We are all very much interested, as men and women, as fathers and mothers, in the Children’s Bureau which has been created this past year, and we were very much interested in the possibility of a woman being made chief of that bureau. There never was a question in our minds but that it should be the very best person that could be found, whether man or woman. But the fact that there was a woman who by education, training and experience was fitted to take this place has been a pleasure to all who are interested in that special development. The fact that she has looked into the life of children from birth through childhood, with work and play and home and school as they have applied to the life of the child, will be of the greatest benefit to us all through these future years.
I am very glad to introduce to this representative audience of the Congress, Miss Julia Clifford Lathrop, who is Chief of the Children’s Bureau of the United States Department of Commerce and Labor.
Address, Miss Julia Clifford Lathrop
Miss Lathrop—Madam President, Ladies and Gentlemen: I need not explain to a Congress interested in Conservation why the representative of this new Bureau should be here and should wish to speak about the Bureau itself.
When I was first honored with this appointment it was suggested that the Bureau should be staffed with women alone, and I was asked what I thought about it. I said I should be very much embarrassed; that I had never known any children who had not two parents, and that I felt that if there had been intended a division of that sort the Lord would have communicated it long ago. I thought it would be presumptious for me to begin, so the Children’s Bureau has on its staff both men and women and, perhaps, I may as well begin by saying something about that staff, and about the organization of this new Bureau. And, first of all, perhaps I may forestall a criticism which is likely to come before very long that we are rather dilatory and are not accomplishing very much, by reminding you that the Bureau did not go into operation last April, when the President approved the bill, but only on the 23d of August, when the appropriation became available, so that really the Bureau is just forty-one days old. It has a staff of fifteen persons, and it has to spend for this first year a sum aggregating about thirty thousand dollars. Its province, as the law says, is to inquire into and report upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life. You can see for yourselves whether that is a big job and whether the army really seems adequate for immediate performance of the contract.
It is, of course, enormously important that a Bureau of this kind, undertaking a sort of work which, after all, is in some respects new, should be composed of people who have very much at heart the welfare of children; who have, even as much as that, the scientific training and wisdom which is necessary if we are to make an appeal to people’s emotions and sentiment. So the staff of the Bureau is composed of people who have been selected from various departments of the Federal Civil Service as having, particularly, acquirements in science, as statisticians, and in other respects particularly fitted, as we believe and as my superiors believe, to do the work of this growing Bureau.
The Bureau has this great general object. Now, it is a question how to take hold of this great task, where to begin, but the law itself does give some hint—it enumerates certain objects which we shall discuss in detail as time goes on.
The first of these is infant mortality and the birth rate, and after that follows various subjects, such as juvenile courts, or the care of children in regard to diseases and accidents which may befall them, the regulation of their labor, legislation affecting children and all matters pertaining to their welfare.
It is all very well for those of us who are doing all sorts of volunteer work, as most of us are, to begin on the problem of helping people at any point where we can take hold. We do not have to know any great fundamental facts; to know that babies need care, and that children ought not to go to work when they are too young, to know that children need to go to school, need to be healthy, need to be happy, and that they need recreation just as much as they do education and that the two are part of the one same great sort of development—all these things we have a right to begin on anywhere we can. But when the Federal Government takes hold, I think it somehow promises a sort of basis to all the rest of us, and it seems as if it were its business to see where there was the most fundamental point to begin its work. When we come to look at the question of dealing with children, we are constantly faced by the fact that we do not know how many children there are; we do not know how many children are born and die in this country. We do know once in ten years how many children exist at a particular moment, and by that decennial information we know that the Bureau has to deal with about thirty-six per cent. of the total population of this country directly, that between thirty-five and forty per cent. of the population of this country is under sixteen years of age, which seems to be the age of the end of childhood, just by common acceptation; at least, at that age in many of our States children are permitted to become independent workmen. So you see we have a very large number of children with whom we have the right to deal directly, and, as I tried to show a moment ago, we think we have a right to deal indirectly with all their parents. We think the whole country is a good deal our province in prospect, but we cannot be satisfied with this decennial knowledge of how many people there are in this country. What we want is a great, democratic continuing public edition of “Who’s Who in America.” We want to know day by day the advent of every citizen into this country. We want, in fact, in a phrase which is not particularly exciting, “birth registration.”
First of all, we want it because we want to know, and we want to know for various reasons, which I think do not occur to most of us every day. In the first place, we want to know because, unfortunately, a great many babies come into this world under circumstances which do not give them the best chance in the world. If the advent of a little child could be at once communicated to doctors and nurses where doctors and nurses are not taken for granted, it would be possible to prevent the risk of that blindness which sometimes overtakes newly-born children; it is possible to establish the health of the mother and child together, so that it may have the best chance in the world; and you all know how throughout this country, even in our remoter counties, there is coming to be a great and splendid health service. I think we cannot be too delighted with what the Red Cross Society, with what many similar societies are doing in the way of rural nursing. I think if Florence Nightingale could look out over America now, she would think we are beginning to realize her noble words about health and nurses.