In the third case the father was a Spaniard and the mother an Italian. Their flat was practically stripped of every piece of salable furniture before they could be induced to allow themselves or any one of their children to be taken to Bellevue. On my first visit not one of them had a change of clothes. There was one bed, and two mattresses on the floor. Two ragged sheets, spotlessly clean, were all they had in the way of covers, though it was then the middle of a cold winter. There was a table, two chairs, a wood-stove, and about a half-dozen pieces of crockery—every one of these articles was broken. The pot and saucepan, though old, were whole.
The committee allowed me twenty-five dollars to spend for that family. Every penny of it went for household furnishings. Later, when I got my fingers on a few extra dollars, I called at the flat and offered to spend it for clothing. Courteously but firmly the mother told me that her husband had said they had taken enough; she must not accept any more help.
The parents of every one of those one hundred and thirty-seven children were defective, either mentally or physically, sometimes both. Even in the three non-pauper families, the bootblack was a cripple, the Finn tubercular, and the Italian wife of the Spaniard had had both breasts removed because of cancer.
I did not record the histories of those cases because they were in any way unusual. They are a fair sample of the cases given to any and every social worker on the staff of a hospital where the patients come from the slums of New York City. Of all the cases I investigated—nearly three hundred—as a social worker, there was not one child of American parentage—all of them the children of immigrants.
For thirty days during the summer of 1920 I kept a record of the nationality of the families on whom I called in the capacity of license inspector. Of the one thousand and six families talked with, eighteen had both parents American. In twenty-one, one parent was American.
Be it understood that when a family claimed to be Irish-American I rated them as Irish. There were a lot of such scum in my district. To my way of thinking the propaganda carried on by such individuals is much more dangerous to American institutions and ideals than that spouted by the few I met who claimed to be Bolsheviki.
Some of the most dangerous persons met during my four years in the underbrush, to American ideals and institutions, had entered the country after the declaration of peace. Four of them were prostitutes of that class known as street-walkers, for the time being or until, as they expressed it:
“I meek von reech haul.”
The fifth, having already made a rich haul, chanced to be visiting her pals when I called. All of these women were attractive to look at, all claimed to have come to this country to join relatives, and all were preaching the downfall of constitutional government. They were here to get money, and they didn’t care how they got it.
They all belonged to one of the oppressed peoples of the earth. They were all Poles, or claimed to be.