Children of the City

by David Nasaw

  Jersey City, New Jersey, November 1912. “Going to the movies: 2:30.” (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)

  While the children saw nothing wrong with spending their hard-earned nickels at the movies, the adult reformers and settlement-house workers were worried about the physical, mental, and moral toll of so much time spent in darkened rooms watching moving images, some of them of subjects best kept secret from growing children. There were dozens and dozens of investigations of the effects of the movies on the children who watched them. Common to every one of them was the investigators’ amazement at the number of children who went to the movies and the number of times they went each week. In Madison, Wisconsin, a 1915 Board of Commerce study of recreation found that the average child spent five to six hundred percent more time at the movies than on religious activities. A 1911 Russell Sage Foundation study in New York City revealed that 62 percent of the school children interviewed “declared that they were accustomed to go to moving-picture shows once a week or oftener.… A truly astonishing proportion, 16% of the total, avow that they go daily.” Of the 507 newsies Ina Tyler interviewed in St. Louis, 87 percent “frequented moving picture shows and cheap theaters.” One boy claimed that he had attended “a show of some kind every night for four months.”19

  The movies had become such an attraction that one social worker reported that the Irish mothers on Manhattan’s West Side had started giving their young boys money for the “nickel dumps,” afraid that if they didn’t, the boys would steal it. Jane Addams claimed that a major source of juvenile crime was the children’s quest for the price of admission to what she called the “house of dreams.” “Out of my twenty years’ experience at Hull House I can recall all sorts of pilferings, petty larcenies, and even burglaries, due to that never ceasing effort on the part of boys to procure theater tickets.”20

  The settlement-house workers, reformers, and educators were worried by what they saw around them. Eleven- to fifteen-year-olds were too influenced, too affected, too attracted, even addicted, to the pleasures of paid entertainment. The theaters were, as Jane Addams called them, “houses of dreams.” Adolescents were prone to dreaming, even without the stimulus of the big screen. What the movies did, the reformers feared, was exaggerate this tendency to dangerous levels. At an age where the boys and girls should have been anchored more firmly to the real world, they were indulging in daily flights of fantasy in darkened movie theaters and nickelodeons. The images before them not only distracted them from the crucial task of preparing themselves for adult life, they impeded their socialization by inflaming their desires. Children who spent too much of their childhood dreaming were going to find it difficult to adjust to the discipline and responsibilities of adult life.

  The children were impervious to such criticisms. They paid their nickel and enjoyed the show, whatever it was, wherever it took them. Contrary to the adults’ fears, the young did not confuse what they saw on the big screen with life on the outside. The movies were not real life. That was why they were so enjoyable. In the real world, bounded for the children by home, school, and the street, dreams did not come true, villains were not always punished, virtue seldom rewarded. The children entered the movie theater as they opened their storybooks: expecting to find there an alternate world, with different values, settings, people, and a guaranteed happy ending. When they left the theater—or put down their stories—they reentered the world they had temporarily vacated. What harm could there be in taking these brief vacations from work and the city? The same street, the same city, the same life would be there when they came out into the light.21

  The children who enjoyed the world presented on the big screen would also have thrilled to the melodramas, the music hall shows, and the legitimate English- and foreign-language theaters. Unfortunately live drama cost more than they could afford. The cheaper theaters had almost all been put out of business by the competition from the movies.22 The only forms of inexpensive live entertainment that remained by the second decade of the century were the cheap vaudeville halls with galleries where, for a dime, the children could sit for hours watching the acts march past: dancers, singers, instrumentalists, magicians, tumblers, comedians, and animals. Like the nickelodeons, the vaudeville galleries offered the children space of their own to do as they pleased. Far above the stage and the better-paying audience, so far above they were almost in a different world, the children sat surrounded by their friends, singing with the singers, giggling at the suggestive jokes, hooting the boring acts off the stage, and staring in amazement as the magicians defied gravity and common sense.23

  Vaudeville and the flickers, the lunch counters and the penny candy shops, the arcades and downtown amusement parlors: these were not treats or luxuries reserved for special occasions. They were, in combination, an integral part of the children’s daily life. Poor, underage, and often immigrant, the children were triply handicapped in their quest to join the life of the city. They were outsiders looking in, guest workers allowed downtown to hawk their wares. Only with money in their pockets were they welcomed to stay and become a part of the city they worked in.

  The children of the city were not ascetics or martyrs or heads of household who had to save all their money to support their families. They were children who worked hard and wanted to enjoy the fruits of their labor. They did not look to their parents for handouts or allowances. They did not believe that those who did not work were entitled to play. They had as little use and as much contempt for idle aristocrats as their parents. They asked only that they be allowed to spend some of what they earned.

  Their parents refused the request.

  St. Louis, May 1910. “Where the boys spend their money.” Lewis Hine took a number of photographs under this caption. This particular one shows a boy in front of a vaudeville theater. The gallery seats cost only ten cents, and there were matinees every day for the boys to attend. (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)

  The Battle for Spending Money

  Adults—engaged in a daily struggle to put food on the table, pay the gas bill, and save a bit for a ship’s ticket for relatives in the old country, a down payment on a house, or a new icebox—did not look favorably on their twelve-year-olds’ demands to be allowed to spend their money as they pleased.

  In most working-class families, the children were expected, even required, to hand in their earnings to their mother, who would return to them what she believed they required for carfare, lunch, and entertainment. Mothers were not to be questioned when it came to spending money. They alone knew what the family took in every week and what it had to pay out. They alone had the discipline and foresight to carefully husband the family’s resources. They alone could estimate—to the penny—what could be put aside for savings and special treats.1

  Parents were not averse to spending money on their children. In good times and bad, they had no choice but to buy them shoes, stockings, and decent clothing for school. There was usually a nickel on Saturdays for the matinee and perhaps a penny or two for a treat at Cheap Charlie’s. When everyone was working steadily and the dreaded “slack” periods were a distant memory, there might even be something left over for a new pencil box, a family outing to Coney Island or Luna Park, perhaps violin or piano lessons.

  What the parents would not do was allow the children to spend money on their own. Money did not belong in their hands. On this there was near universal agreement among adults. Settlement-house workers and working-class parents closed ranks against the children, convinced that they were, by definition, too young, too irresponsible, too susceptible to the temptations of the city to be left alone with their nickels and dimes. As Fannie Fogelson, a “janitress” on East Sixty-second Street, told an investigator from the New York Child Labor Committee, “the possession of money would spoil the best child.… No money that a child may bring into the home can repay the home for the spoiling of the child—child earnings is the dearest money in the world.”2

  Adults feared the “filthy lucre” for the same r
easons that the children cherished it. Children with their own money to spend could do as they pleased away from home, could consume or hide the evidence, and no one, least of all their parents, would be any the wiser. According to Joseph Bosco’s mother, a widow struggling to carry on her deceased husband’s junk business, money made children into “little grown-ups and took the childhood out of them—if they had money they were acting grown-up and only doing the bad things of grown-ups.”3 The boys could smoke cigarettes, spend every afternoon in the nickelodeons, and stuff themselves with hamburger specials; the girls could purchase fancy ribbons, laces, and the silk stockings their mothers refused to let them wear. Money erased the distinctions between childhood and adulthood and, in so doing, tore apart the hierarchical basis upon which the family rested.

  Children with money got “spoiled.” And spoiled children could not be saved. Those that developed a taste for spending money—and the pleasures it purchased—would, their parents feared, never again be able to do without it. The only way to protect their innocence and keep their eyes, ears, and taste buds closed to the temptations of the street was to keep money out of their hands.

  It was easy to protect the younger girls, most of whom did their work at home for no pay. Because they earned no money, they had no money to spend. Their brothers presented a different case. They were, from the age of twelve or so, out on the streets selling papers, blacking boots, and peddling candy and gum. They made their own sales and collected their own tips. When they arrived home in the evening, they were supposed to empty their pockets, which they did. But how were their mothers going to be sure that the change dumped into their laps was the sum total of what had been earned? It was so simple for the boys to deduct a nickel or two and spend it on the way home: for a hamburger in a cheap restaurant, a handful of gum drops at the candy store, a ticket to the nickelodeon, or the latest installment of Oliver Optic’s adventures.

  Children who were obedient in every other regard did what they had to to preserve some part of their earnings for themselves. They lied, they cheated, they hid away their nickels and dimes, they doctored their pay envelopes. The possession of spending money was too important an item in their daily lives to be voluntarily surrendered.

  Their parents were seldom fooled. When the New York Child Labor Committee in 1918 sent investigators into the homes of newsboys to ask about the boys’ spending habits, up to 30 percent of the parents confessed, reluctantly, to fears that their boys were cheating them. (Many more probably suspected as much but were not going to admit it to an investigator they did not know and could not trust.)4 Dominick Abbruzzese’s parents had no trouble at all figuring out that he had been devouring his earnings in the form of cake and candy when he became suddenly “unable to eat his supper.”5 Other parents came to the same conclusion when their children lost their appetites, came home later than usual, or stared uncomfortably at the floor as they emptied their pockets.

  The parents knew what was happening. But they didn’t know how to prevent it. Those who suspected their children of cheating had few options. If their charges were denied, parents could either forget the matter or accuse the boys of being liars and cheats. And then what? If they locked the boys in their rooms, they, the parents, forfeited any possibility of getting any money from them. If they punished them further, the boys just might run away.

  The fact that the children contributed something to the household’s income gave them leverage within the family. Parents who used their children’s earnings to help out at home knew that they put this money at risk every time they questioned them. In the Brusco household, where the father, “a shovel worker,” brought home money only when the weather was good, Frank’s contribution of fifty cents a night made up an important part of the family’s income. Every afternoon, Frank traveled to his corner at Madison and Fifty-ninth Street, where he sold papers until 8 P.M. When he returned home at 9 or 10 P.M., or later, he handed his money to his mother and refused to answer any questions about where he had been or what he had been doing. Frank’s family knew that the boy was holding out on them, that he spent money on the movies and trash to eat, but they had no influence on him. He “gives the 50 cts and thinks that is enough and no questions should be asked.”6

  In the La Polla household, the same conditions held. Anna La Polla told the investigator from the New York Child Labor Committee that she knew her son Dominick made more than the dollar a week he brought home, but, with three younger children at home, the baby Delia only six months old, and her husband, a porter, bringing home twelve dollars a week, she was not about to risk a confrontation.7

  Though in theory all children were supposed to turn in their earnings, and in practice most objected, only the boys were able to win significant concessions. Some mothers, like Anna La Polla, looked the other way as their sons cheated them; others negotiated settlements that allowed the boys to keep a certain percentage of their earnings for themselves. The boys, explained one mother, had to be pacified because they could “run away if you don’t do the right thing by them.” The girls, who could not run away, had no bargaining power and no choice but to follow the dictates of the household. Even those who had taken full-time jobs outside the home at age fourteen and now earned more than their fathers had to “coax, cry, or quarrel with their mothers whenever they wished independent spending money.”8 And yet they, too, needed an independent source of spending money.

  The older girls (fourteen and over) who lived at home and worked downtown or in the neighborhood had no choice, or believed they had no choice, but to spend money on proper clothes and accessories. They walked to work on public streets and rode in streetcars or subways. In the evening, they went to the movies or for a stroll with their girlfriends. Wherever they went, whatever they did, they could not escape the gaze of the anonymous other. Urban space was public space, demanding of those who used it set standards of behavior, deportment, and dress. Eight-year-olds who played all day on the block could dress like peasants for all anyone noticed or cared. Their older sisters had to pay attention to what they wore.9

  This is not to imply that only girls were fashion-conscious. Lucky Luciano (as he would later be known to the public) and his friends regarded fancy, expensive clothes as a visible sign of success, one of the few available to adolescents. Charles Angoff recalls in his autobiography that in his Boston neighborhood the boys fought with their fathers over shoes: the boys wanted low ones, their fathers insisted on buying them high ones. On the Lower East Side, where Harry Roskolenko lived, the boys were as particular about their caps. Only ones with large visors were acceptable because, as everyone knew, the larger the visor, the tougher the kid underneath.10 Still, though the boys made distinctions between the stylish and the unstylish, to be in fashion was for them an option, not a necessity. Only for their older sisters were the right clothes mandatory.

  Working girls could not help comparing their dress and deportment with that of the city’s fashionable women. All they had to do was look around them, read the daily department store advertisements in the papers, and view the pictures of society people in the Sunday supplements and magazines. It was not possible to close one’s eyes to the fashionable or to make believe that such standards need not intrude in one’s own personal space. A Polish-language newspaper in Chicago did its best to explain to parents that their fashion-conscious daughters were not acting aberrantly, but were very much in tune with the American city they now inhabited. “It is evident that most of our young Polish girls of teen age are … afflicted with [the American] passion for fine clothes. The old saying, ‘Clothes do not make a person,’ does not appeal to our women. We must regretfully admit that our girls are being influenced by and are quickly adopting the habits and customs of the American girls.”11

  Of all the articles and accessories that were required of the well-dressed girl, none was more important than the hat. Girls who could afford only one item of fashionable dress had no trouble deciding what that item would be. Hats not on
ly stood out above the crowd, but also were—and had always been—the bearers of important social messages. In the Old Country, as the mothers never ceased to remind their daughters, “women below the middle class” did not wear hats, but went bareheaded or wore simple kerchiefs. In the new world of the American city, as the daughters reported back to their mothers, hats remained socially significant. They signified that the girls who wore them knew enough, cared enough, and were able to spend enough to stay in fashion. Girls who saved for an ostrich plume or bird of paradise feather hat were committing no social crime; on the contrary, they were affirming their allegiance to their new land.

  Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue, New York City, June 12, 1896. An Alice Austin photograph of a newsgirl selling at the entrance to the “El.” Her hat and veil had undoubtedly been purchased from the proceeds of her street trading. (Alice Austin Collection, Staten Island Historical Society)

  In Chicago’s stockyard district, Louise Montgomery found that the American working-class daughters of foreign-born parents all placed “an exaggerated importance upon the possession of a fashionable hat.” Girls who practiced thrift and economy in every other area would not compromise when it came to buying the right hat for themselves. Eight hundred miles away, Ruth True described the same situation among the daughters of American-born Irish and German parents. One working girl reportedly spent a whole week’s wages “on a willow plume. ‘We starved fer that hat,’ her mother said, ‘just plain starved fer it, so we did.’ ”12