The lack of moral stamina is even more evident. They are totally unable to resist physical temptation of any sort. In fact, their training seems to offer them no basis of resistance. They are accustomed to striving not to overcome but to gratify every desire. Lack of privacy and the hopelessly unmoral attitude of the neighborhood toward all matters of sex have left them without any moral standards. In deceit and treachery, the use of superior force and of unfair advantage, they see nothing to be avoided or ashamed of. Revenge and the fiercest retaliation for real or fancied injury, accidental or otherwise, are part of their code. Their life is a struggle for self-preservation, and they are naturally consummately selfish; for the feelings of others they have not the slightest thought. Calloused into unmorality they are unconcernedly cruel, and such a thing as the killing of some boy in a gang fight will be related in a perfectly matter-of-fact manner. They have no respect for age or authority.
Two types of boy are common in these streets, widely dissimilar, but equally pathetic. The first is the boy who wants to “make good,” but cannot shake off the shackles of association and environment; the boy “who’d make something of himself yet if given half a show.” Since leaving school and going to work he has perhaps gone through the process known as “steadying down” and “getting sensible.” Between the years of fourteen and seventeen there may have come a loosening of the old gang ties, a change, and a reshaping. A later period seems to come when after the excitements of his adolescent years he may realize, as to the loafing and depredations into which he has drifted, that “there’s nothing in it.” Sometimes even a boy from a down-at-the-heels and shiftless family makes a desperate effort to pull up. But he lacks the tremendous energy to struggle through the bad name he has gotten by his own career and by identification as “one of that crew.” His bitterness is natural. “Oh, I know—that is another of those Fifty-third Street stories about Charlie Harris. I’ve heard enough of them.” Such a boy is most susceptible at this time to home and outside influence, and if only the opportunity can be taken it will be not unlikely to prove the turning point in his life. But too often there is no one at hand to help him. The West Side boy does not always respond to kindness. He knows little or nothing of it in his life, and his native fickleness and dislike of direction make him, especially after the school age, difficult to handle.
Yet sometimes the effort does succeed. George Ruhl, for instance, was the oldest of three children in a poor German family. Some years ago, when one of the settlement workers first knew him, he was unruly and “difficult” and quite beyond the control of his parents. He refused to go to school, smoked cigarettes, and got into bad company with his gang. When he was twelve years old a settlement worker sent him away to the home of the Salvation Army. The superintendent would not keep him on account of his bad influence upon the other boys. In order to remove him from his gang Miss Summers had him sent to a Boys’ Republic. The leader kept him for two years and gained a remarkably good influence over the boy. He then placed George on a farm in Massachusetts. George has turned out well. The owner of the farm, a selectman of the town, treated him like a member of his own family and trusted him with money and other important matters. Finally he rented a farm to George and another boy, and they are prospering. They run a truck farm, raising also chickens, eggs, and squabs. For many years George sent his mother ten dollars a month to pay the rent. In 1909 he offered to take the whole family down to his farm, but Miss Summers advised against this because it would have imposed too much of a burden upon the boy. Here is a case in which outside help at the right time worked wonders; and undoubtedly the same success might result in many others, were there only more knowledge of the West Side and more voices that would answer to the call. Meanwhile the boy “who can’t make good” is still with us.
The second type commands pity but deserves few excuses. It is the boy who refuses to make good. When a boy goes to work even the lax discipline of the irregularly attended school is absent. West Side boys are not in demand, and his job is often that of an extra “hand,” easily turned off, or else it is of a “blind alley” nature. His delinquency, however, cannot be considered the effect of his job, for boys of this type naturally seek for a low grade of employment.[51] In a fit of temper or idleness he surrenders his job; perhaps he loses it unwillingly. Whole days of enforced freedom will follow. One day in the streets between weeks of monotonous hardship in the factory may demoralize a boy. Possibly he hears of another position, which he thinks will be easier and pay more than the one he has. So he drops his former job and takes the new one. Before he has been in his new position long, the memory of his day of idleness on the street overcomes him, and with a little money in his pocket he quits his position, and this time he does not hunt up a new one until all his money is spent. The next logical step is to try to obtain food and money as long as possible without working for it. And so step by step has evolved the habitual loafer and hanger-on of saloons, the young man who brags that he does not earn a living and does not have to earn one. Two boys known to our workers went through this process and are now young men. Both live off the earnings of mother and sister, and indeed, one of them ordered his sister to go to work “or else how could he live?” The other blacked his sister’s eyes over a similar discussion. Such things are common on the Middle West Side.
Both of these types are direct and logical products of neighborhood conditions, just as many of the ways in which the boy finds his recreation simply announce the fact that he must invent for himself what his home fails to provide. The boy’s inner life is bleak and wretched because every normal instinct of youth, all the qualities of which future men are made, have been sapped and stunted by the gray, grim neighborhood in which even play is crime. There are ten thousand hopeless little tragedies on the Middle West Side today; and our only answer to their appeal is to call for the police.
If the school is at a disadvantage in its labors to build up character, the juvenile court is even more so. A day at court is a transient experience and soon forgotten. Even the effects of months of institutional life are soon outlived under the strong influences of the street and the gang.
Our picture of the West Side boy is now wellnigh complete. Lawless, defiant, a nuisance to his neighbors and a menace to his playmates, it seems as though the future citizen of these streets were little likely to become other than a burden or a detriment to the whole body politic. Certainly he and his gang, taking them as they are, have little to recommend them or help them to offset a notoriety which they have justly gained.
Of course, their days are not on this account all tears and misery. That side of the story has been emphasized because it bears upon the purpose of this study; but if it were the only side these boys would be almost too impossible to be real. But they are very real, and very boylike, careless and happy-go-lucky, too young to know—of if they did know to reflect on—what might have been, taking their world as it is, and ingeniously determined to make the best of it and have a “good time,” no matter at whose expense. They are quaint little figures, with their rich street vocabulary, their heartless and yet almost innocent paganism, their capacity for achieving the dangerous in amusement though they bump into every corner on the way. Look at the gang ready for baseball; its members do not seem overwhelmed by the burden of juvenile delinquency. Look at the little group “playing hookey” under the dock; fear of the truant officer seems to sit lightly on the shoulders of these boys.
No, comedy is no stranger to the Middle West Side; only it is Meredithian comedy and the laughter which it provokes is thoughtful indeed. And it is assuredly true that if you would see all that is most typical of the West Side boy, if you would see him as expressing what in his life he really is, you must turn your back on comedy and gaze on the sadder picture. Look at the illustrations and see the boy himself; then read the following sketch as the caption under the portrait. It is printed verbatim from the New York Evening World of April 10, 1911, and for its truth to life it cannot be bettered.