The Spirit of
Youth and the City Streets (1909)
By Jane Addams
Foreword
Much of the material in the following pages has appeared in current publications. It is here presented in book form in the hope that it may prove of value to those groups of people who in many cities are making a gallant effort to minimize the dangers which surround young people and to provide them with opportunities for recreation.
Nothing is more
certain than that each generation longs for a reassurance as to the value and
charm of life, and is secretly afraid lest it lose its sense of the youth of
the earth. This is doubtless one reason why it so passionately cherishes its
poets and artists who have been able to explore for themselves
and to reveal to others the perpetual springs of life's self-renewal.
And yet the average man cannot obtain this desired reassurance
through literature, nor yet through glimpses of earth and sky. It can come to
him only through the chance embodiment of joy and youth which life itself may
throw in his way. It is doubtless true that for the mass of men the message is
never so unchallenged and so invincible as when
embodied in youth itself. One generation after another has depended upon its
young to equip it with gaiety and enthusiasm, to persuade it that living is a
pleasure, until men everywhere have anxiously provided channels through which
this wine of life might flow, and be preserved for their delight. The classical
city promoted play with careful solicitude, building the theater and stadium as
it built the market place and the temple. The Greeks held their games so
integral a part of religion and patriotism that they came to expect from their
poets the highest utterances at the very moments when the sense of pleasure
released the national life. In the medieval city the knights held their
tourneys, the guilds their pageants, the people their dances, and the church
made festival for its most cherished saints with gay street processions, and
presented a drama in which no less a theme than the history of creation became
a matter of thrilling interest. Only in the modern city have men concluded that
it is no longer necessary for the municipality to provide for the insatiable
desire for play. In so far as they have acted upon this conclusion, they have
entered upon a most difficult and dangerous experiment; and this at the very
moment when the city has become distinctly industrial, and daily labor is
continually more monotonous and subdivided. We forget how new the modern city
is, and how short the span of time in which we have assumed that we can
eliminate public provision for recreation.
A further difficulty lies in the fact that this industrialism has
gathered together multitudes of eager young creatures from all quarters of the earth
as a labor supply for the countless factories and workshops, upon which the
present industrial city is based. Never before in civilization have such
numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home
and permitted to walk unattended upon city streets and to work under alien
roofs; for the first time they are being prized more for their labor power than
for their innocence, their tender beauty, their ephemeral gaiety. Society cares
more for the products they manufacture than for their immemorial ability to
reaffirm the charm of existence. Never before have such numbers of young boys
earned money independently of the family life, and felt themselves free to
spend it as they choose in the midst of vice
deliberately disguised as pleasure.
This stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize
play has, of course, brought about a fine revenge. The love of pleasure will
not be denied, and when it has turned into all sorts of malignant and vicious
appetites, then we, the middle aged, grow quite distracted and resort to all
sorts of restrictive measures. We even try to dam up the sweet fountain itself
because we are affrighted by these neglected streams; but almost worse than the
restrictive measures is our apparent belief that the city itself has no
obligation in the matter, an assumption upon which the modern city turns over
to commercialism practically all the provisions for public recreation.
Quite as one set of men has organized the young people into
industrial enterprises in order to profit from their toil, so another set of
men and also of women, I am sorry to say, have entered the neglected field of
recreation and have organized enterprises which make profit out of this
invincible love of pleasure.
In every city arise so-called "places" --
"gin-palaces," they are called in fiction; in Chicago we
euphemistically say merely "places," -- in which alcohol is
dispensed, not to allay thirst, but, ostensibly to stimulate gaiety, it is sold
really in order to empty pockets. Huge dance halls are opened to which hundreds
of young people are attracted, many of whom stand wistfully outside a roped
circle, for it requires five cents to procure within it for five minutes the
sense of allurement and intoxication which is sold in lieu of innocent
pleasure. These coarse and illicit merrymakings remind one of the unrestrained
jollities of Restoration London, and they are indeed their direct descendants,
properly commercialized, still confusing joy with lust, and gaiety with
debauchery. Since the soldiers of Cromwell shut up the people's playhouses and
destroyed their pleasure fields, the Anglo-Saxon city has turned over the
provision for public recreation to the most evil-minded and the most
unscrupulous members of the community. We see thousands of girls walking up and
down the streets on a pleasant evening with no chance to catch a sight of
pleasure even through a lighted window, save as these lurid places provide it.
Apparently the modern city sees in these girls only
two possibilities, both of them commercial: first, a chance to utilize by day
their new and tender labor power in its factories and shops, and then another
chance in the evening to extract from them their petty wages by pandering to
their love of pleasure.
As these overworked girls stream along
the street, the rest of us see only the self-conscious walk, the giggling
speech, the preposterous clothing. And yet through the huge hat, with its
wilderness of bedraggled feathers, the girl announces to the world that she is
here. She demands attention to the fact of her existence,
she states that she is ready to live, to take her place in the world. The most
precious moment in human development is the young creature's assertion that he
is unlike any other human being, and has an individual contribution to make to
the world. The variation from the established type is at the root of all
change, the only possible basis for progress, all that keeps life from growing
unprofitably stale and repetitious.
Is it only the artists who really see these young creatures as
they are -- the artists who are themselves endowed with immortal youth? Is it
our disregard of the artist's message which makes us so blind and so stupid, or
are we so under the influence of our Zeitgeist that we can detect only
commercial values in the young as well as in the old? It is as if our eyes were
holden to the mystic beauty, the redemptive joy, the
civic pride which these multitudes of young people might supply to our dingy
towns.
The young creatures themselves piteously look all about them in
order to find an adequate means of expression for their most precious message:
One day a serious young man came to Hull-House with his pretty young sister
who, he explained, wanted to go somewhere every single evening, "although
she could only give the flimsy excuse that the flat was too little and too
stuffy to stay in." In the difficult role of elder brother, he had done
his best, stating that he had taken her "to all the missions in the
neighborhood, that she had had a chance to listen to some awful good sermons
and to some elegant hymns, but that some way she did not seem to care for the
society of the best Christian people." The little sister reddened
painfully under this cruel indictment and could offer no word of excuse, but a
curious thing happened to me. Perhaps it was the phrase "the best
Christian people," perhaps it was the delicate color of her flushing
cheeks and her swimming eyes, but certain it is, that instantly and vividly
there appeared to my mind the delicately tinted piece of wall in a Roman
catacomb where the early Christians, through a dozen devices of spring flowers,
skipping lambs and a shepherd tenderly guiding the young, had indelibly written
down that the Christian message is one of inexpressible joy. Who is responsible
for forgetting this message delivered by the "best Christian people"
two thousand years ago? Who is to blame that the lambs, the little ewe lambs,
have been so caught upon the brambles?
But quite as the modern city wastes this most valuable moment in
the life of the girl, and drives into all sorts of absurd and obscure
expressions her love and yearning towards the world in which she forecasts her
destiny, so it often drives the boy into gambling and drinking in order to find
his adventure.
Of
One of the most pathetic sights in the public dance halls of
Chapter 2
The Wrecked Foundations of Domesticity
|
"Sense with keenest edge
unused |
These words written by a poet to his young son express the
longing which has at times seized all of us, to guard youth from the mass of
difficulties which may be traced to the obscure manifestation of that
fundamental susceptibility of which we are all slow to speak and concerning
which we evade public responsibility, although it brings its scores of victims
into the police courts every morning.
At the very outset we must bear
in mind that the senses of youth are singularly acute, and ready to respond to
every vivid appeal. We know that nature herself has sharpened the senses for
her own purposes, and is deliberately establishing a connection between them
and the newly awakened susceptibility of sex; for it is only through the
outward senses that the selection of an individual mate is made and the
instinct utilized for nature's purposes. It would seem, however, that nature
was determined that the force and constancy of the instinct must make up for
its lack of precision, and that she was totally unconcerned that this instinct
ruthlessly seized the youth at the moment when he was least prepared to cope
with it; not only because his powers of self-control and discrimination are
unequal to the task, but because his senses are helplessly wide open to the
world. These early manifestations of the sex susceptibility are for the most
part vague and formless, and are absolutely without definition to the youth
himself. Sometimes months and years elapse before the individual mate is
selected and determined upon, and during the time when the differentiation is
not complete -- and it often is not -- there is of necessity a great deal of
groping and waste.
This period of groping is
complicated by the fact that the youth's power for appreciating is far ahead of
his ability for expression. "The inner traffic fairly obstructs the outer
current," and it is nothing short of cruelty to over-stimulate his senses
as does the modern city. This period is difficult everywhere, but it seems at
times as if a great city almost deliberately increased its perils. The newly
awakened senses are appealed to by all that is gaudy and sensual, by the
flippant street music, the highly colored theater posters, the trashy love
stories, the feathered hats, the cheap heroics of the revolvers displayed in
the pawn-shop windows. This fundamental susceptibility is thus evoked without a
corresponding stir of the higher imagination, and the result is as dangerous as
possible. We are told upon good authority that "If the imagination is
retarded, while the senses remain awake, we have a state of esthetic insensibility,"
-- in other words, the senses become sodden and cannot be lifted from the
ground. It is this state of "esthetic insensibility" into which we
allow the youth to fall which is so distressing and so unjustifiable. Sex
impulse then becomes merely a dumb and powerful
instinct without in the least awakening the imagination or the heart, nor does
it overflow into neighboring fields of consciousness. Every city contains
hundreds of degenerates who have been over-mastered and borne down by it; they
fill the casual lodging houses and the infirmaries. In many instances it has
pushed men of ability and promise to the bottom of the social scale. Warner, in
his American Charities, designates it as one of the steady forces making
for failure and poverty, and contends that "the inherent uncleanness of
their minds prevents many men from rising above the rank of day laborers and
finally incapacitates them even for that position." He also suggests that
the modern man has a stronger imagination than the man of a few hundred years
ago and that sensuality destroys him the more rapidly.
It is difficult to state how much
evil and distress might be averted if the imagination were utilized in its
higher capacities through the historic paths. An English moralist has lately
asserted that "much of the evil of the time may be traced to outraged
imagination. It is the strongest quality of the brain and it is starved.
Children, from their earliest years, are hedged in with facts; they are not
trained to use their minds on the unseen."
In failing to diffuse and utilize
this fundamental instinct of sex through the imagination, we not only
inadvertently foster vice and enervation, but we throw away one of the most
precious implements for ministering to life's highest needs. There is no doubt
that this ill adjusted function consumes quite unnecessarily vast stores of
vital energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature manifestations which
are infinitely more wholesome than the dumb swamping process. Every high school
boy and girl knows the difference between the concentration and the diffusion
of this impulse, although they would be hopelessly bewildered by the use of the
terms. They will declare one of their companions to be "in love" if
his fancy is occupied by the image of a single person about whom all the newly
found values gather, and without whom his solitude is an eternal melancholy.
But if the stimulus does not appear as a definite image, and the values evoked
are dispensed over the world, the young person suddenly seems to have discovered
a beauty and significance in many things -- he responds to poetry, he becomes a
lover of nature, he is filled with religious devotion or with philanthropic
zeal. Experience, with young people, easily illustrates the possibility and
value of diffusion.
It is neither a short nor an easy
undertaking to substitute the love of beauty for mere desire, to place the mind
above the senses; but is not this the sum of the immemorial obligation which
rests upon the adults of each generation if they would nurture and restrain the
youth, and has not the whole history of civilization been but one long effort
to substitute psychic impulsion for the driving force of blind appetite?
Society has recognized the
"imitative play" impulse of children and provides them with tiny
bricks with which to "build a house," and dolls upon which they may
lavish their tenderness. We exalt the love of the mother and the stability of
the home, but in regard to those difficult years between childhood and maturity
we beg the question and unless we repress, we do nothing. We are so timid and
inconsistent that although we declare the home to be the foundation of society,
we do nothing to direct the force upon which the continuity of the home
depends. And yet to one who has lived for years in a crowded quarter where men,
women and children constantly jostle each other and press upon every inch of
space in shop, tenement and street, nothing is more impressive than the
strength, the continuity, the varied and powerful
manifestations, of family affection. It goes without saying that every tenement
house contains women who for years spend their hurried days in preparing food
and clothing and pass their sleepless nights in tending and nursing their
exigent children, with never one thought for their own comfort or pleasure or
development save as these may be connected with the future of their families.
We all know as a matter of course that every shop is crowded with workingmen
who year after year spend all of their wages upon the nurture and education of
their children, reserving for themselves but the shabbiest clothing and a
crowded place at the family table.
"Bad weather for you to be
out in," you remark on a February evening, as you meet rheumatic Mr. S.
hobbling home through the freezing sleet without an overcoat. "Yes, it is
bad," he assents: "but I've walked to work all this last year. We've
sent the oldest boy back to high school, you know," and he moves on with
no thought that he is doing other than fulfilling the ordinary lot of the
ordinary man.
These are the familiar and the
constant manifestations of family affection which are so intimate a part of
life that we scarcely observe them.
Chapter 3
The Quest for Adventure
A certain number of the outrages upon the spirit of youth
may be traced to degenerate or careless parents who totally neglect their
responsibilities; a certain other large number of wrongs are due to sordid men and
women who deliberately use the legitimate pleasure-seeking of young people as
lures into vice. There remains, however, a third very large class of offenses
for which the community as a whole must be held responsible if it would escape
the condemnation, "Woe unto him by whom offenses come." This class of
offenses is traceable to a dense ignorance on the part of the average citizen
as to the requirements of youth, and to a persistent blindness on the part of
educators as to youth's most obvious needs.
The young people are overborne by
their own undirected and misguided energies. A mere temperamental outbreak in a
brief period of obstreperousness exposes a promising boy to arrest and
imprisonment, an accidental combination of circumstances too complicated and
overwhelming to be coped with by an immature mind, condemns a growing lad to a
criminal career. These impulsive misdeeds may be thought of as dividing into
two great trends somewhat obscurely analogous to the two historic divisions of
man's motive power, for we are told that all the activities of primitive man
and even those of his more civilized successors may be broadly traced to the
impulsion of two elemental appetites. The first drove him to the search for
food, the hunt developing into war with neighboring tribes and finally
broadening into barter and modern commerce; the second urged him to secure and
protect a mate, developing into domestic life, widening into the building of
homes and cities, into the cultivation of the arts and a care for beauty.
In the life of each boy there
comes a time when these primitive instincts urge him to action, when he is
himself frightened by their undefined power. He is faced by the necessity of
taming them, of reducing them to manageable impulses just at the moment when
"a boy's will is the wind's will," or, in the words of a veteran
educator, at the time when "it is almost impossible for an adult to
realize the boy's irresponsibility and even moral neurasthenia." That the
boy often fails may be traced in those pitiful figures which show that between
two and three times as much incorrigibility occurs between the ages of thirteen
and sixteen as at any other period of life.
The second division of motive
power has been treated in the preceding chapter. The present chapter is an
effort to point out the necessity for an understanding of the first trend of
motives if we would minimize the temptations of the struggle and free the boy
from the constant sense of the stupidity and savagery of life. To set his feet
in the worn path of civilization is not an easy task, but it may give us a clue
for the undertaking to trace his misdeeds to the unrecognized and primitive
spirit of adventure corresponding to the old activity of the hunt, of warfare,
and of discovery.
To do this intelligently, we
shall have to remember that many boys in the years immediately following school
find no restraint either in tradition or character. They drop learning as a
childish thing and look upon school as a tiresome task that is finished. They
demand pleasure as the right of one who earns his own living. They have
developed no capacity for recreation demanding mental effort or even muscular
skill, and are oblige' to seek only that depending upon sight, sound and taste.
Many of them begin to pay board to their mothers, and make the best bargain
they can, that more money may be left to spend in the evening. They even bait
the excitement of "losing a job," and often provoke a foreman if only
to see "how much he will stand." They are constitutionally unable to enjoy
anything continuously and follow their vagrant wills unhindered. Unfortunately
the city lends itself to this distraction. At the best, it is difficult to know
what to select and what to eliminate as objects of attention among its thronged
streets, its glittering shops, its gaudy advertisements of shows and
amusements. It is perhaps to the credit of many city boys that the very first
puerile spirit of adventure looking abroad in the world for material upon which
to exercise itself, seems to center about the
railroad. The impulse is not unlike that which excites the coast-dwelling lad
to dream of
|
"The beauty and mystery of
the ships |
I cite here a dozen charges upon which boys were brought
into the Juvenile Court of Chicago, all of which might be designated as deeds
of adventure. A surprising number, as the reader will observe, are connected
with railroads. They are taken from the court records and repeat the actual
words used by police officers, irate neighbors, or discouraged parents, when
the boys were brought before the judge. (1) Building fires along the railroad
tracks; (2) flagging trains; (3) throwing stones at moving train windows; (4)
shooting at the actors in the Olympic Theatre with sling shots; (5) breaking
signal lights on the railroad; (6) stealing linseed oil barrels from the
railroad to make a fire; (7) taking waste from an axle box and burning it upon
the railroad tracks; (8) turning a switch and running a street car off the
track; (9) staying away from home to sleep in barns; (10) setting fire to a
barn in order to see the fire engines come up the street; (11) knocking down
signs; (12) cutting Western Union cable.
Another dozen charges also taken
from actual court records might be added as illustrating the spirit of
adventure, for although stealing is involved in all of them, the deeds were
doubtless inspired much more by the adventurous impulse than by a desire for
the loot itself: (1) Stealing thirteen pigeons from a barn; (2) stealing a bathing
suit; (3) stealing a tent; (4) stealing ten dollars from mother with which to
buy a revolver; (5) stealing a horse blanket to use at night when it was cold
sleeping on the wharf; (6) breaking a seal on a freight car to steal
"grain for chickens"; (7) stealing apples from a freight car; (8)
stealing a candy peddler's wagon "to be full up just for once"; (9)
stealing a hand car; (10) stealing a bicycle to take a ride; (11) stealing a
horse and buggy and driving twenty-five miles into the country; (12) stealing a
stray horse on the prairie and trying to sell it for twenty dollars.
Of another dozen it might be
claimed that they were also due to this same adventurous spirit, although the
first six were classed as disorderly conduct: (1) Calling a neighbor a "scab";
(2) breaking down a fence; (3) flipping cars; (4) picking up coal from railroad
tracks; (5) carrying a concealed "dagger," and stabbing a playmate
with it; (6) throwing stones at a railroad employee. The next three were called
vagrancy: (1) Loafing on the docks; (2) "sleeping out" nights; (3)
getting "wandering spells." One, designated petty larceny, was
cutting telephone wires under the sidewalk and selling them; another, called
burglary, was taking locks off from basement doors; and the last one bore the
dignified title of "resisting an officer" because the boy, who was
riding on the fender of a street car, refused to move when an officer ordered
him off.
Of course one easily recalls
other cases in which the manifestations were negative. I remember an
exasperated and frightened mother who took a boy of fourteen into court upon
the charge of incorrigibility. She accused him of "shooting craps,"
"smoking cigarettes," "keeping bad company," "being
idle." The mother regrets it now, however, for she thinks that taking a
boy into court only gives him a bad name, and that "the police are down on
a boy who has once been in court, and that that makes it harder for him."
She hardly recognizes her once troublesome charge in the steady young man of nineteen
who brings home all his wages and is the pride and stay of her old age.
I recall another boy who worked
his way to
There are many of these
adventurous boys who exhibit a curious incapacity for any effort which requires
sustained energy. They show an absolute lack of interest in the accomplishment
of what they undertake, so marked that if challenged in the midst of their
activity, they will be quite unable to tell you the end they have in view. Then
there are those tramp boys who are the despair of every one who tries to deal
with them.
I remember the case of a boy who
traveled almost around the world in the years lying between the ages of eleven
and fifteen. He had lived for six months in
To the
preoccupied adult who is prone to use the city street as a mere passageway from
one hurried duty to another, nothing is more touching than his encounter with a
group of children and young people who are emerging from a theater with the
magic of the play still thick upon them. They look up and down the familiar
street scarcely recognizing it and quite unable to determine the direction of
home. From a tangle of "make believe" they gravely scrutinize the
real world which they are so reluctant to reenter, reminding one of the
absorbed gaze of a child who is groping his way back from fairy-land whither
the story has completely transported him.
"Going to the show" for thousands of young people in
every industrial city is the only possible road to the realms of mystery and
romance; the theater is the only place where they can satisfy that craving for
a conception of life higher than that which the actual world offers them. In a
very real sense the drama and the drama alone performs for them the office of
art as is clearly revealed in their blundering demand stated in many forms for
"a play unlike life." The theater becomes to them a "veritable
house of dreams" infinitely more real than the noisy streets and the
crowded factories.
This first simple demand upon the theater for romance is closely
allied to one more complex which might be described as a search for solace and
distraction in those moments of first awakening from the glamour of a youth's
interpretation of life to the sterner realities which are thrust upon his
consciousness. These perceptions which inevitably "close around" and
imprison the spirit of youth are perhaps never so grim
as in the case of the wage-earning child. We can all recall our own moments of
revolt against life's actualities, our reluctance to admit that all life was to
be as unheroic and uneventful as that which we saw
about us, it was too unbearable that "this was all there was" and we
tried every possible avenue of escape. As we made an effort to believe, in
spite of what we saw, that life was noble and harmonious, as we stubbornly
clung to poesy in contradiction to the testimony of our senses, so we see
thousands of young people thronging the theaters bent in their turn upon the
same quest. The drama provides a transition between the romantic conceptions
which they vainly struggle to keep intact and life's cruelties and trivialities
which they refuse to admit. A child whose imagination has been cultivated is
able to do this for himself through reading and reverie, but for the overworked
city youth of meager education, perhaps nothing but the theater is able to
perform this important office.
The theater also has a strange power to forecast life for the
youth. Each boy comes from our ancestral past not "in entire
forgetfulness," and quite as he unconsciously uses ancient war-cries in
his street play, so he longs to reproduce and to see set before him the valors and vengeances of a society embodying a much more
primitive state of morality than that in which he finds himself. Mr. Patten has
pointed out that the elemental action which the stage presents, the old
emotions of love and jealousy, of revenge and daring take the thoughts of the
spectator back into deep and well worn channels in which his mind runs with a
sense of rest afforded by nothing else. The cheap drama brings cause and
effect, will power and action, once more into relation and gives a man the
thrilling conviction that he may yet be master of his fate. The youth of
course, quite unconscious of this psychology, views the deeds of the hero
simply as a forecast of his own future and it is this fascinating view of his
own career which draws the boy to "shows" of all sorts. They can
scarcely be too improbable for him, portraying, as they do, his belief in his
own prowess. A series of slides which has lately been very popular in the
five-cent theaters of Chicago, portrayed five masked men breaking into a humble
dwelling, killing the father of the family and carrying away the family
treasure. The golden-haired son of the house, aged seven, vows eternal
vengeance on the spot, and follows one villain after another to his doom. The
execution of each is shown in lurid detail, and the last slide of the series
depicts the hero, aged ten, kneeling upon his father's grave counting on the
fingers of one hand the number of men that he has killed, and thanking God that
he has been permitted to be an instrument of vengeance.
In another series of slides, a poor woman is wearily bending over
some sewing, a baby is crying in the cradle, and two little boys of nine and
ten are asking for food. In despair the mother sends them out into the street
to beg, but instead they steal a revolver from a pawn shop and with it kill a
Chinese laundryman, robbing him of $200. They rush home with the treasure which
is found by the mother in the baby's cradle, whereupon she and her sons fall
upon their knees and send up a prayer of thankfulness for this timely and
heaven-sent assistance.
Is it not astounding that a city allows thousands of its youth to
fill their impressionable minds with these absurdities which certainly will
become the foundation for their working moral codes and the data from which
they will judge the proprieties of life?
It is as if a child, starved at home, should be forced to go out
and search for food, selecting, quite naturally, not that which is nourishing
but that which is exciting and appealing to his outward sense, often in his
ignorance and foolishness blundering into substances which are filthy and poisonous.
Out of my twenty years' experience at Hull-House I can recall all
sorts of pilferings, petty larcenies, and even
burglaries, due to that never ceasing effort on the part of boys to procure
theater tickets. I can also recall indirect efforts towards the same end which
are most pitiful. I remember the remorse of a young girl of fifteen who was
brought into the Juvenile Court after a night spent weeping in the cellar of
her home because she had stolen a mass of artificial flowers with which to trim
a hat. She stated that she had taken the flowers because she was afraid of
losing the attention of a young man whom she had heard say that "a girl
has to be dressy if she expects to be seen." This young man was the only
one who had ever taken her to the theater and if he failed her, she was sure
that she would never go again, and she sobbed out incoherently that she
"couldn't live at all without it." Apparently the blankness and
grayness of life itself had been broken for her only by the portrayal of a
different world.
One boy whom I had known from babyhood began to take money from
his mother from the time he was seven years old, and after he was ten she
regularly gave him money for the play Saturday evening. However, the Saturday
performance, "starting him off like," he always went twice again on
Sunday, procuring the money in all sorts of illicit ways. Practically all of
his earnings after he was fourteen were spent in this way to satisfy the
insatiable desire, to know of the great adventures of the wide world which the
more fortunate boy takes out in reading Homer and Stevenson.
In talking with his mother, I was reminded of my experience one
Sunday afternoon in
It is partly in response to this need that more sophisticated
young people often go to the theater, hoping to find a clue to life's
perplexities. Many times the bewildered hero reminds one of Emerson's description of Margaret Fuller, "I don't know where I am
going, follow me"; nevertheless, the stage is dealing with the moral
themes in which the public is most interested.
And while many young people go to the theater if only to see
represented, and to hear discussed, the themes which seem to them so tragically
important, there is no doubt that what they hear there, flimsy and poor as it
often is, easily becomes their actual moral guide. In moments of moral crisis
they turn to the sayings of the hero who found himself in a similar plight. The
sayings may not be profound, but at least they are applicable to conduct. In
the last few years scores of plays have been put upon the stage whose titles
might be easily translated into proper headings for sociological lectures or
sermons, without including the plays of Ibsen, Shaw and Hauptmann, which deal
so directly with moral issues that the moralists themselves wince under their
teachings and declare them brutal. But it is this very brutality which the
over-refined and complicated city dwellers often crave. Moral teaching has
become so intricate, creeds so metaphysical, that in a state of absolute
reaction they demand definite instruction for daily living. Their whole-hearted
acceptance of the teaching corroborates the statement recently made by an
English playwright that "The theater is literally
making the minds of our urban populations today. It is a huge factory of
sentiment, of character, of points of honor, of conceptions of conduct, of
everything that finally determines the destiny of a nation. The theater is not
only a place of amusement, it is a place of culture, a place where people learn
how to think, act, and feel." Seldom, however, do we associate the theater
with our plans for civic righteousness, although it has become so important a
factor in city life.
As it is
possible to establish a connection between the lack of public recreation and
the vicious excitements and trivial amusements which become their substitutes,
so it may be illuminating to trace the connection between the monotony and
dullness of factory work and the petty immoralities which are often the youth's
protest against them.
There are many city neighborhoods in which practically every
young person who has attained the age of fourteen years enters a factory. When
the work itself offers nothing of interest, and when no public provision is
made for recreation, the situation becomes almost insupportable to the youth
whose ancestors have been rough-working and hard-playing peasants.
In such neighborhoods the joy of youth is well nigh extinguished;
and in that long procession of factory workers, each morning and evening, the
young walk almost as wearily and listlessly as the old. Young people working in
modern factories situated in cities still dominated by the ideals of Puritanism
face a combination which tends almost irresistibly to overwhelm the spirit of
youth. When the Puritan repression of pleasure was in the ascendant in
Perhaps never before have young people been expected to work from
motives so detached from direct emotional incentive. Never has the age of
marriage been so long delayed; never has the work of youth been so separated
from the family life and the public opinion of the community. Education alone
can repair these losses. It alone has the power of organizing a child's
activities with some reference to the life he will later lead and of giving him
a clue as to what to select and what to eliminate when he comes into contact
with contemporary social and industrial conditions. And until educators take
hold of the situation, the rest of the community is powerless.
In vast regions of the city which are completely dominated by the
factory, it is as if the development of industry had outrun all the educational
and social arrangements.
The revolt of youth against uniformity and the necessity of
following careful directions laid down by some one else, many times results in
such nervous irritability that the youth, in spite of all sorts of prudential
reasons, "throws up his job," if only to get outside the factory
walls into the freer street, just as the narrowness of the school inclosure induces many a boy to jump the fence.
When the boy is on the street, however, and is "standing
around on the corner" with the gang to which he mysteriously attaches
himself, he finds the difficulties of direct untrammeled action almost as great
there as they were in the factory, but for an entirely different set of
reasons. The necessity so strongly felt in the factory for an outlet to his
sudden and furious bursts of energy, his overmastering desire to prove that he
could do things "without being bossed all the time," finds little
chance for expression, for he discovers that in whatever really active pursuit
he tries to engage, he is promptly suppressed by the police. After several
futile attempts at self-expression, he returns to his street corner subdued and
so far discouraged that when he has the next impulse to vigorous action he concludes
that it is of no use, and sullenly settles back into inactivity. He thus learns
to persuade himself that it is better to do nothing, or, as the psychologist
would say, "to inhibit his motor impulses."
When the same boy, as an adult workman, finds himself confronted
with an unusual or an untoward condition in his work, he will fall back into
this habit of inhibition, of making no effort toward independent action. When
"slack times" come, he will be the workman of least value, and the
first to be dismissed, calmly accepting his position in the ranks of the
unemployed because it will not be so unlike the many hours of idleness and
vacuity to which he was accustomed as a boy. No help having been extended to him
in the moment of his first irritable revolt against industry, his whole life
has been given a twist toward idleness and futility. He has not had the chance
of recovery which the school system gives a like rebellious boy in a truant
school.
The unjustifiable lack of educational supervision during the
first years of factory work makes it quite impossible for the modern educator
to offer any real assistance to young people during that trying transitional
period between school and industry. The young people themselves who fail to
conform can do little but rebel against the entire situation, and the
expressions of revolt roughly divide themselves into three classes. The first,
resulting in idleness, may be illustrated from many a sad story of a boy or a
girl who has spent in the first spurt of premature and uninteresting work, all
the energy which should have carried them through years of steady endeavor.
I recall a boy who had worked steadily for two years as a helper
in a smelting establishment, and had conscientiously brought home all his
wages, one night suddenly announcing to his family that he "was too tired
and too hot to go on." As no amount of persuasion could make him alter his
decision, the family finally threatened to bring him into the Juvenile Court on
a charge of incorrigibility, whereupon the boy disappeared and such efforts as
the family have been able to make in the two years since, have failed to find
him. They are convinced that "he is trying a spell of tramping" and
wish that they "had let him have a vacation the first summer when he
wanted it so bad." The boy may find in the rough outdoor life the healing
which a wise physician would recommend for nervous exhaustion, although the
tramp experiment is a perilous one.
This revolt against factory monotony is sometimes closely allied
to that "moral fatigue" which results from assuming responsibility
prematurely. I recall the experience of a Scotch girl of eighteen who, with her
older sister, worked in a candy factory, their combined earnings supporting a
paralytic father. The older girl met with an accident involving the loss of
both eyes, and the financial support of the whole family devolved upon the
younger girl, who worked hard and conscientiously for three years,
supplementing her insufficient factory wages by evening work at glove making.
In the midst of this devotion and monotonous existence she made the
acquaintance of a girl who was a chorus singer in a cheap theater and the
contrast between her monotonous drudgery and the glitter of the stage broke
down her allegiance to her helpless family. She left the city, absolutely
abandoning the kindred to whom she had been so long devoted, and announced that
if they all starved she would "never go into a factory again." Every
effort failed to find her after the concert troupe left Milwaukee and although
the pious Scotch father felt that "she had been ensnared by the
Devil," and had brought his "gray hairs in sorrow to the grave,"
I could not quite dismiss the case with this simple explanation, but was
haunted by all sorts of social implications.
The second line of revolt manifests itself in an attempt to make
up for the monotony of the work by a constant change from one occupation to
another. This is an almost universal experience among thousands of young people
in their first impact with the industrial world.
The startling results of the investigation undertaken in
Massachusetts by the Douglas Commission showed how casual and demoralizing the
first few years of factory life become to thousands of unprepared boys and
girls; in their first restlessness and maladjustment they change from one
factory to another, working only for a few weeks or months in each, and they
exhibit no interest in any of them save for the amount of wages paid. At the
end of their second year of employment many of them are less capable than when
they left school and are actually receiving less wages.
The report of the commission made clear that while the two years between
fourteen and sixteen were most valuable for educational purposes, they were
almost useless for industrial purposes, that no trade would receive as an
apprentice a boy under sixteen, that no industry requiring skill and
workmanship could utilize these untrained children and that they not only
demoralized themselves, but in a sense industry itself.
An investigation of one thousand tenement children in
Chapter 6
The Thirst for Righteousness
Even as we pass by the joy and beauty of youth on the
streets without dreaming it is there, so we may hurry past the very presence of
august things without recognition. We may easily fail to sense those spiritual
realities, which, in every age, have haunted youth and called to him without
ceasing. Historians tell us that the extraordinary advances in human progress
have been made in those times when "the ideals of freedom and law, of
youth and beauty, of knowledge and virtue, of humanity and religion, high
things, the conflicts between which have caused most of the disruptions and
despondences of human society, seem for a generation or two to lie in the same
direction."
Are we perhaps at least twice in
life's journey dimly conscious of the needlessness of this disruption and of
the futility of the despondency? Do we feel it first when young ourselves we
long to interrogate the "transfigured few" among our elders whom we
believe to be carrying forward affairs of gravest import? Failing to accomplish
this are we, for the second time, dogged by a sense of lost opportunity, of
needless waste and perplexity, when we too, as adults, see again the dreams of
youth in conflict with the efforts of our own contemporaries? We see idealistic
endeavor on the one hand lost in ugly friction; the heat and burden of the day
borne by mature men and women on the other hand, increased by their
consciousness of youth's misunderstanding and high scorn. It may relieve the
mind to break forth in moments of irritation against "the folly of the
coming generation," but whoso pauses on his plodding way to call even his
youngest and rashest brother a fool, ruins thereby the joy of his journey, --
for youth is so vivid an element in life that unless it is cherished, all the
rest is spoiled. The most praiseworthy journey grows dull and leaden unless
companioned by youth's iridescent dreams. Not only that, but the mature of each
generation run a grave risk of putting their efforts in a futile direction, in
a blind alley as it were, unless they can keep in touch with the youth of their
own day and know at least the trend in which eager dreams are driving them --
those dreams that fairly buffet our faces as we walk the city streets.
At times every one possessed with
a concern for social progress is discouraged by the formless and unsubdued modern city, as he looks upon that complicated
life which drives men almost without their own volition, that life of ingenuous
enterprises, great ambitions, political jealousies, where men tend to become
mere "slaves of possessions." Doubtless these striving men are full
of weakness and sensitiveness even when they rend each other, and are but
caught in the coils of circumstance; nevertheless, a serious attempt to ennoble
and enrich the content of city life that it may really fill the ample space
their ruthless wills have provided, means that we must call upon energies other
than theirs. When we count over the resources which are at work "to make
order out of casualty, beauty out of confusion, justice, kindliness and mercy
out of cruelty and inconsiderate pressure," we find ourselves appealing to
the confident spirit of youth. We know that it is crude and filled with
conflicting hopes, some of them unworthy and most of them doomed to
disappointment, yet these young people have the advantage of "morning in
their hearts"; they have such power of direct action, such ability to
stand free from fear, to break through life's trammelings,
that in spite of ourselves we become convinced that
|
"They to the disappointed
earth shall give |
That this solace comes to us only in fugitive moments, and
is easily misleading, may be urged as an excuse for our blindness and
insensitiveness to the august moral resources which the youth of each city
offers to those who are in the midst of the city's turmoil. A further excuse is
afforded in the fact that the form of the dreams for beauty and righteousness
change with each generation and that while it is always difficult for the
fathers to understand the sons, at those periods when the demand of the young
is one of social reconstruction, the misunderstanding easily grows into
bitterness.
The old desire to achieve, to
improve the world, seizes the ardent youth to-day with a stern command to bring
about juster social conditions. Youth's divine
impatience with the world's inheritance of wrong and injustice makes him
scornful of "rose water for the plague" prescriptions, and he insists
upon something strenuous and vital.
One can find innumerable
illustrations of this idealistic impatience with existing conditions among the
many Russian subjects found in the foreign quarters of every American city. The
idealism of these young people might be utilized to a modification of our
general culture and point of view, somewhat as the influence of the young
Germans who came to America in the early fifties, bringing with them the hopes
and aspirations embodied in the revolutions of 1848, made a profound impression
upon the social and political institutions of America. Long before they
emigrated, thousands of Russian young people had been caught up into the
excitements and hopes of the Russian revolution in
Citation: Addams,
Jane. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New
York: Macmillan, 1909; BoondocksNet Edition, 2001).
http://www.boondocksnet.com/editions/youth/ (Feb. 8, 2007).