Transcriber’s Note:
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.
The Survey, Volume XXX, No. 3, Apr 19, 1913
THE COMMON WELFARE
THE STRIKE OF THE
JERSEY SILK WORKERS
For seven weeks the 27,000 workers in the silk mills and dye houses of Paterson, N. J., have been on strike for improved conditions and against a proposed change in method that will, they declare, alter the character of the industry.
The strike began with the broad silk weavers as a protest against the introduction of the three and four loom system. They were soon joined by the ribbon weavers and the dye house men, whose demands are for an eight-hour day and a minimum wage of $12 a week. The dye house men have been laboring in two shifts of twelve hours each. Their work is often carried on under unhealthful conditions of dampness, high temperature and poor ventilation.
All the strikers joined the branch of the Industrial Workers of the World which conducted the Lawrence strike. This is one factor which has caused tension in a situation, in which statutes dating back to colonial days have been brought to bear on a modern industrial struggle till a Supreme Court judge denounced the lengths to which the police have gone.
Back of the police incidents and the spreading of the revolutionary doctrines of the Industrial Socialists is a profound economic change involved in the introduction of the four loom system. This is not merely the substitution of machines for skilled men due to invention, but the supplanting of high-grade textile manufacture by low-grade output because of the greater profits in the cheap goods. It is as if a vineyard were giving way to a hay farm—a change which seriously affects the working population of Paterson.
In order to make the situation clear it is necessary to take a brief look at the history of the silk industry in this country. Twenty years or so ago the competition between Pennsylvania and New Jersey for the manufacture of cheap silks was keen, but within a few years the battle was over. Induced, it is said, by real estate companies, the manufacture of cheap silk on a large scale migrated to Pennsylvania. Great factories were built and leased on easy terms, and these were equipped with automatic looms, four of which could be operated by one girl or boy. There the wives and children of the coal miners furnished a cheap labor supply.
Since this migration the best grade of silk has been made in Paterson, and there has been no competition to speak of that the Paterson manufacturers needed to fear. Yet they have been making only moderate profits while the Pennsylvania manufacturers of cheap silk have been making fortunes. Under the system of multiple looms, the business of Pennsylvania, has expanded 97 per cent in the last six years; under the one and two loom systems of Paterson its business has expanded only 22 per cent in the same time. Therefore the Paterson manufacturers propose to compete in the manufacture of cheaper silks and consequently decided to introduce the multiple loom system. To them this is only a natural economic development, and the opposition of the workers they feel is irrational, as opposed to progress. This view is made apparent in a statement issued by the silk manufacturers’ association:
“As regards the three and four loom system, it is applicable only in the case of the very simplest grade of broad silks and as a matter of fact has for a long time been worked successfully and on a very large scale in other localities. Paterson cannot be excluded from this same privilege. No fight against improved machinery has ever been successful.”
The beginning of the change came in one of the big Paterson mills about a year ago and the strike of last spring[[1]] was at first against the four loom system. The strike became general, however, and this demand was completely lost sight of before the strike came to an end. Since then nine or ten other mills have installed the four loom system and a score have begun to require the weavers to tend three looms instead of two.
[1]. See The Survey of March 16, 1912.
The strikers claim that the new system will cause unemployment, as did the installation of the two loom system together with other improvements in the mechanical equipment of the loom some years ago, and that the logical consequence will be the employment of unskilled women and children in place of the skilled weaver, and a forcing down of the level of wages until the Paterson average of $11.69, as given in the federal report for the year 1908, becomes as low as the Pennsylvania average of $6.56. As the percentage of women employed in Paterson mills has increased in the last few years and as the average of wages given out by the manufacturers this year is under $10, there is basis for these fears. Nor do the manufacturers deny these possibilities; they claim that the loss of skill is an inevitable accompaniment of improved processes, and the replacing of men by women and children is only in line with the development in all the textile trades.
Some of the claims of the strikers are thus summarized by the Paterson Evening News:
“The best information obtainable appears to show that the alleged mechanical advantages of the new system have not proved themselves sufficient to offset the additional strain to which the care of three or four looms subjects the weavers; that the premium wages first paid as an inducement to users of the system have been pared down; that at present a day’s work under the system is proportionately less well paid than a day’s work at two looms; and, finally, that the wages of two loom workers have been depressed with the scaling down of the piece-rate paid to the three and four loom workers.”
In spite of the fact that it is only the large manufacturers who propose to install the new system, the strike is general. The multiple looms, which are large and equipped with automatic devices, can only be installed in large mills. By this system cheap silks alone can be made; the smaller mills must use the Jacquard or other small looms fitted to the making of the fancy grades of silk for which Paterson is famous. The small manufacturer, therefore, does not fear the installation of the new system in the large mills; but he does feel strongly that he has a grievance toward the workers in his mills who struck sympathetically for a wrong not their own.
But it is a very real fear that the entire industry will be undermined that has made the workers stand together, regardless of individual grievances.
While the desire to keep up with industrial progress and to realize large profits is the reason for the importing of the four loom system into Paterson; the desire to save their present standard of living and prevent their industry from coming into the hands of women and children like the other textile trades is the reason for the workers’ opposition. Today Pennsylvania and New Jersey present different phases of the industry, and New Jersey has had a higher wage standard; tomorrow with the triumph of the four loom system they may tend to an equalization of conditions.
The outstanding features in the strike now in its seventh week are lack of violence and disorder, the refusal of the employers to meet or confer with the strikers, aggressive repression by the police and the city government and the efforts of citizens to bring about a settlement. Although practically all the workers in the major industry of the city are on strike, there has been little disorderly conduct attributable to the strikers. There have been reports of the breaking of a window by a stone in a house occupied by a boss dyer and at least one attempt was made to damage a house by means of a bomb, but responsibility for these acts has not been fixed.
CITY OFFICIALS ADOPT
REPRESSIVE MEASURES
In striking contrast to the order maintained by the rank and file of the strikers, there have been actions on the part of the city officials that leading newspapers outside of the strike district have not hesitated to characterize as anarchical. Soon after the strike began and it became known that it was to be conducted under the auspices of the I. W. W., the police began to arrest strike leaders and others who addressed meetings of strikers, regardless of whether they had yet been guilty of any illegal act. Several of them were held in jail for a time and then so great was the outcry raised that for a period of two or three weeks these tactics were abandoned.
On Sunday, March 30, however, the police resumed their former tactics. William D. Haywood, the leader of the strike, had announced that he would speak at an open air meeting, and a large crowd gathered to hear him. As Haywood was going to the meeting place to speak he was approached by members of the police force. They told him that the chief of police had issued an order forbidding any out-door meeting. According to all reports, including testimony given by the police authorities themselves, Haywood acquiesced at once and passed the word to the assemblage that the meeting would take place in Haledon, an independent borough just outside the city limits of Paterson. Accordingly, Haywood started to walk down the street in the direction of Haledon and he was followed by the crowd. Just before he reached the city limits, a patrol wagon bore down upon him. Together with Lessig, another strike leader, he was arrested, taken before the Recorder’s Court, charged with disorderly conduct and unlawful assemblage under the English act of 1635. After being held in jail in lieu of $5,000 bail, both were found guilty of unlawful assemblage and were sentenced by the recorder to six months’ imprisonment.
A writ of certiorari was immediately sought by Haywood’s attorneys and a hearing on this appeal was held by Supreme Court Justice Minturn. When the evidence, most of it furnished by the police department, was in, Justice Minturn ordered the release of Haywood and Lessig. He was unable to find that there had been any unlawful assemblage. The evidence tended rather to show that Haywood was co-operating with the authorities in an endeavor to carry out their orders. At the time of this resumption of their activity the police began also to arrest pickets. From twenty to one hundred a day were taken to headquarters. After Judge Minturn’s decision, all those held in jail were discharged. Since then, while the arrest of pickets has gone steadily on, Recorder Carroll has refused to hold them.
Throughout the strike to date the manufacturers have consistently refused to meet with a committee of strikers or to discuss terms with them in any way. At one time a delegation of clergymen endeavored to get them to meet a committee of strikers in order to discuss grievances. This suggestion was instantly voted down. Last week, when a public meeting of citizens was held to consider whether or not the strike could be brought to an end, the manufacturers, through their representative, stated their position in just two propositions: First, the employers will refuse to meet any committee of strikers “dominated as they are by the I. W. W.”; second, they will meet any of their individual employes “who are not dominated by the I. W. W.”
All along there has been a lively public interest in the strike. Ministers and public-spirited citizens have at different times endeavored to ascertain the underlying causes and to co-operate in restoring harmonious relations. These efforts reached their most formal stage when last week at the call of the president of the Board of Aldermen a public meeting was held in the high school auditorium on Wednesday evening to which employers, strikers, church organizations, the board of trade, organizations of bankers and professional men, and the general public were invited. Representatives of the strikers explained their grievances, a single representative of the employers stated their position as just quoted, and the ministerial association came forward with a proposal for a legislative investigation. Finally, a committee of the Board of Aldermen proposed in a series of resolutions that a committee of fifteen be appointed to discuss a basis upon which the strike could be settled, the committee to consist of five representatives of the strikers, five representatives of employers and five men to be appointed from the membership of the Board of Aldermen. The resolution was passed by the unanimous vote of an audience two-thirds of which were strikers. The strikers appointed their committee. But the employers, in line with their official policy which has been against any meeting with any body of men even to discuss a settlement, refused to do so.
“A MAN’S
FRIENDS”
“I don’t believe there is a man in the country who will not put himself or some one he loves above the whole nation if he is put to a hard enough test.”
These words, spoken by one of the principal characters, contain the essence of a new play, A Man’s Friends, written by Ernest Poole and recently presented in New York. Without moralizing on the need for a wider social consciousness, Mr. Poole seeks to show the limits of the average man’s circle of human loyalty and how far his loyalty to the whole people’s welfare is inhibited by his devotion to his own “crowd.” The play aims to point out that, however much our attention has been focused on graft in its great anti-social consequences, a larger factor in thwarting social progress is our restricted loyalty to groups which are less than the whole people.
A district attorney fights a political machine which, through bribery, has defeated a new building code. He convicts the bribed alderman but cannot obtain from him any information as to the “men higher up.” At last he discovers that his own son-in-law was the go-between in the matter of the bribe. The intense loyalty of wife to husband is shown by his daughter who says to her father: “Your life and principles are nothing now—promise me you’ll keep Hal out of jail,” and by the wife of the guilty alderman who declares “it is not a question of right and wrong—it’s what I think of Nick.”
The play brings out the loyalty to one’s circle of intimates, shown in the refusal of the convicted alderman to divulge incriminating information; and the loyalty to a political coterie whose watchword is “You might as well be dead as a squealer,” and concerning whom the district attorney says: “It is the unwritten law of your system to perjure yourself to save a friend.” He further remarks to the boss, “You won’t help those not in your crowd—and your crowd is too small, even though you can call a hundred thousand people in New York by their first names.”
One element in the play is the definite human appraisal of just what graft and disloyalty to public welfare involve. It flashes out when the boss after telling how he had given a few dollars to a “down and outer” is silenced by the district attorney’s daughter who points out that he owns the gambling place in which the derelict lost his money. It is again emphasized when the district attorney says to those who appeal for leniency toward the men responsible for the defeat of the building code, “All right let’s be human,” and then refers to the 149 factory girls who lost their lives in a factory fire which the building code would have prevented. “People vote,” he says at another time, “with the man who laughs, but the laugh is too expensive.”
How the district attorney shows his own human qualities in the end by saving his son-in-law from prison, but in a way to render important service to the 9,000,000 people of the state, is the climax of the piece.
The play is intended to show how the absorption of the average man in his own affairs and in the interests of his small group of friends is responsible for popular indifference which often makes the conscientious public servant lonely and disheartened. The district attorney, as candidate for governor, has returned from a campaign trip. “There are one million men out for the graft and nine million who don’t care,” he says. His daughter replies: “That does not seem like you, father.” “Well,” he adds, “you ought to have seen them all along the line of my trip; big meetings, cheering, too, plenty of enthusiasm. But the minute I left each town I felt it all suddenly die right out. Every man jack of them back to his business, his job and his friends—the things he really cares about—and I felt as though I had carried on the cheers of each town. Each town throwing it all at my head and shouting ‘Go on, be a hero, save the country—only for God’s sake leave us alone, we have not time, we are busy.’”
BRIEUX’S “DAMAGED
GOODS” PRESENTED
“I didn’t know” bids fair to become an obsolete phrase in connection with the nature of the social evil, if the ripples started by the production of Brieux’s Damaged Goods in New York this spring extend as far as its sponsors intend. The Committee of the Sociological Fund of the Medical Review of Reviews believe that syphilis should no longer be regarded as a mysterious disease, whose ravages are to be shunned but its causes ignored.
Bernard Shaw’s preface to the Brieux play, with its warning against the usual treatment of the subject as taboo and its appeal for publicity and legal assistance in coping with the evil, was read by a clergyman well known for his human contact with every-day social conditions. The drama itself was simply staged and given a sympathetic reading by a strong cast. Almost every bearing of the menace on family and social life is brought out in a way well calculated to meet prejudice due to indifference, ignorance or tradition, and to create a conviction that here is a scourge to be conquered by publicity.
Those who saw the play had come with various mental attitudes. Some were even vaguely questioning whether they had come to see a play or hear a sermon. Not a few of the theatrical critics have dubbed it the latter, but to many parents this very quality made it seem peculiarly profitable for young men who are breaking loose from home life. By some it was even felt that the educational value of the piece would justify its being given a special performance at some holiday season, and that prevention through knowledge would thus be promoted.
NEW YORK CHARITIES
AND THE LAW MAKERS
Convinced that the state charitable and correctional institutions are facing a serious crisis, New York social workers are protesting against certain of the recommendations of Governor Sulzer’s Committee of Inquiry which they fear the Legislature may act upon. This committee, which was appointed by the governor to examine into the administration of the state’s departments in the furtherance of economy, has made recommendations, relative to state charities and corrections, ranging from the repeal of the act establishing the state industrial farm colony for tramps to the refusal of large part of the sums asked for repairs on state institutions. The Prison Farm for Women, Letchworth Village and the State Training School for Boys are among the institutions that would be most seriously affected. The Committee of inquiry also recommended that the State Probation Commission, a non-salaried body, be merged with the Prison Commission.
All told, there are fourteen state hospitals for the insane and sixteen state charitable institutions with a total of 42,000 patients and inmates. The Committee of Inquiry, partly on the alleged ground that the state has little control over the expenditures of these institutions, has made sweeping recommendations for retrenchment on projects to which the state has already committed itself by legislation. Social workers who dispute the findings of the commission point out that it had but a few weeks in which to gain an understanding of the workings and relations of the state institutions to various supervisory and administrative state bodies and that its statements as to excessive cost of housing the inmates are apparently made without a comparison of the situation in other states.
The Committee of Inquiry recommends that the state charitable institutions in some way ought to be consolidated, This, social workers urge, could not be done except by putting together state wards of entirely different types since the only institutions having a capacity of less than 300 are the State Women’s Relief Home, an institution for aged veterans and their wives; the Thomas Indian School; the State School for Blind: the State Hospital for Crippled Children, and Letchworth Village for the Feeble-minded.
For many years the state has been gradually building up a group of institutions for the care of the insane and feeble-minded, the epileptic, and delinquent cases requiring reformatory treatment. The insane are increasing at the rate of about one thousand a year. There is an accumulation at the present time of 5,000 patients in excess of the certified capacity of the fourteen state hospitals. To delay appropriations for new state hospitals already started, it is claimed, is only to put off what must be eventually done.
For the feeble-minded and epileptic New York has provided four institutions in the central and western part of the state which care altogether for about 4,000 inmates and one, Letchworth Village in the southeastern part of the state, which as yet has less than 100 inmates. This, when completed, will serve New York city and vicinity where more than half the population of the state centers.
The next largest group of institutions is the reformatories of which there are two for women, one at Bedford and one at Albion; one for girls at Hudson; and two for boys, of which the State Agricultural and Industrial School at Industry is known the country over as a model of its kind. This institution for caring for boys outside the metropolitan district, social Workers urge, should be paralleled without further delay as suggested by the Committee of Inquiry by one in Westchester County for the boys of New York City and its vicinity.
The state has also undertaken to round out its reformatory and penal system by providing a state farm for women over thirty years of age, the age up to which they may be received in reformatories, and the state industrial farm colony for tramps. These institutions are planned to care for offenders who now cause much expense to localities. Both of these institutions were established after long study of the subject by organizations and individuals expert in dealing with dependents and delinquents but the committee recommends the abandonment of the second and further investigation as to the desirability of the first.
After discussing the situation at a meeting held in New York on April 3, a committee consisting of Henry Morgenthau; Homer Folks, secretary of the State Charities Aid Association; John A. Kingsbury, general agent of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor; the Right Rev. N. G. R. McMahon, supervisor of Catholic Charities, and Mrs. John M. Glenn, was appointed to confer with the governor who has given the committee assurance that he is considering the situation as a whole and will not make separate judgments on each institution by itself.
A similar meeting was held in Buffalo. At this delegates were also selected who have interviewed the governor in behalf of the important humanitarian projects undertaken by the state in the last ten years which are now threatened.
SLEEPING IN THE LAVATORY AT BEDFORD
BEDFORD REFORMATORY
NOW FACING A CRISIS
It was not much more than a year ago that, in connection with the founding of the Bureau of Social Hygiene, the New York magistrates began to make extensive use of Bedford Reformatory for women as a means of saving the young prostitute. And yet the reformatory is already facing a crisis through overcrowding.
The Committee on Criminal Courts of the New York Charity Organization Society has appealed to the public to write, urging an appropriation of $700,000 for this institution, to the leaders of the Legislature: James J. Frawley, chairman Finance Committee of the Senate; Alfred E. Smith, speaker of the Assembly; Robert F. Wagner, majority leader of the Senate; Aaron J. Levy, majority leader of the Assembly. This the committee believes to be a conservative and economical estimate of what will be needed to put up new cottages and other buildings to accommodate present inmates, and to provide for reasonable growth in the next few years.
The letter sent out by the committee reads in part as follows:
“Twelve years ago the state authorities established Bedford Reformatory to care for women between the ages of sixteen and thirty, to try and save some, at least, of the young girls who were otherwise destined to a life of shame and degradation. What Bedford means to the community, the extraordinary work it is doing and has done is set forth in the enclosed article by Ida M. Tarbell.[[2]] That article is a challenge and a call to every man and woman in the state.
[2]. Miss Tarbell’s article which appeared in the American Magazine was reprinted as a pamphlet by the committee.
“Bedford Reformatory now faces a crisis.”
“Today there are 178 more girls there than the place will hold. They are sleeping on cots in the hallways, in parlors, in the gymnasium, in the lavatories, in the linen room, everywhere they can put a bed. Two girls in a room is the rule instead of the exception, notwithstanding the moral dangers of this.”
“Chief Magistrate McAdoo and Chief Magistrate Kempner and their associates in New York and Brooklyn have been asked not to commit any more girls to the institution and the stream has stopped for a moment. But the magistrates are now at their wits’ ends. What are they to do with first offenders? The young girl who is just embarking on this kind of career—shall they fine her and force her to work all the harder at her unlawful calling to earn the money with which to pay the fine? All are agreed that this is objectionable. Fines neither deter nor reform. Shall they send her then to the work-house to mingle in close confinement with the hardened offender, there to become embittered and to have a prostitute’s life fastened more firmly than ever upon her? They must do this or discharge her to walk the streets again.”
EDITORIAL GRIST
THE BATTLE LINES OF CHILD LABOR LEGISLATION
ANNA ROCHESTER
National Child Labor Committee
A majority of the twenty-nine state Legislatures which have been considering child labor laws this winter are still in session, so that many of the most important bills are still pending.
The campaign that is being waged against the most outspoken opposition is on in Pennsylvania, one of the two strongholds of glass manufacturers who employ boys under sixteen at night. With the single exception of West Virginia, where a bill based on the uniform child labor law was defeated this winter, night work for youths under sixteen is no longer allowed in the important glass-producing states. The uniform law was introduced in the present Pennsylvania Legislature by Representative Walnut and referred to the Committee on Labor and Industry. The committee reported it to the House with several amendments. The House rejected all but two of these. Now the uniform law, with the street-trading age limit reduced from twelve years to ten, and the age limit for breaker boys reduced from sixteen to fourteen, has reached its third reading in the House. If its friends can still protect it from the mutilations desired by the glass interests, the telegraph companies, the textile manufacturers and other opponents, Pennsylvania will be in a fair way to protect the 29,170 children employed in manufactories in that state.
The uniform law is also pending in Massachusetts, where it met no opposition in the hearing before the Committee on Social Welfare. Massachusetts has now a ten-hour day and the uniform law would bring her into line with Ohio, New York, Illinois, Mississippi and twelve other states that have the eight-hour day for all under sixteen.
But Massachusetts would lead the country in one respect if another bill that is likewise before the Committee on Social Welfare should pass. This provides for a five-hour day and compulsory school attendance for all workers under sixteen. If this is put into effect it will set a new standard for the Uniform Child Labor Law, which has been drafted by the National Child Labor Committee and endorsed by the American Bar Association. It is based on the best provisions of the best statutes now in force in the several states. Yet the National Child Labor Committee, fearing that two five-hour shifts for certain minors might tend to fasten on industry the ten-hour day for adults, would suggest that Massachusetts go one step further and fix a four-hour day for all under sixteen.
Connecticut, Ohio and Michigan will also advance beyond the standard of the uniform law if bills now pending are enacted. Michigan, it is true, is not trying to reduce the working day below nine hours, but merely to extend it to include canneries and four other occupations hitherto exempt. But Michigan and Ohio propose to raise the general age limit for employment from fourteen to fifteen, while Connecticut is considering sixteen years. Ohio intends also to increase the compulsory school attendance age from fourteen to fifteen for boys and sixteen for girls, and to require that boys of fifteen may not go to work unless they have completed the sixth instead of the fifth grade, the requirement of the present Ohio law and of the uniform law.[[3]]
[3]. The Ohio law has passed both Houses.
The Ohio bill includes, also, the street trading provisions of the uniform law. Special street trading bills are pending in Iowa, Nebraska, New York and also, we understand, in Michigan and Minnesota. Their outcome is doubtful because the average legislator seems to be blind to the bad results of street trading and cheerfully reflects the popular view that these “sturdy, little merchants” are all supporting widowed mothers and headed straight for the White House.
Many states are coming to recognize the needs of children over fourteen. This is evidenced not only by the wide discussion of vocational schools and the bills before the Legislatures of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Massachusetts, New York and other states, but also by the extension of child labor laws. Thus California, having proved the advantage of the eight-hour day for women and boys under sixteen, is considering the eight-hour limit for all under eighteen. Wisconsin is proposing to enlarge the list of hazardous occupations forbidden under eighteen and to provide for continued revision in the future by the Industrial Commission. The prohibition of night messenger service for those under twenty-one is included in the uniform law, as pending in Pennsylvania and passed in Delaware, but not in Massachusetts and Utah, where it has already been enacted. In Connecticut, a dangerous trades bill is pending and the bill for a general sixteen year limit includes an age restriction of twenty-one years for night messenger service. The same night messenger prohibition was included also in the bills based on the uniform law that went down to defeat this year in Utah, Idaho, Arkansas, Texas and West Virginia. Iowa, the only other state in which a night messenger law has been introduced this year, proposes an eighteen year limit.
Regulation of hours for all under sixteen was proposed in Nevada. In Tennessee, there is a bill now before the House Committee on Labor, providing for an eight-hour day under sixteen instead of the present sixty-hour week. A second measure adds mercantile establishments and the stage to the occupations prohibited to children under fourteen. Still another bill has passed in Tennessee, enlarging the Factory Inspection Department by adding a clerk and two deputy inspectors. The matter of enforcement has not received as wide consideration as it deserved. Industrial commissions are under discussion in many states, notably California and Ohio. In Iowa it is proposed to create within the Labor Department a bureau of women and children. Montana’s educational bill would provide for truant officers to enforce the child labor law. In Wisconsin a bill is pending covering some details of the issuing of employment certificates and in Utah it was proposed to increase the number of inspectors. Most important in this connection is the bill in Missouri to extend the jurisdiction of the Factory Inspection Department over the entire state (it is now confined to cities of 10,000 or more inhabitants) and to abolish the present fee system.
Two of the bills recommended by the New York Factory Investigating Commission and directly affecting child labor are still pending: one to prohibit work in cannery sheds by children under fourteen, and the other to prohibit the manufacture in tenement houses of dolls or dolls’ clothing and articles of food or of children’s or infants’ wearing apparel. Other bills recommended by the commission and already passed and signed standardize the issuing of employment certificates throughout the state; give the commissioner of labor power to inquire into the thoroughness of this work as carried on by local health officers; provide for physical examination in factories of children fourteen to sixteen. This last provision promises to be better than the present Massachusetts law because it permits the cancelling of employment certificates of children whom the examination reveals to be physically unfit for factory employment. Following the recommendation of the commission the present Legislature has also reorganized the Labor Department, established an industrial board, increased the number of inspectors and extended the jurisdiction of the Labor Department to cover the enforcement of the labor law concerning women and children in mercantile establishments in second class cities.
In a few states there is a fair record of progress in the legislation already enacted this year. New Jersey and Indiana have brought their educational requirements and provisions for working certificates up to the standard of the uniform law. Vermont has established a nine-hour day and Rhode Island a ten-hour day. The Vermont law also does away with the twelve year limit in certain occupations and substitutes the provision that
“A child under sixteen years of age, who has not completed the course of study prepared for the elementary schools shall not be employed in work connected with railroading, mining, manufacturing or quarrying, or be employed in a hotel or bowling alley, or in delivering messages, except during vacation and before and after school.”
Along with this the law has an absolute fourteen-year limit in “mill, factory, quarry or workshop, wherein are employed more than ten persons.” In North Carolina a bill was introduced with a fourteen-year age limit and a prohibition of night work, but the age limit was immediately amended back to the old thirteen (twelve for apprentices), the increased appropriation for inspectors was cut out, and only the night work prohibition was passed. The Child Labor Commission in Delaware drafted a bill based on the uniform law, which, in a much mutilated form, was finally passed and signed.
Only a few backward states show no progress whatever. Georgia defeated a child labor bill last summer. Alabama has no legislative session until January, 1915. The Florida Legislature has just convened and a bill based on the uniform law will be introduced. No child labor bill was introduced in South Carolina but a compulsory school attendance law was passed by the Legislature, only to be vetoed by the governor. The House passed it again over the governor’s veto, but it failed in the Senate by two votes. In New Hampshire, the only northern state with a general twelve-year age limit, a bill providing for a fourteen-year limit has been unanimously reported to the House and there seems to be a good chance of passing it.
The National Child Labor Committee is watching the situation and helping where it can in these campaigns. It hopes to report many more victories when the legislative season closes. Meanwhile it appeals to the citizens in every state to aid in the enactment and the enforcement of these laws.
ETERNITY AND A PENNY PILL[[4]]
RICHARD C. CABOT, M. D.
[4]. See Courses on Sex Hygiene. By Jane R. McCrady on page [124] of this Issue.
There are some things (chocolate, for instance, or tracts, or paper drinking-cups) that can be shot out of a slot at you and hit their mark. You can apply them to their uses at once. It is the same with the facts fired at you through the window of his booth by the railroad information man. Such facts set you on your track or your train at once.
But when people ask for clear directions about the train to proficiency in violin playing, belief in immortality, or understanding of sex, they always miss their train. Sometimes they complain of the officials.
After a course of lectures on sex last year some workers of my acquaintance handed in written questions beginning “What should I say to a young girl who,” etc., and were disappointed when no definite answer was forthcoming. To illustrate the difficulties of an answer let us ask a few parallel questions:
What paint shall I use for a Madonna?
What are the best words to use in a love sonnet?
What is the best book on being a millionaire?
What kind of bread makes you popular and handsome?
What liniment makes one’s sympathies most supple?
People rush to lectures on “sex hygiene,” sometimes for good reasons, sometimes to satisfy morbid curiosity, but often with a pathetic hunger for the bread of life. In the hope of forestalling such disappointments the lecturer should hang up before them a sign reading:
“This lecture will not solve fundamental problems. Seek ye the Lord.”
THE DAWN OF A BETTER DAY
A MANUFACTURER SPEAKS
Dudley D. Sicher
[This poem was read at a banquet of the Cotton Garment Manufacturers of New York during the last week of March. The author, a representative manufacturer, dedicated these verses, reflecting a new attitude toward employes, to his business associates.—Ed.]
Do we purchase Toil at the lowest rate
As we buy our cloth and thread?
Do our workers labor long and late
For the price of their daily bread
In gloomy lofts where shadows frown,
In foul, unwholesome air,
Till Want and Weariness drag them down
Where—we neither know nor care?
If such things be, they must pass away
Ere we hail the Dawn of a Better Day.
Have they wrought us harm in the darker days,
Have they kept the whole truth hid?
Have they told false tales of our works and ways
And of wrongs that we never did?
Be not too wroth at the hiss of shame,
But pass old slanders by.
And cleanse your shirts of the taint of blame
Where e’er the blame may lie.
Old feuds, old sores be forgot for aye
In the hopeful Dawn of a Better Day.
Let us wipe the slate of the bitter score,
Let us turn the blotted page,
And grant that we owe our workers more
Than the dole of a “living wage.”
They give us more than their time and skill
In the health and strength they spend;
And earn the right to the kindly will
And helpful hand of a friend.
We must give them more than the coin we pay
Ere we hail the Dawn of a Better Day.
So, here’s a task that we may not shirk,
For the toiling thousands plead;
We must give them comfort while they work
And help in every need;
We must lend them strength if their souls are weak
And teach them how to live;
Nor let us, all to meanly seek
Return for all we give,
As we lift our eyes for the gladdening ray
Of the golden Dawn of a Better Day.
If this light that leads us shall not dim
They will see, ere the course is run,
That the worker’s weal and the weal of him
Who owns the shops are one.
Then each shall have his rightful gain
Ungrudged—and great and small
Shall give their best of hand and brain
For the good of each and all,—
And we’ll stand together, come what may
In the brighter Dawn of a Better Day!
CIVICS
THE SCHOOL CENTER
HENRY S. CURTIS
Daniel said to Nebuchadnezzar: “Thou, O king, sawest and beheld a great image. His head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms were of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, and his feet part of iron and part of clay; and a stone smote the image upon the feet that were of iron and clay and brake them in pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken in pieces together.”
This image might represent America nearly as well as the empire of “the great king.” In the original democracies of Greece, the freemen met together in the market place to elect from their friends and acquaintances the officers who determined the policy of the state. The weakness of American democracy is that we have not organized this primitive element or demos on which it is supposed to stand.
Politics in our cities have been corrupt, because there have been no meetings of the community to discuss community affairs. The individual has often been reckless in conduct, because he was not acquainted in the section in which he lived and consequently had no social accountability to public opinion. Foreigners have come among us and drifted in and out of the city slum, bearing with them their racial antipathies to each other, and casting no anchor in the locality because at no time have they become a real part of a community. We have had no real city communities or neighborhoods but mere districts of people in no way organized or related to each other. The feet of the image are of miry clay.
In the country sections the situation is little better. In the days of the pioneer the early settlers were drawn together by common dangers and necessities into a brotherhood of the wilderness. They assisted in erecting the cabin of the newcomer. The women had their quiltings and their sewing circles. The whole community met together to marry the lovers and bury the dead. The school house was the common center, where Sabbath service, debate, music school, and “spell down” were held.
These conditions have undergone an almost complete change. The specializing of industry and new machinery have made farmers independent of their neighbors. The community uses of the public school have fallen away.
The last few years have seen a rapid advance in the principles of Democracy through the initiative, referendum and recall, the presidential primaries and other measures; but the fundamental unit is still unorganized. The feet are still of miry clay. To secure the democratic control of the community or district is the greatest problem of our democracy. This result demands that some agora, forum, or neighborhood center shall be restored to the people.
If a neighborhood center is to be created, the facilities which the neighborhood wishes to use must be brought together in a single place. Thus each facility offered will bring patrons, not to itself alone, but to all the others as well, as each department in a department store brings customers to all the others.
A comparatively few years have seen the cities take up as municipal undertakings the public playground, the municipal gymnasium and bath, the branch library, and a few scattered beginnings in the way of municipal camps. While the undertakings have been carried on by the city and maintained by public funds, they have not been really furnished to all the people of the city, as a rule, because they have not been accessible. They have not been placed in communities, they have no definite clientele. They cut across the lines of the existing organizations of the people. The individual has no direct touch with the community that brings him into relationship with them. All of these facilities are at least as much for the children as adults, but they lie off the beaten paths of child travel, and hence secure a minimum rather than a maximum use.
The only public institution that is central to each community is the school. If this can be made the nucleus around which the other institutions can be gathered, it may be possible to create again a modern forum or market place, that will serve the same purpose as did the old. The large undertakings already under way for the improvement of the school itself can not be carried to full success without certain radical improvements in the school equipment. The playground activity demands larger playgrounds. New York is now paying more than a thousand teachers every summer to direct the play in its school playgrounds; but there are very few schools that have an out-door playground fifty feet square. It is not the same thing to play in a school basement that it is to play in the open air. The school basement is always sunless, and the air is not the same as it is in the open. The French requirement for the lighting of school buildings is that there shall be no other building within a distance equal to the height of the school. The gymnastic work, to secure the best results, must be done in the open air, and not in a dusty gymnasium. In London, all the longer exercises are always taken out of doors in pleasant weather. Some foreign cities now require a certain minimum playground space for every child. In Munich this is twenty-five square feet. In London it is thirty square feet. This would mean an acre of playground to 1,452 children, not a large amount surely, and much less than should be taken in the smaller cities. Throughout the middle states and the West, now generally a block for all new schools is given. In some cases the usefulness of the ground is being nearly destroyed by placing the school building in the center, but where the building is placed at the side or end, as it should be, this ground becomes available for many school and community uses.
This block should be shaded by trees. It should have grass plots, if they have to be renewed every year, as Jacob Riis says; and running around the outside should be a narrow space for children’s gardens where all the nature work material of the school could be grown. In one corner should be a school menagerie and benches should be placed under the trees.
During the school hours, the school park should belong to the nurses and mothers with baby carriages. From three to ten p. m. every school day, and all through the summer, it should be the playground of the children and the social center of the adults. In the winter it should be flooded for skating.
Each of the new public schools of New York contains a gymnasium, but most of these are on the top floor, and they have to equip another in the basement for the play center. Each of the new public schools of Cincinnati contains a gymnasium and a swimming pool, and they are generally on the ground floor or near it. Most of the new high schools all over the country contain a gymnasium at least and many of them swimming pools as well. Wherever these facilities are furnished, they are generally used by the school during the day and by the public at night. A number of cities are now building municipal gymnasiums and baths also, but the children want to use the gymnasium and swimming pool during the day, the adults want to use them at night, it is not evident that two sets of gymnasiums and two sets of swimming pools are necessary.
Berlin has an interesting solution of this problem. They house the gymnasium in a separate building in the yard. In this way the noise and dust which is incident to exercise is removed from the school, and it is possible to give more freedom to the work. In most cases there is a swimming pool in the basement where the pupils are taught to swim. But the chief advantage of the gymnasium’s being in a separate building is that it is thus more accessible to the general public as a free gymnasium and bath at night.
Our public schools and especially our summer schools are greatly hampered by the lack of library facilities. The school in order to be successful must create a love of reading. It cannot do this without books. At present only a small proportion of the children have access to a library, and this is often so distant that little use is made of it. The reason is simple, the library is a strange place and its methods are unknown. If the child, despite this, manifests his desire to draw out books, he must often first get some one to be his security for their return, and this is not always easy for a child of laboring or foreign parentage. But the school may safely trust the child because he is a member of the school and known and responsible, when it would not be at all safe for the public library to give out a book to him.
Parents often have little time or inclination to go to libraries for books, but depend on their children to provide them with reading. If the library were a separate building in the school yard or a part of the school, it would be no task for the children to take out and return as many books as might be desired in the home. The growing use of the school as a social center makes it increasingly important that the branch libraries should be connected with it.
The theaters of Greece and Rome were public institutions. Many of the best theaters of Europe are subsidized. The dramatic form of representation is the one that is nearest to having the experience itself. The socialized theater might undoubtedly be one of the greatest agencies for good that could come into any community.
In the past the expense of the public theater has been almost prohibitive; but to the credit of Thomas A. Edison be it said, that he has brought the theater to every man’s door. Most of our new schools contain auditoriums, and the state and city departments of public instruction will soon be required by public sentiment to furnish educational moving-picture films to every school in the state. With the addition of the theater the success of the school social center and the organization of community life is assured.
Besides these activities which should be connected directly with the school itself, the school is the best dispenser of much of the social betterment work for children. If each school had a camp in the country, it could make a much wiser selection of children to be sent there than any fresh air agency can do. No one child would be sent out successively by half a dozen different societies to the exclusion of the needy but timid child. Judging from a very limited experience it has seemed to me that the children are not at their best in the fresh air camps. Often away from all their friends and acquaintances they are homesick and feel that this trip and this camp have no connection with anything else in their lives.
Besides these great disadvantages under which the present system works, there are corresponding advantages that are lost to the school. With such a camp, there would be an opportunity for nature study and gardening of a most approved kind. Athletics might be so carried on as to supply many of the deficiencies of the school year, and boy scout patrols might be organized for all the older boys. But, best of all, the children would then learn to meet their teachers on a common footing and the tone of the school would be improved.
This extension of the school would not mean for the most part a large increase in expense. Already we are getting the larger playgrounds, the auditoriums, the gymnasiums, and the swimming pools in our new school buildings, but the cities are also building municipal baths and gymnasiums, small playgrounds and public libraries in places that have no relationship to any definite community. It is mostly a question of locating without duplication the facilities that all need in places where they will be accessible to all.
We may well ask ourselves if the school is competent to take these new responsibilities. The answer must be that at present the average school principal is certainly not competent to take charge of these new phases, but that men usually rise soon to new responsibilities or new men appear to take their places. These new relations would bring the school and the home together, would make the school a part of life, would give the pupil a new set of associations with his teachers and with study, and in every way would redound to the good of the school and the community.
MUNICIPAL MUSIC IN NEW YORK
S. H. J. SIMPSON
When the sailing list of each trans-Atlantic liner reads like the program of an all-star gala performance, and conductors, managers and husbands also sail, the small number of the cultured rich who maintain music in New York go likewise; but the city is not left empty. Then the Metropolitan assumes a perpetually “morning after” appearance; so, too, Carnegie Hall; and the new piano emporium will serve as a sounding board for band concerts across the way. It is to these band concerts—not only in Bryant Park but in almost every park and pier in the city—that the reader’s attention is called.
The vastness of New York is one of the greatest problems confronting any public spirited enterprise which aims to reach that vague, elusive faction—the people. The problem has been met and fairly solved musically by the three men who are responsible for the invasion by band and orchestra of the city’s parks and piers during the past three years. It is refreshing to meet with a movement which aims toward no tangible education, moral rescue or poor relief, and to find a department of city government frankly idealistic enough to organize a force whose only aim is the presentation of pure beauty. And it is curiously paradoxical that this movement should have found its opportunity in New York. It is, nevertheless, true that New York supports more entirely free summer concerts than any city in the world.
At the beginning of the current municipal administration the park and pier music in its present form had its birth in the constitution of a committee consisting of the commissioner of docks and ferries, the commissioner of parks and a new official designated as the supervisor of municipal concerts in parks and recreation piers. To the latter is due the lion’s share of credit for the ideals, the organization and the practical working of the system. To the commissioners New York owes a debt for their hearty co-operation, and in some cases, acute personal interest in the problems of the undertaking.
Not only has the size of the music loving population been considered in the multiplication of concerts, but the varieties of appreciation and the national tastes of different neighborhoods have been sympathetically studied by Arthur Farwell, the supervisor. The $100,000 annual municipal appropriation is divided between the piers and parks, and provides for a force of about seventy bands and conductors. Extraordinarily interesting is the study of neighborhoods in connection with the make-up of programs. This is especially so among the docks. The long pier at 129th Street, with an orchestra attracts what the directors are pleased to designate as the “high-brow” crowd. The call there is for the best in operatic and symphonic music—two and three movements of symphonies are often given. Selections from Italian opera flourish at East 112th Street, and at East 3d Street, all sorts of Jewish religious music is featured. The only crowd which has given any trouble assembles at West 50th Street, and the largest of the pier audiences is found at East 34th Street. Probably the most generally representative gathering is in the Mall in Central Park, where seven concerts a week are given in summer.
In thus cursorily reviewing the facts of the condition of municipal music in New York, only the smaller part of the situation is discussed. The movement, under its present impetus, is new, and to a large number of people, unknown. Although it is beyond the scope of the present article to consider, in any detail, the ethical aspect of the situation, it is, nevertheless, appropriate, in view of the comparative untriedness of the idea, to answer a few questions which are constantly brought up by those who are interested in the conditions. Even so, it seems that the time has come when the movement may fairly be said to have passed the experimental stage, if success may be measured by popular approval.
It merely remains to count the numbers in attendance. And here we find the answer to the most frequent query as to whether there is sufficient popular demand to warrant all this effort. The question has been submitted to a practical referendum. Do the people want it? Although no formal count of the audiences has been made it has been estimated that they ranged during the summer of 1912 from 5,000 to 15,000, in the various localities. In Central Park, every seat in the Mall and on the terrace was filled by eight o’clock, and stragglers wandered about the outskirts or stood packed between the benches all the evening. Every spot within hearing was filled, and it was with some difficulty that aisles and passages were kept clear. Nor is this audience a casual one. Any number of habitues are noticeable, night after night, in the same seats—jealous of their places—and night after night, the same tired mothers are there, with the same baby carriages. And way off, along the driveways, or here and there in a street near the docks, a policeman, a laborer, a little street urchin, may sometimes be seen to stop, and, “lifting his head in the stillness,” listen—and pass on.
This attention is, with few exceptions, so marked, that it, of itself, answers another question: Isn’t all this stuff way above the heads of the people? Again, the size of the audiences furnishes the most convincing answer. Theoretically, of course, the best, being the most human, is above no one’s head. But even practically, no genuine heterogeneous crowd of “street-bred people” trails from the dark places on a hot night—carrying or wheeling babies, with small children tugging at the skirts or clamoring to be carried—to hear such things as are above its head.
The aim of the movement is distinctly not educational in the instructive sense, nevertheless, the popular interest in the programs has been taken into consideration by Mr. Farwell in his brief and readable program notes. These give simple, important facts relating to composers and compositions, and do not attempt any detailed analyzation such as is familiar to the average concert goer. That these find a place, would seem to be proved by the knots of people who gather, program in hand, under the lights.
Underlying the entire discussion of this, or any purely artistic movement in this country, there is often the question: What’s the use? Be the reason what it may—personal gratification, civic pride, or any other cause—it is almost safe to say that no citizen grudges New York its parks, its buildings, or its Metropolitan Museum of Art. Why, then, its public music, which gives innocent pleasure, rest, perhaps inspiration to thousands? I do not think that this is grudged to the people. Its neglect is simply a matter of ignorance, rather than indifference, on the part of many men who regularly pay their opera and symphony subscriptions, and who have watched with interest the efforts of several organizations to bring the price of concert tickets down to a low figure. But this philanthropic effort does not strike at the root of the matter. Ideally, music should not have to be offered to the people as a commodity, nor as a charity, nor, primarily, as an education. It should stand, rather, as a temple, to which they may come gladly and freely, and from which they may go full hearted, carrying its best with them.
And this has been accomplished in the piers and parks in the last three years. But the winter contrast is striking. Fed up all summer, it seems hardly fair that men should be starved all winter. The daily papers printed, during September, 1912, a number of letters, asking why these concerts could not be continued through the winter months. There is but one solution of the problem—the municipal orchestra—and in this connection I cannot do better than quote a letter, written by Mr. Farwell to the New York Times, in response to the various suggestions and inquiries:
“The Central Park concerts have shown once for all that the greatest in music appeals directly and powerfully to the people when it is given to them under the right conditions. This is one of the mysteries of music—its power to short circuit an intellectual by a spiritual process. To wait until some hypothetical time in the future for the high gift of music to be given to the people is to be both dilatory and blind. The time for national initiative is at hand. What the people of New York really need is a permanent municipal symphony orchestra.”
Popular response to good music is no longer an open question. The people have answered it conclusively, and popular demand has become a live issue.
THE HOUSING PROBLEM AS IT AFFECTS GIRLS
EDITH M. HADLEY
President Chelsea House Association, New York
In a factory town, at the lunch hour, have you ever consciously watched the girls and women thronging down the steps and filling the streets surrounding the workshop? Have you listened to their noisy laughter and scraps of conversation and tried to understand their meaning? In 1910, when the last Census of Manufactures was taken, there were over 1,500,000 of these girls and women—factory workers in the United States.
In a large city at nightfall, when the lamps are lighted, have you ever observed the streams of girls flowing into the streets from the offices and great department stores? Again at night, have you seen the girls, waiting at the entrances of tenement houses or on the street corners for their “gentleman friends” who are to emancipate them for a few hours from their cramped and dingy environment? And have you asked yourself where and how do these girls live?
During the last few years we have heard so much about the discontent of the labor classes, the “restlessness of the present age,” that the phrases fall upon unheeding ears. But it takes no Socialist to understand that, if a family man’s expenses are $900 a year, and that working to the best of his ability he can earn only $700 to $800, and that if it costs a girl $8 a week to live, and she cannot earn that much, there must be discontent. It is time for the community to regulate such conditions.
The question of wages is so closely allied to the question of housing that a study of the latter involves some knowledge of the former. Cost of living and standard of living must be approached from a fact basis. Studies by Robert Chapin, Scott Nearing and the commission appointed by Congress, indicate that a man, his wife and three children under fourteen, cannot live and maintain efficiency under $900 a year on the Island of Manhattan. This is not excessive for Boston, Buffalo and Chicago. It is low for Pittsburgh, a little high for Philadelphia and Baltimore but a fair average for the great cities east of the Mississippi and north of Virginia.
Investigations prove that there is no great wage variation in different sections of the country. In the West wages run slightly higher than in the East, and in the larger cities than in the smaller towns. From a study of 1,391 New York girls working in department stores, the average earnings were reported as $4.69 a week during the first year and $5.28 the second. They increased in ten years, to $9.81, during which period many fall out of the ranks. Buyers and expert saleswomen remain. Their average earnings mount up to $13.33. In factories the average earnings of 3,421 girls showed $4.62 a week for the first year and $5.34 for the second year. After ten years’ experience $8.48 was reached.
The majority of girls at work live at home and, in many cases, have to a certain extent the protection of their family. But an ever-increasing number of girls are entering the towns and cities, quite alone and friendless, to earn their way. These girls either keep house, live in families, in boarding and lodging houses or in the organized boarding house.
The girl who lives at home usually gives all her earnings to her parents—over 84 per cent working in shops, and 88 per cent in factories in New York city, and a similar number in Chicago and St. Louis. The parents rely upon their daughters for an exact amount of income, so that these girls are in no sense “pin money workers.” The girl at home in New York city usually lives in a three to five-room flat in a tenement house, for which her father pays from $10 to $35 a month; and into these cramped quarters, one, two or more boarders are frequently taken.
In New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Minneapolis and St. Paul, it has been estimated that about 65,000 girls, exclusive of stenographers, office girls, nurses and teachers, are without homes, and entirely dependent upon themselves for support. Girls with a low standard of living can live more cheaply by keeping house than in any other manner. This means that several girls may join together and rent a two or three room flat. After their daily work of eight to twelve hours in factory, shop or office, is over, they have the housework to do—cleaning, cooking, washing and sewing. A girl keeping house or living in lodgings may save on food. She may go without breakfast or lunch, or have bread and coffee for breakfast, bread for lunch, and bread and soup or meat for dinner. She may spend part of her evenings making clothes, the material for which has been bought with money saved from food. “Oh, my, where would we get our clothes, if we bought meat every day?” asked one girl. How long do these girls remain economically efficient?
Fortunate is the girl who can find a home with some respectable tenement house family. Here she frequently underpays. Anna Friedman earns $7 a week as cashier; she lives with Mrs. McCoy in a $27 a month five-room flat. Anna pays $3 a week for her accommodation, but considers herself entirely self-supporting, as Mrs. McCoy’s husband is absent part of the time, and Anna’s companionship is of some value. She therefore has a margin of $4 for clothes, laundry, amusements, sickness and incidentals, and is well off. Girls living in this way usually associate with the family, using all rooms in common.
The most dangerous way in which a girl can live is in a lodging, or as they are called “a furnished-room house.” Investigations of forty-three boarding and lodging houses in one city showed that five were known to be houses where fast women lived. “Not only were good and bad houses on the same block, but good and bad people were living in the same house.”
Freda Lippeg earned $3 a week, and paid $1.50 for her room; her food, which she cooked in her room, cost her $1.46. Seeing how easy it is for them to get plenty to eat, pretty clothes to wear, and to have “good times,” what temptations are placed in the way of such girls living in houses with immoral women!
While a landlady may prove to be a girl’s best friend, giving her advice, trusting her when she is unable to pay, even lending her money, in the majority of cases the girl has no supervision at all. With the exception of houses in Philadelphia, where the wage earner’s standard of respectability demands a sitting room, few houses can afford to have one. As a lodging house is now conducted, the landlady’s net profits, are usually free rent of her room and $150 a year. As the parlor is the best paying room, the requirement of its use for lodgers would mean a readjustment of rents, either of house or rooms or both. So the girls receive their “gentlemen friends” in their bed rooms.
For the young girl in a strange city, earning moderate wages, no manner of life is so capable of approaching that of the home as the organized boarding house. Scattered throughout the United States are a number of these houses, but the supply can in no way approach the demand. In many cases they are too expensive for the poorer girl to afford. Few of these houses aim to be self-supporting, which fact also deters many self-respecting girls. The girl rightfully wishes to be a customer at the boarding house, and not an object of charity. The rules in some of the houses are stringent; sometimes a closing hour is enforced, and girls returning later may be locked out. Nearly all have an age and a wage limit. But they all have a drawing room which is usually furnished with a piano, books and magazines. Here girls may receive their friends, and have the companionship of other girls. Often warm friendships are formed.
The welfare of the house depends upon the “housemother,” whose opportunities and responsibilities are unbounded. To be able to keep a clean, well ordered, full house; to supply an ample amount of nourishing food; to receive enough board money from the girls to cover all expenses without dunning them is no easy matter. But in addition to this to be sympathetic without being partial or sentimental; to be able to care for the tired and sick; to be patient and firm with the hysterical; to understand and direct youth, gayety and extravagance; and to help the girls who are in danger of losing their “woman’s heritage,” a woman must give the best that is in her. The Eleanor Clubs in Chicago; the Ladies’ Christian Union Houses, the Chelsea House Association and the Virginia in New York; and the Girl’s Friendly Society Lodges in New York, Providence and Louisville are helping to solve the housing problem for girls. But why have we not hundreds, instead of tens of these houses? Can we not see the relationship between unsanitary, overcrowded homes, the loneliness and often vicious environment of many lodging houses, and human waste and immorality?
“If, because of our privileges, because of our warm, comfortable clean homes, we can not say to these girls ‘My sister come home,’ surely it rests upon us to do it in some community way. And if we can not get the housing of girls taken up as a community duty, then all the more must we struggle by private enterprise to find out the way. We must say there shall be no town throughout the length and breadth of our land where the girl can not find safe shelter, a place which if her need is great, she may call home.”
JERSEY HOUSING ASSOCIATION FORMED
One hundred and seventy-four delegates attended the first state housing conference and participated in the organization of the New Jersey State Housing Association, in the City Hall, Newark, last month. The conference and the formal organization of the association had its inception at the National Housing Conference in Philadelphia in December, 1912, when William L. Kinkead of Paterson and Captain Charles J. Allen, secretary of the New Jersey Tenement House Department, gathered the New Jersey delegates and took the preliminary steps which led to the recent action.
Among the speakers were John A. Campbell, president of the State Board of Tenement House Supervision; former Governor Franklin Murphy, James Ford of Harvard University and his brother George B. Ford of Columbia University, who had just completed an exhaustive survey of Newark, for the City Plan Commission; Judge Harry V. Osborne, of the Essex County Court of Common Pleas; Richard Stevens, Miles W. Beemer and others.
The dominant note in the conference was the proposed amendment to the present Tenement House Law of New Jersey which Professor George B. Ford referred to as “the best law of its kind in America when enacted in 1901 and not far behind the best laws of its kind at this time.” The delegates were agreed that the present law should be amended to include two family houses, many of which it was agreed are in worse condition than the tenement houses.
Another proposed amendment which practically all the delegates favored was to require that all tenement houses three stories high be equipped with fire escapes. The law at present reads that outside iron fire escapes be provided on all non-fireproof tenement homes more than three stories in height. It was stated that the enactment of the proposed amendments would necessitate a considerable increase in the staff of the Tenement House Department and the delegates pledged themselves to use every effort to secure a larger appropriation for additional inspectors and clerks.
In his address Col. Franklin J. Murphy, Jr., called attention to the fact that the city of New York, with 104,000 tenement houses, spends $800,000 annually for the tenement house department, or $7.69 per house per year, while in the last fiscal year New Jersey allowed $51,000 for the tenement department, with 71,000 houses, or seventy-one cents per house per year.
The purposes of the association as set forth in the constitution adopted by the conference are as follows:
1. To improve housing conditions in every practical way.
2. To bring to the attention of each community the importance of right housing conditions and the consequence of bad conditions.
3. To study in various cities and towns the causes of congestion of population and bad housing conditions and the methods by which such conditions may best be remedied.
4. To aid all local housing committees by advice and direction and to encourage the formation of such committees where they do not at present exist.
5. To act as a clearing house of information for such agencies and committees and to furnish advice and suggestions to those interested in housing reform and generally to promote popular interest in the subject.
6. To aid in the enactment and enforcement of laws that will
a—Encourage the erection of proper types of dwellings;
b—Secure their proper maintenance and management;
c—Prevent the erection of unfit buildings;
d—Bring about a reasonable and practical improvement of the older buildings;
e—Secure reasonable, scientific and economical building laws.
7. To aid in defending such laws when enacted and in correcting and amending them from time to time to suit changing conditions.
IOWA’S REMOVAL LAW
Iowa claims to have in her “removal law” the best recall of all. This law makes it the duty of the attorney general, or, if he fails, of the governor or any six citizens, to take steps in the courts for the summary removal of any officer of a town, city or county who neglects to enforce any law.
EDUCATION
THE BEGINNINGS OF A NEW SCIENCE
If a man about town should drop into the Harvard psychological laboratory and see an operator in rough clothes slowly turning a small crank and calling off disconnected letters of the alphabet while a changing panorama of squares and digits passed by beneath a glass plate, he might think that this was the university’s day off and that here was a new game for the amusement of the employes. But if he should ask “What’s the ante?” and want to sit in, he would soon discover his mistake. He would learn that he was looking at one of the few experiments yet contrived for picking the right man for the right job. He might even be told that this was one of the wee beginnings of a new science which, by systematically placing the psychological experiment at the service of education and industry, may some day prevent the tragic waste of misfit starts in life and go far toward solving the problem of vocational guidance for the schools. The observer would probably be warned, however, against construing what he saw as any endorsement of the social desirability of guiding children into this vocation or that.
The device of the changing panorama is designed to test a man’s fitness to be a motorman on an electric street car. Worked out under the direction of Prof. Hugo Munsterberg,[[5]] it is calculated to discover powers of attention, discrimination and adjustment with respect to rapidly moving objects, some going at different rates of speed parallel to the line of vision, others crossing it from side to side. While Professor Munsterberg undertook to transplant the activity of the motorman into laboratory processes, he did not try to reproduce a miniature of the exact conditions under which the motorman works. As the crank is turned, a series of cards slips by under a glass plate, each card having two heavy lines down its center to represent a street car track. Along the sides of this track, between it and the curbstone at the edge of the card, are scattered various digits which have arbitrarily fixed movements, like the pieces on a chess board, though not so complex. The job of the person being tested is to pick out, as the cards slip by, the precise points on the track which are threatened by the moveable digits in the street. Some of these numbers represent pedestrians, some horses and some automobiles.
[5]. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, by Hugo Munsterberg. Houghton, Mifflin Co. 320 pp. Price $1.50: by mail of The Survey $1.62.
Tried motormen, says Professor Munsterberg, agree that they really pass through this experiment with the feeling they have on the car. Though the test is not regarded as yet perfected, its results are thought to be fairly satisfactory when compared with actual efficiency in service. Efficiency, in this connection, means chiefly ability to avoid accidents. Some electric railroad companies have as many as 50,000 accident indemnity cases per year which involve an expense amounting in some instances to 13 per cent of the annual gross earnings. Professor Munsterberg believes that it may be quite advantageous later on to subject applicants for the position of motorman to tests based on the principle involved in the one here described. Even in this inadequate form, he thinks, the test would be sufficient to exclude perhaps one-fourth of those who are nowadays accepted for service.
In a public address recently Leonard P. Ayres, director of the Division of Education of the Russell Sage Foundation, brought together all the psychological tests in vocational guidance which, so far as he has been able to discover, are being used in any completed form. Besides the simpler tests for vision, hearing and color discrimination to which pilots, ship officers and railroad employes are usually subjected, there are only three, he said, which have for their object the more difficult task of selecting from among all the applicants those best fitted to perform the work. One of these is Professor Munsterberg’s test for motormen.
Another is a test used in a bicycle ball factory, where girls inspect the small polished steel balls for flaws by rolling them over and over on one hand with the fingers of the other and examining them under a strong light. S. E. Thompson, the employer, soon recognized that the quality most necessary in the girls, besides endurance and industry, was a quick power of perception accompanied by quick responsive action. He therefore subjected his girls to the laboratory test which measures in thousandths of a second the time needed to react on an impression with the quickest possible movement. The final outcome was that thirty-five girls did the work formerly done by 120; the accuracy of the work was increased by 66 per cent; the wages of the girls were doubled; the working day decreased from 10½ to 8½ hours; and the profits of the factory were increased.
The third example which Mr. Ayres found of the application of psychological tests to the selection of employes in industry is a series of tests for telephone operators. These also were conducted by Professor Munsterberg at Harvard. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company employs 23,000 operators. Applicants for positions are given a preliminary training of three months in the company’s schools. During this time they receive salaries. So many eventually prove unfitted for the work that more than a third leave within six months. Not only does this involve financial loss to the company but it is a heavy handicap to young girls who are trying to fit successfully into the industrial life of the day.
The object of the tests was to develop methods whereby the unfit girls could be eliminated before instead of after entering the service. The girls were examined with reference to memory, attention, general intelligence, space perception, rapidity of movement, accuracy of movement, and association. The results showed in general that those who came out best in the tests were most efficient in practical service, while those who stood at the foot of the list failed later and left the company’s employ.
“It seems fair to conclude,” says Mr. Ayres, “that when such tests are perfected, short examinations of a few minutes each will prevent thousands of applicants from wasting months of study and training in preparing for a vocation in which they cannot succeed.”
While these three tests have been used only on actual applicants for positions, a fourth test has been applied to beginning students in stenography and typewriting to determine which ones possess the abilities likely to bring success. This has been worked out under the direction of Prof. James E. Lough of New York University and consists chiefly of putting the subject through slight movements with a view to measuring his ability in habit formation.
In addition to actual tests Mr. Ayres found that experimentation is going on with regard to other occupations. Munsterberg is experimenting on tests for marine officers. Ricker of Harvard has constructed apparatus for testing chauffeurs. Whipple of Cornell has done some work with tests for motormen. Seashore of Iowa has published a careful study of tests of the ability of a singer. So far as is known, no work in this field is being done in Europe.
By the extension and amplification of such means as these Professor Munsterberg deems it not at all unlikely that we may some day have a real science of vocational guidance. That there is need for a far more adequate way of linking up young people to their work in life he has no doubt. “Society relies instinctively,” he says, “on the hope that the natural wishes and interests will push every one to the place for which his dispositions, talents and psychophysical gifts prepare him.” But this confidence he regards as unfounded. To quote further:
“In the first place, young people know very little about themselves and their abilities. When the day comes on which they discover their real strong points and their weaknesses, it is often too late. They have usually been drawn into the current of a particular vocation, and have given too much energy to the preparation for a specific achievement to change the whole life-plan once more. The entire scheme of education gives to the individual little chance to find himself. A mere interest for one or another subject is influenced by many accidental circumstances, by the personality of the teacher or the methods of instruction, by suggestions of the surroundings and by home traditions, and accordingly even such a preference gives rather a slight final indication of the individual qualities.”
On the other hand, Professor Munsterberg recognizes that a valuable start toward enabling young people to make wiser selection of their work has been made by the agencies for vocational guidance already existing in Boston and elsewhere. But he says that most counselors engaged in studying the qualities of boys and girls about to enter industry seem to “feel instinctively that the core of the whole matter lies in the psychological examination,” and that for this they must wait until the laboratories can furnish them with really reliable means and schemes. They may then, he thinks, become the appropriate agencies for applying the methods of psychology. He instances the long list of questions which the late Professor Parsons, usually referred to as the father of vocational guidance, employed with the idea of finding out something definite about the mental traits of young people. Replies to questions of this kind says Professor Munsterberg,
“can be of psychological value only when the questioner knows beforehand the mind of the youth, and can accordingly judge with what degree of understanding, sincerity, and ability the circular blanks have been filled out. But as the questions are put for the very purpose of revealing the personality, the entire effort tends to move in a circle.”
Of course Professor Munsterberg does not undertake to pass judgment on the social desirability of vocational guidance of any sort. That, he declares, is not the business of the psychologist. His concern is with means solely, not with ends. If the laboratory develops a way of telling who are fit for stenography and who are not, that does not mean that all the fit should be urged to become stenographers. The vocation may be overcrowded. Again, if a test be devised for discovering what qualities are essential to the successful operative in a particular industry, it does not follow that all who want to enter that industry and have the needed qualities should be advised to do so. Conditions as to health, wages, hours, and a score of other things may suggest that another trade ought to be chosen. So that vocational guidance, if it shall ever be a closed and perfected system, will yet demand the supplementary services of the labor investigator, the sanitary expert, the industrial technician and whoever else can contribute to any phase of the problem of why this calling should be followed instead of that.
THE WINTER’S FIGHT OVER VOCATIONAL TRAINING
The past winter has been perhaps the stormiest season which the incipient movement for vocational education has had to weather in this country. Before state legislatures and national Congress the battle has been fought. In Washington, D. C. the Page and Lever bills granting federal aid to industrial education in the states inflicted mutual slaughter on each other and died in conference. In Illinois a fight has waged over two measures, one providing for the “dual” system of administration and the other for the “unit,” and the probability is that neither will pass at this session.
But in spite of these casualties the war has not been without its fruits. Indiana enacted practically without opposition what is perhaps the most comprehensive statute on this subject yet passed. The Indiana Commission on Industrial and Agricultural Education, appointed in 1911, published during the closing days of 1912 a vigorous report on the whole subject of vocational training for youth. The reasons why boys and girls need such training were put by the commission as follows:
“The larger part of the boys and girls leave school before the completion of the elementary course, unprepared in anything which will aid them in their immediate problem of earning a living with their hands. From statistics available in other states it is safe to estimate that there are fully 25,000 boys and girls in this state between fourteen and sixteen who have not secured adequate preparation for life work in the schools and who are now working in “dead end” or “blind alley” jobs, or in other words, jobs which hold no promise of future competence or advancement. The investigations in Massachusetts and New York city show that not more than one out of five of the pupils leaving school at fourteen do so because it is necessary to help make a living. The conditions are doubtless even better in Indiana. The remainder, four out of five, leave school for a variety of reasons, chief among which is the feeling among pupils and parents that the schools do not offer the kind of instruction which they need for the work they expect to do and which would justify them in foregoing wage earning for a time in order to get it.”
The commission found no organized effort in Indiana to put pupils in touch with the opportunities for life work. The pupils are in the main, it declares, left to their own resources in choosing a vocation except where enterprising teachers have been able to give personal advice. It believes that every city and town should survey the vocational opportunities within its borders and place the information, together with all information available on vocational work, within reach of the pupil at the proper age.
Contrary to the claims of some of those who are administering industrial education in other states the commission found that the largest problem in carrying out such training is the lack of teachers competent to do the work. “If the vocational subjects are to find and hold the place that is due them in the common schools of the state,” says the commission, “the teachers must be educated to handle them more effectively than they have been able to handle such subjects in the past.”
The Indiana statute, which was signed by the governor in March, established a state system of vocational education and gave state aid for training in industries, agriculture and domestic science, through all-day, part-time, continuation and evening schools. This work is to be carried on either in separate schools or in special departments of regular high schools. In every case, the local control is vested in the regular board of education for the community and the laws are to be administered as a whole by the State Board of Education. The state board has been reorganized so that seven of its members must be professional educators. The remaining five may be laymen. Two of the laymen must be citizens of prominence and three of them shall be actively interested in vocational education. One of these last three shall be a representative of employes and one of employers. Attendance upon day or part-time classes is restricted to persons over fourteen and under twenty-five years of age; and upon evening classes to persons over seventeen years of age. The state superintendent of public instruction is made the executive officer and a deputy superintendent is to be placed under him in charge of industrial and domestic science education. The agricultural work is carried on by another deputy.
Local communities are required to supply the plant and equipment for carrying on the work. When this has been approved by the State Board of Education, the community is to be reimbursed out of the state treasury to the amount of two-thirds the salary of each teacher giving instruction either in vocational or technical subjects.
In order to secure the benefit of the knowledge and co-operation of the layman, local school authorities are required to appoint, subject to the approval of the State Board of Education, advisory committees composed of members representing local trades and industries, whose duty it shall be to counsel with the board and other officials in the conduct of the affairs of the school.
In both Pennsylvania and New Jersey bills creating state systems of vocational education are likely to pass soon. The Pennsylvania measure has already gone through the House by a vote of 182 to 2. This latter bill is very similar to the Indiana act. The State Board of Education administers the act, with the state superintendent of public instruction as the executive officer.
The regular board of education is in charge of the local schools. They are required to appoint advisory committees composed of members representing local trades, industries and occupations, to aid them in making the work practical and effective.
In general the New Jersey measure is similar to those of Indiana and Pennsylvania. There also the work is to be administered by the State Board of Education and local boards of education, and may be carried on either in approved schools or departments; these departments must consist of separate courses, pupils and teachers. Advisory committees are not provided for in the act, but it is expected that these will be required by the board of education under authority conferred by previous legislation.
In Connecticut and New York, which have already made some provision for vocational education, laws are pending which considerably extend the scope of the systems. In Washington a measure establishing a “dual” system of vocational schools is regarded as unlikely of passage. In Massachusetts a pending amendment to a former act authorizes school committees, with the approval of the State Board of Education, to require every child between fourteen and sixteen years of age who is regularly employed not less than six hours a day, to attend school at the rate of not less than four hours per week, during the school year. Another measure which will probably become a law raises the compulsory school age from fourteen to fifteen, for all children, and for illiterates from sixteen to seventeen. Attendance on a vocational school of children fourteen years of age is accepted as school attendance.
FROM SCHOOL TO JOB IN PHILADELPHIA
A twentieth century verification of the scriptural truth that “to him who hath shall be given” is put forward by the Public Education Association of Philadelphia, which recently completed a study of the children in that city who leave school at fourteen or fifteen to go to work.
There are in the Philadelphia public high schools, says a pamphlet issued by James S. Hiatt, secretary of the association, 13,039 boys and girls. At the same time there is a like number, 13,740, who have been allowed to drop out of school at fourteen and to fight their industrial battle alone. For the former group, who are really more able to take care of themselves, the city pays $1,532,000 a year for further training in citizenship and preparation for life. For the latter group it pays nothing.
“Is this a square deal?” asks the association. “Is it economy on the part of the city to permit these child workers to go out untrained into industry, to give their lives before they are mature and then to become a burden upon the community?”
With regard to these 13,740 between the ages of fourteen and sixteen whom the school census of June, 1912, found to be at work, the study undertook to answer two questions: first, are the occupations in which the boys and girls are employed of such a nature that they will train for a competence in later life? Second, is the immediate wage received of sufficient importance to counterbalance the tremendous loss of power in those who face mature life unprepared? As a continuation of this investigation the Compulsory Education Bureau has followed up since September of last year and will continue to do so, every child who leaves school to go to work. The kind of job taken, the exact nature of the work done, and the wage received will be learned. About 1,700 labor certificates are issued in Philadelphia every month.
At the outset it was discovered that the problem is not one of the immigrant child chiefly. The percentage of American parentage was 50.2; of foreign parentage, 48.1; of Negro parentage, 1.7 Nor is it a problem of boys chiefly, for 6,849, or 49.85 per cent of the total, were girls.
The Survey has already told how the Vocational Guidance Survey of New York followed a group of boys and girls from the day they received their labor certificates through all the different jobs which they held during the next four or five months. The study emphasized the hit-or-miss jumping from one line of work to another which untrained youths are sure to resort to, acquiring no training and achieving no advance. The Philadelphia study furnishes a cross section of the positions held by this much larger group at a given moment. Forty-three per cent of both boys and girls were in the factory, where, says the report,
“the positions are largely mechanical and require but short time in learning, little responsibility, and great specialization of processes. These positions offer an initial wage which is alluringly high, but hold out little incentive for growth and but slightly advanced wages for the experienced operative.”
Twenty-nine per cent were in the store and the office, “where a few may advance to higher places, but it is evident that a majority must hold low-grade positions which require little preparation or skill.”
A comparison of the employments of both sexes showed that there is no kind of work which both boys and girls will not do. While boys predominate in the store, the office, in messenger service, street trades and skilled trades, girls have the largest number in the factory, in service and in house work. Yet twenty-five girls were exposed to the dangers of street trades and 118 boys were taken out of school to do house work in their own homes without pay. The diagram on the next page shows the percentages and numbers of the total engaged in the various lines of work, and the relative proportion of boys and girls in each.
When it came to tabulating wages the surprising discovery was made that with respect to 35.3 per cent of the total either no wage was received or the amount of it was entirely unknown to the family. Twenty-two per cent received between $2 and $4 a week, and 37 per cent between $4 and $6. Smaller wage divisions are shown here:
| Male | Female | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wages | Number | Per cent | Number | Per cent |
| Unknown or zero | 1,961 | 28.4 | 2,893 | 42.2 |
| Under $2 | 19 | .3 | 22 | .3 |
| $2 to $2.50 | 59 | .8 | 75 | 1.0 |
| $2.50 to $3 | 72 | 1.0 | 113 | 1.6 |
| $3 to $3.50 | 728 | 10.5 | 581 | 8.4 |
| $3.50 to $4 | 806 | 11.6 | 624 | 9.1 |
| $4 to $4.50 | 1,338 | 19.4 | 1,130 | 16.1 |
| $4.50 to $5 | 610 | 8.8 | 525 | 7.6 |
| $5 to $6 | 874 | 12.6 | 600 | 8.7 |
| $6 and over | 424 | 6.1 | 286 | 4.1 |
| Total | 6,891 | 100.0 | 6,849 | 100.0 |
Split up by sexes these figures show that 42.2 per cent of the girls were found in the group whose wages were unknown or zero, while only 28.4 per cent of the boys were in that group. For both boys and girls the largest number of those whose wages is known is found in the group which receive $4.00 to $4.50. The detailed comparison is here given:
| Wages | Number | Per Cent |
|---|---|---|
| Unknown or zero | 4,854 | 35.3 |
| Under $2 | 42 | .3 |
| $2 to $2.50 | 134 | .9 |
| $2.50 to $3.00 | 185 | 1.3 |
| $3 to $3.50 | 1,308 | 9.5 |
| $3.50 to $4 | 1,430 | 10.4 |
| $4 to $4.50 | 2,468 | 17.8 |
| $4.50 to $5 | 1,135 | 8.2 |
| $5 to $6 | 1,474 | 10.7 |
| $6 and over | 710 | 5.1 |
| Total | 13,740 | 100.0 |
The average wage for all boys who receive between $2 and $6 is $4.26; that for girls $4.19, the large number of girls who receive a comparatively high wage in factories bringing their average up.
The average increase, between fourteen and fifteen years of age, of the workers noted is thirty-seven cents. It is much less in some of the industries. “Does such a slight return and such a meager raise,” asks the report, “pay for all the loss of mature power, as well as for that efficiency which might be gained by longer continuing in the proper kind of training?”
WHERE THE YOUNGSTERS WORK IN PHILADELPHIA
The figures and percentages refer to parts of the whole 13,740 boys and girls found in the lines of work named. The drawings show roughly the ratio of boys to girls in each line. “Housework” means housework in own home.
The following conclusions are drawn by the association as a result of its study:
“1. That the problem of the working child is not an immigrant problem, since over 50 per cent of those reported as at work are of the second generation of American birth.
“2. That this is not the problem of the boy alone, since over 49 per cent of the workers are girls.
“3. That the vast majority of children who leave school at fourteen to enter industry go into those kinds of employment which offer a large initial wage for simple mechanical processes, but which hold out little or no opportunity for improvement and no competence at maturity.
“4. That wages received are so low as to force a parasitic life.
“5. That but slight advancement is offered the fifteen-year-old over the fourteen-year-old child worker.”
ILLITERACY AND THE RURAL SCHOOL
Hardly are we given time to grasp the Census Bureau’s new facts about illiteracy in the United States before the Bureau of Education gives us its own interpretation of some of them. Illiteracy, as viewed by the Census Bureau, means inability to write on the part of those ten years old and over. As a nation the number of illiterates among us decreased from 10.7 per cent of the population in 1900 to 7.7 per cent in 1910. In spite of this decrease a bulletin by A. C. Monahan of the Bureau of Education refers to the “relatively high rate of illiteracy” in the country and says that this rate is due not to immigration but to the lack of educational opportunities in rural districts. The percentage of rural illiteracy is twice that of urban, although approximately three-fourths of the immigrants are in the cities. Still more significant is a comparison between children born in this country of foreign parents with those born of native parents. Illiteracy among the latter is more than three times as great as that among the former, “largely,” says Mr. Monahan, “on account of the lack of opportunities for education in rural America.”
The decrease in national illiteracy during the decade 1900–1910 was not only relative but absolute, despite the growth of the population. In 1900 the figure was 6,180,069. In 1910 it was 5,516,163. But while illiteracy among the total population was decreasing, that among the foreign born whites remained almost stationary. In 1900 the percentage was 12.9, in 1910 12.7. Among the whites born in this country the decrease during the decade was from 4.6 to 3 per cent. Illiteracy among the Negroes showed a decrease of almost one-third. In 1900 44.5 of the whole Negro population could not write; in 1910 the percentage was 30.4.
The distribution of illiteracy between the sexes was very even. Among males it amounted 7.6 of the total, among females to 7.8. There was less of it among white females, however, than among white males, the percentage for the former being 4.9, for the latter 5. White girls and women born outside of this country show more illiteracy than men and boys of the same class, but those born in the United States show less than native males, as follows:
| Whites | Male | Female |
|---|---|---|
| Foreign born | 11.8 | 13.9 |
| Native | 3.1 | 2.9 |
The New England and the Middle Atlantic groups of states changed places in the illiteracy column between 1900 and 1910. At the former period New England was fifth and the Middle Atlantic states, comprising New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, fourth, but by 1910 New England had displaced the latter group. In both years the West North Central, comprising Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas, showed the least illiteracy of any of the geographical divisions, while the East South Central, comprising Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi, had the worst record,
The section known as the West almost caught up with the North during the decade, the respective percentages being 4.4 and 4.3.
Mr. Monahan’s bulletin goes briefly into the whole rural school problem. The author found 226,000 one-teacher schoolhouses in the United States, of which 5,000 are log buildings still in active use. Although more than 60 per cent of the children in the United States are enrolled in country schools, the rural aggregate attendance is only 51 per cent.
With the help of recent appropriations made by Congress the Bureau of Education has undertaken to make a careful study of the needs of the rural schools, and the bulletin just issued is one of the first definite results of the work.
WOMEN IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
How women have advanced from the educational ranks to the highest administrative positions in the public schools is revealed in figures just compiled by the United States Bureau of Education. Four states, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming, have women at the head of their state school systems, and there are now 495 women county superintendents in the United States, nearly double the number of ten years ago.
In some states women appear to have almost a monopoly of the higher positions in the public-school system. In Wyoming, besides a woman state superintendent and deputy superintendent, all but one of the fourteen counties are directed educationally by women. In Montana, where there are thirty counties, only one man is reported as holding the position of county superintendent.
The increase in the number of women county superintendents is most conspicuous in the West, but is not confined to that section. New York reports forty-two women “district superintendents,” as against twelve “school commissioners” in 1900.
MOTHERHOOD AND TEACHING
Motherhood and teaching collided in New York three weeks ago when the Board of Education refused to grant a year’s leave of absence without pay to Katherine C. Edgell, a high school teacher, who wanted to bear and rear a child. The board recorded its opposition by a vote of thirty-two to five. By a vote of twenty-eight to nine it shut off discussion because “too much had been published about this affair already.”
Mrs. Edgell is still on the payroll of the schools, although she has not been in attendance since February first. Inasmuch as it is the custom of the board to punish unexcused absence by dismissal for neglect of duty, it seems to have no alternative but to proceed to that extremity against Mrs. Edgell. This is just what was done recently in the case of Lily R. Weeks, who was absent some time on account of the birth of a child, though the board did not know the nature of her illness. Mrs. Weeks appealed her case to the state commissioner of education, before whom it is now pending.
This demand of Mrs. Edgell that she be allowed to continue in her profession though a mother is, of course, only a symptom of the world-wide movement of women into the gainful occupations of life. It reveals how acute has grown the feeling on this subject among some of the women teachers of New York. Heretofore any married woman teacher who wanted leave of absence to bear a child carefully concealed the nature of her illness from the Board of Education. At length, one woman stood out and asked that, as a matter of right, her position be kept open for her while she brought a new life into the world. Instantly scores of her colleagues came to her defense. Women lawyers passed resolutions in sympathy with her and physicians publicly approved her stand.
The case of Mrs. Edgell is not the first time that the New York Board of Education has expressed its opinion with regard to married women teachers. Until 1904 a by-law of the board provided that the marriage of a woman teacher should automatically cause her instant dismissal without further action. But the Court of Appeals decided in 1903 that a teacher could not be dismissed for marrying and the by-law was changed. Since then the board has apparently not been altogether friendly toward the married women in its employ. During the discussion that has attended the Edgell case it has been repeatedly asserted by principals and teachers that there are hundreds of women in the schools who have kept their marriages secret because of the well-known policy of the board to make it almost impossible for married women to secure promotion or increase in salary.
A physician who is a member of the school board and a member of the board of superintendents are authorities for the sweeping statement, that if this ruling is adhered to the board of education is quite likely to be responsible for 300 cases of deliberate abortion among the public school teachers of New York every year.
When the board, by its vote of twenty-eight to nine, shut off discussion because “too much has been published about this affair already,” it did what was destined to provoke hotter and longer discussion than ever. But underlying that there is a very general feeling that this subject presents many phases which should be given profound consideration, not a snap verdict. Would the distraction of a baby interfere with class room work, or the absence of the mother and teacher handicap her own children; or would having children of her own add something to a woman’s educative powers? What effect would the widespread continuance of married women in the schools have on men’s salaries? What is there in the practice and experience of other cities to help New York in deciding so big a question as the interaction of motherhood and teaching?
What protection should be thrown around the prospective mother is a question that is only beginning to be raised among professional and salaried classes. Up to the present nearly all women in these groups have resigned their positions, if not at marriage then at childbirth. No general policy of dealing with them seems to have been adopted either by public or private employers.
With women in the wage-earning class the case is different. In at least twenty countries or parts of countries in Europe legal protection is thrown around the working woman who bears a child. In Berne, Switzerland, all women “employed for purposes of gain” are prohibited from working for from four to eight weeks after confinement. In Ticino, Italy, no woman can work for six months after confinement. The conception underlying this legislation is not that mothers are not efficient workers, but that earning a livelihood must be made easier for those who want also to fulfill the other functions of womanhood. In England the period of prohibition is four weeks after, and in Germany six weeks. In Servia no woman can work for six weeks before nor six weeks after. In several of these places the position must be kept open for the woman while she is bearing her child.
Examples of such protection nearer at home are not lacking. Both Massachusetts and New York have laws declaring that specified periods of absence shall be allowed to women in industrial establishments at time of confinement.