Jacob A. Riis

“ There were other games and no end of colored paper to cut up, the dear delight of childhood, but made in the hands and under the eyes of the teacher to train eye and hand while gently but firmly cementing the friendship ushered in by the gorgeous bubble. No wonder, with such a stock, a mother complained that she had to whip her Jimmie to keep him home.
Without a doubt the kindergarten is one of the longest steps forward that has yet been taken in the race with poverty; for in gathering in the children it is gradually, but surely, conquering also the street with its power for mischief. ”

“ Play with the dirt is better than none without it. In the tenements the children and the dirt are sworn and loyal friends. In his early raids upon the established order of society, the gutter backs the boy up to the best of its ability, with more or less exasperating success. In the hot summer days, when he tries to sneak into the free baths with every fresh batch, twenty times a day, wretched little repeater that he is, it comes to his rescue against the policeman at the door. Fresh mud smeared on the face serves as a ticket of admission which no one can refuse. ”

“ Thus modestly began the Fresh Air movement that has brought health and happiness to more than a hundred thousand of New York’s poor children since, and has spread far and near, not only through our own but to foreign lands, wherever there is poverty to relieve and suffering to soothe. It has literally grown up around the enthusiasm and practical purpose of the one man whose personality pervades it to this day. ”

“ Is it likely that a corporation that runs a railroad to make money could be prevailed upon to take more interest in a proposition to make it surrender part of its profits than the city’s sworn officers in their bounden duty? Yet let anyone go and see for himself what effect such a park has in a crowded tenement district. Let him look at Tompkins Square Park as it is to-day and compare the children that skip among the trees and lawns and around the band-stand with those that root in the gutters only a few blocks off. ”

“ Against the drift and the head-winds of an unparalleled immigration that has literally drained the pauperism of Europe into our city for two generations, against the false currents and the undertow of the tenement in our social life, we are making headway at last.
Every homeless child rescued from the street is a knot made, a man or a woman saved, not for this day only, but for all time. ”

“ The kind of the soil determines the quality of the crop. The tenement is his soil and it pervades and shapes his young life. It is the tenement that gives up the child to the street in tender years to find there the home it denied him. Its exorbitant rents rob him of the schooling that is his one chance to elude its grasp, by compelling his enrolment in the army of wage-earners before he has learned to read. Its alliance with the saloon guides his baby feet along the well-beaten track of the growler that completes his ruin. ”

“ They brighten even the slum tenement, and shine into the home which just now we despaired of reaching by any other road than that of pulling it down. Tireless, indeed, the hands need be that have taken up this task. Flag their efforts ever so little, hard-won ground is lost, mischief done. But we are gaining, no longer losing, ground. Seen from the tenement, through the frame-work of injustice and greed that cursed us with it, the outlook seemed little less than despairing. ”

“ The distinguishing characteristic of the American city boy is his genius for organization. Whether it be in the air, in the soil, or in an aptitude for self-government that springs naturally from the street, where every little heathen is a law unto himself—one of them surely, for the children of foreigners, who never learn to speak the language in which their sons vote, exhibit it, if anything, more plainly than the native-born—he has it, undeniably. ”

“ Rule there must be; boss rule at that. That is the kind their fathers own, the fashion of the slums. It is a case of rule or ruin, order or anarchy. To let the boys have full swing would merely be to invite the street in to take charge of the house, and only trouble would come of it. But the boss must be a benevolent and very politic despot. The boy must have a fair chance. To enlist him heart and soul, the opportunity must be given him to show that he can rule himself. And he will show it. He must be allowed to choose his own leaders. ”

“ And while playing they learn to speak the strange new tongue and to love the pretty flag with the stars that is everywhere in sight. The night school gathers in as many as can be corralled of those who are big enough, if not old enough, to work. The ease and rapidity with which they learn is equalled only by their good behavior and close attention while in school. There is no whispering and no rioting at these desks, no trial of strength with the teacher, as in the Italian ragged schools, where the question who is boss has always to be settled before the business of the school can proceed. ”

“ The entire absence of privacy in their homes and the foul contact of the sweaters’ shops, where men and women work side by side from morning till night, scarcely half clad in the hot summer weather, does for the girls what the street completes in the boy. But for the patriarchal family life of the Jew that is his strongest virtue, their ruin would long since have been complete. It is that which pilots him safely through shoals upon which the Gentile would have been inevitably wrecked. It is that which keeps the almshouse from casting its shadow over Ludlow Street to add to its gloom. ”

“ In the West Side School, as in most of the others, the dinners are furnished by some one or more practical philanthropists, whose pockets as well as their hearts are in the work. The schools themselves, like the Society’s lodging-houses for homeless children, stand as lasting monuments to a Christian charity that asks no other reward than the consciousness of having done good where the need was great. Sometimes the very name of the generous giver is unknown to all the world save the men who built as he or she directed. ”

“ The poorest Hebrew knows—the poorer he is, the better he knows it—that knowledge is power, and power as the means of getting on in the world that has spurned him so long is what his soul yearns for. He lets no opportunity slip to obtain it. Day and night schools are crowded by his children, who are everywhere forging ahead of their Christian school-fellows, taking more than their share of prizes and promotions. Every synagogue, every second rear tenement or dark back yard, has its school and its school-master with his scourge to intercept those who might otherwise escape. ”

“ In the executive chair of a sovereign State sits to-day a young man who remembers with gratitude and pride the day they took him in hand and, of the material the street would have moulded into a tough, made an honorable man and a governor. And from among the men whose careers of usefulness began in the Society’s schools, and who to-day, as teachers, ministers, lawyers, and editors, are conspicuous ornaments of the communities, far and near, in which they have made their homes, he would have no difficulty in choosing a cabinet that would do credit and honor to his government. ”

“ That is a very different thing from the institution that, with its handsome buildings, its lawns, and its gravelled walks, looks to the poor parent like a grand boarding-school where his child can be kept, free of charge to him, and taught on terms that seem alluringly like the privileges enjoyed by the rich, until it shall be old enough to earn wages and help toward the family support; very different from the plan of sending the boy to the asylum to be managed, the moment parental authority fails at home. ”

“ It is the bête noire of the Society, partly on account of the difficulty of making it go without too great an outlay, partly on account of the boys themselves. They are of all the city’s outcasts the most unfortunate and the hardest to manage. Their misfortune has soured their temper, and as a rule they are troublesome and headstrong. No wonder. There seems to be no room for a poor crippled lad in New York. There are plenty of institutions that are after the well and able-bodied, but for the cripples the only chance is to shrivel and die in the Randall’s Island Asylum. ”

“ Society had indeed arrived at the same diagnosis some time before. Reasoning by exclusion, as doctors do in doubtful diseases, the symptoms of which are clearer than their cause, it had conjectured that if the “tough” whom it must maintain in idleness behind prison-bars, to keep him from preying upon it, was a creature of environment, not justly to blame, the community must be, for allowing him to grow up a “tough.” So, in self-defence, it had turned its hand to the forming of character in proportion as it had come to own its failure to reform it. ”

“ Let him watch the little pedlars hawking their shoe-strings, their matches, and their penny paper-pads, with the restless energy that seems so strangely out of proportion to the reward it reaps; the half-grown children staggering under heavy bundles of clothes from the sweater’s shop; the ragamuffins at their fretful play, play yet, discouraged though it be by the nasty surroundings—thank goodness, every year brings its Passover with the scrubbing brigade to Ludlow Street, and the dirt is shifted from the houses to the streets once anyhow ”

“ The law that failed to save the boy while there was time yet to make a useful citizen of him provides the means of catching him when his training begins to bear fruit that threatens the public peace. Then it is with the same blundering disregard of common sense and common decency that marked his prosecution as a truant that the half grown lad is dragged into a police court and thrust into a prison-pen with hardened thieves and criminals to learn the lessons they have to teach him. The one thing New York needs most after a truant home is a special court for the trial of youthful offenders only. ”

“ But for its appeal, the love of the beautiful might slumber in those children forever. In their homes there is nothing to call it into life. The ideal of the street is caricature, burlesque, if nothing worse. Under the gentle training of the kindergartner the slumbering instinct blossoms forth in a hundred different ways, from the day the little one first learns the difference between green and red by stringing colored beads for a necklace “for teacher,” until later on he is taught to make really pretty things of pasteboard and chips to take home for papa and mamma to keep. ”

“ Between threading colored beads, cutting and folding pink and green papers in all sorts of odd ways, as boats and butterflies and fancy baskets; moulding, pasting, drawing, weaving and blowing soap-bubbles when all the rest has ceased to hold his attention, the day slips by like a beautiful dream, and he flatly refuses to believe that it is gone when the tenement home claims him again. ”

“ Be they Protestants, Catholics, Jews, or heathen, it matters not if an invitation is waiting. The supply is governed entirely by the demands that come from the country. Sometimes it is a Catholic community that asks for children of that faith, sometimes prosperous Jews, who would bring sunlight and hope even to Ludlow Street; rarely yet Italians seeking their own. The cry of the missionary, from the slums in the hot July days: “How shall we give those babies the breath of air that means life?—no one asks for Italian children,” has not yet been answered. Prejudice dies slowly. ”

“ Very soon it makes itself felt in the street and in what goes on there, as anyone can see for himself by observing the children’s play in a tenement neighborhood where there is a kindergarten and again where there is none, while by imperceptibly turning the play into work that teaches habits of observation and of industry that stick, it builds a strong barrier against the doctrine of the slum that the world owes one a living, which lies in ambush for the lad on every grog-shop corner. ”

“ They replied: ‘It is a dangerous thing to interfere between parent and child, and you might get yourself into trouble if you did so, as parents are proverbially the best guardians of their own children.’ Finally, in despair, with the piteous appeals of the dying woman ringing in her ears, she said: ‘I will make one more effort to save this child. There is one man in this city who has never turned a deaf ear to the cry of the helpless, and who has spent his life in just this work for the benefit of unoffending animals. ”

“ As we mould the children of the toiling masses in our cities, so we shape the destiny of the State which they will rule in their turn, taking the reins from our hands. In proportion as we neglect or pass them by, the blame for bad government to come rests upon us. The cities long since held the balance of power; their dominion will be absolute soon unless the near future finds some way of scattering the population which the era of steam-power and industrial development has crowded together in the great centres of that energy. ”

“ The donkey hung in the window of a notion store, and a knot of tenement-house children with tails improvised from a newspaper, and dragged in the gutter to make them stick, were staggering blindly across the sidewalk trying to fix them in place on the pane. They got a heap of fun out of the game, quite as much, it seemed to me, as any crowd of children could have got in a fine parlor, until the storekeeper came out with his club. Every cellar-door becomes a toboggan-slide where the children are around, unless it is hammered full of envious nails ”