumulated a fortune and went back, as many people do, I suppose rather proud, to see the old country and friends who remained there and with whom he had kept in constant communication, a prosperous and splendid example of what America could do for a man. He had been in Berlin for about two hours when the police were on his track merely because he was a German citizen and must serve in the army. He telephoned to a lawyer friend and asked him what could happen. He said, “There is just one thing that can happen, and that is that you get out of town.” So, two hours after he arrived at Berlin on this triumphal journey, he left very actively, and he is said never to have heaved a sigh of such joyful relief as when the crossed the boundary into France. That is an example of people really knowing where they were born and being able to prove it.
I suppose the reason we have not been more eager about our birth rate is because we have not thought anything about it. We think a great deal about writing the baby’s name in the family Bible and christening it in the church we attend, but somehow we have forgotten this larger, more fundamental thing. The advent, of every citizen of this country ought to be on the books of the commonwealth.
There is a very good story, which belongs to your own Dr. Hurty. I do not know whether you all know it, or whether I dare tell it, but I will presume that this audience is largely made up of visitors, and steal his story. In this State, Dr. Hurty is authority for saying there was a farmer who had a ne’er-do-well son and a granddaughter, and when the farmer came to die he wished to leave the farm to the granddaughter, but he left the use of it to the son until the granddaughter should arrive at the age of twenty-one. When the girl, as she thought, was twenty-one, she claimed her inheritance, but the other side said she was only nineteen. She went to the Bible, where her name was written down, but the leaf was torn out, and the court was very much perplexed. It came to be a serious legal question, and finally a neighbor recollected that the grandfather had had a very remarkable calf born on the same day with this little girl, and he said he knew the farm books kept by the grandfather would record this pedigree. So the farm books were looked up and the birth of the calf was discovered and the birth of the girl was established. (Laughter.) You all remember how George Bernard Shaw warns us against placing confidence in the deus ex machina. He says you cannot presume on things being some miraculous way you would like them to be, and so we cannot presume on grandfathers always keeping herds of cattle. (Applause.)
I am perfectly sure, as I have said before, as I had the honor of saying over at San Francisco before the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, that if the women of America wanted birth registration they would get it in a twelvemonth. Now, it sounds so very remote from putting down the baby’s name in the book.
In the State of Indiana you have a very good law, Dr. Hurty tells me, and all that is necessary is for the women of Indiana to say that they want the names when their children are born recorded in the public records of Indiana. In 1910, when the last census was taken, all that we know about the births in this country was what we learned from eight States, the New England States, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Not your State, or mine, Illinois, was deemed worthy to be considered at all. So far as the general government was concerned, for anything it knew, nobody had been born in either of these States in ten years. In the next census year, I hope very much in a great many States in this country, perhaps in all the States in this country, we shall be able to be recognized by the general government as having been born and as having been born very accurately, so that we will be worthy to be counted, as much so as if we lived in Boston and Massachusetts, which, they are always telling us, are the most accurate State and city.
Of course, the Bureau cares for a great many things besides the registration of births, but I hope I have made it plain that we should ask that we be allowed to get a method of acquiring steady, constant and reliable means of legal proof as to the children who enter this Nation, because it is the dignified basis for a governmental Bureau, which I believe is destined to grow to proportions which none of us can measure, which shall continue long after all of us are gone. No other bureau in the world makes so tremendous an appeal to the emotions and sentiment—a children’s bureau, a bureau to concern itself with the life and happiness of the children of a great nation, and the more appealing it is, the more must it be founded upon facts which will bear the very closest scientific scrutiny. What the Bureau will be doing years from now I do not know. I know what it must do now. The law is very distinct about some of the things it must do, and by implication many of the things it cannot do. It is a bureau to gather information and to publish it as the secretary of the department under which it exists may direct. It can publish in any way which the secretary deems best. There are a great many different ways of publishing facts. We are learning to publish facts through the sort of thing you have in the State House here and other exhibits, through the appeal to the eye. In this way thousands of those who cannot study very carefully or cannot read a table to save their lives may understand, and I hope it is with some of the simpler methods of popularizing things that this Bureau may begin to make itself useful.
The Bureau, although it is a different type from all the other work of the government in a certain sense, after all, is not so isolated as we might think. There is a Bureau of Labor, which has studied much the labor of women and children. There is the Census Bureau, of which I have spoken. There is the Bureau of Immigration and of Education, and the Bureau in the Department of Agriculture, which has concerned itself very much in the South with those very interesting and productive efforts for better farming, which have begun their activities by stimulating tomato-canning among the girls. All of these things, part of them purely educational, part of them a matter of direct work, are things which we shall not do over again, from which we hope to learn very much.
There have been a good many anxieties about this Bureau, many people have thought it was a mistake. Some people have said, “Ah, well, you are going to center everything about children away off there in Washington where there will be a government with a lot of very comfortable clerks sitting about in offices and writing down figures about children instead of doing things for children and you will palsy local effort.” If the Bureau does that it is a failure. What the Bureau must do is to stimulate and help local effort. It must gather facts and try to present them so convincingly and simply that they will be useful and stimulate many to activity.
Then there has been a great dread lest the Children’s Bureau might interfere with parental rights, lest the Bureau might seem to override the dignity and privacy of homes. I do not believe the Bureau will ever do that, because I know that the people who care most about the Bureau are people who realize that the welfare of the child is measured by the welfare and the wisdom of its parents, and that the way to help the child is not to take him out of the family, but keep him in it and help the parents to help him. And the Bureau will do its work with a fine respect for parenthood. And perhaps I cannot better close, since this is a woman’s meeting, and we may well be generous to the gentlemen scattered here and there, by a story of a man, a father.
Not long ago I went to a meeting in Chicago, at which there were many delegates from the foreign colonies in that city. It was a representative meeting standing for about one hundred thousand residents of that foreign town. It was really a meeting of protest against threatened restrictions which many of us thought very ill-advised and cruel, which were to be applied to immigration. A man rose who belonged to a foreign colony which we are accustomed to regard as especially dull and illiterate, and he told very simply how that colony had come from a people who had been oppressed, the study of its language had been forbidden, reading and writing had been forbidden, and in a way, a certain illiteracy and dulness had been forced upon them; and he told so simply with what ardor they came here where there was freedom, where there were schools. I shall never forget how simply he said, “I am a father, and, like every father, I want my child to go higher than me.”
That was the simple but overwhelmingly eloquent expression of a man whose English was very broken, but who, after all, spoke exactly the great impulse which has controlled all of us since the beginning of that wonderful seventeenth century when parents began to come over here. And, as I heard him speak, I thought that whether it was those who came in the cabin of the Mayflower, or those who sank in the steerage of the Titanic, they were all moved by that same mighty impulse, that the next generation should have a better chance than they had.
Now, this Bureau must move forward if it is to be useful in the same spirit in which families move forward, in which the race moves forward, to give the next generation a better chance than this has had. I thank you. (Applause.)
The Chairman—Those of us who heard Dr. Wiley, the other evening, give his impressions, may be interested in giving to Miss Lathrop another fact which will prove the value of birth registry. Dr. Wiley said that no one across the water could marry unless he could prove that he had been born. It would be impossible for many to marry in this country, if that were the case here.
We have always admired the way the Daughters of the American Revolution have taken the history of our country, have looked up the old stamping grounds and marked them, and have taught the children in schools the traditions of the country, to honor the makers of our country and to make them good American citizens. But we are really more pleased that the Daughters of the American Revolution have recently taken up more modern things, and that they are preserving the resources of the children. The speaker has been very much interested in modern life, in community life for the rural life of our country.
As a loyal Daughter, I have great pleasure in introducing to you Mrs. Matthew T. Scott, of Washington, D. C., President General of the Daughters of the American Revolution.