Children of the City
Page 26
42. Editor and Publisher, June 1, 1918, 21; The Hustler, April 1918, 8.
43. New York Times, August 23, 1912, 8.
44. Editor and Publisher, October 7, 1916, 26.
45. New York Times, May 31, 1911, 10; New York Times, May 26, 1911, 12; Editor and Publisher, June 3, 1916, 16, and October 27, 1917, 27.
46. The Hustler, February 1918, 4.
47. Reed, Newsboy Service, 135–36; Fleisher, “Newsboys of Milwaukee,” 71.
48. Harry Bremer, “Report of Investigation: New York Newsboy” (1913), NCLC, box 4, 8–9; see also Fleisher, “Newsboys of Milwaukee,” 91.
49. Golden, The Right Time, 55; Chicago Vice Commission, The Social Evil in Chicago (Chicago, 1912), 238–39.
50. Mrs. W. J. Norton, “A Study of the Newsboys of Cleveland” (Winter 1908–9), NYCLC, box 31, folder 15, 5; Florence Kelley, “The Street Trader Under Illinois Law,” in Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, ed., The Child in the City (Chicago, 1912), 291.
51. Mott, American Journalism, 480–82, 524–26, 584–85.
52. Bremer, “Street Trades Investigation,” 1; Scott Nearing, “The Newsboy at Night in Philadelphia,” Charities and Commons XVII (February 2, 1906), 778.
53. Johnston, “Street Trades,” 523; William Hard, “De kid wot works at night,” Everybody’s Magazine XVIII (January 1908), 35; Bremer, “Street Trades Investigation,” 12–13.
54. Nearing, “Newsboy at Night,” 779.
55. Bremer, “New York Newsboy,” 20–21; see also Storey, “Newsboy in Syracuse,” 6–7.
56. Clopper, Child Labor, 64.
57. Wertheim, “Chicago Children,” 4; Bremer, “New York Newsboy,” 20.
58. See, e.g., Clopper, Child Labor, 63–64.
59. Names and phrases borrowed from the titles of Horatio Alger novels.
Chapter Six
1. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York, 1943), 8–9.
2. Ibid.
3. Bosley Crowther, Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer (New York, 1970), 17–20.
4. Juvenile Protective Association, Junk Dealing and Juvenile Delinquency (Chicago, n.d.), JAMC, 5.
5. Massachusetts Child Labor Committee, Child Scavengers (Boston, n.d.), 2.
6. Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, 1880–1980 (College Station, Texas, 1981), 159–60, 153.
7. Charles Zueblin, American Municipal Progress, rev. ed. (New York, 1916), 73–83; Melosi, Garbage in Cities, 143.
8. Zueblin, Municipal Progress, 77–81.
9. Melosi, Garbage in Cities, 170–75.
10. Ibid., 161–62.
11. Sophonisba P. Breckinridge and Edith Abbott, “Housing Conditions in Chicago, Illinois: Back of the Yards,” American Journal of Sociology XVI, no. 4 (January 1911), 464–65; Howard E. Wilson, Mary McDowell, Neighbor (Chicago, 1928), 143–44.
12. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1905; reprint, New York, 1960), 29–30.
13. Breckinridge and Abbott, “Back of the Yards,” 466.
14. See, e.g., Leonard Covello, The Heart Is the Teacher (New York, 1958), 34; Massachusetts Child Labor Committee, Child Scavengers, 1–2.
15. The Children’s Aid Society, New York Street Kids (New York, 1978), 44.
16. Perry Duis, “The Saloon and the Public City: Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1975), 132.
17. Clifford Shaw, The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story (1930; reprint, Chicago, 1966), 50–53.
18. Detroit Free Press, August 8, 1914, 5.
19. Henry W. Thurston, Delinquency and Spare Time (Cleveland, 1918), 26.
20. Covello, Heart Is Teacher, 28.
21. Ibid., 34.
22. Hy Kraft, On My Way to the Theater (New York, 1971), 13–14.
23. Oral history of John Madro, CP, 10.
24. Oral history of Marie Arendt, CP, 3–4.
25. Katherine Anthony, Mothers Who Must Earn (New York, 1914), 9–10.
26. Ibid., 146.
27. Charles Chapin, Municipal Sanitation in the United States (Providence, 1902), 316.
28. Philip Davis, Street-land: Its Little People and Big Problems (Boston, 1915), 73.
29. Juvenile Protective Association, Junk Dealing, 17; Massachusetts Child Labor Committee, Child Scavengers, 2.
30. Juvenile Protective Association, Junk Dealing, 13, 11, 58–60.
31. Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber, Harpo Speaks (New York, 1974), 38, 58.
Chapter Seven
1. National Child Labor Committee, Child Workers in Kentucky (New York, 1919), 185.
2. “Hearing Upon the Various So-Called Labor Bills Before the Judiciary of the Senate at the Senate Chamber,” Albany, N.Y., March 4, 1903, NYCLC, box 2, folder 9, 10.
3. “Memo” on Chicago Daily News letterhead, JAMC, 6.
4. U.S. Department of Labor, Children’s Bureau, Child Labor Legislation in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1915), 382–417.
5. [Myron Adams] “Newsboy Conditions in Chicago,” JAP, 23; Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference of the National Child Labor Committee (Supplement to the Annals, March 1909), 230–31, 228–29.
6. “Hartford Regulates Child Street-Trades,” Survey XXV (December 31, 1910), 511–12.
7. Lewis W. Hine, “Conditions in Vermont Street Trades, etc.” (December 1916), NCLC.
8. On household chores, see Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930 (New York, 1979), 147–49; Sophonisba B. Breckinridge, New Homes for Old (New York, 1921), 54–65, 122–28; Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982).
9. Oral history of Adelia Marsik, IC, 4; E. G. Stern, My Mother and I (New York, 1917), 29–30; “The Pre-Adolescent Girl … Gads Hill Center,” LDT, box 7, folder 4, 13; “The Pre-Adolescent Girl in Her Home,” LDT, box 7, folder 4, 11; Breckinridge, New Homes, 124–27.
10. Stern, Mother and I, 55–56; Catharine Brody, “A New York Childhood,” The American Mercury XIV (1928), 60.
11. “The Pre-Adolescent Girl in Her Home,” 3, 5.
12. Greenwich House, Thirteenth Annual Report (New York, 1913–14), 18.
13. New York Times, April 9, 1909, 11.
14. John Modell and Tamara K. Hareven, “Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families,” in Tamara K. Hareven, ed., Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1900–1930 (New York, 1977), 164–66; Gunther Barth, City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1980), 47–50.
15. U.S. Congress, Senate, Reports of the Immigration Commission (Washington, D.C., 1911), 26:139, 85, 92; J. C. Kennedy, Wages and Family Budgets in the Chicago Stockyards District (Chicago, 1914), 63.
16. On variations among different ethnic groups, see, e.g., John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Urbana, 1982), 102–8; 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.
17. Tentler, Wage-Earning Women, 141; Thomas Bell, Out of This Furnace (1949; reprint, Pittsburgh, 1976), 149–53.
18. Charlotte Baum, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel, The Jewish Woman in America (New York, 1976), 108–9; Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, 1977), 214–15.
19. State of New York, Preliminary Report of the Factory Investigating Committee (March 1, 1912), Appendix VII; Jeremy Felt, Hostages of Fortune: Child Labor Reform in New York State (Syracuse, 1965), 140–45; Mary Van Kleeck, Child Labor in Home Industries (New York, 1910).
20. Reports of the Immigration Commission, 26:94, 295, 643, 202, 295.
21. See Preliminary Report of Factory Investigating Committee for copies of these photographs.
23. Brody, “New York Childhood,” 61–62.
24. Greenwich House, Thirteenth Report, 18. I have rearranged the first and third paragraphs for clarity.
25. Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive (New York, 1982), 70.
26. Oral history of Marietta H. Interlandi, IC, 37.
Chapter Eight
1. David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison, Wis., 1983), 112.
2. Michael M. Davis, Jr., The Exploitation of Pleasure: A Study of Commercial Recreations in New York City (New York, 1912), 8–9.
3. Juvenile Protective Association, “First Lessons in Gambling” (1911), JPA, folder 118; see also Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York, 1943), 10–12.
4. Smith, A Tree Grows, 12–13.
5. The Hustler, December 1917, 12, 14.
6. Davis, Exploitation of Pleasure, 10.
7. Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film (New York, 1939), 4–7.
8. On first nickelodeon: ibid., 55–56; on New York City: John Collier, “Cheap Amusements,” Charities and the Commons XX (April 1908), 74; on Chicago: Lucy France Pierce, “The Nickelodeon,” World Today XV (October 1908), 1052.
9. Milton Berle with Haskel Frankel, Milton Berle (New York, 1974), 55.
10. Barton Currie, “The Nickel Madness,” Harper’s Weekly LI (August 24, 1907), 1246.
11. Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, England, 1983), 197.
12. Edward Wagenknecht, The Movies in an Age of Innocence (Norman, Okla., 1962), 15, 20–21.
13. Wagenknecht, The Movies, 26; Jacobs, Rise of Film, 57, 68–71; Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (New York, 1982), 88–91.
14. Jacobs, Rise of Film, 67–76.
15. Robert Sklar, Movie-made America: A Social History of American Movies (New York, 1975), 45; Cleveland Recreation Survey, Commercial Recreation (Cleveland, 1920), 21; Wagenknecht, The Movies, 15; Sam Levenson, Everything but Money (New York, 1966), 109.
16. Cleveland Recreation Survey, 33; Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909; reprint, New York, 1972), 86–87; Levenson, Everything but Money, 108–11.
17. Rosenzweig, Eight Hours, 199–204; Phil Silvers with Robert Saffron, The Laugh Is on Me (New York, 1973), 10–11.
18. Esther Lee Rider, “Newsboys in Birmingham,” American Child III, no. 4 (February 1922), 318; William Hard, “De kid wot works at night,” Everybody’s Magazine XVIII (January 1908), 35.
19. Madison Board of Commerce, Madison Recreational Survey (Madison, 1915), 78–80; Davis, Exploitation of Pleasure, 34; Research Department, School of Social Economy of Washington University, “The Newsboy of Saint Louis” (St. Louis, n.d.), 9. See also Edward Chandler, “How Much Children Attend the Theater, the Quality of the Entertainment They Choose, and Its Effect Upon Them,” Proceedings of the Child Conference for Research and Welfare (New York, 1909), 50.
20. Russell Sage Foundation, Boyhood and Lawlessness (New York, 1914), 67–68, 142–43; Addams, Spirit of Youth, 80.
21. William Saroyan, The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills (New York, 1952), 176.
22. Davis, Exploitation of Pleasure, 25, 35–36; 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), 213.
23. Davis, Exploitation of Pleasure, 32–33; Juvenile Protection Association, “Junk Dealing and Juvenile Delinquency,” JAMC, 17; Harry Bremer, “Street Trades Investigation” (October 9, 1912), NCLC, 9.
Chapter Nine
1. Sophonisba Breckinridge, New Homes for Old (New York, 1921), 45.
2. Investigator’s report on Charles Goldowsky, NYCLC, box 31, folder 9.
3. Investigator’s report on Joseph Bosco, NYCLC, box 31, folder 9.
4. See NYCLC, box 1, folder 9. I manually computed the number of investigators’ reports which mentioned that the boys were cheating their parents in this way.
5. Investigator’s report on Dominick Abbruzzese, NYCLC, box 31, folder 9. See also reports on John Kovack and Frank Konfalo.
6. Investigator’s report on Frank Brusco, NYCLC, box 31, folder 9.
7. Investigator’s report on Dominick La Polla, NYCLC, box 31, folder 9.
8. Louise Montgomery, The American Girl in the Stockyards District (Chicago, 1913), 57–58.
9. Perry Duis, “The Saloon and the Public City. Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1975), I:167–68.
10. Marlin A. Gorsch and Richard Hammer, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano (Boston, 1974), 9–11; Charles Angoff, When I Was a Boy in Boston (New York, 1947), 95–96; Harry Roskolenko, The Time That Was Then; East Side 1900–1913—An Intimate Chronicle (New York, 1971), 1.
11. “The Circle of Error,” Dziennik Zwiαzkowyi Zgoda (March 15, 1910), FLPS.
12. Montgomery, American Girl, 60; Ruth True, The Neglected Girl (New York, 1914), 60.
13. Narod Polski V, no. 13 (March 27, 1901), FLPS. See also Narod Polski XVI, no. 43 (October 23, 1912), FLPS.
14. Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, The City Worker’s World in America (New York, 1917), 130–31.
15. Katherine Anthony, Mothers Who Must Earn (New York, 1914), 51.
16. Simkhovitch, City Worker, 130–31.
17. Montgomery, American Girl, 57–58; True, Neglected Girl, 49.
18. Harry Bremer, “Report of Investigation: New York Newsboy” (1913), NCLC, box 4, chart #4; Maurice Hexter, “The Newsboys of Cincinnati,” Studies from the Helen S. Trounstine Foundation I, no. 4 (January 15, 1919), 127; Alexander Fleisher, “The Newsboys of Milwaukee,” Fifteenth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics, State of Wisconsin (1911–12), 76; Herbert Maynard Diamond, “Street Trading Among Connecticut Grammar School Children,” Report of the Commission on Child Welfare to the Governor, Supplementary Number (1921), 20.
Chapter Ten
1. Samuel Ornitz, Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl: Anonymous Autobiography (New York, 1923), 30.
2. See, e.g., National Child Labor Committee, “Street-workers,” Pamphlet no. 246 (July 1915), 3; George Hall, “The Newsboys,” Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the National Child Labor Committee (Supplement to the Annals, 1911), 100–2.
3. “Sex O’Clock in America,” Current Opinion LV (August 1913), 113; Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of America Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, Connecticut, 1981), 76; James R. McGovern, “The American Woman’s Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals,” Journal of American History LV (September 1968), 27; Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York, 1976), 136–72.
4. Chicago Vice Commission, The Social Evil in Chicago (Chicago, 1912), 247–51.
5. Ibid., 237; Mike Gold, Jews Without Money (1930; reprint, New York, 1965), 6.
6. Chicago Vice Commission, Social Evil, 6.
7. Edward Clopper, Child Labor in City Streets (New York, 1912), 111–13.
8. Ruth True, The Neglected Girl (New York, 1914), 19.
9. “The Pre-Adolescent Girl … Gads Hill Center,” LDT, box 7, folder 4, 13.
10. Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1980), 114–35.
11. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore, 1982), 20.
12. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York, 1943), 218; Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive (New York, 1982), 138–42.
13. See, e.g., “Minutes” of NYCLC Executive Committee, October 17, 1904, August 30 and December 20, 1905, and January 20, February 24, and May 8, 1906, NYCLC, box 11, folder 1, part 2, 3; Elsa Wertheim, “Chicago Children in the
Street Trades” (1917), JAMC, 9; Bruce Watson, “Street Trades in Pennsylvania,” American Child IV (August 1922), 121.
14. U. S. Department of Labor, Children’s Bureau, Child Labor Legislation in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1915), 382–417.
15. Lillian Wald, The House on Henry Street (1915; reprint, New York, 1971), 71–72.
16. See, e.g., on controversy over “stage children” in Chicago, S. H. Clark, “The Artist Child,” in The Child in the City, ed. Sophonisba P. Breckinridge (Chicago, 1912), 302–9.
17. Milton Berle with Haskel Frankel, Milton Berle (New York, 1974), 67–71.
18. New York Times, May 20, 1913, 1.
19. SPCC folders, LW, box 42.
20. James Paulding, “Enforcing the Newsboy Law in New York and Newark,” Charities XIV (June 10, 1905), 836.
21. John Commons et al., History of Labor in the United States (New York, 1935), III:435; U. S. Department of Labor, Child Labor Legislation, 382–417.
22. Paulding, “Enforcing Newsboy Law,” 836–37; Elizabeth C. Watson, “Report of Investigation Conducted for the NYCLC” (1911), NYCLC, box 3, folder 4, 3–8; see also “Report of Committee on Newsboys to the Board of Directors,” February 15, 1909, November 18, 1910, and March 2, 1917, in “Minutes” of NYCLC Executive Board, NYCLC, box 11, book 2; letters dated November 8, 1911, from superintendents of schools in Utica and Yonkers to George Hall on “enforcement of laws,” NYCLC, box 31, folder 12; “View of Situation—2/13/17—E. H. Sullivan,” memo, NYCLC, box 31, folder 22.
23. Paulding, “Enforcing Newsboy Law,” 836–37; Esther Lee Rider, “Newsboys in Birmingham,” American Child III (February 1922), 316; Alexander Fleisher, “The Newsboys of Milwaukee,” Fifteenth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics, State of Wisconsin (1911–12), 61–62; Wilma Ball, “Street Trading in Ohio,” American Child I (August 1919), 126; 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, 116; Maurice Hexter, “The Newsboys of Cincinnati,” Studies from the Helen S. Trounstine Foundation I, no. 4, (January 15, 1919), 165.