One outcome of this inquiry has been the formation of a society of employers designed to bring about scientific consideration of the present misemployment of children and adults, underemployment, and other wastes of industry.
We believe that continuation schools are necessary for all boys and girls engaged in shop or factory work, and that expert vocational guidance and educational direction should be offered those who leave school to become wage-earners. It is inevitable that to people at all socially minded close contact with many children should exercise the humanities. The stress that we lay on the enforcement of these protective measures comes from a conviction that the children of the poor, more than all others, need to be prepared for the responsibilities of life that so soon come upon them.
The great majority of the boys and girls accept passively the conditions of the trade or occupation into which chance and their necessities have forced them. The desire for something different seldom becomes articulate or strong enough to impel them to overcome the almost insuperable barriers. Occasionally, however, the spirit of revolt asserts itself. “I work in a sweatshop,” said a young girl who brought her drawings to me for criticism, “and it harasses my body and my soul. Perhaps I could earn enough to live on by doing these, and my brother bids me to display them”; and she added, “I could live on three dollars a week if I were happy.” The drawings were promising, and the temperamental young creature, in answer to my questioning, admitted that she had illustrated David Copperfield for pastime and had “given David a weak chin.”
The difficulty of proper placement in industry experienced by the ordinary boy and girl is intensified in the case of the colored juveniles. It is now nine years since a woman called at the Henry Street house and almost challenged me to face their problem. She was what is termed a “race woman,” and desired to work for her own people. It was not difficult to provide an opening for her. The devoted daughter of a man who had felt friendship for the colored people made it possible for us to establish a branch of the settlement on the west side of the city in that section known as San Juan Hill. At “Lincoln House,” with the co-operation of representatives of the race and their friends, a programme of social and educational work adapted to the needs of the neighborhood is carried on. To find admirably trained and efficient colored nurses was a comparatively simple matter; and the response of the colored people themselves in this respect was immediately encouraging. Necessity for patient adherence to the principle of giving opportunity to the most needy children, that they may be better equipped for the future, is emphasized in the case of the colored children in school and when seeking work; but difficulties, mountainous in proportion and testing the most buoyant optimism, loom up when social barriers and racial characteristics enter into individual adjustments. The restricted number of occupations open to them discourages ambition and in time reacts unfavorably upon character and ability; and thus we complete the vicious circle of diminishing opportunities and lessening vigor and skill. Colored women are often conspicuously good and tender mothers, and when I have watched large groups of them assembled in their clubrooms, exhibiting their babies with justifiable pride, I have felt a wave of unhappiness because of the consciousness of the enormous handicap with which these little ones must face the future.
Uses of the Back Yard in One of the Branches of the Henry Street Settlement
A distinguished musician told me not long ago that he gave specially of his time and talent to the colored people of New York because of a debt he owed to a gifted colored neighbor. When he was a boy, his attempts to play the violin attracted the man’s attention; the latter offered his services as instructor when he learned that the boy could not afford to take lessons. The colored man had great talent and had studied with the best masters in Europe, but when he returned to America he was unable to obtain engagements or procure pupils, and in order to earn his living was obliged to learn to play the guitar. Discouraging as was his experience, there is, I believe, relatively freer opportunity for the exceptionally gifted of the colored race in the arts and professions than for the ordinary young men and women who seek vocational careers.
Experience in Henry Street, and a conviction that intelligent interest in the welfare of children was becoming universal, gradually focused my mind on the necessity for a Federal Children’s Bureau. Every day brought to the settlement, by mail and personal call,—as it must have brought to other people and agencies known to be interested in children,—the most varied inquiries, appeals for help and guidance, reflecting every social aspect of the question. One well-known judge of a children’s court was obliged to employ a clerical staff at his own expense to reply to such inquiries. Those that came to us we answered as best we might out of our own experience or from fragmentary and incomplete data. Even the available information on this important subject was nowhere assembled in complete and practical form. The birth rate, preventable blindness, congenital and preventable disease, infant mortality, physical degeneracy, orphanage, desertion, juvenile delinquency, dangerous occupations and accidents, crimes against children, are questions of enormous national importance concerning some of which reliable information was wholly lacking.
Toward the close of President Roosevelt’s administration a colleague and I called upon him to present my plea for the creation of this bureau. On that day the Secretary of Agriculture had gone South to ascertain what danger to the community lurked in the appearance of the boll weevil. This gave point to our argument that nothing that might have happened to the children of the nation could have called forth governmental inquiry.