Proceedings [of the] fourth National Conservation Congress [at] Indianapolis, October 1-4, 1912

by United States. National Conservation Congress

Now, those are perhaps the most important reasons why we want to know the advent of every child, so that we can help that little child, and help his mother and keep her alive, because it is a very terrible thing that out of all the children who are born into this country a very large number—two hundred thousand, some people say, and three hundred thousand, some people say—die before they are twelve months old, and more, a third of them die before they have been in the world a month. I want us to consider this for a minute, not as an economic problem, but what it means in the old fashioned terms of human suffering, the agony and loss of family happiness and joy, that two hundred thousand little babies should die and leave the hearths to which they come every single year of the world in this country. And when we think that already, doctors tell us, we know enough so that that waste is very largely the fault of our carelessness and selfishness and greed, it makes us blush to think we are not all working hard to save the lives of these children.

Now, there are great efforts already undertaken to save the lives of these little babies, in which many of you are already engaged, and we may well hope that such societies as this Conservation Congress and the Congress for the Prevention of Infant Mortality will before the next decennial census occurs have made a great difference in the number of children who are born, only to die.

But, suppose that a child lives, is there any real sense in his having a birth certificate, or is that just some abstract notion of the statisticians, who get all the certificates and have punching machines and a great many mechanical contrivances for numbering and making computations out of figures? I think you will be surprised to find how much human connection it has.

In the first place, as to this very Bureau for which I am venturing to speak, we are told to find out about the diseases of children and about the birth rate of children. How can we know about the birth rate unless we know how many children are born and die? In Washington, there was set up a wonderful placard on the wall to show the birth rate in that city, and there were columns of red and green and other colors, and you just knew, humanly speaking, that the birth rate was fluctuating that way, and you talked with somebody and you discovered that this birth rate was fluctuating as one set of gentlemen or another was electing the health officer.

So now we want to have some authoritative way of truly finding out how many children come into the world in order to know what the birth rate is, in order to know how to study the diseases of children, and then, when children grow a little older, we want to have a public record of their births so that we may know when they are entitled to go into the schools to begin on that system of care and culture for which the public schools stand, and then beyond that, when they are older and the time comes for their advent into the army of work to which we hope we all belong, then we want to know that those who are less favored are not hurried into that army unduly. How much it would simplify the problem if we had not to trust to all sorts of chance ways of proving a child’s birth and if we had a public record of it.

Have you ever thought that we are the only great nation which does not know how many children are born into it, and which does not do its children the dignity of putting their names down in a public record? All Europe has a public registry, and why? Because it has a standing army and wants the names of its boys for conscription. Now, in a country of peace, aren’t we to have any victories for peace? Are not we to recognize a child as having any dignity to be a peaceable citizen and not either a target for a gun, or the man behind the gun?

I think you will, perhaps, be interested if I venture to tell a story of a neighborhood in which I have lived long, an illustration of how a birth certificate is a good thing. A little while ago, a family came over to Hull House for some help. They were awfully poor. The oldest girl, who was at that time the breadwinner of that family, was out of work on account of the garment workers’ strike. There were eight children. They had come over at the time of the earthquake in Messina. The father had been entombed and his mind had almost succumbed to the fearful experience. He was always thinking the walls were coming on him and he was not in a very good frame of mind to be a successful breadwinner. So they got into difficulties and asked the Charities Board to help them. There was another younger girl and they thought they had better get a work certificate for Giovanna, but the truant officer said she looked too young and couldn’t have it, and she was sent back to school. And then they got a little more desperate and they tried again to have poor little Giovanna go to work. The Charities Board, who were helping the case, thought they had a right to dictate a little as to how they should help, and they just wrote to the City Hall in Messina, and the City Hall in Messina sent back a very prompt letter showing how old the children were, and showing that the daughter who had been at work for two years was really about fourteen years old and had been working that time illegally, had been cheated of two years of school, where she might have learned good English and learned American housekeeping and had a better chance to earn more money the next two years. The other little girl was still younger. So the people in Hull House and the people in the Associated Charities and the factory inspector made a veritable cordon around this helpless family and demanded they be sent back to school. The oldest girl went back very unwillingly. She said indignantly, “Me go back to school, me big enough to be married.” She was very hurt and humiliated. I am not sure we did right about it. Giovanna was confiscated and sent back to school for two years. This family did not have a fair chance over here just because the factory inspector and school authorities, not having any birth reports over here for children, followed the usual system of guessing and did not think to take advantage of what Messina, notwithstanding the earthquake, had to offer from her very responsible records.

Has it ever occurred to you that to very many of our foreign residents a birth certificate for a child would be an absolute asset?

In Chicago is a very prosperous and highly respected man. He came from Germany when he was a baby of four years, with the family. His father was never naturalized and the man himself never was challenged in his right to vote. He grew up and attended our public schools, and all that. He accumulated a fortune and went back, as many people do, I suppose rather proud, to see the old country and friends who remained there and with whom he had kept in constant communication, a prosperous and splendid example of what America could do for a man. He had been in Berlin for about two hours when the police were on his track merely because he was a German citizen and must serve in the army. He telephoned to a lawyer friend and asked him what could happen. He said, “There is just one thing that can happen, and that is that you get out of town.” So, two hours after he arrived at Berlin on this triumphal journey, he left very actively, and he is said never to have heaved a sigh of such joyful relief as when the crossed the boundary into France. That is an example of people really knowing where they were born and being able to prove it.

I suppose the reason we have not been more eager about our birth rate is because we have not thought anything about it. We think a great deal about writing the baby’s name in the family Bible and christening it in the church we attend, but somehow we have forgotten this larger, more fundamental thing. The advent, of every citizen of this country ought to be on the books of the commonwealth.