The Battle with the Slum Part 14

Janitor and Board of Commissioners to the contrary notwithstanding, the dream became real. There stands another school in Hester Street to-day within easy call, that has a roof playground where two thousand children dance under the harvest moon to the music of a bra.s.s band, as I shall tell you about hereafter--the joy of it to have that story to tell!--and all about are others like it, with more coming every year. To the indignant amazement of my captor, the janitor, his school has been thrown open to the children in the summer vacation, and in the winter they put a boys' club in to worry him. What further indignities there are in store for him, in this day of "frills," there is no telling. The Superintendent of Schools told me only yesterday that he was going to Boston to look into new sources of worriment they have invented there.

The world does move in spite of janitors. In two short years our school authorities advanced from the cautious proposition that it "was the sense" of the Board of Superintendents that the schoolhouses might well be used in the cause of education as neighborhood centres, etc., (1897), to the flat declaration that "every rational system of education should make provisions for play" (1899). And to cut off all chance of relapse into the old doubt whether "such things are educational," that laid so many of our hopes on the dusty shelf of the circ.u.mlocution office, the state legislature has expressly declared that the commonwealth will take the chance, which Boards of Education shunned, of a little amus.e.m.e.nt creeping in. The schools may be used for "purposes of recreation." To the janitor it must seem that the end of all things is at hand.

So the schools and their playgrounds were thrown open to the children during the long vacation, with kindergarten teachers to amuse them, and vacation schools tempted the little ones from the street into the cool shade of the cla.s.srooms. They wrought in wood and iron, they sang and they played and studied nature,--out of a barrel, to be sure, that came twice a week from Long Island filled with "specimens"; but later on we took a hint from Chicago, and let the children gather their own specimens on excursions around the bay and suburbs of the city. That was a tremendous success. And there is better still coming, as I shall show presently. It sometimes seems to me as if we were here face to face with the very thing we are seeking and know not how to find. The mere hint that money might be lacking to pay for the excursions set the St.

Andrew's Brotherhood men on Long Island to devising schemes for inviting the school children out on trolley and sh.o.r.e trips. What if they all, the Christian Endeavor, the Epworth League, and the other expressions of the same human desire to find the lost brother, who are looking about for something to try their young strength and enthusiasm on--what if they were to hitch on here and help pull the load that may get mired else? They need men and women in that work. Mere paid teaching will never do it. If they can only get them, I think we may be standing upon the threshold of something which shall bring us nearer to a universal brotherhood than all the consecration and all the badges yet devised. I am thinking of the children and of the chance to take them at once out of the slum and into our hearts, while making of the public school the door to a house of citizenship in which we shall all dwell together in full understanding. Without that door the house will never be what we planned. And there is the key, all ready-made, in the children.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The New Idea: a Stairway of Public School No. 170.]

The mere contact with nature, even out of a barrel, brought something to those starved child lives that struck a new note. Sometimes it rang with a sharp and jarring sound. The boys in the Hester Street school could not be made to take an interest in the lesson on wheat until the teacher came to the effect of drought and a bad year on the farmer's pocket.

Then they understood. They knew the process. Strikes cut into the earnings of Hester Street, small enough at the best of times, at frequent intervals, and the boys need not be told what a bad year means.

No other kind ever occurs there. They learned the lesson on wheat in no time, after that. Oftener it was a gentler note that piped timidly in the strange place. A barrel of wild roses came one day, instead of the expected "specimens," and these were given to the children. They took them greedily. "I wondered," said the teacher, "if it was more love of the flower, or of getting something for nothing, no matter what." But even if it were largely the latter, there was still the rose. Nothing like it had come that way before, and without a doubt it taught its own lesson. The Italian child might have jumped for it more eagerly, but its beauty was not wasted in Jew-town, either. The baby kissed it, and it lay upon more than one wan cheek, and whispered, who knows what thought of hope and courage that were nearly gone. Even in Hester Street the wild rose from the hedge was not wasted.

The result of it all was wholesome and good, because it was common sense. The way to fight the slum in the children's lives is with sunlight and flowers and play, which their child hearts crave, if their eyes have never seen them. The teachers reported that the boys were easier to manage, more quiet, and played more fairly than before. The police reports showed that fewer were arrested or run over in the streets than in other years. A worse enemy was attacked than the trolley car or the truck. In the kindergarten at the Hull House in Chicago there hangs a picture of a harvest scene, with the man wiping his brow, and a woman resting at his feet. Miss Addams told me that a little girl with an old face picked it out among all the rest, and considered it long and gravely. "Well," she said, when her inspection was finished, "he knocked her down, didn't he?" A two hours' argument for kindergartens or vacation schools could not have put it stronger or better.

It is five seasons since the Board of Education took over the work begun by the a.s.sociation for Improving the Condition of the Poor as an object lesson for us all, and I have before me the schedule for this summer's work, just begun. It embraces seventeen vacation schools in which the boys are taught basketry, weaving, chair-caning, sloyd, fret-sawing, and how to work in leather and iron, while the girls learn sewing, millinery, embroidering, knitting, and the domestic arts, besides sharing in the boys' work where they can. There are thirty-five school playgrounds with kindergarten and gymnasiums and games, and half a dozen of the play piers are used for the same purpose. In twelve open-air playgrounds and parks, teachers sent by the Board of Education lead the children's play, and in as many more public baths teach boys and girls to swim on alternate days. In Crotona Park, up in the Bronx, under big spreading oaks and maples, athletic meets are held of boys from down-town and up-town schools in friendly rivalry, and the Frog Hollow Gang, that wrecked railroad trains there in my recollection, is a bad memory. Over at Hudson-bank on the site of the park that is coming there, teams hired by the Board of Education are ploughing up the site of Stryker's Lane, and the young toughs of the West Side who held that the world owed them a living and collected it as they could, are turning truck farmers. They are planting potatoes, and gardening, and learning the secret of life that the living is his who can earn it. The world "do move." No argument is needed now to persuade those who hold the purse strings that all this is "good business." Instead, the mayor of the city is asking the Board of Education to tell him of more and better ways of putting the machinery to use. The city will foot the bill, if we will show them how. And we will show them how.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Truck Farming on the Site of Stryker's Lane.]

The last four years have set us fifty years ahead, and there is no doubling on that track now. Where we had one kindergarten when I was put out of the Fourth Ward school by a trustee for daring to intrude there to find out what they were teaching, we have a hundred and fifteen at this writing in Manhattan alone, and soon we shall have as many as five hundred that are part of the public school in the greater city. "The greatest blessing which the nineteenth century bequeathed to little children," Superintendent Maxwell calls the kindergarten, and since the children are our own to-morrow, he might have said to all of us, to the state. The kindergarten touch is upon the whole system of teaching.

Cooking, the only kind of temperance preaching that counts for anything in a school course, is taught in the girls' cla.s.ses. A minister of justice declared in the Belgian Chamber that the nation was reverting to a new form of barbarism, which he described by the term "alcoholic barbarism," and pointed out as its first cause the "insufficiency of the food procurable by the working cla.s.ses." He referred to the quality, not the quant.i.ty. The United States experts, who lately made a study of the living habits of the poor in New York, spoke of it as a common observation that "a not inconsiderable amount of the prevalent intemperance can be traced to poor food and unattractive home tables."

The toasting-fork in Jacob's sister's hand beats preaching in the campaign against the saloon, just as the boys' club beats the police club in fighting the gang.

The cram and the jam are being crowded out as common-sense teaching steps in and takes their place, and the "three H's," the head, the heart, and the hand,--a whole boy,--are taking the place too long monopolized by the "three R's." There was need of it. It had seemed sometimes as if, in our anxiety lest he should not get enough, we were in danger of stuffing the boy to the point of making a hopeless dunce of him. It is a higher function of the school to teach principles than to impart facts merely. Teaching the boy munic.i.p.al politics and a thousand other things to make a good citizen of him, instead of so filling him with love of his country and pride in its traditions that he is bound to take the right stand when the time comes, is as though one were to attempt to put all the law of the state into its const.i.tution to make it more binding. The result would be hopeless congestion and general uselessness.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Doorway of Public School No. 165.]

It comes down to the teacher in the end, and there are ten thousand of them in our big city.[39] To them, too, a day of deliverance has come.

Half the machine teaching, the wooden output of our public schools in the past, I believe was due to the practical isolation of the teachers between the tyranny of politics and the distrust of those who had good cause to fear the politician and his work. There was never a more saddening sight than that of the teachers standing together in an almost solid body to resist reform of the school system as an attack upon them.

There was no pretence on their part that the schools did not need reform. They knew better. They fought for their places. Throughout the fight no word came from them of the children's rights. They imagined that theirs were in danger, and they had no thought for anything else.

We gathered then the ripe fruit of politics, and it will be a long while, I suppose, before we get the taste out of our mouths. But the grip of politics on our schools has been loosened, if not shaken off altogether, and the teacher's slavery is at an end, if she herself so wills it. Once hardly thought worthy of a day laborer's hire, she ranks to-day with a policeman in pay and privilege. The day that sees her welcomed as an honored guest in every home with a child in school will break the last of her bonds, and do more for the schools and for us than any one thing I can think of. Until that day comes the teachers, as a cla.s.s apart, will have interests apart, or feel that they have, and will be bound to stand together to defend them; and they will work for pay.

But for the real work of a teacher no one can ever pay her.

[Footnote 39: On May 31, 1902, there were 10,036 cla.s.s teachers in elementary schools in the Greater New York, exclusive of princ.i.p.als and the non-teaching staffs, and of the high school teachers. With these, the total number was 11,570, with a register of 445,964 pupils.]

The day is coming. The windows of the schoolhouse have been thrown open, and life let in with the sunlight. The time may be not far distant when ours shall be schools "for discovering apt.i.tude," in Professor Felix Adler's wise plan. The problem is a vast one, even in its bulk; every year seats must be found on the school benches for twenty thousand additional children. In spite of all we have done, there are to-day in the greater city nearly thirty thousand children in half-day or part-time cla.s.ses, waiting their chance. But that it can and will be solved no one can doubt. We have just _got_ to, that is all.

In the solution the women of New York will have had no mean share. In the struggle for school reform they struck the telling blows, and the credit of the victory was justly theirs. The Public Education a.s.sociation, originally a woman's auxiliary to Good Government Club E, has worked as energetically with the school authorities in the new plan as it fought to break down the old and secure decency. It has opened many windows for little souls by hanging schoolrooms with beautiful casts and pictures, and forged at the same time new and strong links in the chain that bound the boy all too feebly to the school. At a time when the demand of the boys of the East Side for club room, which was in itself one of the healthiest signs of the day, had reached an exceedingly dangerous pa.s.s, the Public Education a.s.sociation broke ground that will yet prove the most fertile field of all. The Raines law saloon, quick to discern in the new demand the gap that would divorce it by and by from the man, attempted to bridge it by inviting the boy in under its roof. Occasionally the girl went along. A typical instance of how the scheme worked was brought to my attention at the time by the head worker of the college settlement. The back room of the saloon was given to the club free of charge, with the understanding that the boy members should "treat." As a means of raising the needed funds, the club hit upon the plan of fining members ten cents when they "got funny."

To defeat this device of the devil some way must be found; but club room was scarce among the tenements. The Good Government Clubs proposed to the Board of Education that it open the empty cla.s.srooms at night for the children's use. It was my privilege to plead their cause before the School Board, and to obtain from it the necessary permission, after some hesitation and doubt as to whether "it was educational." The Public Education a.s.sociation a.s.sumed the responsibility for "the property,"

and the Hester Street school was opened. The property was not molested; only one window was broken that winter by a stray ball, and that was promptly paid for by those who broke it. But the boys who met there under Miss Winifred Buck's management learned many a lesson of self-control and practical wisdom that proved "educational" in the highest degree. Her plan is simplicity itself. Through their play,--the meeting usually begins with a romp,--in quarters where there is not too much elbow-room, the boys learn the first lesson of respecting one another's rights. The subsequent business meeting puts them upon the fundamentals of civilized society, as it were. Out of the debate of the question, Do we want boys who swear, steal, gamble, and smoke cigarettes? grow convictions as to why these vices are wrong that put "the gang" in its proper light. Punishment comes to appear, when administered by the boys themselves, a natural consequence of law-breaking, in defence of society; and the boy is won. He can thenceforward be trusted to work out his own salvation. If he does it occasionally with excessive unction, remember how recent was his conversion. "_Resolved_, that wisdom is better than wealth," was rejected as a topic for discussion by one of the clubs, because "everybody knows it is." This was in the Tenth Ward. If temptation had come that way in the shape of a push-cart with pineapples--we are all human! Anyway, they had learned the right.

That was the beginning of a work of which shall, I hope, hear a good deal more hereafter. It is all in its infancy yet, this attempt on the part of the munic.i.p.ality to get the boys off the street and out of the reach of the saloon. A number of schools were thrown open, where the crowds were greatest, for evening play and for clubs, and sometimes they laid hold of the youngster and sometimes not. It was a question again of the man or the woman who was at the helm. One school I found that surged with a happy crowd. It was over at Rivington and Suffolk streets, No.

160. Oh, how I wish they would soon stop this hopeless numbering of our schools, and call them after our great and good men, as Superintendent Maxwell pleads, so that "the name of every school may in itself be made a lesson in patriotism and good citizenship to its pupils." There they would be in their right place. One alderman got the idea during the Strong reform administration, but they hitched the names to the new parks instead of the schools, and that turned out wrong. So they have the Ham Fish Park for Hamilton Fish, the "Sewer" Park for William H.

Seward, the Thomas Jefferson Park up-town which no one will ever call anything but the Little Italy Park, and the good name of De Witt Clinton put to the bad use of spoiling beautiful "Hudson-bank." Only, the effort will be wasted. The old name will stick. How different if the new schools had been called after these statesmen! And what a chance to get their pupils interested! In the "Alexander Hamilton School," for instance, where "the Grange" and his thirteen trees abide yet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Main Entrance of Public School No. 153.]

But that is another story. I was thinking of the Jackson Pleasure Club of boys from eleven to thirteen which I found in session in No. 160, and of its very instructive const.i.tution. I am going to print it here entire for the instruction of some good people who don't understand. The boys got it all up themselves with the help of a copy of the United States Const.i.tution and the famous "Stamp Act."

CONSt.i.tUTION OF THE JACKSON PLEASURE CLUB

EVENING RECREATION CENTRE P. S. NO. 160, NEW YORK CITY

We the boys of the J. P. C. in order to form a perfect club, we establish justice insure domestic tranquillity provide for the common defence. We promote the general welfare and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our descendants to establish the Const.i.tution for the J. P. C.

No boys can be members who are less than thirteen years and must be from the 7th Grammar on.

No member can be President or Vice President unless 6 months in club.

All officers will keep their term six months.

The officers can not commit a law until it is pa.s.sed by the members. If it is an important one it will be pa.s.sed by votes. By this I mean that if 5/8 of the members pa.s.s it is pa.s.sed if 1/2 is pa.s.sed it is not pa.s.sed.

Several committees are appointed to look over these rules which seldom happen on the streets.

If any member or officer is seen gambling, smoking or fighting a fine of $0.02 will be asked and must be paid the next meeting.

Special meetings will be held each month. Meetings will be held at 8 o'clock P.M. to 9 P.M.

No secrets or slang language or nicknames allowed or a fine of $.03 is asked.

If any body recites a recitation and makes a mistake he is not to be laughed at or a fine of $.02 must be paid.

If any member takes the laws into his own hands and interferes with the president or any other officers or walks up and down the meeting room or draws pictures on the boards a fine of $.02 will be paid.

Any one who is spoken to 3 times about order will be put out for that meeting.

Amendment I. No member will be allowed to go on a stranger's roof, or a fine of $.03 will be asked.

Why not on a stranger's roof? Because flying kites, up there the boys run across and interfere with the neighbor's pigeons, which is apt to make him wroth. So you see it is all in the interests of "domestic tranquillity and the common defence." They are not meaningless phrases, those big words, they are the boy's ideas of self-government, of a real democracy, struggling through in our sight. And suppose he does walk on rhetorical stilts, he has precedent and will show it to you. A nation learned to walk on them. Who shall say they are not good enough for him?

But to return to what I was speaking about: with the women to lead, the school has even turned the tables on the jail and invaded it bodily. For now nearly five years the Public Education a.s.sociation has kept school in the Tombs, for the boys locked up there awaiting trial. Of thirty-one pupils on this school register, when I examined it one day, twelve were charged with burglary, four with highway robbery, and three with murder.

That was the gang run to earth at last. Better late than never. The windows of their prison overlooked the spot where the gallows used to stand that cut short many a career such as they pursued. They were soberly attentive to their studies, which were of a severely practical turn. Their teacher, Mr. David Willard, who was a resident of the university settlement in its old Delancey Street home has his own sound view of how to head off the hangman. Daily and nightly he gathers about him, in the house on Chrystie Street where he makes his home, half the boys and girls of the neighborhood, whom he meets as their friend, on equal terms. Mr. Willard, though a young man, is one of the most unique personages in the city. He is now one of the probation officers, under the new law which seeks to save the young offender rather than to wreak vengeance upon him, and his influence for good is great. The house in Chrystie Street is known far and wide as "the Children's House." They have their clubs there, and their games, of which Willard is the heart and soul. "I never saw anything remarkable in him," said one of his old college professors to me; "if anything, he was rather a dull student."

It seems, then, that even colleges are not always inst.i.tutions for "discovering apt.i.tude." It was reserved for Chrystie Street in Willard's case.

Once a week another teacher comes to the Tombs school, and tells the boys of our city's history, its famous buildings and great men, trying so to arouse their interest as a first step toward a citizen's pride.

This one also is sent by a club of women, the City History Club, which in five years has done strange things among the children. It sprang from the proposition of Mrs. Robert Abbe that the man and the citizen has his birth in the boy, and that to love a thing one must know it first. The half-dozen cla.s.ses that were started for the study of our city's history have swelled into many scores of times that number, with a small army of pupils. The pregnant fact was noted early by the teachers, that the immigrant boy easily outstrips in interest for his adopted home the native, who perchance turns up his nose at him, and later very likely complains of the "unscrupulousness" of the Jew, who forged ahead of him in business as well.

The cla.s.ses meet in settlement, school, or church to hear about the deeds of the fathers, and, when they have listened and read, go with their teachers and see for themselves the church where Washington worshipped, the graves where the great dead lie, the fields where they fought and bled. And when the little Italian asks, with shining eyes, "Which side were we on?" who can doubt that the lesson has sunk into a heart that will thenceforward beat more loyally for the city of his home? We have not any too much pride in our city, the best of us, and that is why we let it be run by every scalawag boss who comes along to rob us. In all the land there is no more historic building than Fraunces' Tavern, where Washington bade good-by to his officers; but though the very Chamber of Commerce was organized there, the appeal of patriotic women has not availed to save it to the people as a great relic of the past. The last time I was in it a waiter, busy with a lot of longsh.o.r.emen who were eating their lunch and drinking their beer in the "Long Room," had hung his dirty ap.r.o.n on a plaster bust of the Father of his Country that stood upon the counter about where he probably sat at the historic feast. My angry remonstrance brought only an uncomprehending stare for reply.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Superintendent C. B. J. Snyder, who builds our Beautiful Schools.]

But in spite of the dullards, the new life I spoke of, the new sense of responsibility of our citizenship, is stirring. The People's Inst.i.tute draws nightly audiences to the great hall of the Cooper Inst.i.tute for the discussion of present problems and social topics--audiences largely made up of workingmen more or less connected with the labor movement.

The "People's Club," an outgrowth of the Inst.i.tute, offers a home for the lonely wage-earner, man or woman, and more accept its offer every year. It has now nearly four hundred members, one fourth of them women.

Every night its rooms at 241 East Fourteenth Street are filled. Cla.s.ses for study and recreation are organized right along. The People's University Extension Society invades the home, the nursery, the kindergarten, the club, wherever it can, with help and counsel to mothers with little children, to young men and to old. In a hundred ways those who but yesterday neither knew nor cared how the other half lived are reaching out and touching the people's life. The social settlements labor unceasingly, and where there was one a dozen years ago there are forty. Down on the lower East Side, the Educational Alliance conducts from the Hebrew Inst.i.tute an energetic campaign among the Jewish immigrants that reaches many thousands of souls, two-thirds of them children, every day in the week. More than threescore clubs hold meetings in the building on Sat.u.r.day and Sunday. Under the same roof the Baron Hirsch Fund teaches the children of refugee Jews the first elements of American citizenship, love for our language and our flag, and pa.s.ses them on to the public schools within six months of their landing, the best material they receive from anywhere.

So the boy is being got ready for dealing, in the years that are to come, with the other but not more difficult problems of setting his house to rights, and ridding it of the political gang which now misrepresents him and us. And justice to Jacob is being evolved. Not yet without obstruction and dragging of feet. The excellent home library plan that proved so wholesome in the poor quarters of Boston has only lately caught on in New York, because of difficulty in securing the visitors upon whom the plan depends for its success.[40] The same want has kept the boys' club from reaching the development that would apply the real test to it as a barrier against the slum. There are fifteen clubs for every Winifred Buck that is in sight. From the City History Club, the Charity Organization Society, from everywhere, comes the same complaint. The hardest thing in the world to give is still one's self.

But it is all the time getting to be easier. There are daily more women and men who, thinking of the boy, can say, and do, with my friend of the college settlement, when an opportunity to enter a larger field was offered her, "No, I am content to stay here, to be ready for Johnnie when he wants me."

[Footnote 40: The managers of the New York Public Library have found a way, and have maintained twenty-seven home libraries during the past year (1901): little cases of from fifteen to forty books entrusted to the care of some family in the tenement. Miss Adeline E. Brown, who is in charge of the work, reports a growing enthusiasm for it. The librarian calls weekly. "We come very near to the needs of these families," she writes, "the visit meaning more to them than the books. In nearly every case we allow the books to be given out at any time by the child who glories in the honor of being librarian. In one wretched tenement, on the far East Side, we are told that the case of books is taken down into the yard on Sunday afternoon, and neighbors and lodgers have the use of them." It is satisfactory to know that the biggest of the home libraries is within stone's throw of Corlear's Hook, which the "Hook Gang"