The Children of the Poor

by Jacob A. Riis

As far as I know, this is the only instance in which the quadrille has been made one of the regular English branches taught in the Industrial Schools. But cake and lemonade have more than once smoothed the way to a hearty acceptance of the three R’s with their useful concomitants, as taught there. One of the excellent features of the system is the “kitchen garden,” for the little ones, a kind of play housekeeping that covers the whole range of house-work, and the cooking class for the larger girls that gives many of them a taste for housekeeping which helps to overcome their prejudice against domestic service, and so to solve one of the most perplexing questions of the day—no less serious to the children of the poor than to the wives of the rich, if they only knew or would believe it. It is the custom of the wise teachers, when the class has become proficient, to invite the mothers to a luncheon gotten up by their children. “I never,” reports the teacher of the Eighteenth Ward Industrial School after such a session, “saw women so thoroughly interested.” And it was not only the mother who was thus won over in the pride over her daughter’s achievement. It was the home itself that was invaded with influences that had been strangers to it heretofore. For the mother learned something she would not be apt to forget, by seeing her child do intelligently and economically what she had herself done ignorantly and wastefully before. Poverty and waste go always hand in hand. The girls are taught, with the doing of a thing, enough also of the chemistry of cooking to enable them to understand the “why” of it. The influence of that sort of teaching in the tenement of the poor no man can measure. I am well persuaded that half of the drunkenness that makes so many homes miserable is at least encouraged, if not directly caused, by the mismanagement and bad cooking at home. All the wife and mother knows about housekeeping she has picked up in the tenement since she was married, among those who never knew how to cook a decent meal or set a clean table; while the saloonkeeper hires the best cook he can get for money, and serves his hot lunch free to her husband in a tidy and cheerful room, where no tired women—tired of the trials and squabbles of the day—no cross looks, and no dirty, fighting children come to spoil his appetite and his hour of rest.

Here, as everywhere, it is the personal influence of the teacher that counts for most in dealing with the child. It follows it into the home, and often through life to the second and third generation, smoothing the way of trouble and sorrow and hardship with counsel and aid in a hundred ways. “Sometimes,” says one of the teachers, who has seen the children of her first pupils go from her school into their own homes to take up the battle of life, “sometimes a teacher, while conducting a class, is also fashioning, from some soft white material, a shroud for some little one whose parents can provide none themselves. When a child dies of a disease that is not contagious, its classmates gather around the coffin and sing in German or English, ‘I am Jesus’s little lamb.’ Sometimes the children’s hymn and the Lord’s Prayer are the only service.” Her life work has been among the poorest Germans on the East Side. “Among our young men,” she reports, “I know of only three who have become drunkards, and many are stanch temperance men. I have never known of one of our girls drinking to excess. I have looked carefully over our records, and can truly say that, so far as I can learn, not one girl who remained with us until over seventeen lived a life of shame.”

What teaching meant to this woman the statement that follows gives an idea of: “Shrove Tuesday evening is a time when all Germans plan for a frolic; they call it ‘Fastnacht.’ Twenty years ago I gave the young people of the evening school a party on that evening, and at the suggestion of one of the girls decided to have a reunion every year at that time. So each year our married girls and boys, and those still unmarried, who have grown beyond us in other ways, come ‘home.’ We sing the old songs, talk over old times, play games, drink coffee and eat doughnuts, and always end the evening with ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ Last spring, two of the young men stood at the stairway and counted the guests as they went to the supper-room: they reported over four hundred. Letters came from Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, Texas, Idaho, and Wyoming from those who would gladly have been with us. All who live within a radius of fifty miles try to be here.”

“Among our grown girls,” she adds, “we have teachers, governesses, dressmakers, milliners, trained nurses, machine operators, hand sewers, embroiderers, designers for embroidering, servants in families, saleswomen, book-keepers, typewriters, candy packers, bric-à-brac packers, bank-note printers, silk winders, button makers, box makers, hairdressers, and fur sewers. Among our boys are book-keepers, workers in stained glass, painters, printers, lithographers, salesmen in wholesale houses, as well as in many of our largest retail stores, typewriters, stenographers, commission merchants, farmers, electricians, ship carpenters, foremen in factories, grocers, carpet designers, silver engravers, metal burnishers, carpenters, masons, carpet weavers, plumbers, stone workers, cigar makers, and cigar packers. Only one of our boys, so far as we can learn, ever sold liquor, and he has given it up.”

Not a few of these, without a doubt, got the first inkling of their trade in the class where they learned to read. The curriculum of the Industrial Schools is comprehensive. The nationality of the pupils makes little or no difference in it. The start, as often as is necessary, is made with an object lesson—soap and water being the elements, and the child the object. As in the kindergarten, the alphabet comes second on the list. Then follow lessons in sewing, cooking, darning, mat-weaving, pasting, and dressmaking for the girls, and in carpentry, wood carving, drawing, printing, and like practical “branches” for the boys, not a few of whom develop surprising cleverness at this or that kind of work. The system is continually expanding. There are schools yet that have not the necessary facilities for classes in manual training, but as the importance of the subject is getting to be more clearly understood, and interest in the subject grows, new “shops” are being constantly opened and other occupations found for the children. Even where the school quarters are most pinched and inadequate, a shift is made to give the children work to do that will teach them habits of industry and precision as the all-important lesson to be learned there. In some of the Industrial Schools the boys learn to cook with the girls, and in the West Side Italian School an attempt to teach them to patch and sew buttons on their own jackets resulted last year in their making their own shirts, and making them well, too. Perhaps the possession of the shirt as a reward for making it acted as a stimulus. The teacher thought so, and she was probably right, for more than one of them had never owned a whole shirt before, let alone a clean one. A heap can be done with the children by appealing to their proper pride—much more than many might think, judging hastily from their rags. Call it vanity—if it is a kind of vanity that can be made a stepping-stone to the rescue of the child, it is worth laying hold of. It was distinct evidence that civilization and the nineteenth century had invaded Lewis Street, when a class of Hungarian boys in the American Female Guardian Society’s school in that thoroughfare earned the name of the “neck-tie class” by adopting that article of apparel in a body. None of them had ever known collar or necktie before.

THE FIRST PATRIOTIC ELECTION IN THE BEACH STREET INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL—
PARLOR IN JOHN ERICSSON’S OLD HOUSE.

It is the practice to let the girls have what garments they make, from material, old or new, furnished by the school, and thus a good many of the pupils in the Industrial Schools are supplied with decent clothing. In the winter especially, some of them need it sadly. In the Italian school of which I just spoke, one of the teachers found a little girl of six years crying softly in her seat on a bitter cold day. She had just come in from the street. In answer to the question what ailed her, she sobbed out, “I’se so cold.” And no wonder. Beside a worn old undergarment, all the clothing upon her shivering little body was a thin calico dress. The soles were worn off her shoes, and toes and heels stuck out. It seemed a marvel that she had come through the snow and ice as she had, without having her feet frozen.