The Bitter Cry of the Children

I

In a New York kindergarten one winter’s morning a frail, dark-eyed girl stood by the radiator warming her tiny blue and benumbed hands. She was poorly and scantily clad, and her wan, pinched face was unutterably sad with the sadness that shadows the children of poverty and comes from cares which only maturer years should know. When she had warmed her little hands back to life again, the child looked wistfully up into the teacher’s face and asked:—

“Teacher, do you love God?”

“Why, yes, dearie, of course I love God,” answered the wondering teacher.

“Well, I don’t—I hate Him!” was the fierce rejoinder. “He makes the wind blow, and I haven’t any warm clothes—He makes it snow, and my shoes have holes in them—He makes it cold, and we haven’t any fire at home—He makes us hungry, and mamma hadn’t any bread for our breakfast—Oh, I hate Him!”^[41]

This story, widely published in the newspapers two or three years ago and vouched for by the teacher, is remarkable no less for its graphic description of the thing called poverty than for the child’s passionate revolt against the supposed author of her misery. Poor, scanty clothing, cheerless homes, hunger day by day,—these are the main characteristics of that heritage of poverty to which so many thousands of children are born. Tens of thousands of baby lives are extinguished by its blasts every year as though they were so many candles swept by angry winds. But their fate is far more merciful and enviable than the fate of those who survive.

For the children who survive the struggle with poverty in their infant years, and those who do not encounter that struggle until they have reached school age, not only feel the anguish and shame which comes with developed consciousness, but society imposes upon them the added burden of mental effort. Regarding education as the only safe anchorage for a Democracy, we make it compulsory and boast that it is one of the fundamental principles of our economy that every child shall be given a certain amount of elementary instruction. This is our safeguard against those evils which other generations regarded as being inherent in popular, representative government. The modern public school, with its splendid equipment devised to promote the mental and physical development of our future citizens, is based upon motives and instincts of self-preservation as distinct and clearly defined as those underlying our systems of naval and military defences against armed invasion, or the systems of public sanitation and hygiene through which we seek to protect ourselves from devastating plagues within.

The past fifty or sixty years have been attended with a wonderful development of the science of education, as remarkable and important in its way as anything of which we may boast. We are proud, and justly so, of the admirable machinery of instruction which we have created, the fine buildings, laboratories, curricula, highly trained teachers, and so on, but there is a growing conviction that all this represents only so much mechanical, rather than human, progress. We have created a vast network of means, there is no lack of equipment, but we have largely neglected the human and most important factor, the child.^[42] The futility of expecting efficient education when the teacher is handicapped by poor and inadequate means is generally recognized, but not so as yet the futility of expecting it when the teacher has poor material to work upon in the form of chronically underfed children, too weak in mind and body to do the work required of them. We are forever seeking the explanation of the large percentage of educational failures in the machinery of instruction rather than in the human material, the children themselves.

The nervous, irritable, half-ill children to be found in such large numbers in our public schools represent poor material. They are largely drawn from the homes of poverty, and constitute an overwhelming majority of those children for whom we have found it necessary to make special provision,—the backward, dull pupils found year after year in the same grades with much younger children. In a measure the relation of a child’s educability to its physical health and comfort has been recognized by the correlation of physical and mental exercises in most up-to-date schools, but its larger social and economic significance has been almost wholly ignored. And yet it is quite certain that poverty exercises the same retarding influences upon the physical training as upon mental education. There are certain conditions precedent to successful education, whether physical or mental. Chief of these are a reasonable amount of good, nourishing food and a healthy home. Deprived of these, physical or mental development must necessarily be hindered. And poverty means just that to the child. It denies its victim these very necessities with the inevitable result, physical and mental weakness and inefficiency.

In a careful analysis of the principal data available, Mr. Robert Hunter has attempted the difficult task of estimating the measure of privation, and his conclusion is that in normal times there are at least 10,000,000 persons in the United States in poverty.^[43] That is to say, there are so many persons underfed, poorly housed, underclad, and having no security in the means of life. As an incidental condition he has observed that poverty’s misery falls most heavily upon the children, and that there are probably not less than from 60,000 to 70,000 children in New York city alone “who often arrive at school hungry and unfitted to do well the work required.”^[44] By a section of the press that statement was garbled into something very different, that 70,000 children in New York city go “breakfastless” to school every day. In that form the statement was naturally and very justly criticised, for, of course, nothing like that number of children go absolutely without breakfast. It is not, however, a question of children going without breakfast, but of children who are underfed, and the latter word would have been better fitted to express the real meaning of the original statement than the word “hungry.” Many thousands of little children go breakfastless to school at times, but the real problem is much more extensive than that and embraces that much more numerous class of children who are chronically underfed, either because their food is insufficient in quantity, or, what is the same thing in the end, poor in quality and lacking in nutriment.

It is noteworthy that no serious criticism of the estimate that there are 10,000,000 in poverty has been attempted. Some of the most experienced philanthropic workers in the country have indeed urged that it is altogether too low. I am myself convinced that the estimate is a most conservative one. It would be warranted alone by the figures of unemployment, which show that in 1900, a year of fairly normal industrial conditions, 2,000,000 male wage-earners were unemployed for from four to six months. But to these figures Mr. Hunter adds a mass of corroborative facts which suggest that the only just criticism which can be made of his estimate is that it is an understatement. And, if there are 10,000,000 persons in poverty in the United States, there must be at least 3,300,000 of that number under fourteen years of age.

To test the accuracy of the statistics of unemployment, low wages, sickness, charitable relief, etc., by detailed investigation would be an impossible task for any private investigator. No such test could be effectively carried out in a single great city by private agencies. But, while they are open to the criticisms which all such statistics are subject to, those given by Mr. Hunter represent the most reliable data available. They justify, I believe, the conclusion that in normal times there are not less than 3,300,000 children under fourteen years of age in poverty, and a considerably greater number in periods of unusual depression. If we divide this number into two age groups, those under five and those from five to fourteen, we shall find that there are 1,455,000 in the former group and 1,845,000 in the latter. It is a well-known fact, however, that poverty is far more prevalent among children over five years of age than among younger children, and it is safe to assume that of the total number of children estimated to be in poverty, there are fully 2,000,000 between the ages of five and fourteen years, nearly 12 per cent of the total number of children living in that age period. The importance of this from an educational point of view is apparent when it is remembered that from five to fourteen years is the principal period of school attendance.

III

This problem of poverty in its relation to childhood and education is, to us in America, quite new. We have not studied it as it has been studied in England and other European countries where, for many years, it has been the subject of much investigation and experiment. When it was suggested that 60,000 or 70,000 children go to school in our greatest city in an underfed condition, and when Dr. W. H. Maxwell, superintendent of the Board of Education of New York City, declared in a public address that there are hundreds of thousands of children in the public schools of the nation unable to study or learn because of their hunger,^[45] something of a sensation was caused from one end of the land to the other. But in England, where for more than twenty years investigators have been studying the problem and experimenting, and have built up a considerable literature upon the subject, which has become one of the most pressing political problems of the time, they have become so conversant with the facts that no fresh recital, however eloquent, can create anything like a sensation. And what is true of England is true of almost every other country in Europe. Only we in the United States have ignored this terrible problem of child hunger. We have so long been used to express our commiseration with the Old World on account of the heavy burden of pauperism beneath which it groans, and to boast of our greater prosperity and happiness, that we have hardly observed the ominous signs that similar causes at work among us are fast producing similar results. Now we have awakened to the fact that here, too, are two nations within the nation,—the nation of the rich and the nation of the poor,—and that Fourier’s terrible prophecy of “poverty through plethora,” has found fulfilment in the land where he fondly dreamed that his Utopia might be realized. The poverty problem is to-day the supreme challenge to our national conscience and instincts of self-preservation, and its saddest and most alarming feature is the suffering and doom it imposes upon the children.

Such investigations as have been made by Mr. Hunter, myself, and others in New York and other large cities, meagre as they have been, tend to the conclusion that the extent of the evil of underfeeding has not been exaggerated. It is true that the Board of Education of New York City appointed a special committee to investigate the subject and that their report, based upon the testimony of a number of school principals and teachers, would indicate that only a very small number of children in our public schools suffer from underfeeding. Many persons who regarded that report as the conclusive answer of the expert were at once satisfied. In order that the reader may better understand the investigations herein summarized and view them without prejudice, it may be well to digress somewhat to discuss that very optimistic report.

At a very early period of the agitation upon the subject, and before the Board of Education had discussed it, I undertook a series of investigations with a view to testing as far as possible Mr. Hunter’s estimate. My investigations included personal observation and inquiry in a number of public schools in various parts of the city having a total attendance of something more than 28,000 children. When the Board of Education took action upon the matter and appointed its special committee, I was already far advanced in that work. Realizing that the value of such an inquiry as the Board of Education had decided upon must depend entirely upon the methods adopted, I turned my attention to the task of watching carefully the “investigation.” It was a case of investigating an investigation. When the special committee met I laid before the members certain evidence of the utter worthlessness of the reports they had received from the schools, as well as some of the information I had gathered concerning the extent of the evil of underfeeding, in the hope that the committee might be induced to undertake a careful and extensive investigation of the whole subject by a body of experts.

In the first place, the official inquiry had been confined to the number of “breakfastless” children, and, secondly, the principals had no instructions as to the manner in which their inquiries should be conducted. The various District Superintendents merely requested the principals to “carefully investigate” and report the number of children attending school without breakfast, in some cases forty-eight hours being allowed and in many others only twenty-four hours. The result of this lack of method and system was most deplorable, many of the principals adopting methods of investigation which not only proved quite futile, but, what is more important, effectually destroyed all chances of proper investigation for the time being. From the statements submitted to the committee, I quote two examples as showing the character of the “evidence” upon which its report was based.

IV

The principal of a large school on the West Side reported that “after careful inquiries” he had found only one little girl who came to school without breakfast, and she did so from choice, saying, “Because I never used to have any breakfast in Germany, sir, and didn’t want any.” There were also two boys, Syrians, who said that they had three meals each day but could never get enough to eat. The little girl insisted that she “always had a good lunch.” Here, then, was a big school with over two thousand pupils, representing twenty different nationalities, in which there were only three possible cases of underfeeding, the element of doubt being strong in each case! Every one who has had the least experience of work amongst the poor knows perfectly well that it would be absolutely impossible to gather together 2000 children from the tenements of any city without including many more cases of undoubted hardship and suffering. And the neighborhood of this school is a particularly poor one. Close to the school are some of the foulest tenements to be found in the whole city. The crowding of two families in one room is common, and poverty and squalor are abundantly evidenced on every hand.

After the principal had told me of his report I went over the district with the Captain of the neighboring Slum Post of the Salvation Army. The Captain knew personally several children attending the school who were literally half starved. Out of 26 children, boys and girls, at the free breakfast one morning there were 22 from the school, and their hunger and misery were beyond question. One little boy was barely seven years old, and a more woful appearance than he presented cannot well be imagined. He had come to the breakfast station two days before the date of our visit, the Captain said, literally famishing, filthy, and covered with sores. The good woman had fed and cleaned the poor little waif and bandaged his feet and legs. “It was an awful job,” she said, “for he was so dirty. It took four changes of water to get him well cleaned. Then I bandaged him and got some old but clean clothes for him.” Even so, after two days of such feeding and care as he had never known before, the poor child looked forlorn, weak, and inexpressibly miserable. Little Mike’s case was doubtless exceptionally bad, but it is not too much to say that the whole district is a wen of terrible poverty. Yet from the principal’s report it would seem that the children bear no share of its hardships and privations. And this is impossible. It is the children who suffer most of all.

To account for the principal’s roseate and obviously misleading report, it is only necessary to understand how the inquiry was made upon which the report was based. Asked to explain how he had made his investigation, the principal said, “I went to every class and asked all those children who had had no breakfast to stand up.” When it is remembered that children are naturally very sensitive about their poverty, regarding it as being something in the nature of a personal degradation, nothing need be said to show the futility of such a method of inquiry. I have frequently known children on the verge of exhaustion to deny that they were hungry, so keenly do they feel that poverty is a disgrace. I saw the little girl and the two Syrian boys in the presence of the principal upon the occasion of my second visit to the school and questioned them. The two boys said, through an interpreter, that they had bread and coffee for every meal and vigorously denied having had butter, jam, milk, eggs, or meat of any kind. They certainly looked anæmic, weak, and underfed. The little girl’s story, which I could get only by dint of careful and sympathetic questioning, epitomizes the whole problem of underfeeding as it affects thousands of children. She gave at first practically the same answer as she had given the principal, saying that she did not have breakfast because she was not accustomed to it and didn’t need it, and that she always had a good lunch.

But her full story revealed a very different condition from what these innocent replies would indicate. Both her parents go out to work, leaving home soon after five o’clock in the morning. The father is a laborer employed at the docks, and the mother works in the kitchen of a cheap restaurant. They go away leaving the little girl in bed, and when she rises there is generally some cold coffee and bread for her. But there is no clock, and she does not know the time and is afraid of being late to school and does not stay to eat. “Sometimes, when papa has no work, there is no food left for me to eat,” she said. Then she told of her “good lunch.” Generally there is five cents left upon the table for her to buy lunch with. “Only when papa is not working is there no money left.” On the day of my interview with her she had spent her five cents for a cup of coffee with nothing at all to eat, as she had done for two or three successive days. Asked why she had not bought something to eat, or a glass of milk, instead of coffee, she answered, “Because coffee is hot, sir, and I was so cold.” Her father returns home at six o’clock in the evening and sends her to the delicatessen store to buy something—generally bologna sausage—for their evening meal. The mother, who eats at the restaurant, does not return until about two hours later. From this fuller story of the little girl’s life it is seen that her “good lunch” day after day consists of a cup of coffee without a morsel of food, and that she fasts frequently, almost constantly, from the evening of one day to the evening of the next.

Such tactlessness on the part of the principal of a great public school seems almost incredible. But it is a fact that most teachers seem to have no other method of finding out anything from their children than by calling upon them to “show hands,” notwithstanding that experience proves it to be a most unreliable one. Children not only shrink from confessing their poverty and hunger, but they are also quick to give the answers desired by the teacher, even though the teacher’s feelings are only manifested by a slight inflection of voice. Public examination of the children is a useless as well as most cruel method to adopt. But it was generally adopted, and I could cite case after case from my notes. One other case, however, must suffice. The principal of one of the smallest schools in the city, situated on the East Side in a poor Italian district, assured me that there were practically no hungry or underfed children in the school. Asked to estimate the number of such children, she said that they were “less than 1 per cent of the attendance.” She had found 9 cases of destitution just previously as a result of an inquiry made through the teachers, which, as was pointed out to her, meant fully 2 per cent of the attendance. For the total enrolment in this school is less than 500 and the average attendance not more than 450. Asked how the 9 cases had been discovered, the principal replied, “Why, I simply went to each class and asked, ‘What little boy or girl did not have breakfast to-day, or not enough breakfast? Please show hands.’” There was, she said, no doubt whatever that the 9 children were the victims of great poverty. That as many as 2 per cent of the children should, under the circumstances, confess their poverty is undoubtedly a most serious fact and indicates a much larger number of actual victims.

How such a method of examination intimidates the children and fails to elicit the truth, the following incident, related as nearly as possible in the principal’s own words, will show. It relates to a little boy whom we will call Tony:—

“I went to a classroom and asked: ‘How many children had no breakfast to-day? Show hands!’ Not a single hand went up. Then the teacher said, ‘Why, I am sure that boy, Tony, looks as if he were half starved.’ And he really did, so I told him to stand up and questioned him. ‘Did you have any breakfast this morning, Tony?’ I asked. He hung his head for a minute and then said, ‘No, mum.’

“‘Now, Tony, wouldn’t you like to have a good breakfast every morning,—some hot coffee and nice rolls?’

“‘Yes, mum.’

“‘Well, do you know the Salvation Army where they give breakfasts to little boys who need them?’

“‘Yes, mum.’

“‘Well, if I get you a ticket, won’t you go there to-morrow and get your breakfast?’

“The little fellow’s eyes flashed and he looked straight at me and said, ‘No, mum, I don’t want it.’ Really, I admired his spirit. Poor as he was, he did not want charity.”

Better than any argument the principal’s own words show the cruel, inquisitorial method and its effectiveness in suppressing the truth. I repeat, that was the method of inquiry generally adopted, and it was upon reports based upon the results of such examinations that the special committee of the Board of Education based its report.

V

Of course, not all teachers are so tactless. A very large number are merely unobservant, possibly because they have become inured to the pitiful appearance of the children and their painfully low physical development. It is common to hear teachers in poor districts say: “When I first came to this school my heart used to ache with pity on account of the poverty-stricken appearance of many of the children and the sad tales they sometimes tell. But now I have grown used to it all.” That, in many cases, tells the whole secret—they have grown accustomed to the sight of stunted bodies and wan, pinched faces. There are teachers, earnest men and women devoted to their profession, and consecrating it by an almost religious passion, who study the home life and social environment of the children intrusted to their care; but they are, unhappily, exceptions. The number of teachers having no idea of how a healthy child should look is astonishingly large. The hectic flush of disease is often mistaken by teachers and principals for the bloom of health.

In one large school the principal, in the course of a personally conducted visit to the different classrooms, singled out a little Italian girl, and asked with a note of pride in his voice: “Wouldn’t you call this a healthy child? I do. Look at her round, full face.” There were a great many signs of ill health in that little girl’s appearance which the good principal did not recognize. I pointed out some of the signs of grave nervous disorder, due, as I afterward learned, almost beyond question, to malnutrition. Her cheeks were well rounded, but her pitifully thin arms indicated a very ill-developed body. I pointed out her nervous hand, the baggy fulness under her eyes, and the abrasions at the corners of her twitching mouth,^[46] and asked that the teacher might be consulted as to the girl’s school record. “She is not a very bright child,” said the teacher, “and what to do with her is a problem. She is very nervous, irritable, and excitable. She seems to get exhausted very soon, and it is impossible for her to apply herself properly to her work. I think very likely that she is underfed, for she comes from a very poor home.” Subsequent investigation at her home, on Mott Street, showed that her father, who is a consumptive, earns from sixty cents to a dollar a day peddling laces, needles, and other small articles, the rest of the income supporting the family of seven persons being derived from the mother’s labor. They occupy one small room, and the only means of cooking they have is a small gas “ring” such as is sold for ten cents in the cheap stores.

Where principals and teachers declined to assist, it was impossible to make inquiries in the schools, and it was useless to make them in schools where the children had already been openly questioned. Wherever it was possible to secure the coöperation of principals or teachers, I got them to question the children privately and sympathetically. In 16 schools, 12,800 children were thus privately examined, and of that number 987, or 7.71 per cent, were reported as having had no breakfast upon the day of the inquiry, and 1963, or 15.32 per cent, as having had altogether too little. Teachers were asked to exclude as far as possible all cases of an obviously accidental nature from the returns, as, for instance, when a child known to be in fairly comfortable circumstances had come to school without breakfast merely because of lack of appetite. They were also requested to regard as having had inadequate breakfasts only children who had had bread only (with or without tea or coffee), or such things as crackers or crullers in place of bread, but without milk, cereals, cake, butter, jam, eggs, fruit, fish, or meat of any kind. That this standard was altogether too low will probably be admitted without question, but there was no way of examining the actual meals of the children, and some sort of arbitrary rule was necessary. The figures given are therefore based on a very low standard, and most certainly do not include all cases either of the unfed or underfed. It is more than probable that some children who had gone without breakfasts refused to admit the fact, and there were several instances in which children known to be desperately poor, and who, the teachers felt, were certainly underfed, gave the most surprising accounts—which must have been drawn from their imaginations^[47]—of elaborate breakfasts. Out of 12,800 children, then, 2950, or more than 23 per cent, were found either wholly breakfastless or having had such miserably poor breakfasts as described. And that is certainly an understatement of the evil of underfeeding in those schools.

One of the most notable of these school investigations was undertaken by the principal of a large school to “prove conclusively that really there is no such thing as a serious problem of underfeeding among our school children.” The principal is a devoted believer in the theory of the survival of the fittest, and in the elimination of the weak by competition and struggle. “If you attempt to take hardship and suffering out of their lives by smoothing the pathway of life for these children, you weaken their character, and, by so doing, you sin against the children themselves and, through them, against society,” he said. With the view of Huxley and others that the real interest and duty of society is to make as many as possible fit to survive, he expressed himself as having no sympathy, on the ground that it conflicts with nature’s immutable law of struggle. But, as often happens, his deeds frequently run counter to his merciless creed, and he is one of the most generous and compassionate of men. The children trust him, and the sense of an intimate friendship between him and them is the most delightful impression the visitor receives. There is no absence of real, effective discipline, but it is discipline based upon sympathy, friendship, and trust. The principal declared that he did not believe that 5 children could be found in the whole school of 1500 who could be described as badly underfed, or who came to school breakfastless.

The district in which this school is situated is one of the poorest in the city, the population consisting almost exclusively of Italians. Most of the men are unskilled laborers working for very low wages and irregularly employed. Many of them are recent immigrants and subject to the vicious padrone system. Every fresh batch of immigrants intensifies the already keen and brutal competition, and to maintain even the low standard of living to which they are accustomed, the wives frequently work as wage-earners. The people are housed in vile tenements, and the crowding of two families into one small room is by no means uncommon. “Little mothers” and their rickety infant charges crowd the pavements. In the early morning, even during the winter months, groups of shivering children gather outside the school waiting for admission hours before the time of opening, and at lunch time instead of going to their homes they hasten away with their pennies and nickels to buy ice cream, pickles, peppers, or cream puffs for their midday meal. Knowing these to be the conditions existing in the neighborhood, it was impossible to accept the optimistic views of the principal without serious questioning, and it was to convince me that he was right that he undertook to have the investigation made while we went over the school.

The teachers were requested to examine every child privately, and to report the number of children having had no breakfast that morning and the number having had inadequate breakfasts. Some of the teachers absolutely refused to ask the children “such questions,” and two or three sent in obstinately stupid reports such as “nobody underfed but the teacher.” Reports were received from 19 classes with an actual attendance of 865 children, of which number 104 were reported as having had no breakfast and 54 as having had too little. Not all the reports were of equal value, I afterward found, some of the teachers having ignored the rule and regarded coffee and bread as sufficient. In one case there were three children who declared that they had only cold coffee without any food. They should have been reported as breakfastless, but in fact they were not reported in either column. So that it is probable that in this case also the figures given are an understatement of actual conditions. In one class of 43 children 13 were reported as having had no breakfast and 12 as having had insufficient, and when the report was sent back with instructions that the teacher try to find out why the 13 children had no breakfast, it was returned with the postscript in the teacher’s handwriting, “There was no food for them to eat.” In another class out of 65 children no less than 30 were reported as having had no breakfast, but of these 12 had had either tea or coffee. As they did not have food of any kind other than the tea or coffee, the teacher reported them as breakfastless. Making all allowances for discrepancies and differences of value in the teachers’ reports, it is surely most serious that no less than 17.81 per cent of the children examined should be reported as either breakfastless or very inadequately fed that day. It should be said that this inquiry took place in the winter, the season when there is most unemployment among unskilled laborers, and it is not probable that the same amount of poverty would be found all the year round.

One incident in connection with the investigation in this school is worthy of record. A lad of about 13 or 14 years of age in one of the highest grades, who had been reported as having had no breakfast, was seen in the principal’s office at noon. He seemed to be quite rugged and healthy, and the principal said that he was “the brightest boy in the school, and a good lad, too.” He showed us his lunch—a roll of bread and two small pieces of almost transparent cheese. “Isn’t that enough for a boy?” asked the principal, laughingly. The boy responded: “Yes, but I had no breakfast, and this has to do me all day. I don’t have any breakfast most times, and sometimes no lunch or supper. You know that Mr. B—— used to give me some very often.” And the principal confirmed this part of the lad’s story with a tender, “Yes, I know, sonny.” The boy told us a saddening story of a mother cowed down by a brutal husband, and of the latter’s vice. He is a cook and has often beaten his wife, who works in an embroidery factory. A year or so ago he went to Italy, leaving his wife here. Soon afterward he wrote to her for money to pay his passage back. She was penniless, but, the lad quaintly said, “she made a debt of a hundred dollars” to send to him. “Then she had to pay every week, and there wasn’t much food.” The rest of his tale of shame—shame of a father’s sin—need not be told. It is too horrible. “Why doesn’t your mother leave him and just take you with her? You are the only child, aren’t you?” asked the principal. “Yes, I’m the only one, but there are ten dead,” was the boy’s startling reply. It was, unconsciously, a significant comment upon the good principal’s theory of the survival of the fittest.

In another school the principal told me that she had reported to the District Superintendent that of 1000 children on the register at least 100 were badly underfed. She told of children fainting in school or in the yard from lack of food, and of others suffering from disorders of the bowels due to the same cause. Many of these children were pointed out in the course of several visits to the school. “Ignorance plays a large part in the problem,” said the principal, “but I think it is mostly poverty. When work is hard to get, or there is sickness in the family, or when there is a strike, then the children suffer most, and that shows that it is poverty in most cases.” Upon one of my visits to this school, I encountered one of those pathetic incidents of which I have gathered so many in the course of these investigations. Little Patsey, the American-born child of Irish parents, had for some days been ailing and unable to attend properly to his lessons. The teacher suspected that improper food was the cause, and Patsey’s account of his diet confirmed her in that opinion. So she advised Patsey to tell his mother that oatmeal would be better for him. “Get oatmeal, Patsey, it’s better—and very cheap, too.” There were tears in the principal’s eyes as she told how, that very morning, the teacher had found what she supposed to be powdered chalk upon the floor and was about to scold the culprit, when she discovered that it was Patsey’s oatmeal! Poor little Patsey had for three days been spending his daily lunch allowance of three cents upon oatmeal and eating it dry. Teacher had said that it was better! Only the thought of the teacher’s influence, and the hope that through the medium of such influence as hers it may be possible to dispel much of the ignorance of which so many children are the victims, relieves the pathos of the incident and brightens it.

VI

Soon after the foregoing investigations were made, Dr. H. M. Lechstrecker, of the New York State Board of Charities, conducted an examination of 10,707 children in the Industrial Schools of New York City. He found that 439, or 4.10 per cent, had had no breakfast on the date of the inquiry, while 998, or 9.32 per cent, exhibited anæmic conditions apparently due to lack of proper nourishment. Upon investigation the teachers found that the breakfasts of each of the 998 consisted either of coffee only, or of coffee with bread only. Only 1855, or 17.32 per cent, started the day with what Dr. Lechstrecker considered to be an adequate meal.^[48] Other independent inquiries in several cities show that the problem is by no means peculiar to New York.

In Buffalo the principal of one large school, Mr. Charles L. Ryan, is reported as saying that of the 1500 children in his school at least one-tenth come to school in the morning without breakfast. In 8 schools in Buffalo, having a total average attendance of 7500 pupils, the principals estimated that 350, or 4.46 per cent, have no breakfasts at all, and that 800 more have too little to insure effective work. No less than 5105 of the 7500 children were reported as having tea or coffee with bread only.^[49] It is rather difficult to analyze these figures satisfactorily, but it would appear that no less than 17.33 per cent of the total number of children in these 8 schools are believed by the principals and teachers to be appreciably handicapped by defective nutrition, and that only 16.80 per cent are adequately and satisfactorily fed.

In Chicago several independent investigations have been made. Mr. William Hornbaker, principal of the Oliver Goldsmith school, says: “We have here 1100 children in a district which is so crowded that all our pupils come from an area comprising only about twenty acres. When I began work here, I discovered that many of the pupils remained all day without food. A great majority of the parents in this district, as well as the older children, are at work from dawn to dusk, and have no time to care for the little ones. Such children have no place to go when dismissed at noon.”^[50] At this school a lunch room has been established, and two meals a day are provided for about 50 of the most necessitous children. At first these meals were sold at a penny per meal, but it was found that even pennies were too hard to obtain. Mr. Hornbaker points out that the pride of the larger children restrains them, and it is most difficult to get them to admit their hunger, but the younger children are not so sensitive. He says that “unquestionably a majority of the children are improperly fed, especially in the lower grades.” Out of a total attendance of 5150 children in 5 Chicago schools 122 were reported as breakfastless, 1464 as having only bread with coffee or tea, a total of 30.79 per cent.^[51]

In Philadelphia several inquiries were made, with the result that of 4589 children 189 were reported as going generally or often without breakfast of any kind, while 2504 began the day on coffee or tea and bread, a total of 58.52 per cent.^[52] In Cleveland, Boston, and Los Angeles, among many other cities, teachers and others declare that the evil is quite as extensive.

Massing the figures given from New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Chicago, we get a total of 40,746 children examined, of which number 14,121, or 34.65 per cent, either went breakfastless to school or got miserably poor breakfasts of bread and tea or coffee. At least bread and tea must prove to be a poor diet, wholly insufficient to meet the demands of a growing human body, and the difficulty of obtaining good, wholesome bread in our cities intensifies the evil. The wholesale adulteration of food is indeed a most serious menace to life and health to which the poor are constantly subjected.

These figures are not put forward as being in any sense a statistical measure of the problem. The investigations described, and others of a like nature, afford no adequate basis for scientific estimates. They are all confined to the one morning meal, and the standard adopted for judging of the adequateness of the meals given to the children is necessarily crude and lacking in scientific precision. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that it is not a question of whether so many children go without breakfast occasionally, but whether they are underfed, either through missing meals more or less frequently or through feeding day by day and week by week upon food that is poor in quality, unsuitable, and of small nutritive value, and whether in consequence the children suffer physically or mentally, or both. Only a comprehensive examination by experts of a large number of children in different parts of the country, a careful inquiry into their diet and their physical and mental development, would afford a satisfactory basis for any statistical measure of the problem which could be accepted as even approximately correct. Yet such inquiries as those described cannot be ignored; in the absence of more comprehensive and scientific investigations they are of great value, on account of the mass of observed facts which they give; and the results certainly tend to show that the estimate that fully 2,000,000 children of school age in the United States are badly underfed is not exaggerated.

As stated, all the investigations described were confined to the breakfast meal. There has been practically no effort made, so far as I am aware, to determine how many children there are who go without lunches back to their lessons, or, what is quite as important, how many there are to whom are given small sums of money to procure lunches for themselves; and what kind of lunches they buy. Even in Europe most of the investigations made have been confined to the morning meal. Yet this lunch question is probably even more important than the other. There are doubtless many more children who go without lunch than without breakfast. Thousands of children who get some sort of breakfast, even if it is only coffee and bread, get nothing at all for lunch, and a still larger number—in some schools I have found as many as 20 per cent—get small sums of money, ranging from one to five cents, to buy lunches for themselves. And in most cases the condition of these is just as deplorable as if they had nothing at all, if not much worse. Their tragedy lies in the fact that in most cases the money they spend would be quite sufficient to provide decent, nourishing meals if it were wisely spent, instead of which they get what is positively injurious.

When a child of eight or nine years of age whose breakfast consists of tea and bread lunches day after day upon pickles, its digestive system must of necessity be impaired. Wise discrimination cannot be expected from young children, and the temptation of the candy stores and of the push carts laden with ice cream or fruit is great. Often the fact that children in the very poorest districts spend so many pence is urged as evidence that no serious problem of poverty exists, but that is a wholly unwarranted assumption. There may not be absolute destitution; the family income may be sufficient to keep its members above the line of primary poverty, but the conditions under which it is earned, necessitating the employment of the mother, involve the suffering of the children. The mother is taken away from her legitimate work, the care of her home and children, and they are left to their own resources. In the course of these investigations I have found hundreds of children going back to their lessons without having had any lunch, and hundreds more of the class just described. In one class of 40 in an East Side school I found 11 with pennies to buy their own lunches. These children were all between the ages of eight and ten years. In another school the principal said that there were 50 such children known to her out of a total of less than 500. In 4 other schools, with an attendance of 4500, the principals’ estimates of the number of such children aggregated 521, or 11.51 per cent.

This phase of the problem of child hunger is not peculiar to New York. The reports of teachers in many cities and towns and my own observations show that this evil is invariably associated with poverty; and European investigations all support that view.^[53] It is probable that in some of the smaller manufacturing towns it prevails to a larger proportional extent than in cities like New York, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis, but of that matter there are no data. The answers of teachers and others to inquiries as to what such children buy have been monotonously alike. They buy candy, cream puffs, ice cream, fruit (very often damaged, decayed, or unripe), pickles, and other unwholesome things. One cold day last winter I visited the neighborhood of a large school with an idea that it might be possible to ascertain just exactly what a number of children would buy for lunch. Any one who has ever watched the outpouring of children from a large school will realize how utterly impossible it is to keep any considerable number of them under observation. Like a great river that has broken its banks the human torrent rushes through the streets and crowds them awhile, then spreads far and wide. I found 14 children in a delicatessen store, 8 boys and 6 girls. Seven of them bought pickles and bread; 4 bought pickles only; 2 bought bologna sausage and rye bread, and 1 bought pickled fish and bread. In a neighboring street I made similar observations one day during the summer. Out of 19 children 8 bought pickles, 2 of them with bread, the others without; 6 bought ice cream, 2 bought bananas, and 3 others bought candy. For the children of the poor there seems to be some strange fascination about pickles. One lad of ten said that he always bought pickles with his three cents. “I must have pickles,” he said. It would seem that the chronic underfeeding creates a nervous craving for some kind of a stimulant which the child finds in pickles. The adult resorts to whiskey very often for much the same reason. There is every reason to believe that this malnutrition lays the foundation for inebriety in later years. The custom of giving the children money instead of prepared lunches is also responsible for a good deal of gambling, especially among the boys. Little Tony plays “craps” and loses his lunch, and the boy who wins gets a particularly big unwholesome “blow out,” or adds a packet of cigarettes to his meal of pickles or cream puffs.

In one large school on the West Side the principal confidently declared that 10 per cent would be altogether too low an estimate of the number of badly underfed children in that school. “If you mean only the breakfastless ones,” she said, “why, it is too high, but if you include those whose breakfasts are totally inadequate, and those who have no lunches, those whose lunches at home are as inadequate as their breakfasts, and those who get only the bad things they buy for lunch—in a word, if you include all who suffer on account of defective, low nutrition, the estimate of 10 per cent is too low for this school. There are whole blocks in this district from which we scarcely get a child who is not, at some time or other in the course of a year, in want of food. The worst cases are in the primary grades, for many of the older children drop out. The boys find odd jobs to do, and the girls are needed at home to care for the smaller children.” The population of this district is largely Irish and most of the men belong to that class of unskilled laborers which, more than any other industrial class, suffers from irregularity of employment. Many are longshoremen, others are truck-men, builders’ laborers, and so on. No other class of workers suffers so much from what may be called accidental causes as this. A war in some far-away land may for a while seriously divert the stream of commerce, and the longshoreman of New York suffers unemployment and its attendant poverty; a strike of bricklayers or carpenters will throw the laborers and their families into the maws of all-devouring misery, or a week of bad weather may cause inexpressible hardship. When employment is steady the wages they receive are in most cases only sufficient to keep their families just above the line of poverty; when there is sickness or unemployment, even for a couple of weeks, there is privation and the growth of a burden of debt which remains to crush them downward when wages begin to come in again. Want actually continues in such cases through what, judged by the wage standard, appears to be a time of normal prosperity. It is hardly to be wondered at that there is a good deal of intemperance and improvidence. These conditions are the economic soil in which intemperance, thriftlessness, and irresponsibility flourish.

In this district, with the coöperation of a well-trained and experienced woman investigator, a careful investigation of the condition of 50 families represented in the school was made. The number of children attending school from the 50 families was 79. Of that number there were 24 who had no breakfast of any kind on the days they were visited, while of the 55 more fortunate ones no less than 30 had only bread with tea or coffee. Only 35 of the children had any lunch, or money with which to procure any, 44 missing that meal entirely. Terrible as they are, these figures do not tell the whole story. It is impossible to appreciate what going without lunch means to these children unless we take into account the fact that those who go without lunch, and those who eat only the deleterious things they buy, are in most cases the same children who either go breakfastless or have only bread and coffee day after day. And their evening meal is very often a repetition of the morning meal, bread and coffee or tea. From the schedule showing the actual dietary of the children in question contained in the report of my co-investigator I give, in the following table, the particulars relating to 6 families. They are perfectly typical cases and demonstrate very clearly the woful inadequacy of diet common to children of the poor.

It is a horrible fact that many of these children whose diet is so unwholesome cannot eat decent food, even when they are most hungry. It is not merely a question of appetite, but of stomachs too weak by reason of chronic hunger and malnutrition to stand good and nutritious food. This has been frequently observed in connection with Fresh Air Outings for poor children in the tenement districts. I have known scores of instances. Very often these children have to be patiently taught to eat. Sometimes it takes several days to induce them to take milk and eggs. They crave for their accustomed food—coffee and bread, or pickles. The same fact has been observed in connection with adults in the hospitals. When the Salvation Army started its free breakfast stations in New York, the newspapers made a good deal of the fact that the children refused to eat the good soup and milk porridge at first provided. That was regarded as conclusive evidence that they were not hungry, for a hungry child is supposed to eat almost anything. That is true in a measure of children who are merely hungry, but these children are more than hungry. They are weak and unhealthy as the result of chronic underfeeding. I myself saw many children at the Salvation Army free breakfast depots whose hunger was only too apparent try bravely to eat the soup until they actually vomited. They would beg for a piece of bread, and when it was given them eat it ravenously. In an uptown school a little English boy fainted one morning while at his lessons. He had fainted the day before in the school yard, but the teacher thought that it was due to overexertion while at play. When he fainted the second time she took him to the principal’s office, and they discovered that he had not eaten anything that day, and only a piece of bread the day before. The principal sent for some milk, and when it was warmed in the school kitchen she gave it to the lad with a couple of dainty chicken sandwiches from her own lunch, expecting him to enjoy a rare treat. But he didn’t. He took only a bite or two and a sup of milk, then began to vomit. He could not be induced to eat any more nor even to drink the milk. Presently, however, he said to the teacher, “I think I could eat some bread, teacher,” and when they sent out for some rolls and coffee he ate as though he had seen no food for a week. Very few people, it may be added, incidentally, realize how much the teachers and principals of schools in the poorest districts give out of their slender incomes to provide children with food, clothing, and shoes. But how little it all amounts to in the way of solving the problem is best expressed in the words of one principal, “What I can give in that way to the worst cases only lessens the evil in just the same degree as a handful of sands taken from the seashore lessens the number of grains.”