The Children of the Poor

by Jacob A. Riis

The last hymn had been sung and the congregation had gone home, eagerly discussing their pastor’s new scheme; but a little company of men and women remained behind in the church to talk it over with the minister. They were plain people. The sermon had shown them a plain duty to be done, and they knew only one way: to do it. The dinner-hour found them there yet, planning and talking it over. It was with a light heart that, as a result of their talk, the minister set out for New York the day after with an invitation to the children of the slums to come out in the woods and see how beautiful God had made his world. They were to be the guests of the people of Sherman for a fortnight, and a warm welcome awaited them there. A right royal one they received when, in a few days, the pastor returned, bringing with him nine little waifs, the poorest and the neediest he had found in the tenements to which he went with his offer. They were not such children as the farm-folk thereabouts saw every day, but they took them into their homes, and their hearts warmed to them day by day as they saw how much they needed their kindness, how under its influence they grew into bright and happy children like their own; and when, at the end of the two weeks, nine brown-faced laughing boys and girls went back to tell of the wondrous things they had heard and seen, it was only to make room for another little band. Nor has ever a summer passed since that first, which witnessed sixty city urchins made happy at Sherman, that has not seen the hospitable houses of the Pennsylvania village opened to receive holiday parties like those from the slums of the far city.

Thus modestly began the Fresh Air movement that has brought health and happiness to more than a hundred thousand of New York’s poor children since, and has spread far and near, not only through our own but to foreign lands, wherever there is poverty to relieve and suffering to soothe. It has literally grown up around the enthusiasm and practical purpose of the one man whose personality pervades it to this day. Willard Parsons preaches now to a larger flock than any church could contain, but the burden of his sermon is ever the same. From the Tribune office he issues his appeals each spring, and money comes in abundance to carry on the work in which city and country vie with each other to lend a hand. After that first season at Sherman, a New York newspaper, the Evening Post, took the work under its wing and raised the necessary funds until in 1882 it passed into the keeping of its neighbor, the Tribune. Ever since it has been known as the Tribune Fresh Air Fund, and year by year has grown in extent and importance until at the end of the year 1891 more than 94,000 children were shown to have been given a two weeks’ vacation in the country in the fifteen summers that had passed. The original 60 of 1877 had grown to an army of holiday-makers numbering 13,568 in 1891. By this time the hundred thousand mark has long been passed. The total amount of money expended in sending the children out was $250,633.88, and so well had the great fund been managed that the average cost per child had fallen from $3.12 in the first year to $2.07 in the last. Generalship, indeed, of the highest order was needed at the headquarters of this army. In that summer there was not a day except Sunday when less than seven companies were sent out from the city. The little knot of children that hung timidly to the skirts of the good minister’s coat on that memorable first trip to Pennsylvania had been swelled until special trains, once of as many as eighteen cars, were in demand to carry those who came after.

The plan of the Fresh Air Fund is practically unchanged from the day it was first conceived. The neediest and poorest are made welcome. Be they Protestants, Catholics, Jews, or heathen, it matters not if an invitation is waiting. The supply is governed entirely by the demands that come from the country. Sometimes it is a Catholic community that asks for children of that faith, sometimes prosperous Jews, who would bring sunlight and hope even to Ludlow Street; rarely yet Italians seeking their own. The cry of the missionary, from the slums in the hot July days: “How shall we give those babies the breath of air that means life?—no one asks for Italian children,” has not yet been answered. Prejudice dies slowly. When an end has been made of this at last, the Fresh Air Fund will receive a new boom. To my mind there are no more tractable children than the little Italians, none more grateful for kindness; certainly none more in need of it. Against colored children there is no prejudice. Sometimes an invitation comes from Massachusetts or some other New England State for them, and then the missions and schools of Thompson Street give up their pickaninnies for a gleeful vacation spell. With the first spring days of April a canvass of the country within a radius of five hundred miles of New York has been begun. By the time the local committees send in their returns—so many children wanted in each town or district—the workers from the missions, the King’s Daughters’ circles, the hospitals, dispensaries, industrial schools, nurseries, kindergartens, and the other gates through which the children’s host pours from the tenements, are at work, and the task of getting the little excursionists in shape for their holiday begins.

SUMMER BOARDERS FROM MOTT STREET.

That is the hardest task of all. Places are found for them readily enough; the money to pay their way is to be had for the asking; but to satisfy the reasonable demand of the country hosts that their little guests shall come clean from their tenement homes costs an effort, how great the workers who go among those homes “with a Bible in one hand and a pair of scissors and a cake of soap in the other” know best. A physician presides over these necessary preliminaries. In the months of July and August he is kept running from church to hospital, from chapel to nursery, inspecting the brigades gathered there and parting the sheep from the goats. With a list of the houses in which the health officers report contagious diseases, he goes through the ranks. Any hailing from such houses—the list is brought up to date every morning—are rejected first. The rest as they pass in review are numbered 1 and 2 on the register. The No. 1’s are ready to go at once if under the age limit of twelve years. They are the sheep, and, alas! few in number. Amid wailing and gnashing of teeth the cleansing of the goats is then begun. Heads are clipped and faces “planed off.” Sometimes a second and a third inspection still fails to give the child a clean bill of entry. Just what it means is best shown by the following extract from a mission worker’s report to Mr. Parsons, last summer, of the condition of her squad of 110, held under marching orders in an up-town chapel:

“All the No. 2’s have now been thoroughly oiled, larkspur’d, washed in hot suds, and finally had an application of exterminator. This has all been done in the church to be as sure as possible that they are safe to send away. Ninety have been thus treated.” Her experience was typical. Twenty No. 1’s in a hundred was the average given by one of the oldest workers in the Fresh Air Service whose field is in the East Side tenements.

But all this is of the past, as are the long braids of many a little girl, sacrificed with tears upon the altar of the coveted holiday, when the procession finally starts for the depot, each happy child carrying a lunch-bag, for often the journey is long, though never wearisome to the little ones. Their chaperon—some student, missionary, teacher, or kind man or woman who, for sweet charity’s sake, has taken upon him this arduous duty—awaits them and keeps the account of his charges as squad after squad is dropped at the station to which it is consigned. Sometimes the whole party goes in a lump to a common destination, more frequently the joyous freight is delivered, as the journey progresses, in this valley or that village, where wagons are waiting to receive it and carry it home.

Once there, what wondrous things those little eyes behold, whose horizon was limited till that day, likely enough, by the gloom of the filthy court, or the stony street upon which it gave, with the gutter the boundary line between! The daisies by the roadside, with no sign to warn them “off the grass,” the birds, the pig in its sty, the cow with its bell—each new marvel is hailed with screams of delight. “Sure, heaven can’t be no nicer place than this,” said a little child from one of the missions who for the first time saw a whole field of daisies; and her fellow-traveller, after watching intently a herd of cows chew the cud asked her host, “Say, mister, do you have to buy gum for all them cows to chew?”