Children of the City

by David Nasaw

  37. Root, Eating in America, 234–35.

  38. Ibid., U. S. Department of Agriculture, Consumption of Food in the United States, 1909–52 (Washington, D.C., 1953), 109.

  39. Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982), 27–29; Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York, 1974), 315–16.

  40. Strasser, Never Done, 16–23; Boorstin, The Americans, 322–24; Root, Eating in America, 188; Patten, New Basis, 20.

  41. Patten, New Basis, 19; U. S. Department of Labor, “Women in the Candy Industry in Chicago and St. Louis,” in Bulletin of the Women’s Bureau, no. 25 (Washington, D.C., 1923), 1; Root, Eating in America, 421.

  42. Michael and Ariane Batterberry, On the Town in New York: From 1776 to the Present (New York, 1973), 168; Al Hirshberg and Sammy Aaronson, As High as My Heart: The Sammy Aaronson Story (New York, 1957), 19.

  43. Moss Hart, Act One: An Autobiography (New York, 1959), 8.

  44. Hy Kraft, On My Way to the Theater (New York, 1971), 13.

  45. Charles Zueblin, American Municipal Progress, rev. ed. (New York, 1916), 3–4.

  Chapter Two

  1. Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City (New York, 1923), 44–45.

  2. Henry James, The American Scene (New York, 1946), 131–34; Dreiser, Color of a City, 44; Robert Woods, ed., The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study (Boston, 1898), 235.

  3. See, for example, Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (Chicago, 1933).

  4. Madison (Wis.) Board of Commerce, Madison Recreation Survey (Madison, 1915), 7; see also Roderick Duncan McKenzie, The Neighborhood: A Study of Local Life in the City of Columbus, Ohio (Chicago, 1923), 604.

  5. Oral history of Frank Broska, IC, 19.

  6. See, for example, “The Pre-Adolescent Girl in Her Home,” LDT, box 7, folder 4, 11.

  7. Catharine Brody, “A New York Childhood,” The American Mercury XIV (1928), 57.

  8. Mike Gold, Jews Without Money (1930; reprint, New York, 1965), 38 39.

  9. Iona and Peter Opie, Children’s Games in Street and Playground (London, 1969), 11; Colin Ward, The Child in the City (New York, 1978), 97.

  10. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, 1955), 10.

  11. Harry Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then: The Lower East Side: 1900–1913—An Intimate Chronicle (New York, 1971), 24; Gold, Jews Without Money, 31.

  12. Opie, Children’s Games, 10.

  13. Gold, Jews Without Money, 28.

  14. Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber, Harpo Speaks (New York, 1974), 36.

  15. John Collier and Edward M. Barrows, The City Where Crime Is Play: A Report by the People’s Institute (New York, 1914), 14–18.

  16. Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909; reprint, New York, 1972), 55–57; on “juvenile justice,” see also Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago, 1969); Ellen Ryerson, The Best-Laid Plans: America’s Juvenile Court Experiment (New York, 1978), 35–77.

  17. Collier and Barrows, The City, 18; Alan Levy, The Bluebird of Happiness: The Memoirs of Jan Peerce (New York, 1976), 46.

  18. Gold, Jews Without Money, 28.

  19. Eddie Cantor, as told to David Freeman, My Life Is in Your Hands (New York, 1928), 50; Charles Angoff, When I Was a Boy in Boston (New York, 1947), 97–98.

  20. Philip Davis, Street-land: Its Little People and Big Problems (Boston, 1915), 28; Woods, City Wilderness, 235.

  21. Marx, Harpo, 17–18, 27–28.

  22. Samuel Ornitz, Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl: An Anonymous Autobiography (New York, 1923), 30–31.

  23. Frederick Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago, 2nd rev. ed. (Chicago, 1936), 288.

  24. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 11–12; Opie, Children’s Games, 2–4.

  25. Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive (New York, 1982), 140–42, 152–53; Brody, “New York Childhood,” 57–60; Sophie Ruskay, Horsecars and Cobblestones (New York, 1973), 41–44.

  26. Collier and Barrows, The City, 27, 42–44; John Chase, “Street Games of New York City,” Pedagogical Seminary XII (1905), 503–4; Joseph E. Lee, “Play and Congestion,” Charities and the Commons XX (April 4, 1908), 43–45; Samuel Chotzinoff, A Lost Paradise (New York, 1955), 84–90.

  27. George Burns, The Third Time Around (New York, 1980), 9–10.

  28. Gold, Jews Without Money, 32–36; Chotzinoff, Lost Paradise, 84–90.

  29. Burns, Third Time Around, 11.

  30. Brody, “New York Childhood,” 57; Oral history of Celia Blazek, CP, 10–11; Jerre Mangione, Mount Allegro (New York, 1972), 2–3; Milton Berle with Haskel Frankel, Milton Berle (New York, 1974), 25–26.

  31. Thrasher, The Gang, 28, 215.

  32. Ibid., 35–36.

  33. Oral history of William Gropper, AJC, tape 1, 15–16.

  34. See, for example, Ornitz, Haunch, Paunch, 18, 35–37, 48–51.

  35. Thrasher, The Gang, 194.

  36. Chotzinoff, Lost Paradise, 86; Marx, Harpo, 35–36.

  37. J. Alvin Kugelmass, Ralph J. Bunche: Fighter for Peace (New York, 1962), 27–30; Harry Golden, The Right Time: An Autobiography (New York, 1969), 49.

  38. Marx, Harpo, 35–36; Burns, Third Time Around, 31.

  39. For Cleveland, see Henry W. Thurston, Delinquency and Spare Time (Cleveland, 1918), 34–35; for New York City, see Chotzinoff, Lost Paradise, 84.

  40. Thurston, Delinquency, 24–25.

  41. David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison, Wis., 1983), 35–36.

  42. Simon Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (New York, 1913), 52.

  43. Otto T. Mallery, “The Social Significance of Play,” Annals XXXV (January–June 1910), 156; Macleod, Building Character, 66–71.

  44. Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, England, 1983), 150–51.

  45. Rosenzweig, Eight Hours, 149; Henry S. Curtis, “Provision and Responsibility for Playgrounds,” Annals XXXV (January–June 1910), 342.

  46. See special issue of Annals on “parks movement”: Annals XXXV (January–June 1910), 304–70.

  47. City Club, Amusements and Recreation in Milwaukee (Milwaukee, 1914), 10; Rowland Haynes and Stanley Davies, Public Provision for Recreation (Cleveland, 1920), 23–24; Collier and Barrows, The City, 11.

  48. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 12.

  Chapter Three

  1. J. C. Kennedy, Wages and Family Budgets in the Chicago Stockyards District (Chicago, 1914), 63–68; Louise Bolard More, Wage-Earners’ Budgets: A Study of Standards and Cost of Living in New York City (New York, 1907); Louise C. Odencrantz, Italian Women in Industry (New York, 1919), 18–21; Louise C. Odencrantz and Zenas L. Potter, Industrial Conditions in Springfield, Illinois (Department of Surveys and Exhibits, Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1916), VIII:120; Robert Coit Chapin, The Standard of Living Among Working Men’s Families in New York City (New York, 1909), 55; Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, 1977), 161.

  2. Odencrantz and Potter, Springfield, 120; Kennedy, Wages and Budgets, 68.

  3. Odencrantz, Italian Women, 18–19; Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community, 38–43.

  4. U.S. Congress, Senate, Reports of the Immigration Commission (Washington, D.C., 1911), 11:388.

  5. David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (Cambridge, England, 1979), 41.

  6. John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Urbana, 1982), 89–108; Elizabeth H. Pleck, “A Mother’s Wages: Income Earning Among Married Italian and Black Women, 1896–1911,” in Michael Gordon, ed., The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, 2nd ed. (New York, 1978), 490–510.

  7. John Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770–Present, Expanded Stud
ent Edition (New York, 1981), 57–61.

  8. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 96; Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, 1982), 140.

  9. Bender, Urban Vision, 147–149.

  10. U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Children in Gainful Occupations at the Fourteenth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1924), 18–28; U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Comparative Occupation Statistics for the United States, 1870–1940,” by Alba Edwards (Washington, D.C., 1943), 91–92; Paul Osterman, “Education and Labor Markets at the Turn of the Century,” Politics and Society IX, no. 1 (1979), 103–22; Selwyn Troen, “The Discovery of the Adolescent by American Educational Reformers, 1900–1920: An Economic Perspective,” in Lawrence Stone, ed., Schooling and Society (Baltimore, 1976), 239–51.

  11. Troen, in Stone, Schooling and Society, 241–42; New York Factory Investigating Commission, Second Report of the Factory Investigating Commission (1913), I:266.

  12. Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (1929; reprint, New York, 1956), 40–42; Osterman, Education and Labor, 113–15.

  13. See, for example, National Industrial Conference Board, The Employment of Young Persons in the United States (New York, 1925); Massachusetts Commission on Industrial and Technical Education, Report (Boston, 1906), 46.

  14. Committee on Industrial Welfare of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, A Report on the Problem of the Substitution of Women for Man Power in Industry (Cleveland, 1918), 25, 29; Isaac A. Hourwich, Immigration and Labor. The Economic Aspects of European Immigration to the United States (New York, 1912), 318–24.

  15. U. S. Bureau of the Census, “Children in Gainful Occupations,” 19.

  16. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 30.

  17. U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, School Attendance in 1920, by Frank Alexander Ross (Washington, D.C., 1924), 189, 190, 181; National Center for Educational Statistics, Digest of Educational Statistics (Washington, D.C., 1980), 44; David Hogan, “Education and the Making of the Chicago Working Class, 1880–1930,” History of Education Quarterly XVIII (Fall 1978), 228.

  Chapter Four

  1. Alan Levy, The Bluebird of Happiness: The Memoirs of Jan Peerce (New York, 1976), 34.

  2. Harry Golden, The Right Time: An Autobiography (New York, 1969), 55.

  3. Hy Kraft, On My Way to the Theater (New York, 1971), 18.

  4. Investigator’s report on Theodore Waterman, NYCLC, box 31, folder 9; Milton Berle with Haskel Frankel, Milton Berle (New York, 1974), 66; Eddie Cantor with Jane Kesner Ardmore, Take My Life (Garden City, 1957), 15.

  5. Harry Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then: The Lower East Side: 1900–1913—An Intimate Chronicle (New York, 1971), 32; James Cagney, Cagney by Cagney (New York, 1977), 31; George Burns, The Third Time Around (New York, 1980), 23.

  6. Investigator’s report on Nicholas Giordano, NYCLC, box 31, folder 9.

  7. Edward Clopper, “Children on the Streets of Cincinnati,” Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the National Child Labor Committee (Supplement to the Annals, 1908), 117–18.

  8. M. E. Ravage, An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant (1917; reprint, New York, 1971), 97–99.

  9. Mark Sullivan, Our Times, 1900–1925, vol. IV. The War Begins, 1909–1914 (1932; reprint, New York, 1972), 88.

  10. Bessie Turner Kriesberg, “Autobiography,” YIVO, 286.

  11. Kraft, On My Way, 17.

  12. Burns, Third Time, 39–40.

  13. Harry Jolson, as told to Alban Emley, Mistah Jolson (Hollywood, 1952), 43–50.

  14. Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York, 1976), 556.

  15. Ibid., 558.

  16. Eddie Cantor, as told to David Freedman, My Life Is in Your Hands (New York, 1928), 22.

  17. Norman Katkov, The Fabulous Fanny: The Story of Fanny Brice (New York, 1953), 8–9.

  18. Jolson, Mistah Jolson, 43–50.

  19. Burns, Third Time, 23–26.

  20. Ibid., 27; Cantor, My Life, 22–23; Jolson, Mistah Jolson, 43–50.

  21. Katkov, Fabulous Fanny, 8.

  22. Berle, Milton Berle, 50–51.

  23. National Child Labor Committee, Child Welfare in North Carolina (New York, 1918), 220.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber, Harpo Speaks (New York, 1974), 32–33.

  26. See, for example, Samuel Chotzinoff, A Lost Paradise (New York, 1955), 204–6.

  Chapter Five

  1. Jacob A. Riis, “The New York Newsboy,” Century Magazine LXXXV (December 1912), 240–48.

  2. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism, A History: 1690–1960, 3rd ed. (New York, 1962), 447; Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth Century America (New York, 1980), 79.

  3. William R. Scott, Scientific Circulation Management (New York, 1915), 108.

  4. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982), 123–24; Barth, City People, 90–92; Edwin Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretative History of Journalism, 2nd ed. (New York, 1962), 404.

  5. Barth, City People, 88–90; Editor and Publisher, December 21, 1907, 4; Alfred McClung Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America: The Evolution of a Social Instrument (New York, 1937), 289–90; Maurice Hexter, “The Newsboys of Cincinnati,” Studies from the Helen S. Trounstine Foundation I, no. 4 (January 15, 1919), 120–21.

  6. Emery, The Press, 516.

  7. Editor and Publisher, December 21, 1907, 4.

  8. Editor and Publisher, May 24, 1902, 2.

  9. Hexter, “Newsboys,” 148–49.

  10. See “Circulation Manager’s Column” in Editor and Publisher, March 25, April 13 and 20, May 6 and 27, June 3, July 1, and October 21, 1916.

  11. Editor and Publisher, June 30, 1917, part II, 13.

  12. Edward Clopper, “Children on the Streets of Cincinnati,” Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the National Child Labor Committee (Supplement to the Annals, 1908), 115.

  13. Hexter, “Newsboys,” 148–49.

  14. Joseph Gies, The Colonel of Chicago (New York, 1979), 32–37; Wayne Andrews, Battle for Chicago (New York, 1946), 232–35; Lloyd Wendt, Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper (Chicago, 1979), 352–53; John Cooney, The Annenbergs: The Salvaging of a Tainted Dynasty (New York, 1982), 31–39.

  15. Lee, Daily Newspaper, 266.

  16. For New York City, see “Memo to George Hall from C. Aronovici, Special Investigator, September 26, 1906,” NYCLC, box 31, folder 13, 5; Harry Bremer, “Report of Investigation: New York Newsboy,” NCLC, box 4, 2; for Chicago, see [Myron Adams], “Newsboy Conditions in Chicago” JAP, 27; for Baltimore, see Lettie Johnston, “Street Trades and Their Regulation,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction (1915), 520; for Cincinnati, see Clopper, “Children of Cincinnati,” 116; for Dallas, see Civic Federation of Dallas, The Newsboys of Dallas (Dallas, 1921), 3.

  17. Research Department, School of Social Economy of Washington University, “The Newsboy of Saint Louis” (St. Louis, n.d.), 10.

  18. U. S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Children in Gainful Occupations at the Fourteenth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1924).

  19. U. S. Department of Labor, Children’s Bureau, Child Labor Legislation in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1915), 12–13 (Summary Chart No. 1, Table 6).

  20. “Saving the Barren Years,” in The Child in the City: A Handbook of the Child Welfare Exhibit, 1911, JAMC.

  21. Edward Clopper, Child Labor in City Streets (New York, 1912), 35.

  22. Hexter, “Newsboys,” 122.

  23. Anna Reed, Newsboy Service: A Study in Educational and Vocational Guidance (Yonkers, 1917), 27–44. Figures for the percentage
of newsboys per grade were computed by dividing the number of newsboys per grade by the total number of males per grade.

  24. Memo from George Hall, November 15, 1911, NYCLC, box 31, folder 13, 4.

  25. Justice Harvey Baker to C. Watson, March 13, 1911, NYCLC, box 31, folder 15.

  26. Hexter, “Newsboys,” 118–19.

  27. William Le Roy Zabel, “Street Trades and Juvenile Delinquency” (M.A. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1918), 46; Alexander Fleisher, “The Newsboys of Milwaukee,” Fifteenth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics, State of Wisconsin (1911–12), 77; Charles Storey, “Report of Newsboy Investigation in Syracuse,” NYCLC, box 31, folder 13, 5.

  28. Investigator’s report, December 29, 1916, NYCLC, box 31, folder 22.

  29. Loraine B. Bush, “Street Trades in Alabama,” American Child IV, no. 2 (August 1922), 109.

  30. Leonard Benedict, Waifs of the Slums and Their Way Out (New York, 1907), 106–7; Mary Aydelott, “Children in Street Trades” (M.A. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1924), 24–26; Elsa Wertheim, “Chicago Children in the Street Trades” (1917), JAMC, 5–9.

  31. Fleisher, “Newsboys of Milwaukee,” 67.

  32. Grace W. Cottrell, “Investigation of the Newsboys of Mount Vernon” (May 14, 1912), NYCLC, box 31, folder 13, 7.

  33. Harry Bremer, “Street Trades Investigation” (October 9, 1912), NCLC, box 4, 1–3, 9.

  34. Margaret Kent Beard, “A Study of Newsboys in Yonkers—1920,” NYCLC, box 31, folder 27, 7.

  35. Lewis W. Hine, “Conditions in Vermont Street Trades, etc.,” (December 1916), NCLC.

  36. Clopper, Child Labor, 55–56.

  37. Ibid., 55; Reed, Newsboy Service, 130.

  38. Joe E. Brown, as told to Ralph Hancock, Laughter Is a Wonderful Thing (New York, 1956), 12–13.

  39. Harry Golden, The Right Time: An Autobiography (New York, 1969), 39–40.

  40. George Burns, The Third Time Around (New York, 1980), 30.

  41. Editor and Publisher, July 20, 1918, 37; New York Times, October 4, 1917, 18.