“ Slowly but surely their example is beginning to have its effect on the docile little Italian whose life has hitherto 117 swung like a pendulum back and forth between her labors at the factory and the duties and restraints of home. She begins to long for the same freedom that the other girls enjoy. But freedom does not mean for her what it means for the American girl, trained in a different school from the beginning. She has not the same hard little powers of resistance, nor can she make the same truculent boast of being able to “take care of herself.” ”

“ What chance has the best of boys who must spend two-thirds of his school days in such a playground? What wonder that he becomes a callous young criminal, when the very conditions of his play lead him to crime? The whole influence of such conditions on a child’s life can never be gauged. But just as apart from his traditions and background he is incomprehensible as a boy, so, as a wanton little ruffian, he is unintelligible apart from his playground. ”

“ There were outward evidences of family life in the block where they dwelt—dilapidated tenements, with a sordid little grocery store in the middle of the block. A garish little saloon stood on the corner. The houses did not present the solid red brick front of the usual tenement street, with its delusive appearance of respectability. The buildings were irregular; some were low and shack-like. Their windows faced Jersey and the nightly glory of the sunset, but even this could not redeem the sordidness and squalor of the neighborhood. ”

“ She is the daughter of the people, the child of the masses. Athletics, sports, diversions, the higher education, will not be hers to divert this deep craving. She is not close enough to her church for religion to control it. It will stay with her, sweeping her inevitably out of the simplicity of little girlhood into the thousand temptations of her environment, if not, perhaps, into one of the commonest of neighborhood tragedies. ”

“ It is, then, not in the absence but in the breakdown of neighborhood and family protection that we must seek the reasons for social, moral, and physical deterioration in these girls.
The character of the community goes far to counter-balance any advantage the girl may gain from living in an environment familiar to herself and to her parents. If she grows up in one of these blocks, she is, from babyhood, in the midst of lawlessness and rumors of lawlessness. They are afloat in the air she breathes, as certain to be inhaled as are the heavy odors from the gas plants and slaughter pens. ”

“ In the first place, he has never known any other playground. At the earliest possible stage of infancy he is turned out, perhaps under an older sister’s supervision, to crawl over the steps of the tenement or tumble about in the gutter in front of it, watching with large eyes the new sights around him. Here he is put to play, and here he learns to imitate the street and sidewalk games of other boys and girls. He is scarcely to be blamed for a point of view so universally held that it never occurs to him to doubt it. ”

“ HIS GAMES It would be impossible to describe the thousand and one uses to which the West Side boy puts his playground. After all, the street is not such a bad place to play in if you have known nothing better; and as you tumble out of school on a fine afternoon, ready for mischief, it offers you almost anything, from a fight with your best friend to a ride on the steps of an ice wagon. But certain games and sports are so universal in this district as to deserve separate mention. ”

“ Another group of families take a commitment with the same indifference with which they accept all the other unavoidable facts of life. If babies die, or the husband is out of work, or the children are sent away for a couple of years, it is all a part and parcel of the inevitable, all equally removed from choice and regret. Often the parents are so busy earning a meager living that they hardly know where the children are passing their time, and so the boys develop into rowdies who spend their nights on roofs or stairs and their days in loafing. ”

“ But even the most persistent of optimists, willing to make many allowances, must demur against 52 the coldblooded and treacherous methods to which the feuds and enmities of West Side gangs have reduced their members. If ever these boys had a sense of the spirit of fair play, they seem to have lost it completely. They win by planning overwhelming advantages. An attack upon three or four or even one defenseless boy by 30 or 40 merciless youngsters, who even attempt to surround their prey and strike from behind, is not a disgraceful thing to them but an exploit to be proud of. ”

“ The desire to play is strong in her. Lack-luster resignation and pessimism are rare among the young even where poverty weighs most heavily. The girl’s buoyant spirit breaks loose at the instant of release from factory walls or from the momentary depression of family want. It bubbles forth in girls’ laughter and girls’ play, and in girls’ capricious, whimsical, egoistic moods.
The West Side girl is an independent young person. She has seen a good deal of the world. She has the early sophistication bred of a crowded, close-pressed life. ”

“ The bitter lesson of endurance so well learned, familiar as second nature, is repeated again and again with sons who are too lazy to work and depend upon the mother’s earnings for what they cannot get by gambling or stealing. Often her force is spent. She is weak, querulous, discouraged. To expect her to stem the tide of outside forces which are molding the boy into the nerveless or vicious man his father was before him is to ask the utterly impossible. ”

“ From the midst of this squalid and disjointed home life one fact emerges—that the recreation of the West Side boy lies beyond the power of the family. To look to such homes as those of this district to counteract the tremendous forces that play upon him outside is as unreasonable as it is useless. Wretched as it is, the tenement home has an influence, usually vaguely restrictive, and in a few cases wise enough and strong enough to help a boy who is “steadying down” and “getting sensible”; but this influence can rarely bear the strain of competition with the pull of the street and the gang. ”

“ They had tried keeping her in and putting her under the surveillance of her nine-year-old brother, but no amount of punishment would change her fundamentally. Rancor and hatred had bitten into her soul. She was a strong, tall girl, loud, unkempt, and disorderly. She was more frank than most girls, partly from recklessness. But the bitterness with which she spoke of her parents, the coldness with which she said, “They can have my money if that’s what they want,” was that of hardened maturity.
The parents often get a settled distrust of a girl with which they do not hesitate to confront her. ”

“ Perhaps this is due to the fact that he is more in touch with American life than the shut-in Italian mother, whose life is almost wholly occupied with child-bearing and child-burying.
The eagerness of most Italian parents for the arrival of a daughter’s fourteenth birthday strikes one with no little pathos when one bears in mind how pitifully small is the equipment of the child at that age grown up in so restricted an environment. The girl herself is as eager to go to work as her parents are to have her. She takes it for granted that she should help in the family income. ”

“ Another of the many ways in which this versatile youngster amuses himself is by playing truant.
The equipment of the typical boy of the Middle West Side when he is first sent to school is pitiable. Excessive cigarette smoking, the wrangling atmosphere of the home, the excitement of the street, have sapped his nervous power. He is restless, easily reduced to sulkiness, and exceedingly hard to interest. The varied excitement of the streets, combined with the inevitable cigarette, has lost to him all power of continued thought or concentration. School itself, like the boy, has little chance. ”

“ And so the word “gang” here has grown to be synonymous with the worst side of boy life, and the group itself, which might in other surroundings and under other traditions be a positive civic asset, simply adds the irresponsibility of the mob to the recklessness of youth and becomes a force which turns West Side boyhood into cowards and savages. As a priest of one of the Roman Catholic churches said the other day, “The social evil may be an important one, but the question in this neighborhood is that of the gangs.” ”

“ The gang contains the friends to whose praise and criticism he is most keenly sensitive, its standards are his aims, and its activities his happiness. Untrammeled by the perversion of special circumstances it might encourage his latent interests, train him to obedience and loyalty, show him the method and the saving of co-operation, and teach him the beauty of self-sacrifice. Gang life at its best does so. ”

“ The result is always the same: the sullen fellow slouching before the querulous, upbraiding parent, resentful in every line, ready to jerk away snarling, or to flash out in a pitched battle of tempers, leaving behind bitterness, misunderstanding and anger. Sometimes this shipwreck is accepted with a Spartan quiescence; lifelong experience forces these women for mere self-preservation into an endurance grown easier than revolt. Yet the suffering is great, and these mothers, inadequate and weak as they are, form one of the most pitiful chapters in the story of juvenile delinquency. ”

“ Sometimes the family is broken up, the children are carried away, and the parents left to drink out the rest of their lives as they will. To remove the children may seem high-handed and brutal, but the reverse picture—the family left to vent its weakness and its vice on the plastic children in its care—is surely a worse alternative. Some of these women are known as “harborers.” They send the youngsters out to beg, and wink at their pilfering if they do no worse. School in their eyes, as in the boys’, is an unnecessary regulation and enforced by an arbitrary society. ”

“ In view of these significant facts it became necessary not only to examine the environment of the West Side boy, but also to estimate the influence of the Children’s Court and other institutions upon him when toughness, truancy, gambling, or other temptations had carried him over the brink into real delinquency. That society should feel itself compelled to resort continually to the arrest and trial of children is in itself a confession of defeat. ”

“ But as poverty is the enemy of adolescence, adolescence is the adversary of poverty. The vivifying forces of youth are a protection against the depleting effects of want and insecurity. The girl does not take to drink as her mother does. Weeks of want are quickly forgotten in a following period of comfort. When kindliness and cheer once more prevail in her home, consciousness of the lack of ease and loveliness is shaken from her. ”