V. SUMMARY
Reviewing our study of the three groups of boys described in the preceding sections—the boy who is let go, the boy who is paroled in the custody of his parents, and the boy that gets sent up—we find that the impression made by the court was rarely a permanent one. One after the other we have seen how the typical boy of each group passes through the hands of the court and returns to his West Side environment scarcely changed by his experience. For the boy who is let go, it means but a ripple in his life. The court again goes further and “paroles” him. At the end, he is still the same boy. The most drastic treatment of all, commitment to an institution for a definite short term usually fails to remake the character of a boy who has been subjected both before and after his sojourn in the institution to the full force of the neighborhood influences. When a boy is so difficult to manage that commitment becomes the only adequate remedy, the term should be indefinite so that release may depend on education, behavior and development of character. And release should be followed by supervision by a representative of the court or of the institution until the boy shows that he can stand morally without such assistance.
A well organized official probation staff without doubt furnishes the most effective method for dealing with most of these cases. This applies to all three classes described in the preceding sections—the boy who is let go, the boy who is paroled in the custody of his parents, and the boy that gets sent up. The use of official probation does not necessarily exclude volunteer probation, but it should make possible careful supervision and co-ordination of volunteer work under the court.
Our study points out the necessity of recognizing both the family unit and the neighborhood unit in handling cases. In order to do efficient probation work, the investigator must be familiar with local conditions. He needs to know, on the one hand, all the influences which have helped to make the boy what he is, and, on the other hand, the neighborhood agencies which are familiar with his individual and family history, and may be enlisted in reforming him.
A thorough physical and mental examination is necessary in many cases before the court can proceed intelligently in its treatment.[47] A fundamental need also in the treatment of juvenile delinquency is the conferring of equity powers on the court, in order to avoid the hindrances of purely criminal trials and to reach the child and his family more directly.
Finally, we must not forget, in considering the darker aspects of the extreme cases presented in the section on commitments, that all delinquent boys are not of that type. As a rule, the boy delinquent stands out among the ranks of mishandled West Side youngsters only as one of them who has had the misfortune to be apprehended where others equally guilty have escaped; in most cases he does not differ in any great degree from his mates. Viewed from the standpoint of the district and in the light of what we know of its manner of life, juvenile delinquency is seen to be largely the product of conditions dangerous to youth in the homes and on the streets. To deal with the boy only after he has committed a crime is to deal with the product and not at all with the source of his offending; to allow him to return to his old surroundings without official supervision and control is, except in rare instances, a futile expedient.
CHAPTER VII
THE CENTER OF THE PROBLEM
In studying the boy of the Middle West Side we are studying the future as well as the present of his district; and in gathering together for a composite picture his various traits which have already been noted, it will not be out of place to refer once more to certain neighborhood characteristics which he reflects as well as to some aspects of his life and environment which have not as yet been illustrated. In this volume we wish mainly to present the boy as he is today, not to suggest the method of his regeneration. But an attempt to account for his peculiarities naturally results in deductions which may seem to argue a basis for some definite plan of reform; and with an increasing intimacy with West Side conditions it becomes more and more difficult to resist the conclusion that many of his vices are forced upon him by circumstances so strong as to be almost unavoidable.
Stealing, for instance, the theft of anything, but especially of coal and wood, is, as we have seen, encouraged; it is looked upon absolutely as a matter of course. The boy is brought up to consider it part of the daily routine;[48] the winter cold drives home his family’s need for heat, yet the family income is too slender to allow the purchase of coal. His mother sends him out to get fuel, and he knows that somehow he must find it. The line of least resistance is worn smooth in his neighborhood, and it is natural and easy to fall in with the parental fiction that the fuel which reaches the tenement has miraculously dropped from heaven.
This fiction does not apply, however, to the more general “swipin’” or “crookin’” which consists in stealing on the spur of the moment any unconsidered trifles which may be lying around. Usually things so stolen are small and of little value. Boys start out on “crookin’” expeditions, taking anything edible or vendible that they can lay hands on; and in this they have the example of older fellows, even married men, who will steal in a desultory way whenever they have the chance. “Every time I get a vacant house,” said a wrathful real estate agent one day, “it means that I’ve got to put in new lead pipes, or new faucets, or new gas fixtures, or perhaps all of them. The damned crooks of the neighborhood, young and old, break in and rip them out to sell.” And a certain settlement had the same experience. When it was first opened practically every removable thing in the house disappeared, including even the necessaries for meals.
Here again, though such thefts are far less excusable, the boys have a definite point of view. They are quite non-moral and have never learned to consider the question of property. Their code is the primitive code of might and they look upon their booty as theirs by right of conquest. Further, the very pressure of poverty is an incentive to stealing for various ends. They are cigarette fiends—they must have cigarettes. They are hungry; they crave amusement, and “the movin’ pictures” mean a nickel. All these things cost money, and when one is penniless and knows no moral code and sees one’s elders acknowledging none, the temptation to adopt the tactics of the thief and the thug becomes almost irresistible.
Carrying Loot From a Vacant Building
Closed by the Gangs
Much that these boys think and do is the direct result of their natural propensity to imitate, combined with the fact that they have never been taught the difference between childhood and manhood. Thus they learn to fight, to smoke, to drink as their elders do. Fist fights in the street are of the most common occurrence, particularly among the young men from sixteen to twenty years of age. To “go down to the docks and fight it out” is one method of settling all disputes, whether of politics, love, or personal appearance. Homeric tales are related of some of these combats. A youth of eighteen demands of a bigger man an apology for an alleged insult to the former’s sister. The two go behind a sandpile on the docks, where in the presence of a large group of witnesses they fight fiercely for several hours until both are exhausted. Gang fights, as we have said, are frequently settled by a personal fight between two leaders. These fights sometimes end in one or both of the combatants being maimed, and, with the rougher element, occasionally in murder.
The seriousness of a fight between older men in this neighborhood is recognized, and ordinarily every effort is made to separate the fighters before they become committed to fight to the finish. If a man is defeated by the fists of his opponent, he will seize a club, a bottle, a paving stone, or a revolver, if he can get one, and continue the fight with this advantage. Very frequently a street fight between two men results in a feud which will be carried on from day to day, until one or the other is permanently disabled.
Often these feuds result in the destruction of property, which is here an accepted way of “getting even.” Tenants who are evicted are not unlikely by way of revenge to do as much damage as they can to the apartment before leaving. If one club is at war with another, it is expected that the stronger will invade the premises of the weaker and smash up furniture and furnishings. Revenge in this district is wreaked primarily upon person; failing that, upon property. And this latter custom has become so prevalent and so much developed that much damage is done from pure maliciousness and from wanton joy of breaking and destroying. “Scenery Burned by Vandals” runs a recent newspaper headline.[49]
Vandals destroyed three truckloads of scenery stored last night on “The Farm,” in Twelfth Avenue between Thirty-fifth and Thirty-sixth Streets....
Shortly after 11 o’clock last night the first truck was set afire. The scenery was covered with canvas, and when the firemen arrived it was a total wreck. Three hours later the other two trucks were set afire. The trucks also were burned, and the total loss was estimated at $7,000.
Such outrages are quite common. They are merely a development of the method employed by West Side toughs for “getting a come-back”; merely a warning of the fact that the district owns to no law but the law of the Texan or Corsican Vendetta. Does someone habitually steal clothes from the wash-line? Then the husband “lays for” him with a club. Does some man or boy strike a boy on the street? The mother, or father, or big brother goes down to “get even.” Fear and gang ethics forbid the giving of information, and the whole neighborhood is saturated with treachery and suspicion.
With examples of this kind all around him, what wonder that the boy fights often and recklessly; that he turns naturally to violence; and that his combats, singly or in gangs, make no demands on the spirit of fair play?
With regard to smoking, the little West Sider’s indulgence is entirely unrestrained. On the streets, with his gang, and often in his home, he smokes incessantly from about the time that he is six years old; though, of course, to a stranger or a settlement worker he will deny that he has ever touched a cigarette. A boy’s club in the neighborhood recently insisted that its members be allowed to smoke during club meetings. All of them said that they smoked at home and with their parents’ full knowledge. These were boys ranging from ten to fourteen years of age. In another club, a boy of thirteen said that it was impossible for him to refrain from smoking more than half an hour at a time when he was out of school. Other boys sided with him, saying that they simply had to smoke. By a vote of the club, however, smoking was abolished during club meetings. After that, this boy went to the roof or hallway to smoke at intervals during the session of the club. His was not an extreme case, although he smoked to greater excess than most of the boys. And in another club, which was formed away from settlement influence, it was found practically impossible to keep the majority of the boys from smoking. They were willing enough to vote to abolish it, but were unable to adhere to the principle which they themselves had established. A few parents objected on principle to their boys’ smoking, but they had not the power or opportunity of preventing it. So the cigarette habit is added to the boy’s vices, and the stunted, anemic cigarette fiend is a frequent figure on these streets.
In the same way drinking and intoxication come quite naturally into his life. Beer is a great dinner and supper staple in the tenements, and every day sees a long procession of women, girls, and boys, filing with tin pails to the saloon for the evening drink. Most of the girls make for the “Family Entrance,” though many go unblushingly through the screen door to the main saloon and come out a moment later with a foaming pail of beer. Others,—and this is particularly characteristic of the smaller girls,—ask some lounging male of their acquaintance to go in and get the beer for them. The deputy usually rewards himself by a long pull from the pail before he comes out of the saloon. It is astonishing, however, how large a number even of little girls and boys ten years old or less, walk boldly out of the front door with their pails. Almost every saloon has also its line of ragged urchins, crouched on their hands and knees on the stone doorstep, peering under the screen at the crowd within. Occasionally, on gala Saturday nights, a group of men will hold what is known as a “beer racket.” Each one contributes a sum of money, fifty cents, a dollar, or sometimes more, to a saloon keeper, who agrees to furnish all the beer they can drink. The party then retires to a convenient neighborhood roof, and keg after keg is sent up until the last drinker has succumbed. Usually one or more boys may be found with the group, overcome with drink.
De Witt Clinton Park
The only city playground on a bright Saturday afternoon
A Favorite Playground
The beer pail is frequently refilled during the game
Little attention is paid by the neighborhood to drunkenness, and among the boys themselves it is regarded as rather a joke for one of their number to become intoxicated. The worst feature of intemperance here is, indeed, not the occasional appearance of a boy intoxicated but the indifference with which the adults treat such a spectacle. At the last annual outing of the Tammany leaders in this district a score or more of unaccompanied boys, from ten to fourteen years old, managed by hook or crook to join the excursion party, which counted among its numbers many well known and responsible business men of the neighborhood. From the time the excursion boat left the landing to the time it discharged its passengers, on both incoming and outgoing trips, the excursionists were drenched in a torrent of free beer. Kegs were tapped a dozen at a time, and in pails, in glasses, in trayloads of “schooners,” it was rushed to the upper decks so fast that it sometimes went a-begging even among the hundreds of thirsty West Siders. Naturally, the small boys got hold of it, and on the way home a group of them with a gang of immature youths scarcely beyond boyhood themselves, sequestered a couple of kegs in a nook on the after spar deck and actually emptied both kegs. When the boat landed several of them plainly showed the effects of their revel, and one boy of fourteen was helped ashore by his laughing playmates, his legs reeling, his head rolling from side to side, and his eyes staring with the dull vacuity of drunkenness. Among the men, hundreds of whom saw this sight, not a voice was raised in protest; some laughed; some scolded the boys for their intemperance; most watched with cynical indifference, as though this were to be expected.
Thus it is seen that all these vices—drinking, smoking, ruffianism—come very naturally to the West Side boy. Even if he realizes them for what they are, he is ill-fitted to resist them. He sees them all around him from infancy; and, boylike, he makes them his own through imitation.
Another of the many ways in which this versatile youngster amuses himself is by playing truant.
The equipment of the typical boy of the Middle West Side when he is first sent to school is pitiable. Excessive cigarette smoking, the wrangling atmosphere of the home, the excitement of the street, have sapped his nervous power. He is restless, easily reduced to sulkiness, and exceedingly hard to interest. The varied excitement of the streets, combined with the inevitable cigarette, has lost to him all power of continued thought or concentration. School itself, like the boy, has little chance. Perhaps it is lacking in anything which makes a vital appeal to his nature, but from the first it is handicapped. Not only is the lure of the streets tremendous, but the bewildered school teacher is presented with a child who has been born into ignorance and inexpansibility, reared in an atmosphere of discord and vice, and given every chance of acquiring disastrous physical and moral habits, before ever he reached the class room; and the problem that confronts the teacher is not that of building up a character but of making over one that is already seriously deformed.
The sources of the truancy habit are undoubtedly to be traced in the boy’s first acquaintance as an infant with the streets. As we have seen, he is familiar from babyhood with the bustle and confusion of street life and his first pleasurable experiences are associated with it. The atmosphere of the street, its scenes and sounds, permeate the child’s whole existence and fasten upon him the shackles of habit. After a year or two of more or less complete subjection of his budding mind to this influence, the child is expected to exchange without protest the thrilling, lawless streets for the orderly commonplace of the school room. Of course he is attracted by the novelty of the latter for a time, but after that he feels the strain of two conflicting influences—the lure of the street and the instinct of obedience to authority. If he wishes to yield to the street, he has the traditions of generations of truants and any number of conniving playmates to aid him to escape. And here we have the beginnings of the “delinquency” which almost inevitably sooner or later leads him to the juvenile court.[50]
Here is the confession of a ten-year-old truant, which is typical of school life in the district:
“I used to go to the Fifty-second Street school with Jimmie, but they made me change to Forty-eighth Street because I stayed away so much. I would leave home in the morning at school time and then come up here and play in the streets instead of going to school. I would just hang around the corners with the other boys or go after loot with them. A little while ago, Jimmie and I wanted money, and we got a dog to follow us into a candy store on Eleventh Avenue, and there we tried to sell it. It was a dandy dog, a thoroughbred, but the storekeeper said he had two already and wouldn’t buy it. We tried to sell it again but it got away from us. We tried that with another one once but it was a bum one. Nobody would buy it, and after spending the whole morning trying, we gave it a kick and chased it off. Jimmie and I and a bunch of boys all got a duck apiece in Jersey once and we were able to sell them for fifty cents apiece.”
“How do you get over to Jersey without paying?”
“That’s easy,” said Jimmie, “you go down to de ferry and wait till two or t’ree ladies comes in togeder. One of ’em gits two or t’ree tickets for the bunch, and you step right up in front of the first lady, like you was her son. The gateman sees the tickets in her hand, and then you beat it, while she’s tryin’ to explain to the gateman. Coming back is easier still, ’cos you can always sneak through the wagon, or express, or employes’ entrances there.”
“When our whole family goes to Jersey,” went on the narrator, “all of us kids sneak in that way. My father buys tickets and then we walk through the gates and he refuses to pay for us because he don’t know us. Just now it is too cold to go to Jersey much, or do anything but keep in school. Besides I’m on parole now. I have to have a good conduct card and have to go and see Mr. Carson once in so often and tell him about what I’m doin’.”
Truancy here is developed into a system, which the youngsters can adjust to any occasion with the greatest facility. If you start to school with your books in the morning it is an easy matter to leave them at a candy store or with a friend, and put in the morning furthering your own interests on the docks or in the streets. If a truant officer asks you your name or your business on the streets, one name is as good as another,—if it is far enough from your own; and there are many plausible reasons for being out of school, if you can avoid having to prove them. A placating note to your teacher written by yourself is as good as one by your mother, if you can only make the teacher believe that your mother wrote it. After two or three days in the street, it is necessary to maintain a strict watch over the mail box, if you would beat your parents to the truant officer’s notice which will sooner or later be found therein. This notice can be removed from the box by the judicious use of a bent pin, and communication between the school and the home is thus indefinitely postponed.
Once these details are arranged, the streets of New York are open to the boys for a holiday. Money, while not an absolute necessity, is much to be desired, and there are many ways of obtaining it,—witness the statement of “Jimmie’s” friend, above. It is against the law for boys under fourteen years to work, and the greater number of employers to whom they apply do their best to make this law effective; in any case, labor as a financial resource makes no strong appeal. But there are things to sell if you can only get hold of them without being caught. Pennies may be begged, or stolen from other and smaller children. Similarly food may be begged when necessary, or obtained unobtrusively from fruit stand and grocery counters. Jimmie’s friend is by no means the only boy who starts for school regularly every morning and very often does not return before nine or ten o’clock at night, staving off the pangs of hunger (which often seems to be the only form of homesickness known in this district) through the resources here described.
Akin to truancy is the “wanderlust.” This passion to get out and away, travel, and court adventure, comes to the boy of the Middle West Side as it comes to most boys—and often he obeys its call. The resulting experiences are usually only a short and amusing incident in his life; very rarely do they lead to a permanent change. One young adventurer told of a characteristic trip:
“Denny Murphy came over to our house one morning last summer and said, ‘Red, let’s beat it.’ ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘where to?’ ‘Out west,’ Denny said. I did not have anything else to do and I thought it would be a good thing to go west. So that afternoon, Denny and I went over to Jersey City. Denny had some money. I don’t know where he got it, but he probably stole it, for he was always crazy about robberies; talked about ‘pulling off’ robberies and things of that kind, and I knew he had been in some hold-ups. We were going to go to Philadelphia first, but I thought we needed more money and could probably get a job in Paterson. So we took a freight train to Paterson. Got there in the evening and I tried for a job in the factory. I told the man I had been getting six dollars a week in another factory and told him I lived in Paterson, but the manager caught me lying about where I lived and fired me out. So Denny and I slept that night in the doorway of that same factory.
“In the morning we both looked around for a job, but there was nothing doing. Finally I got on a barge and they were going to take me on there washing dishes and being cabin boy, but there was nothing for Denny to do, and the boat was going up the river instead of down, so there wasn’t any use in our staying there; so that night Denny came in and we slept on the back of the boat. Denny had some more money now—No, I don’t know where he got it—and we went over to Jersey City again on the trolley car. Then we caught a freight train for Philadelphia. The cars were locked and we had to climb clear up and ride on top. We got down to some town just the other side of Trenton before a brakeman saw us and booted us off, and then we had to wait there the rest of the afternoon and get on a coal car which took us to Philadelphia. We spent that night in a freight car and then got on another freight train out in the West Philadelphia yards and started west. We climbed in a box car marked ‘Springfield, Ohio,’ shut the door, and I went to sleep. When I woke up it was daylight, and the car was in another city. I supposed it was Springfield but it wasn’t; it was only Harrisburg. We walked all around the town, but we couldn’t find anything to do, and finally we got out of money. Along about dark we saw a bellboy, we thought he was, coming out of a hotel. He was a ‘coon’ in uniform, so we thought he must be a bellboy. Then Denny said, ‘Here’s our chance to get money.’ He said we could take a club and come up behind and blackjack the coon and rob him. So we came up in the dark and just as we got close up behind him, he turned around and we saw that he was not a bellboy at all but a policeman. I never knew before they had ‘coon’ policemen anywhere.
“Denny and I beat it for the railroad as fast as we could go. We did not wait to eat or anything, but caught a freight train that we saw moving, and when we got on we found we were bound for Philadelphia again. In the car with us was a ‘coon’ bumming like we were. He wanted to know who we were and where we were going. We told him we were just looking around the country, and he wanted to take us south with him. He said the Southern people were mighty fine people and would surely give us good jobs if we would go with him as far as Atlanta. We had come back from the west now and we thought we might as well go south as anywhere else, so we told him we would go with him. Then I went to sleep again and when I woke up there wasn’t any coon any more. He had beat it somewhere and left Denny and me behind.
“We got off the train at a little station called Overbrook, just outside of Philadelphia, and just as we hit the cinders, two railroad detectives jumped out from behind the switchhouse and grabbed us both and that ended our western trip.
“They took us into the city to the House of Detention, where we stayed over that night and the next two or three days. There was a man there who treated us fine and made us tell all about ourselves, and after two or three days he put us on a passenger train and sent us back to New York. I’ve never tried to go west since.”
Parties and dances, now and then a “grand annual ball” or “fête” at a dance hall or casino, an occasional visit to a moving picture show, one or two dilapidated poolrooms, and the sordid and ever-present saloon—these are practically the only amusements definitely offered to the West Side boy. And as he casts about for means to supplement them it is natural for him to turn early to indulgence in sexual immorality, which he has seen and heard talked of in the tenement and the street since he began to be old enough to notice anything. His sense of modesty has been strangled at birth. All round him he is accustomed to hear obscene terms, the meaning of which any older person will freely explain in a way which robs them of any moral significance whatever. There are plenty of “big fellers” and “wise girls” on the streets to teach him anything that he wishes to know. In the tenements themselves immoral practices are common even among small children, with the full knowledge of everyone except their parents, who are nevertheless apathetically aware of the sins of their neighbors’ children. In a number of ways the boys here learn, not the truth about reproduction, for that is very little known here, but about sexual enjoyment and its many forms of perversion, topics which occupy a large share of the mind of adolescent youth in this environment. Children of both sexes indulge freely in conversation which is only carried on secretly by adults in other walks of life. Certain roofs in the neighborhood have a name as rendezvous for children and young couples for immoral practices.
In common with other districts of the city the neighborhood has many sexual perverts, and these furnish an actual menace to the children. As infants, practically, the boys have heard the same stories repeated until they regard sexual matters as forbidden, of course,—and therefore, like smoking cigarettes and gambling, to be hidden from parents, police, or other authorities,—but with no sense of abhorrence. Knowledge of the methods of the perverts, on the other hand, leads to experimentation among the boys, and to the many forms of perversion which in the end make the degenerate. Self-abuse is considered a common joke, and boys as young as seven and eight actually practice sodomy. Every night the doorways are blocked with girls from fourteen to twenty years of age who lean against the walls and rails, and talk with the young men, the “talk” occasionally degenerating into a laughing scuffle. Girls as a rule are never mentioned by the boys except in club-room stories of the grossest immorality.
Universally these boys lack stamina—physical, mental, moral. They are incapable of prolonged exertion; a minute or two of fast boxing exhausts them completely, and only the exceptional ones are able to box continuously for more than two or three rounds. Their baseball teams are too apt to “blow up” in the fourth or fifth inning, no matter what individual cleverness some of the members may have shown, because the players are so shortwinded and feeble of limb. There are, of course, a number of well developed athletes among them, but a boy of normal physique stands out far above his playmates, and those of exceptional skill are few indeed.
Their mental energies are scattered and undependable. They are incapable of prolonged thought upon any one subject, and lack absolutely the concentration which mental discipline can impart. Quick they may be and clever, but they are seldom deep, and through years of mental inaction they seem unable to grasp anything like an abstract idea or principle. Of any except the simplest and most exciting card games they quickly tire.
The lack of moral stamina is even more evident. They are totally unable to resist physical temptation of any sort. In fact, their training seems to offer them no basis of resistance. They are accustomed to striving not to overcome but to gratify every desire. Lack of privacy and the hopelessly unmoral attitude of the neighborhood toward all matters of sex have left them without any moral standards. In deceit and treachery, the use of superior force and of unfair advantage, they see nothing to be avoided or ashamed of. Revenge and the fiercest retaliation for real or fancied injury, accidental or otherwise, are part of their code. Their life is a struggle for self-preservation, and they are naturally consummately selfish; for the feelings of others they have not the slightest thought. Calloused into unmorality they are unconcernedly cruel, and such a thing as the killing of some boy in a gang fight will be related in a perfectly matter-of-fact manner. They have no respect for age or authority.
Two types of boy are common in these streets, widely dissimilar, but equally pathetic. The first is the boy who wants to “make good,” but cannot shake off the shackles of association and environment; the boy “who’d make something of himself yet if given half a show.” Since leaving school and going to work he has perhaps gone through the process known as “steadying down” and “getting sensible.” Between the years of fourteen and seventeen there may have come a loosening of the old gang ties, a change, and a reshaping. A later period seems to come when after the excitements of his adolescent years he may realize, as to the loafing and depredations into which he has drifted, that “there’s nothing in it.” Sometimes even a boy from a down-at-the-heels and shiftless family makes a desperate effort to pull up. But he lacks the tremendous energy to struggle through the bad name he has gotten by his own career and by identification as “one of that crew.” His bitterness is natural. “Oh, I know—that is another of those Fifty-third Street stories about Charlie Harris. I’ve heard enough of them.” Such a boy is most susceptible at this time to home and outside influence, and if only the opportunity can be taken it will be not unlikely to prove the turning point in his life. But too often there is no one at hand to help him. The West Side boy does not always respond to kindness. He knows little or nothing of it in his life, and his native fickleness and dislike of direction make him, especially after the school age, difficult to handle.
Yet sometimes the effort does succeed. George Ruhl, for instance, was the oldest of three children in a poor German family. Some years ago, when one of the settlement workers first knew him, he was unruly and “difficult” and quite beyond the control of his parents. He refused to go to school, smoked cigarettes, and got into bad company with his gang. When he was twelve years old a settlement worker sent him away to the home of the Salvation Army. The superintendent would not keep him on account of his bad influence upon the other boys. In order to remove him from his gang Miss Summers had him sent to a Boys’ Republic. The leader kept him for two years and gained a remarkably good influence over the boy. He then placed George on a farm in Massachusetts. George has turned out well. The owner of the farm, a selectman of the town, treated him like a member of his own family and trusted him with money and other important matters. Finally he rented a farm to George and another boy, and they are prospering. They run a truck farm, raising also chickens, eggs, and squabs. For many years George sent his mother ten dollars a month to pay the rent. In 1909 he offered to take the whole family down to his farm, but Miss Summers advised against this because it would have imposed too much of a burden upon the boy. Here is a case in which outside help at the right time worked wonders; and undoubtedly the same success might result in many others, were there only more knowledge of the West Side and more voices that would answer to the call. Meanwhile the boy “who can’t make good” is still with us.
The second type commands pity but deserves few excuses. It is the boy who refuses to make good. When a boy goes to work even the lax discipline of the irregularly attended school is absent. West Side boys are not in demand, and his job is often that of an extra “hand,” easily turned off, or else it is of a “blind alley” nature. His delinquency, however, cannot be considered the effect of his job, for boys of this type naturally seek for a low grade of employment.[51] In a fit of temper or idleness he surrenders his job; perhaps he loses it unwillingly. Whole days of enforced freedom will follow. One day in the streets between weeks of monotonous hardship in the factory may demoralize a boy. Possibly he hears of another position, which he thinks will be easier and pay more than the one he has. So he drops his former job and takes the new one. Before he has been in his new position long, the memory of his day of idleness on the street overcomes him, and with a little money in his pocket he quits his position, and this time he does not hunt up a new one until all his money is spent. The next logical step is to try to obtain food and money as long as possible without working for it. And so step by step has evolved the habitual loafer and hanger-on of saloons, the young man who brags that he does not earn a living and does not have to earn one. Two boys known to our workers went through this process and are now young men. Both live off the earnings of mother and sister, and indeed, one of them ordered his sister to go to work “or else how could he live?” The other blacked his sister’s eyes over a similar discussion. Such things are common on the Middle West Side.
Both of these types are direct and logical products of neighborhood conditions, just as many of the ways in which the boy finds his recreation simply announce the fact that he must invent for himself what his home fails to provide. The boy’s inner life is bleak and wretched because every normal instinct of youth, all the qualities of which future men are made, have been sapped and stunted by the gray, grim neighborhood in which even play is crime. There are ten thousand hopeless little tragedies on the Middle West Side today; and our only answer to their appeal is to call for the police.
If the school is at a disadvantage in its labors to build up character, the juvenile court is even more so. A day at court is a transient experience and soon forgotten. Even the effects of months of institutional life are soon outlived under the strong influences of the street and the gang.
Our picture of the West Side boy is now wellnigh complete. Lawless, defiant, a nuisance to his neighbors and a menace to his playmates, it seems as though the future citizen of these streets were little likely to become other than a burden or a detriment to the whole body politic. Certainly he and his gang, taking them as they are, have little to recommend them or help them to offset a notoriety which they have justly gained.
Of course, their days are not on this account all tears and misery. That side of the story has been emphasized because it bears upon the purpose of this study; but if it were the only side these boys would be almost too impossible to be real. But they are very real, and very boylike, careless and happy-go-lucky, too young to know—of if they did know to reflect on—what might have been, taking their world as it is, and ingeniously determined to make the best of it and have a “good time,” no matter at whose expense. They are quaint little figures, with their rich street vocabulary, their heartless and yet almost innocent paganism, their capacity for achieving the dangerous in amusement though they bump into every corner on the way. Look at the gang ready for baseball; its members do not seem overwhelmed by the burden of juvenile delinquency. Look at the little group “playing hookey” under the dock; fear of the truant officer seems to sit lightly on the shoulders of these boys.
No, comedy is no stranger to the Middle West Side; only it is Meredithian comedy and the laughter which it provokes is thoughtful indeed. And it is assuredly true that if you would see all that is most typical of the West Side boy, if you would see him as expressing what in his life he really is, you must turn your back on comedy and gaze on the sadder picture. Look at the illustrations and see the boy himself; then read the following sketch as the caption under the portrait. It is printed verbatim from the New York Evening World of April 10, 1911, and for its truth to life it cannot be bettered.
Johnnie Moran, twelve years old, ... was arraigned today ... in the Children’s Court.
The boy was taken in charge Saturday night by Detectives Carter and Brown from headquarters, after he had watched his father die of dropsy thirty-six hours previously; after he had seen the body robbed by a playmate; after he himself had taken “de old man’s” watch, and had then gone to play in the street as if nothing out of the usual had occurred.
Johnnie is undersized. His chest is sunken and his shoulders slope; his furtive little gray eyes are deep set under a bulging brow, topped by a shock of hair of no particular color; his small fingers are cigarette-stained, and his clothes look as if their origin had been the ash barrel. Here is the story he told an Evening World reporter, while swinging his thin legs unconcernedly from a bench in the room above the Children’s Court, where the little prisoners were waiting to be called for trial:
“Me old man was sick a week and three days. I didn’t know what wuz the matter wid him, and he didn’t neither. He just laid around and groaned and his legs swelled awful. His name? He wuz named John, too, and he was a night watchman, when he woiked, down to the dock at Thoity-seventh Street. Yes, sir, he drinked some mostly before he went to work in the evenin’. But it didn’t seem to bother him. No, sir, he never treated me bad; hardly ever licked me.
“The old man never had nothing to eat, ’cept what I bringed him the first day he wuz sick. Yes, sir, I went to school every day. I wuz ’fraid the troont-off’cer’d git me. The old man didn’t mind—he just stayed by himself. No, sir, nobody come to see him, and he never told me to git nobody. After school I’d play in the streets with the other fellows and I’d git some buns and milk. I didn’t want much—wuzn’t hungry—and the old man never seemed to want anything.”
Johnnie produced a wad of chewing gum from some recess of his jacket and a second later the atmosphere around him reeked with the odor of mint.
“Thursday night,” he went on, “he wuz took woise. I slept on a bundle of old things in a corner and in the night I heard the old man git up and go in the kitchen and sit down there. He groaned somethin’ awful—like this,” and the boy gave a startling imitation, “and I couldn’t sleep and I told him to shut up. Then, after a while, he stopped groaning and when I got up to go to school I see he wuz nearly all in.
“He told me to tie a rope around him and try and pull him onto the bed and I did it, but it wuzn’t no use. Then I went out and got a roll and a glass o’ milk and when I come back he wuz half way onto the bed, and he didn’t answer when I spoke to him and shook him. I called him four or five times, but he never answered, and so I went on to school. I didn’t want the troont-off’cer to git me.
“Yes, sir, I knowed he wuz dead, but I had to go to school. Then after school was out, I told some of the fellers and two of ’em went up in the room with me, and one of ’em—he wuz a big boy—took five dollars out of the old man’s pocket and I took his watch. The big boy—his name wuz Frank Reede—wouldn’t give me none of the five dollars and he and the other kid run away.
“The next day I got hungry and I told the janitor and he told the cops and they come and got me and took the old man’s watch to keep for me. Yes, sir, I’m sorry the old man’s dead. He wuz good to me. No, sir, me muther is dead. She died when I wuz a year old when we lived in Thoity-thoid Street. I dunno how long we have been living in Thoity-seckin Street. What’ll they do with me, Mister?”
What shall we do with him? That is a question which the institutions, the officials, and the people of New York must answer.