Children of the City
Page 24
Dumont. I don’t think you’d love me if I were poor.
Groucho. I might, but I’d keep my mouth shut.”21
The Marx Brothers recall the streets not simply in the content but in the style of their comedy. Like many other entertainers who grew up on the streets and served an apprenticeship in vaudeville, they translate to the screen the energy and drive that propelled them forward on the street and the stage. There was, as Gilbert Seldes observed in the 1920s of Fanny Brice and Al Jolson, both former street children, an almost “ ‘daemonic’ heat and abandon” in their performances,22 the same manic energy that fueled the Marx Brothers movies and stage and screen performances by Danny Kaye, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Milton Berle (especially in his “Texaco Star Theater” television shows), and Phil Silvers (as Sergeant Bilko on television), all of whom grew up on the streets.
The former street traders performed as adults without a trace of self-consciousness or a hint of embarrassment—and they never slowed down. What Irving Howe has identified as “the almost hysterical frenzy with which many of them worked” was, as he put it, a direct spin-off from their immigrant experience and their Jewish backgrounds.23 It was also a lesson learned in their youth. The street traders’ and performers’ energy and exuberance betrayed an anxiety that anything less than total effort would not suffice. Their customers demanded everything they had. Child newsies, peddlers, and performers had to make themselves heard, seen, and noticed; they had to create their customers and their audience out of anonymous passers-by. There was plenty of money out there on the streets, but it had to be corralled and coerced out of adult pockets. One had to shout, gesticulate, and perform day after day. And even then, nothing was guaranteed.
From stage and screen, and later on radio and television, the former street children broadcast to the nation the lessons they had learned on the streets and their faith in themselves and in America. While a few, like Samuel Ornitz, made headlines by defying inquisitors from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, most went out of their way to parade their love of the nation, middle-class pieties, and capitalism. James Cagney, under some suspicion in the 1930s for his activism in the Screen Actors Guild and his left-liberal politics, volunteered (through his agent brother) to star in a movie version of George M. Cohan’s life not only because the role of the “damndest patriotic man in the country”24 would rescue his reputation, but because he considered himself as much a “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as Cohan. George Jessel dressed in his Uncle Sam suit, Eddie Cantor selling war bonds, Burns and Allen transporting their vaudeville routines into a suburban setting (with their WASP neighbors, the Mortons), Milton Berle as television’s Uncle Miltie, Irving Berlin writing and singing “God Bless America”—all were unmistakably former street kids, but they were also 100 percent American and, as they never ceased to remind themselves and their audiences, very proud of it.
The street children of the city, those who attained fame and fortune in show business and those who did not, grew up with a faith in themselves and a faith in America. They had won the battle of the streets—as children—and come home with change in their pockets, enough to help support their families and buy themselves a good time. They carried into adult life the vision of a social world where one’s earnings were usually sufficient to satisfy one’s needs for subsistence and amusement.
Those who had been born with the century and had taken their first full-time jobs in the 1920s were hard hit by the Great Depression (with the exception, of course, of some of the Hollywood stars), but not hard enough to destroy the faith that had been built on the streets of the city. There was too much wealth in the nation. And they were too shrewd, too smart, and too disciplined by their apprenticeship on the streets to be shut out for long. Nicholas Gerros, a Greek immigrant who had shined shoes as a boy and opened up a small clothing store in the late twenties, recalled of the Depression that it “influenced [but] didn’t bother me too much because I was young [i.e., new] in the business and I also was young.”25 Jerre Mangione, another former street child, spent the Depression years in New York City employed in a dozen capacities as writer, critic, and editor. Through the ups and downs, he remained, as he put it, “more responsive than ever to the Horatio Alger syndrome implanted by my public-school teachers.… The promises proffered in the demonic Manhattan landscape, though often based on quicksand premises, held me enthralled.”26
If the Depression tested but did not upset the street traders’ faith, the boom that began on the home front during World War II and extended with periodic brief recessions through the 1960s served to reconfirm it. Those who held jobs—and very few of the former white male street traders did not—found that their paychecks were large enough to cover the necessary expenses of home and family and buy goods and services their parents had never dreamed of. Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, they accepted the social world as it was or could become with minor adjustments. They might complain about prices, taxes, and wages. They might even protest government policies and strike against employers. But they never doubted that they lived in the best of all social worlds. Their patriotism, often bordering on chauvinism as they grew older, came naturally. Whether they grew up to become movie stars, heavyweight champions of the world, steelworkers, or corner newsstand owners, they had come further than their parents and they trusted their children would do even better.
When, through the later 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, scores of intellectuals, politicians, and economists celebrated the “end of ideology” and the rising “age of affluence,” they were codifying the faith in capitalism and the American political system that the street children had held all along. What Godfrey Hodgson has identified as “the ideology of the liberal consensus” was not imposed from the top down.27 The former street traders did not need Daniel Bell, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Peter Drucker, W. W. Rostow, John Kenneth Galbraith, or the editors of Fortune magazine to tell them that capitalism worked, “and since World War II [as Galbraith had put it], quite brilliantly.”28 It was not “false consciousness” or the hegemonic powers of the corporate state that had convinced them that this was the case; it was, rather, their particular experience as children reconfirmed in adult life.
The former street traders suffered from tunnel vision through their lifetimes. Their good fortune—and the celebration of it by mid-century ideologists and politicians—blinded them to the fate of the millions, here and abroad, who were not about to enter the age of affluence. The closure of ideological debate (a phenomenon described from opposite ends of the political spectrum by Daniel Bell and Herbert Marcuse) locked them into a one-dimensional universe of discourse where anticapitalist (equated with anti-American) arguments could be neither presented nor considered. When, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, oppositional, critical ideologies resurfaced with the civil rights and anti-war movements, they could be easily dismissed by the former street traders who, having hustled for pennies as children, could not accept the claim that America was not and had not always been the land of opportunity and beacon of freedom for the poor and oppressed.
The street children’s good fortune stayed with them through the years. They were born in cities expanding in economic opportunities for young white males. They grew old amidst the economic euphoria and unprecedented supremacy this nation enjoyed in the aftermath of World War II. They retired when the Social Security system was still a marvel of solvency. By the time a prolonged economic downturn set in, in the 1970s and 1980s, their time was running out.
The street traders are no longer with us, but their influence on our culture remains as strong today as it was thirty and forty years ago. Their faith in America and in capitalism was so comforting, so proudly proclaimed, so in tune with the ideological currents of the mid-century liberal consensus, so often confirmed by their personal experience, and so vividly presented to the public that it exerted an influence far greater than it should have.
From the vantage point of the middle 1980s—wit
h jobs disappearing from these shores, infrastructures collapsing, credit tightened, and overall unemployment locked at record-high levels—it would be sheer folly to retain much faith in the social and economic order the street traders trusted. And yet their optimism, their Americanism, their trust in the ability of the economy to right itself remain with us—as a barrier to the rethinking and restructuring that must take place if we are to proceed toward a more productive and more just future. The “American Century,” so labeled and celebrated by Henry Luce in the 1940s, was coterminous with the street children’s lifetime. But it has ended. And will not return.
While we must consign to political oblivion those who continue to espouse the old platitudes about the good life in America, we can and should remember the children of the city and the cities they grew up in. Those cities were probably as dangerous, as dirty, and as depraved as ours, but they were places of promise, of hope, of trust in the future. When we talk to our parents, grandparents, and relatives who grew up on the streets or see before us the image of James Cagney singing “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” or the Marx brothers outwitting villans, or George Burns crooning “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at the 1983 All-Star Game, we are momentarily brought back to that world and enriched by it.
Appendix:
A Note on Sources:
The Newsboy Studies
An invaluable source for this work have been the “newsboy studies” completed between 1902 and 1922. The child labor and child welfare reform groups and, in some states, departments of labor and industrial statistics, collected as much data as possible about working children, convinced that the data put into proper form would convert an otherwise apathetic public to their cause. Much of the material was never published. Some remains in note form or as rough drafts, interview schedules, case studies, or internal memoranda.
In the course of my research, I was able to locate and consult reports on newsboy conditions in the following cities and states (full references to these reports can be found in the Notes):
New York City (1902–3, 1906, 1911, 1912, 1915, 1915–18), Buffalo (1903), Syracuse (1911), Mount Vernon (1912), Albany (1920), and Yonkers (1920), New York; Chicago, Illinois (1905, 1918); Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1911); Des Moines, Iowa (1920); Cincinnati (1908, 1917), Cleveland (1908–9), and Toledo (1920), Ohio; Seattle, Washington (1915–16); Dallas, Texas (1921); Birmingham, Alabama (1920); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1910); Detroit, Michigan (1914); Boston, Massachusetts (1920); Baltimore, Maryland (1913, 1915, 1916); Bennington, Rutland, and Burlington, Vermont (1910); St. Louis (1910) and Kansas City (1914–15), Missouri; Newark, Hoboken, Paterson, Jersey City, Bayonne, Trenton, and Elizabeth, New Jersey (1912).
Statewide reports on child laborers with specific sections on newsboys were available for New Jersey (1907), Alabama (1922), Tennessee (1920), Kentucky (1919), North Carolina (1918), Oklahoma (1918), Iowa (1922), Ohio (1919), and Pennsylvania (1922).
A guide to the published reports is Children in Street Trades in the United States: A List of References, compiled by Laura A. Thompson, U.S. Department of Labor (Washington, D.C., 1925).
Unpublished reports were located in the papers of the New York Child Labor Committee, New York State Library, Albany, New York; papers of the National Child Labor Committee, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Jane Addams Memorial Collection and the papers of the Juvenile Protective Association, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois; and Jane Addams Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
Abbreviations
Abbreviations for Manuscript and Oral History Collections
AJC William E. Wiener Oral History Library of the American Jewish Committee, New York, New York.
CP Oral History of Chicago-Polonia, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois.
CSS Community Service Society Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, New York.
FLPS Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey, Works Projects Administration, 1942, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois.
IC Italians in Chicago Project, Manuscript Department, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois.
ICMA International Circulation Managers Association, Reston, Virginia.
IHS Illinois Humane Society Papers, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois.
JAMC Jane Addams Memorial Collection, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois.
JAP Jane Addams Papers, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
JPA Juvenile Protective Association Papers, Special Collections, University of Illlinois at Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois.
LC Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
LDT Lea Demarest Taylor Papers, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois.
LW Lillian Wald Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, New York.
NCLC National Child Labor Committee Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
NYCLC New York Child Labor Committee Papers, New York State Library, Albany, New York.
NYWP New York World Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, New York.
YIVO Oral History Collection, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York, New York.
Notes
Chapter One
1. David Ward, Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth Century America (New York, 1971), 51–150; Sam Bass Warner, Urban Wilderness (New York, 1972), 85–112.
2. On Chicago: Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade, Chicago: The Growth of a Metropolis (Chicago, 1969), 214; on Boston: Sam Bass Warner, Streetcar Suburbs (New York, 1976), 46–116; on Cincinnati: Zane L. Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati: Urban Politics in the Progressive Era (New York, 1968), 25–29; on Columbus, Ohio: Roderick Duncan McKenzie, The Neighborhood: A Study of Local Life in the City of Columbus, Ohio (Chicago, 1923), 360–62; on Pittsburgh: John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Urbana, 1982), 21–25; on Manhattan: Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City (New York, 1923), 6–7.
3. Gerard R. Wolfe, New York: A Guide to the Metropolis (New York, 1975), 163–85.
4. Ibid.
5. Glen E. Holt and Dominic A. Pacyga, Chicago: A Historical Guide to the Neighborhoods (Chicago, 1979), 17–18; Mayer and Wade, Chicago, 218–20.
6. William Leach, “Department Stores and Consumer Culture: The Transformation of Women in an Age of Abundance, 1890–1920” (unpublished paper, 1982); Susan Porter Benson, “Palace of Consumption and Machine for Selling: The American Department Store,” Radical History Review, no. 21 (Fall 1979), 208–11.
7. Leach, “Department Stores,” 1.
8. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York, 1932), 24.
9. Leach, “Department Stores,” 8–10.
10. Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life of the Last 100 Years (New York, 1951), 259–72.
11. On the new nightlife, see Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, Conn. 1981).
12. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 67. Also, on vaudeville, see Russel Nye, The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York, 1970), 167–72; Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1980), 192–228.
13. Nye, Unembarrassed Muse, 168.
14. Barth, City People, 211.
15. Arnold Bennett, Your United States: Impressions of a First Visit (New York, 1912), 137.
16. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 40–41.
17. Ibid., 45.
18. Ibid., 49–50; Morris, Incredible New York, 243.
19. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 148–71; Nye, Unembarrassed Muse, 327.
20. Morris, Incredible New York, 273.
21. H. G. Wells, The Future in America (New York, 1906), 135.
22. Robert Shackleton, The Book of Chicago (Philadelphia, 1920), 177–78.
23. See, for example, Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1973); and, in rebuttal to Handlin, Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of the Uprooted,” Journal of American History 51, no. 3 (December 1964), 404–17.
24. M. E. Ravage, An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant (1917; reprint, New York, 1971), 72–73.
25. James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850–1970 (Urbana, 1980); Paul Underwood Kellogg, ed., The Pittsburgh Survey, vol. 5: The Pittsburgh District: Civic Frontage (New York, 1914), 92–114; Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-Class Reform, Chicago, 1880–1930 (New York, 1978), 6–41.
26. Dreiser, Color of a City, 86.
27. Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem, 2 vols. (New York, 1903), I:8.
28. Ibid., 436.
29. Ibid., 425.
30. Edith Abbott, The Tenements of Chicago, 1908–1935 (Chicago, 1936), 213.
31. Mike Gold, Jews Without Money (1930; reprint, New York, 1965), 100.
32. Ibid., 88–89.
33. Ravage, American in the Making, 60, 66–77.
34. Harry Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then: The Lower East Side: 1900–1913—An Intimate Chronicle (New York, 1971), 97; see also Katherine Anthony, Mothers Who Must Earn (New York, 1914), 9.
35. Roskolenko, Time That Was, 91–107; Anthony Sorrentino, Organizing Against Crime: Redeveloping the Neighborhood (New York, 1977), 38.
36. Simon Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (New York, 1913), 23; Waverley Lewis Root, Eating in America: A History (New York, 1976), 234.