Shaping Modern Youth: Social Policies and Growing Up Working-Class in Industrial America, 1890-1945

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Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. SHAPING MODERN YOUTH: SOCIAL POLICIES AND GROWING UP WORKING-CLASS IN INDUSTRIAL AMERICA, 1890-1945 by PATRICK JOSEPH RYAN Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Thesis Advisor: Dr. Michael Grossberg Department of History CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May, 1998 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 9833906 Copyright 1998 by Ryan, Patrick Joseph All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9833906 Copyright 1998, by UMI Company. AH rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Copyright c (1998) by Patrick Joseph Ryan Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of 'FrtJ'Klck- c l&Seph ________________ r ^ t/js g p L c y candidate for the (signed)_ f Y L / k a J l ___ (chair of committee) / (date) 3 ■ 2 7 degree.* -fftX •W e also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary m aterial contained therein. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I grant to Case Western Reserve University the right to use this work, irrespective of any copyright, for the University’s own purposes without cost to the University or to its students, agents and employees. I further agree that the University may reproduce and provide single copies of the work, in any format other than in or from microforms, to the public for the cost of reproduction. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. SHAPING MODERN YOUTH: SOCIAL POLICIES AND GROWING UP WORKING-CLASS IN INDUSTRIAL AMERICA 1890-1945 Abstract by PATRICK JOSEPH RYAN This dissertation examines how a series of interlocking labor, welfare, and education policies reframed the practices of growing up working-class in the halfcentury before World War II. For the masses of working people in northern American cities, youth became a period o f life protected from adult laboring relations, given over to therapeutic professionals, and situated in high schools that became committed to a peer-centered economy of consumption. Working-class youths were active protagonists in these events. As much as anyone, it was they who elevated the cult of youth over the filial piety demanded by their parents’ traditions and the self-control expected by the new professionals. Yet, ongoing waves of culturally distinct generations did not emerge. This study shows that ‘youth culture’ can not be comprehended as autonomous from ‘adult culture.’ It suggests that a cult o f youth ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sponsored by professional groups, but shaped by working-class youths and their parents, radically individualized how gender, race, and religion informed identities. The meanings of maturation were increasingly directed inward toward the body and the personality of individuals. This disassociated them from the interdependency that was articulated through kinship, religious institutions, and other remaining expressions o f paternal order. iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Michael Grossberg for his criticism and good humor. Helpful guidance also was provided by Catherine Kelly and Jonathan Sadowsky. My fellow graduate student and good friend, Jess Ballenger, read the first painful versions of all the chapters and helped me work through the ideas common to our work. Julie, my spouse, encouraged my efforts throughout, lived with the single-mindedness required to complete this project, and won the bread of the household. For her devotion and love, I am grateful. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS List o f Tables............................................................................................... vi-ix Chapter One - Introduction: Families, Individualism, and the Social Consequences of Modem Institutions............................................ 1-27 PART I: A NEW STRUCTURE OF DEPENDENCY, FAMILY ECONOMY AND LABOR POLICY IN INDUSTRIAL AMERICA Chapter Two - Paternalism Unbound: Wage-Earning Fathers and the Decline of Generational Interdependency in American Households, 1890 and 1918........................................................... 29-62 Chapter Three - Claiming Incompetence: Age, Liability, and the Exodus of Youths from Ohio’s Factories and Mills, 1889 to 1930 ............. 63-85 Chapter Four - Urban Retreat: The Ideological Origins of Newsboys’ Clubs and Camps............................................................................ 86-131 PART II: LESSONS OF LIBERATION WELFARE AND SCHOOLING IN CLEVELAND, OHIO Chapter Five - From Charity to Therapy: Youth and the Definition of Poverty during the Depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s . . . 133-184 Chapter Six - Contested Treatment: Individualism, Fostered Youths and Case Workers between the World W a r s ............................... 185-255 Chapter Seven - In Search o f the ‘Real’ World: The Rise of ExtraCurricular Activities as Revealed by Students’ Writings at Two Public High Schools, 1900 to 1945 ...................................... 256-327 Conclusion................................................................................................ 328-338 Appendix A: An essay on the Sources for Chapter T w o ......................... 339-359 Appendix B: An essay on the Sources for Chapter Five......................... 360-371 Selected Bibliography................................................................................. 372-403 v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LIST OF TABLES Table 2.1 - Real Wages in OhioIndustries by Sex and Age,1878-1923 . . page 35 Table 2.2 - Sources o f Household Income by MemberStatus across Age Groups, 1890 ......................................................................... page 39 Table 2.3 - Sources o f Household Income by Member Status across Age Groups, 1918.......................................................................... page 40 Table 2.4 - Sources o f Household Income by Member Status across Age Groups for African-American Households, 1 9 1 8 ................. page 44 Table 2.5 - Correlation Coefficients for Sources of Household Income by Member Status for Families with an Eldest Child 10 to 19, 1890 and 1918 page 48 Table 2.6 - Children’s Combined Income by Region and Eldest’s Age for 1890 and 1918 in constant 1890 d o lla rs.................................. page 49 Table 2.7 - Generational Economic Interdependency in Households with Wage-Earning Fathers, 1890 and 1918........................................... page 54 Table 2.8 - Generational Interdependency by Birthplace of Father from the 1890 Household Budget Survey............................................... page 55 Table 2.9 - Generational Interdependency by Race from the 1918 Household Budget Survey............................................................. page 58 Table 2.10 - Generational Interdependency by Father’s Industry and Eldest’s Age, 1890 and 1918......................................................... page 60 Table 3.1- Youth Workers as a Percentage of the Work Force by Industry in Ohio’s Large Firms, 1878-1937 page 82 Table 5.1 - Referral Ticket from the Bethel Associated Charities, 1893-1898 page 138 Table 5.2 - Case Investigation Sheet from the Bethel Associated Charities, 1893-1898 ...................................................................... page 140 vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table 5.3 - Who Reported Families to the BAC,1893-1898? page 142 Table 5.4 - The Number of Multiple Visits Noted in BAC Case Books, 1893-1898 page 147 Table 5.5 - Why was the Case Closed? - According the Social Worker o f the Associated Charities in 1934 ............................................... page 150 Table 5.6 - Problems and Causes of Poverty Assigned by Visitor from BAC cases, 1893-1898 .................................................................. page 152 Table 5.7 - Problems and Causes of Poverty Assigned by Worker from 65 Cases Closed by the AC in Nov-Dee o f 1934 ......................... page 153 Table 5.8 - Which Children Earned Among the BAC Families, 1893-1898? page 166 Table 5.9 - Friendly Visitor’s Prescriptions for Youths’ Life-Course Needs, 1893-1898 ........................................................................ page 172 Table 6.1 - Justification for Taking Custody o f Foster Y ouths................. page 190 Table 6.2 - Highest Status Occupational Title Achieved Prior to Discharge by Sex and R a c e ............................................................ page 197 Table 6.3 - Fostered Youths’ Occupational Status Upon Discharge by R ace............................................................................................ page 203 Table 6.4 - Girls’ Living Arrangements at Discharge by R a c e ................ page 215 Table 6.5 - Employment Status at Discharge by Race and S ex ................. page 216 Table 6.6 - Boys’ Living Arrangements and I.Q. Scores at Discharge by R ace............................................................................................ page 225 Table 6.7 - Youths’ Living Arrangements, Educational Outcomes, and I.Q. Scores at D ischarge................................................................ page 225 Table 6.8 - Boys’ Educational Outcomes by R a c e .................................... page 226 Table 6.9 - I.Q. and Vocational Guidance for Foster Y ouths................... page 239 vii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table 6.10 - Highest Vocational Training Afforded Foster Youths by Race and S e x ............................................................................ Table 6.11 - Vocational Counselors’ Advice to Foster Youths by Race and S e x ................................................................................ Table 6.12 - Vocational Counselors’ Diagnoses of Youths’ Vocational Problem by Race and S e x ............................................................... page 243 page 246 page 247 Table 6.13 - The Vocational Goals Voiced by Foster Youths by Race and S e x ................................................................................... page 248 Table 7.1 - Seniors’ Activities 1900 - 1945 ............................................... page 297 Table 7.2 - Curriculum Tracking by Race at East Technical for 1927 and 1939 ......................................................................................... page 304 Table 7.3 - Extra-Curricular Participation and Leadership by Race, School, and Y ear............................................................................ page 305 Table A. 1 - Real Income Indices Calculated for Chapter T w o ...... page 344 Table A.2 - (Figures Graphed in Tables 2.2 and 2.3) Sources of Household Income by Member Status Across Father’s Age Groups from Household Budget Surveys 1890 and 1918............. page 346 Table A.3 - (Figures Graphed in Table 2.1) Real Mean Annual Wages in 1890 dollars by Sex and Age in Ohio’s Mining, Metals, Glass, Textiles, and Manufacturing Industries Selected from Skill Levels Comparable to the Household Budget Surveys............................ page 346 Table A. 4 - Numbers of Employees & Mean Annual Wages in Constant 1890 dollars by Sex and Age in 26 Ohio Industries, 1878-1923 . . page 351 Table B. 1 - Ethnicity/Race of Households from 1890s BAC sample . . . . page 365 Table B.2 - Race and Nativity of Fathers in 43 “The Client-Speaks” Family-Interviews........................................................................... page 366 Table B .3 - Relationship of Dependents to Household Heads in the 1890s BAC Sample page 367 viii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table B.4 - Marital Status o f 269 Families in1890s BAC Sam ple page 368 Table B.5 - Marital Status of 65 Cases that Roberta Vance Sampled from AC in 1934 ............................................................................ page 368 Table B.6 - Father’s Occupation Among 202 Families with Fathers in 1890s BAC Sample.................................................................... page 369 Table B.7 - Fathers’ Occupational Statues Among 43 Families of “The Client Speaks” ...................................................................... page 370 Table B.8 - Mother’s Occupation Among 265 Families with Mothers in BAC Sam ple............................................................................... page 371 be Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Families, Individualism, and the Social Consequences of Modern Institutions When Ethel Springer investigated labor conditions on the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Chesapeake canals in 1920, she found that most boats were operated by families. Sons learned to captain from their fathers. As one mother told Springer, “the children are brought up on the boat and don’t know nothin’ else, and that is the only reason they take up ‘boating’.” Every family member’s labor was important. Children drove mules, opened locks, and took shifts steering the boats. Springer reported that 94 of 101 children over six years of age did some work on the boats. In only six families did the parents pay cash to their children for services rendered. Canal boat captains with four or more children usually did not hire deck hands and they reported that without their children they could not have continued to work the canals.1 Springer was perplexed by the family labor system on these canals. She awkwardly called the men in charge of the boats “captain-fathers.” She needed two words to denote a role that according to her world view should not have been bound as one. The boats left little room for privacy among the family-crews. They had no toilets, and although most families had places to stay off the canals during the winters, ’ Ethel M. Springer, Canal Boat Children on the Chesapeake and Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New YorkCanals (The American Canal and Transportation Center, 1921 c. reprinted 1981), 7-8, 13-14. I Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. these too lacked “modem conveniences.” The children drank no milk, had no safe places to play, and it was common for a child too young to swim to be roped or chained to the deck. These people existed beyond the reach o f the helping professions. The children only attended about half the school’s winter session. Almost all the mothers reported giving birth without a physician. One captain-father said, “we never need a doctor, we just stay sick until we get well.”2 The canals o f northern Appalachia were vital to America’s industrial development. Prior to the Civil War they facilitated the growth of markets for commercial farming and mining in the region. Even as steamships and railroads dwarfed them in amounts o f goods shipped, the smaller keelboats and the family labor systems that fit these waterways continued to operate.3 Into the twentieth century, similar systems of family labor coexisted with and furthered capitalist development.4 2Springer, Canal Boat Children, 8-19, 24, 26-38. 3An excellent map in Susan Previant Lee and Peter Passell, A New Economic View o f American History New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979), 71-79, shows the canals of this region as they were in 1860. They also review the vital role the canals played in the transportation revolution and industrial development of the Antebellum era. 4Two other examples of family labor systems that have been important to capitalist development are those of agricultural migrants and industrial homeworkers. For more on agricultural migration, householding, and kinship in Appalachia see Rhoda Halperin, The Livelihood o f Kin: Making Ends Meet “The Kentucky Way " (Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 1990. Although women have been the predominant industrial home workers, men have also participated in it. Home work has been a type of family labor system because it pools the efforts of parents, their children, and other kin under familial relations of production, yet it was capitalistic in that these workers do not generally own crucial materials or means of production, their labors are commodified, and they are removed from the market exchange of the goods they produced. See U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Potential Earning Power o f Southern Mountaineer Handicraft, Bulletin No. 128, 1935; Frieda S. Miller, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 The historical symbiosis between family labor systems and industrial capitalism should not, however, cause us to overlook the trend from 1820 to 1920 away from family labor systems to wage labor systems. To use an example from the transportation industry, Springer found a very different labor system when she compared the New York canals to those of Appalachia. By 1920, mules no longer pulled small boats along a towpath on these canals. The New York canals were traveled by steamers hauling several barges with crews o f wage-earning men. The ships were larger, took longer routes, and carried more diversified cargo. Of 179 children found on the canals of New York, most were family members of the ships’ captains. Only 19 reported working at all. The captain’s cabins were large and “partitions insured privacy.” All the children of school age were attending classes. Many wives of the men working the New York canals procured the services of a physician and some gave birth in hospitals.5 Springer’s 1920 comparison between the New York and Appalachian canals documents the existence o f quite different systems of labor in the same industry only a few hundred miles apart and suggests the diversity of family-labor relationships in America at this point in time. But, this does not mean that family relationships, “Industrial Home Work in the United States,”International Labour Review 43 (January-June 1941), 1-50; U.S. Department of Labor, Growth o f Labor Law in the United States (1967), 265-272; Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the politics o f industrial homework in the United States (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 5Springer, Canal Boat Children, 26-38. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 4 household economics, and systems of labor at any place ever have been, as Tamara Hareven has claimed, “autonomous” from one another.6 Quite to the contrary, the 6 Hareven critiqued Edward P. Thompson, Talcott Parsons, and Oscar Handlin for building a “theory of social breakdown” and arguing that “adaption to industrial life... stripped migrants of their traditional culture.” Tamara Hareven, Family Time Industrial Time: The Relationship between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1. In Family Time Industrial Time Hareven showed convincingly that the workers of the Amoskeage textile mills in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries maintained economic and social ties to kin and family that facilitated a stable industrial work-force and allowed workers to exercise limited power in the relations of production However, she also wrote that “family time is autonomous in certain areas. Changes in the family are slower than in other social institutions and the accepted historical” meta-narratives of Western society might not fit the family. See Tamara K. Hareven, “The Family as a Process: The Historical Study of the Family Cycle”Journal o f Social History 7 (1973-74) 325. See the essays in Michael Drake ed., Time, Family and Community: Perspectives on Family and Community History (Cambridge: The Open University, 1994). For a concise statement of the continuity/complexity view see Tamara K. Hareven, “The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change,” American Historical Review 96 (1991): 95-124. I think Hareven and those social historians who followed her lead often mishandle the concept of time by either ignoring it, assuming continuity, or proceeding as if social change is too complex to make much sense. For example, she argued that one could get beyond static crosssectional household economic and demographic data by using “age structure as a proxy for longitudinal patterns.” This statement is not logically valid. Grouping households by the ages of the parents might serve as a proxy for inferring widely shared life-course behaviors, expectations, and reasoning at a particular point in the past But in order to make any claims about continuity or change over time one must deal with comparative data (evidence from distinct, but comparable persons) or longitudinal data (evidence that follows the lives of people over time). Hareven concluded Family Time Industrial Time with the assertion that the study had, “cast serious doubt on any assumptions of simple linear historical change.” Yet, all of her eighteen charts in chapter 8, “Family work strategies and the household economy” are from a single year (1900); her evidence was rarely compiled or analyzed over time. When Hareven did use a periodization scheme in chapters 9-12, it was organized around the market conditions of labor supply and demand at the mill and its influence upon management-worker relations, but she kept this explanatory scheme analytically distinct from the dynamics of family life. These methodological choices are symptomatic of Hareven's frequent assumption of continuity in the history of the family. See pages 276-354,368-9 of Family Time Industrial Time. The stress on autonomy, complexity, and continuity is widely shared in the literature. Eric Hopkins also attempted to minimize and externalize measurable changes in family economic relationships when he argued that the transformation of working-class children's lives in nineteenth century England was “not the consequence of any profound change in attitudes to children... it was the product of philanthropic or compassionate motives, together with a concern for social control, at a time of unprecedented social change - a swelling population, industrialisation, and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5 contrast between the canals suggests that technology, labor relations, and family life are intimately related and change together. Like almost all families o f the time, the canal boat families were dependent on cash. Captain-fathers obtained cash, and thus the ability to sustain and control their households through seasonal work contracts that depended upon and reinforced their ‘paternal’ rights to command the labors of their wives and children. Industrial enterprises benefited from such family labor systems, but by the second half of the nineteenth century these same enterprises were extending wage relations of production through large scale textile, metals, mining, glass, and manufacturing firms to a growing proportion of American workers. Wage relations of production transformed the binding power of paternalism.7 The captains of New urbanization.” Eric Hopkins, Childhood transformed: Working-class children and Nineteenth-century England (New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 5. For similar studies see Cathy L. McHugh's Mill Family: The Labor System in the Southern Cotton Textile Industry, 1880-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 75; Janet Finch, “Do Families Support Each Other More or Less in the Past?” in Michael Drake ed., Time, Family and Community: Perspectives on Family and Community History (Cambridge: The Open University, 1994), 104. Also see Janet Finch, Family Obligations and Social Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). For an important critique of the thesis of long-term continuity in generational living arrangements see Steven Ruggles, “The Transformation of American Family Structure” American Historical Review 99 (February 1994): 103-124. 7On the relationships between master-servant law and the rise of wage labor see Christopher L. Tomlins, “Law and Power in the Employment Relationship,” in Labor Law in America: Historical and Critical Essays edited by Christopher L. Tomlins and Andrew J. King (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992): 70-98. On the decline of apprenticeship due to the rise of the cash wage see the excellent study, W.J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986). On the of domestic service under the transition to wage relations of production see David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York, NY: Oxford Press, 1978); Faye Dudden, “Experts and Servants: the National Council of Household Employment and the Decline of Domestic Service in the Twentieth-Century” Journal of Social History 20 (Winter 1986): 269-289; Phyllis Palmer, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 6 York’s canals were bosses, not fathers. Bosses commanded wage laborers through a commodity exchange, not through the paternalism of master-servant relationships. The men working the modern New York canals were not sons learning to be captains or fathers; many of them had established households of their own. Their patriarchical authority was not bound to explicit, legal control of the property or labors o f women and children. Rather, it rested on men earning the lion’s share o f the cash that funded domesticity. Domesticity naturalized mothers’ unpaid household labors, obscured men’s dependence upon them, and celebrated the liberation of children from the alienating commodification o f labor.1 Modem domestic relations also revolutionized the relationships between the generations and classes by introducing new caring professionals (social workers, teachers, medical personnel) into the process of growing up. As the canal-boat story suggests, the various transitions to modem domestic relations were uneven and prolonged. This was especially true among the diverse Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989). 8 On the male breadwinner ideal and patriarchy see Wally Seccombe, “Patriarchy stabilized: the construction of the male breadwinner wage norm in nineteenth-century Britain,” Social History 11, no. 1 (January 1986): 53-76. On the increasing demands of mothers’ unpaid labor see Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work For Mother: The Ironies o f Household Technologyfrom Open Hearth to Microwave (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1983). On the dependence of men’s wage earning on women's unpaid labors and its significance for the process of commodifying labor generally see Wally Seccombe, "The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism," New Left Review 83 (Jan-Feb 1974): 3-24; Jeanne Boydston, "To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-Class Subsistence," Radical History Review 35 (1986): 7-25. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7 newcomers to the American wage-earning classes of the Iate-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. One cannot assume that the meanings reformers such as Ethel Springer gave to household political economics were shared by the families o f the New York canals of whom she approved. When Appalachian whites came to urban areas and into closer orbit with the professionals classes, we also do not know what they made o f the changes in domestic relations that accompanied their migration. The same questions apply to other large groups who came to industrial cities in search o f work during these years, such as the African-Americans who journeyed out of debt peonage and land tenancy in the Jim Crow South, or the Orthodox Jews who left the shtetls of Eastern Europe, or the Greek and Roman Catholics who came from the shores o f the Mediterranean. This is not to say that the ideals of reformers and the institutions (such as schools, hospitals, and other social services) that they built to acculturate and assist these groups were unimportant. Without social provisions for children and the domestication of women’s work for which Springer was an advocate, the capitalist relations of labor on the New York canals, and other sites of industrial production, probably would not have become so common in the twentieth-century. This dissertation examines how a series o f interlocking labor, welfare, and education policies provided a new setting within which professionals, youths, and their parents fashioned the practices o f growing up working-class in the half-century before World War II. For the masses of working people in northern American cities, youth became a period of life protected from adult laboring relations, given over to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 8 therapeutic professionals, and situated in high schools committed to a peer-centered economy of consumption. Working-class youths were active protagonists in these events. As much as anyone, it was they who elevated the cult of youth over the filial piety expected by their traditions and the self-control demanded by the new professionals. Yet, ongoing waves of culturally distinct generations did not emerge. This study shows that ‘youth culture’ cannot be comprehended as autonomous from ‘adult culture.’ It suggests that a cult o f youth sponsored by professional groups, but shaped by working-class youths and their parents, radically individualized the ways gender, race, and religion informed identities. The meanings of maturation were increasingly directed inward toward the body and the personality of individuals which became disassociated from the articulation o f group interdependency found in kinship, religious institutions, and other remaining expressions o f paternal control. The remainder o f this introduction will define key terms, review the literature most relevant to my argument, and outline the structure of the project. Key Terms and Literature Questions about the intersections between mental life and social structures are central to this study, but I have not grounded my work in either the lives and ideas of elites or the administration of institutions. These approaches have predominated in historical literature on social policies because the sources they demand are plentiful, and because they have produced interesting debates. However, these avenues of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 9 research have been plagued by two interrelated limitations. The first appeared in the sterility o f the social control debate o f the late 1960s and 1970s.9 However, the trouble with treating altruistic progress and class interest as dichotomous entities was not only a matter of oversimplification. Rather, as Thomas Haskell pointed out in the middle 1980s, the social control debate tended to distract scholars from focusing their attention on the subtle relationships between the ways people have lived and the narratives they use to articulate and give meanings to these ways.10 It is important to 9As criticism of reformers and professionals grew in historical literature during the 1960s, scholars split over the question of whether humanitarian reforms constituted increasing social control or increasing altruism. On the one side stood social critics who argued that social institutions such as schools and juvenile courts were designed to control the children of subordinate groups by preparing them for lives of oppression. See Michael B. Katz, The Irony o f Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention o f Juvenile Delinquency (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969); David Nasaw, Schooled to Order: A social History o f Public Schooling in the United States (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979); William Graebner, A History o f Retirement: The Meaning and Function o f An American Institution, 1885-1978 (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1980); Barbara Brenzel, Daughters o f the State: A Social Portrait o f the First Reform School for Girls in North America, 1856-1905 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Joan Gittens, Poor Relations: The Children o f the State of Illinois, 1818-1990 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994). On the other side of the debate stood defenders of the professions and humanitarian ideals, who argued that the history of social policies for families is the story of progress. See Walter I. Trattner, Crusadefor the Children: A history o f the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America, (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970); Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars, New York City, 1805-1973: A History o f Public Schools as Battlefields o f Social Change (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1974); Joseph M. Hawes, The Children s Rights Movement o f the United States, A History o f Advocacy and Concern (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991). By the late 1970s some scholars were dissatisfied with the assumptions of the social control debate and embarked upon explicit attempts to identify its weakness and to supersede them. See Gerald N. Grob, “Reflections on the History of Social Policy in America,” Reviews in American History (September 1979): 293306. 10 in two important essays, Thomas Haskell rejected the relevance of the distinction between control and altruism when he asked historians to do more than “unmask the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 10 emphasize that questions about class and professional interests or humanitarian sentiments are hardly irrelevant to policy history, but they must always be pursued as part o f what Haskell called the “cognitive structures” that allowed and compelled reformers to engage their world as they did. Much of this had been implicit in the best o f the institutional and intellectual studies o f social policy history before and throughout the height of the social-control debate.11 Jacques Donzelot, who is often cited as a social control theorist, described with great depth the ideological structures that developed with the juvenile court and modern social services in France. According to Donzelot these reforms were part of a interestedness of ostensibly disinterested reforms” by working to “demonstrate the ‘naturalness’ of these reforms, given the historical development of certain cognitive structures...” See Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part L,” American Historical Review 90 (1985): 342. In addition to Haskell’s work, political scientists developed a similar, though more theoretically explicit and less historical, route around the social controlprogressive altruism polarity through “group-grid” theory. See Michael Thompson, Richard Ellis, and Aaron Wildavsky, Cultural Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990); Richard J. Ellis, American Political Cultures (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993); Dennis J. Coyle, ed., Politics, Policy, and Culture (San Francisco, CA: Westview Press, 1994). 11 Haskell gave credit to David Brion Davis, The Problem o f Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, NY: 1975). The foundational works in policy history had also tried to relate ideas to power more subtly than through class interest or altruism. See George M. Fredrickson’s work on the Sanitary Commission in The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1965). For Richard Hofstadter the reformers of the era were motivated by a world view that created “status anxieties.” For Robert Wiebe the professions were more than just a means for the “new middle class” to establish their social power, but provided a way for them to make sense of the transition from island communities to urban society. For Paul Boyer, attempts to control the masses in rising cities rested on a nostalgic view of a past village harmony. See Richard Hofstadter, The Age o f Reform, from Bryan to FDR (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf 1955); Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1967); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 11 larger movement that “liberalized” families. They spurred on a social transition from families organized around master-servant relationships to ones where maturation was defined as a rejection of heritage. According to Donzelot, these new institutions and the care givers who built them offered therapies that advanced a transition from “a government o f families to a government through the family,” and consequently increased the social responsibilities of the State.12 When I write o f ‘therapeutic’ outlooks, I mean ones that collapse social questions into individual biological or psychological ones. Under the therapeutic approach, “cases” of arrested psychological development, or dietary deprivation, or improper training, or psychological trauma impede the ability of certain unfortunate, individuals to function according to society’s rules. These maladjusted persons need expert treatment to think, appreciate, and feel appropriately and to eliminate their unnecessary dependencies or vulnerabilities.13 Therapeutic approaches to social 12Jacques Donzelot, The Policing o f Families, translated by Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1979), 92, 104, 112. Donzelot’s most persuasive passages regarding government through families show the displacement of the power of the father by the power of the juvenile court judge. On the American development of the “Judicial Patriarchy” see Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Also see Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1977); Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value o f Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 13 On the historical development of therapeutic treatment among psychiatric professionals see Philip Rieff, The Triumph o f the Therapeutic (New York, NY, 1966). On distinguishing the therapeutic outlook from classical and biblical ones, Rieff wrote that the “anxieties of this isolated individual and defaulting citizen (who, at best, sees the public life as yet another way of helping himself get through his own life) reflect not merely the pressures mounting inside his closed little circles of love and friendship; those anxieties also reflect the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 12 policies first appeared in the ‘moral reform’ of the early Republic and gave birth to modem forms o f ‘rehabilitation.’14 For children and youths the distinction between therapeutic intervention and merely ensuring their full, ‘normal’ development was far more obscure.15 Instead o f ‘rehabilitation,’ when dealing with children and youth we speak o f ‘enrichment programs’ or ‘education.’ All three have been and are therapeutic interventions. This study will show some of the ways that therapeutic thinking emerged in step with the liberalization of domestic relations and increasing individualism. It is at lines of personal competition that surround his new-found freedom from public responsibility and theological sovereignty. To meet these double anxieties, Freud taught the analytic attitude; his only alternative would have been to reassert some doctrine curtailing the very individuality that he sought to protect” See Philip Rief£ Therapy and Technique (New York, NY: Collier, 1963), 8-18. For a broader view of the development of the therapeutic ethos see T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place o f Grace: Antimodemism and the Transformation ofAmerican Culture, 18801920 (New York, NY: 1981) and T.J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of Consumer Culture, 1880-1930" in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 edited by Richard Wrightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1983), 1-38. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983). '4On moral reform and the origins of attempts to rehabilitate adults see David J. Rothman, The Discovery o f the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1971); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth o f the Prison, translated by AJan Sheridan (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979); Louis P. Masur, Rites o f Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation ofAmerican Culture, 1776-1865 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989). 15Carolyn Steedman has creatively explored the discursive history of what she dubbed “the idea of human interiority” and its intimate relationship to modem notions of child development Following Steedman, I believe that insuring ‘healthy’ child development has become the ‘natural’ form of therapeutic treatment See Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea o f Human Interiority, 1780-1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 13 this juncture that more profound limitations of the intellectual and institutional approaches to policy history become apparent. It is impossible to interpret the meanings and consequences o f Donzelot’s liberalization o f families through modem institutions unless we can reconstruct the world views and experiences of patients, inmates, students, and clients. Linda Gordon squarely addressed this issue in her 1988 study Heroes o f Their Own Lives. With great clarity she explained that the purpose of studying the recipients o f services is not merely to uncover the existence o f the “powers of the weak,” or to make graphic the ways that helping professionals violated family privacy, or to document the mechanisms by which modem caring institutions shaped class-consciousness. The purpose of the social approach to policy is to ask “whose rights?” and “whose consciousness?” because, “... one man’s loss in privacy was often another’s (frequently a woman’s) gain in rights.” Gordon gave Donzelot’s transition from “a government of families to a government through the family,” a fresh moral perspective. She concluded Heroes with an endorsement o f state intervention into domestic life by writing that the, “very inequalities of power that make the state oppressive create the need for state responsibility for welfare, and these inequalities include gender and age as well as class.”16 Undoubtedly Gordon’s perspective as a feminist contributed to her insight into 16See Linda Gordon, “Family Violence, Feminism, and Social Control,” Feminist Studies v. 12, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 452-78. Linda Gordon, Heroes o f Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880-1960 (Boston: Viking Penguin Inc., 1988), 289-299. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 14 state “governance through the family,” but her reconstruction o f the lives o f “the weak” through social worker’s case notes was equally essential to the story she was able to tell. Her simple question “whose consciousness?” has enormous implications for all social inquiry. For example, my use of ‘individualism’ owes a good deal to Robert Bellah’s et al., Habits o f the Heart. Bellah and his team were able to locate four major strains of individualism in American culture which they called Biblical, Republican, Utilitarian or Economic, and Expressive. They attached the origins of each in the American context to a representative figure: John Winthrop, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Walt Whitman, respectively. They were sensitive to the ways each strain of American individualism had evolved since the days of each archetypal figures, yet heavy reliance upon them and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America prevented them from adequately addressing what newcomers or newly freed Americans might have brought to the nation’s political cultures since the middle of the nineteenth-century.17 The trouble is not just one of omission. Bellah et al. referred to the economic and expressive forms of individualism as ‘modem’ or ‘radical’ in order to highlight the ways that the independence of the self-made man (economic individualism) or the therapist’s striving for inner peace (expressive individualism) made it difficult to create a language of moral commitment, civic virtue, or social responsibility as had the 17 Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1985). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 15 adherents o f what they called biblical and republican individualism. But, how much sense does it make to call slave owner Thomas Jefferson an ‘individualist’? Can we lump the religious traditions of Jews and Catholics who came to America in large numbers between 1890 and 1924 under the heading of John Winthrop’s ‘biblical individualism’? When we begin to explore the social implications of the republican and biblical traditions, linking them to the term ‘individualism’ shows itself to be an oxymoron. It is more reasonable to place republican and biblical traditions under the term ‘paternalism’ in order to stress how significant the break from them has been. It is at this point that gender becomes a central concept. By ‘paternal,’ I do not mean the broad, trans-historical category o f male-domination subsumed by the term ‘patriarchy.’ Paternalism is a personal, fatherly form of domination that has been used notably by men as diverse as nineteenth-century American slave owners, the captain-fathers of Appalachian canals, or present-day clergy in the Catholic Church. As such, ‘paternalism’ can be part o f social relations as different as those found within plantations, canal-boat families, or church parishes. These examples should make it clear that the social and moral implications of paternalism are neither simple nor transcendent. Yet, for paternalism to survive it must operate through filial pieties which have been difficult to maintain during the rise of cash wages, industrial Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 16 disciplines, and therapeutic languages.1* As Bellah et al. discussed in some detail, it was these three developments in American society that spearheaded the emergence o f modem economic and expressive forms o f individualism. But bereft of gender analysis, the transition to modem individualism makes little sense. In her study of the rise of American social provision between 1890 and 1930, Molly Ladd-Taylor concisely defined the primary discursive support of reform as matemalistic. Matemalism is a combination o f beliefs, (1) that there is a uniquely feminine value system based on care and nurturance; (2) that mothers perform a service to the state by raising citizen-workers; (3) that women are united across class, race, and nation by their common capacity for motherhood and therefore share a responsibility for all the world’s children; (4) that ideally men should earn a family wage to support their “dependent” wives and children at home.19 Thus, matemalism was the articulation of how some professionals, such as Ethel Springer, thought domestic relations should be structured. Within it we can see how the economic individualism of the male-breadwinner ideal survived through a gendered dynamic with a therapeutic and expressive concern for child nurture, adjustment, and education. Matemalism was more than a middle-class women’s response to patriarchy.20 It was a profound, long-coming ideological development that proposed 18One of the clearest portraits of paternalism can be found in the character of the narrator’s father in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (New York, NY: Persea Books, c. 1925, 1975). 19Molly Ladd-Taylor Mother-Work: Women, Child-Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 3. 20 Some viewed this as part of the maintenance of patriarchy and some viewed it more positively as women’s road to liberation. For the former view see Eileen Boris and Peter Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 17 to restructure the meanings o f individualism and commitment in American life. What happened when these matemalistic professionals went about to transmit their sensibilities to the masses o f Americans from diverse cultural backgrounds? Here again Linda Gordon’s social approach to policy and her question, “whose consciousness?” comes forward. Unfortunately we have too few studies that even ask this question or recognize the methods required to explore it.21 For example, in Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, Theda Skocpol argued that a nascent ‘paternalist’ welfare state collapsed in early twentieth-century America and in its place a ‘matemalist’ one emerged. For Skocpol paternalism and matemalism were merely opposites. If women made major decisions, received benefits, and gained these objectives by purporting to “extend domestic ideals into the public life,” then the policy was matemalist. If soldiers or retired industrial workers received the benefits, and men made the decisions, then the policy was paternal. These definitions worked Bardaglio, “The Transformation of Patriarchy: The Historic Role of the State,” in Families, Politics, and Public Policy: A Feminist Dialogue on Women and the State edited by Irene Diamond (New York, NY: Longman, 1983). For the later see Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 620-647. Also see Linda Gordon ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds. Gender and the Origins of Welfare States in Western Europe and North America (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992). 21 Very few works have given even partial attention to the methods of a social approach to policy history. Two fine examples that do are Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the politics o f industrial homework in the United States (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel HiU, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. for Skocpol because she pursued a “polity-centered” or elite approach to policy. She did not delve into how professionals and their clients related to one another and it is at this grassroots level (which we will explore in chapters Five, Six, and Seven), that the gender and class work of matemalism shows itself most clearly. What Skocpol called a transition from paternal to maternal policies as a liberation for women, this dissertation will portray as a rise of modem, individualistic approaches to social policies that maintained some elements of patriarchal order during a general breakdown o f the paternal ways of the newcomers to American cities.22 The limits o f an elite-based approach to policy studies are also apparent in Andrew Polsky’s The Rise o f the Therapeutic State. Polsky claimed that a primary shortcoming o f what he called the “therapeutic state” was the failure to recognize that “clients do not passively cooperate with the agency, but rather try to manipulate intervention to achieve their own purposes.” Given this premise about the powers of the weak, one might expect that the relationships between social service providers and their clients would become a significant part of his inquiry. Yet, he never explored the meaning of the phrase “their own purposes.” Social service providers and their clients are conspicuously absent from the book. Partly due to this methodological choice, Polsky’s critique o f therapeutic intervention was reduced to the assertion that it does 22 In my view cultural and structural approaches to the rise of welfare states are not as weak as Skocpol portrayed them in her extended review of them. Consequently Skocpol’s polity-centered approach has less to recommend it See Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins o f Social Policy in the United States (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 19 not “work” and that it is undemocratic. The second point is self-evident because experts by definition are not democrats, but it is unclear what Polsky meant by the former. Contrary to Polsky’s technocratic critique of therapy, I have found that therapeutic approaches to social problems have “worked” to radically individualize how providers and clients understand and guide their awn lives.72 In addition to contributing to the social history of public policies, this dissertation will address a number o f other issues in the history of families and children. It will make in clear that the evolution of the “generation gap” in this century has been wrought by more than post-WWTI affluence.24 It will suggest that current expressions of conservative disdain for today’s youth that rely on a vision of ‘happy days’ family harmony before the 1960s are rather nostalgic, and self-interested, 23 See Andrew J. Polsky, The Rise o f the Therapeutic State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 5. 24The idea that post-WWD affluence allowed for suburbanization and a flourishing of youth culture along with an expansion of the youth consumer market is undeniable. These changes were quite apparent to social commentators of the 1950s such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Goodman, and have been stressed by present scholars such as Grace Palladino and Brett Harvey. This said, current scholars often over state the novelty of the PostWar era. Palladino relied on the fact that marketers did not direct their work toward teenaged consumers until the 1940s to conclude that most young Americans supported their families through the 1930s with little to say about consumption within the Household. Her claim that the “the Great Depression had finally pushed teenage youth out the workplace and into the classroom,” is simply false; her contention that most youths prior to the thirties, “could expect to be seen, but not heard within their family circle and ignored, for the most part, outside of it,” is a doubtful overstatement Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1996), xii, 5. Also see, Brett Harvey, The Fifties: A Women's Oral History (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1994). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 20 remembrances.25 The problem of nostalgia haunts all accounts of decline, but not all criticism. Older forms of paternal control or communal discipline were undesirable. What follows is not a story o f decline, but one that calls for a humble assessment of modem social change and the rise of individualism. It will challenge narratives of youth liberation that slight the disciplining power of the therapeutic services, mass media, and industrial institutions.26 25 See Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992). 26Perhaps the strongest statement of the theme of progressive liberation in the history of American youth can be found in Mary Handlin and Oscar Handlin, Facing Life: Youth and Family in American History (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Company, 1971). Progressive liberation is the latent organizing theme of several general works such as Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1996); Elliot West, Growing Up in Twentieth-Century America: A History and Reference Guide (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1996); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History o f American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988); John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History o f Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988). These scholars are quick to ask questions about “whose rights?” and “whose consciousness?” but by so doing they make an appeal to the authority of experience and this risks treating experience as an unmediated category. There are no easy solutions to this liability, but Joan Scott wrote a helpful essay warning scholars to resist reproducing narratives of liberation for marginal groups. See Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience” in Questions o f Evidence: Proof Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, edited by James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 363-400. Of available accounts my narrative of youth liberation is most indebted to Joseph Kett's conclusions that the triumph of adolescence has been defined by conformity, muscular anti-intellectualism, and passivity. Joseph Kett, Rites o f Passage: Adolescence in America, 1780-Present (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1977). Two fine recent social histories of youths have shown the diversity of growing up in America, but these researchers have had difficulty making any general claims. See Harvey Graff, Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age, 1850-1890 (New York, NY: Twayne Publishers, 1997). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 21 The Structure of the Project This project explores of the social consequences of labor, welfare, and education policies. Chapters Two, Three, and Four utilize traditional quantitative and literary sources. But, the bulk of the study is devoted to the interpretation o f social worker case notes and writings of high school students in chapters Five, Six, and Seven. Except for the use o f federal household budget surveys that encompassed all regions of the United States, this study limits itself almost entirely to evidence from northern industrial cities. Well over half of the text is dedicated to three chapters dealing with welfare and education in one such city -- Cleveland, Ohio. This was not chosen to imply that Cleveland is a representative location —an “Elmstown” or “Middletown” —of the urban industrial north. But, it did provide an excellent array of archival resources for this study. Cleveland is a good location for the study because during the time between 1890 to 1945 the city developed heavy industries and manufacturing, experienced the arrival o f Southern and Eastern Europeans and African-Americans, and created social policies to help, monitor, and direct these peoples. At this juncture of the project, reconstructing the relationships between professionals, youths, and their families has limited the amount of effort that could be devoted to the lives of policy elites. What follows is also not institutional history social policies, although it does rely on several local studies of just this type. Part I of the study, “A New Structure of Dependency” explores how workingclass youths’ engagement with adult economic and social life faded within households, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 22 in workplaces, and on city streets in the early twentieth-century. I argue that this transformation came about not due to ‘market forces,’ but through the visible hand of public policy and according to matemalist ideals about domestic order and urban life. The first chapter o f this section uses federal household budget surveys to show that wage earning by children, co-residing with wage-earning kin, or taking in boarders were greatly reduced in the early twentieth-century across region, ethnicity, race, and nativity. Fathers’ wages achieved a new stability and supremacy relative to other household members over their life times and this helped create a new, more durable setting for the male breadwinner ideal. Direct economic reciprocity between the generations was reduced, and this opened new avenues for defining growing up working-class. There were numerous ways in which social policies stabilized the earnings of working-class men and discouraged minors and women from competing with them in the more lucrative sectors of the wage-labor market. Chapter Three takes up one of these policies by examining work injury claims in the state of Ohio that helped create new age standards for “due care” and “negligence” after the 1880s. The new age standards made it difficult for employers to use common law defenses to limit their liabilities for injuries sustained by youths. Although the law provided rational economic incentives for employers to avoid hiring youths, work accident claims did not function as market mechanisms. For one, judges directly tied the determination of negligence to statutory violations. Moreover, the courts provided a formal setting Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 23 where youths were encouraged to play the role of the incompetent impulsive child. Thus the courts provided ways for jurists, employers, parents, professionals, and youths to acculturate themselves to modern youth dependency. As youths exited the heavy industries and manufacturing positions that were monopolized by adults (mostly men), they continued to earn cash in what was dubbed the “casual” or the poorly paid, unregulated, and non-union sectors of the economy such as street trading. In Chapter Four, I argue that newsboys were successfully and widely organized in the early twentieth-century, but that these organizations were not labor unions led by newsboys or adult newsworkers. They were the newsboys’ associations, clubs, and camps often funded by newspaper publishers. Under pressure from child labor reformers who believed children had no business on the city streets, these clubs became increasingly oriented toward recreational, psychological, and medical treatment. By the 1930s, even prominent newsboys’ club operators who distrusted professional social workers came to express the professionals’ therapeutic world view and joined their retreat from the city. Part II, “Lessons of Liberation,” delves deeper into the lives of working-class youths and their relations with helping professionals by narrowing the scope of the study to institutions in Cleveland, Ohio. Broadly speaking, each chapter of this section demonstrates in some way that professionals used welfare and schooling to teach liberal traditions to the children o f paternalistic working-class families. The liberal ideals o f professionals were not monolithic, but they widely contained notions of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 24 feminine cleanliness, control of sexuality, and sensitive nurturing of children in order to foster ego development. Maturity was generally defined by professionals as economic independence. For boys this often centered on breadwinning and for girls it often centered on marrying a breadwinner and making a home. Helping professionals proffered gendered themes of a masculine economic individualism alongside a feminine expressive individualism. Working-class families and youths did not simply imbibe the ideals of service providers, but they engaged professionals in formative therapeutic relationships that helped shape their outlooks. Youths elevated peer-centered consumption, heterosociality, and romantic naturalism in opposition to the utilitarian self-control demanded of economic individualism and the more restrictive aspects of domesticity. As a result, professional case work and public high schooling produced more radical forms o f expressive individualism in the younger generation than anyone at the time could have predicted, controlled, or even fully comprehended. Chapter Five uses case notes and client interviews to compare poverty relief during the great depressions o f the 1890s and the 1930s. In the 1890s, friendly visitors, parents, and youths seemed to have widely shared the presumption that a young person’s lot was cast with her or his own kind because poverty was intertwined with gender, ethnic, religious, and class identities. By the 1930s this commitment to generational continuity no longer held sway as professional social workers and working-class clients alike voiced a clear distinction between parental poverty and the potential o f childhood and youth. I call this shift in relief work and attitudes toward Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 25 poverty the transition from “charity to therapy.” A new language emerged to name stigmas and keep secrets that supported anxieties about failed male breadwinners, generational discontinuity, and encouraged expressive individualism. The next chapter explores therapeutic relationships more deeply by using the rich foster care records of the Cuyahoga County Child Welfare Bureau. Social workers pursued treatment plans and offered vocational guidance according to a combination of test scores, racism, and the gendered assumptions o f the male breadwinner ideal. They worked under the belief that maturity was achieved for young men with occupational independence and for young women with marriage to a breadwinning male. For them, success demanded delayed gratification and setting up one’s own nuclear household. Youths who did poorly on intelligence tests, especially if they were African-American, were the most likely after age 15 to be guided into the least promising training programs and job placements away from their family and friends. The best way for youths to elude the sorting protocols of professionals was to remain in school between ages 16 and 18. However, this was a difficult task for foster youths in the interwar years. Foster youths struggled to remain in schools not only because they wanted to delay entrance into full-time, often unskilled, labor or because they delighted in denying social workers control over their lives - though these were indeed factors - but because high schools were seductive. High school life gave youths an unparalleled cultural space where they could counter the individualized work ethic and middle-class domesticity that the case workers were trying to inculcate Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 26 among them. The final chapter reconstructs the rise of extra-curricular activities at two Cleveland public high schools between 1900 and 1945 through student literary magazines, newspapers, and yearbooks. These sources have provided a rare glimpse into the ways extra-curricular activities helped school authorities discipline students to modem organizational techniques, while encouraging youths to become peer-centered, sexually liberated consumers. The more comprehensive high schools became, the more the cult of youth grew, the more disengaged students became from the normative demands o f filial piety and self-control. The origins of extra-curricular activities lay in a search for ‘real’ or authentic experiences which, ironically, compulsory attendance at high schools (through industrial discipline and separating youths from other spheres of social life) had denied students. The nostalgic modernist search for vigorous experiences fed students’ fascination with spectator sports and this was used by authorities to rally support for the ultimate experience of modem alienation - the World Wars. Like the nostalgic need for a vigorous and ‘real’ experience which sports hero worship helped create and fill, the students of the literary and debating societies produced writings that developed another avenue in the search for authenticity. They constructed a sense o f their gender, religious, and racial identities by locating something transcendent within themselves or through a pantheistic naturalism. However, these writings also suggest that scholastic and artistic clubs were Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 27 fundamentally different than spectator events. They enhanced the student’s ability to speak and think about their lives. These clubs turned the expressive individualism o f the cult of youth, the therapeutic aspects of self-realization that existed within it, toward more socially critical directions. High schools presented youths with the twin lures of anonymity and liberation that constitute the core features of expressive individualism in a mass society. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PART I: A NEW STRUCTURE OF DEPENDENCY, FAMILY ECONOMY AND LABOR POLICY IN INDUSTRIAL AMERICA 28 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER TWO PATERNALISM UNBOUND: Wage-Earning Fathers and the Decline in Generational Interdependency in American Households, 1890 - 1918 This chapter explores income patterns within the households of wage-earning men employed in textiles, metals, mining, glass, and manufacturing around the turn of the last century. Several previous studies have shown that many late nineteenthcentury American households participated in a gendered wage-earning hierarchy. Fathers and sons were the most likely to earn wages, followed next by daughters over 15 and other relatives in the household, next mother’s earned wages, and the last option tended to be daughters under 15 and the taking of boarders.1 My analysis 1For especially good work on the wage-earning hierarchy see Christine E. Bose, “Household Resources and U.S. Women’s Work: Factors Affecting Gainful Employment at the Turn of the Century” American Sociological Review 49 (August 1984): 474-490; Nancy Folbre, “Women’s Informal Market Work in Massachusetts, 1875-1920,” Social Science History 17 (Spring 1993): 135-160. Although single-year quantitative studies have helped frame this chapter, there are weaknesses to such an approach that have encouraged me to compare two household budget surveys. The one-year approach makes it difficult to know how to interpret particular values or associations unless the researcher pays extremely close attention to other comparable studies before or after the given year and uses them to interpret findings. Thomas A. Arcury has explained that using measures of central tendency to investigate the relationship between household organization and specific macro-economic changes is problematic when narrowed to the short-term because of high variation in the immediate responses of individuals and families. Thomas A. Arcury, "Rural Elderly Household Life-Course Transitions, 1900 and 1980 compared," Journal o f Family History 11 (no. 1 1986): 55-76. For examples of the one-year approach see: Gary Cross and Peter R. Shergold "The Family Economy and the Market: Wages and Residence of Pennsylvania Women in the 1890s" Journal o f Family History 11 (July 1986): 245-265; Melanie Archer, "The Entrepreneurial Family Economy: Family Strategies and Self-Employment in Detroit, 1880," Journal o f Family History 15 (no. 3 1990): 261-283; Barry R. Chiswick, "Jewish Immigrant Wages in America in 1909: An Analysis of the Dilligham Commission Data," Explorations in Economic History 29 (July 1992): 274-289; (continued...) 29 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 30 suggests that this wage-earning hierarchy was restructured during the early twentieth century and a new pattern emerged. Income earning by children and youths, coresiding with income-sharing kin, and taking in boarders were greatly reduced. During the first half of the twentieth century, combining mothers’ and fathers’ wages to meet needs became both more socially acceptable and more common than relying on income from children.2 Fathers’ wages achieved a new stability and supremacy relative to other household members over their life times. The obtainablity of the adult malebreadwinner ideal increased, and this was associated with an equally dramatic decline in the economic contributions of youths.3 These new earning patterns were widely ’(...continued) Cheryl Elman, "Turn of the Century Dependence and Interdependence: Roles of Teens in Family Economies of the Ages," Journal o f Family History 18 (no. 1 1993): 65-85. See note 6, Chapter One for a review of the literature most opposed to the narrative of change this chapter proposes. 2Valerie K. Oppenheimer, "The Life Cycle Squeeze: The interaction of men's occupational and family life cycles," Demography 11 (1974): 227-245; Michael R. Haines, "Industrial Work and Family Life Cycle, 1889/90," Research in Economic History 4 (1979): 289-356; Frances S. Hensley, "Women in the Industrial Work Force in West Virginia, 1880-1945," West Virginia History 49 (1990): 115-124. 3My purposes are to describe the degree and timing by which a group of households headed by wage-earning men experienced changes in household economics. Historical economists tend to research households in order to demonstrate the maxim that all people are essentially profit- or leisure-maximizing individuals. They call this discovering the “utility function.” Clark Nardinelli stated his classical economic assumptions quite bluntly when he admitted, “one difference between the economic approach and other approaches is that changes in parental attitudes are not assumed to be driving other historical changes. Rather, the economist assumes that attitudes do not change. Changes in the economic role of children over time are explained by changes in technology, prices, and income. [Thus, the decision for a family member to seek paid labor] does not depend on attitudes, affections, customs, sexual stereotypes, or outside coercion; it depends only on relative productivities.” Clark Nardinelli, Child Labor and the (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 31 experienced in households of different regions, races, and fathers’ place o f birth and industry o f employment. Measuring this structural shift in household economics opens the door for competing historical interpretations of what youths and parents in these families made of the changes. Thus, the remainder of the dissertation will offer interpretations o f the meanings that youths, parents, and professionals forged in the contexts o f specific social institutions that flourished due to and also sped this transition in household economics. Appendix A provides a more complete discussion o f my handling of 3(...continued) Industrial Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 36-39, 59. Even more subtle economists have harbored these assumptions. In her essay “Family Strategies and the Family Economy in the Late 19th Century: the Role of Secondary Workers,” in Theodore Hershberg ed. Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 285, Claudia Goldin argued that “[ordinary people in times past were, indeed, faced with severe constraints —economic, cultural, and institutional —and were bound by tradition far more than today. But, families, at some point in time, began to control more of their present and future lives and eventually were capable of planning longrun strategies of life.” (279) Thus, constraints and strategies exist in tension; too many constraints and there exist no room for strategic decisions. This seems to make good sense, but it overlooks the ways constraints make a strategy possible, because the constraints of life provide the grounding to identify goals and create an ethic which together form the essential elements of any behavior. Once we begin to understand that constraints do not disable strategic behavior, but make it possible, we are less likely to assume that past behavior was merely a product of the constraints of “traditions” or “technological limitations” or scarcity, but view them as legitimate strategies. Then we are less likely to assume present behavior is quite so free of existing constraints. Goldin’s ahistorical, perhaps asocial, thinking influenced her conclusions in Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History o f American Women (New York, 1990), where she claimed that wage discrimination did not begin until around 1900 because the gender gap in wages reflected differences in physical strength. For a more contextually grounded historical treatment of the subject see: Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1990). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 32 quantitative sources for this chapter, but some brief comments are in order.4 What will be referred to as the ‘1890 data’ was based on a survey of income, expenditures, and demographic information from 8,544 households in 24 U.S. states and 5 European nations whose ‘household heads’ (almost all men) worked in metals production, mining, glass, and textiles. I selected 5,896 U.S. households from the 1890 data. What will be called the ‘1918 data’ was based on a similar, but more extensive, survey between 1917 and 1919 of 12,817 households in 42 U.S. States whose ‘household heads’ (all men) worked in a larger spectrum of the American economy and wider portion of the occupational hierarchy. From this survey I selected 4,505 households whose fathers held occupations o f roughly similar skill and industry as the 1890 survey. All dollar figures have been converted to constant 1890 dollars according to the federal consumer price index. Unless noted, all earnings figures are reported as annual earnings. The household budget surveys have some unique strengths. The U.S. Census provides residential, occupational, and demographic data on households, and state employer wage surveys from the era provide data on the wage earnings o f men, women, and children by industry. But, the household budget surveys combined 4 In this chapter I will frequently refer to a quantitative technique called Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA). MCA is used to discover the association between a dependent numeric variable, such as income, and multiple categorical factors. It was designed to separate the importance of interdependent categories. See Frank Andrews et al, Multiple Classification Analysis: A Report on a Computer Program for Multiple Regression Using Categorical Predictors (secondedition) (Ann Arbor, MI: Institute for Social Research, 1973). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 33 household profiles with earnings and expenditure variables. Thus, unlike the U.S. Census, the household budget surveys allow one to introduce direct economic variables, such as father’s, mother’s, or children’s earnings, rather than using a proxy for them such as home ownership or father’s occupational title. As an improvement over the wage surveys, they allow the researcher to move beyond tabulating the wages o f men, women, and children in large enterprises to include more diverse sources of non-wage, cash income. They also allow one to analyze the economic relationships between fathers, mothers, and children by demographic variables.5 The most s Other scholars have used these federal household budget surveys, but their questions and methods were usually different than mine. All but one of the previous studies used the 1890 data without comparing it to the 1918 data. This one-year approach is problematic. See note ?? of this chapter. In the late 1970s John Modell and Michael Haines completed important work preparing and analyzing the 1890 data. They used a “life-cycle” grouping of households similar to the one I will use here. Due to limits in available techniques, they used ordinary least squares regression (Haines, 1979) or transformed all variables to dichotomous ones (Modell, 1978) to determine relationships between variables. Because of the non-linearity and co-linearity in some relationships between variables my use of ANOVA and MCA has been an improvement. See Michael Haines, “Industrial Work and Family Life Cycle, 1889/90,” Research in Economic History 4 (1979): 289-356; John Modell, “Patterns of Consumption, Acculturation, and Family Income Strategies in Late Nineteenth-Century America” Family and Population in NineteenthCentury America edited by Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978): 206-240; Konrad H. Jarausch and Kenneth A. Hardy, Quantitative Methods for Historians: A Guide to Research, Data, and Statistics (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991) 140-169 and Appendix B. In 1991, an excellent essay by Patrick M. Horan and Peggy G. Hargis, “Children’s Work and Schooling in the Late Nineteenth-Century Family Economy” American Sociological Review 56 (October 1991): 583-596, used the 1890 data to conclude that household economic characteristics influenced children’s work and schooling participation more than local economic or market conditions. In 1993, Brian Gratton and Carole Haber compared mean values between the 1890 data and 1918 data, to claim that the elderly live separately because they have become more affluent, not because domestic emotions have changed. Their proposition that love and household economics are essentially unrelated is suspect in my view. I wonder how they can construct a phrase like “intimacy at a distance” without wincing. Gratton and Haber did not (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 34 disappointing limitations of the household budget surveys is that the birth place of the father was not recorded in the 1918 data, the race of the father was not recorded in the 1890 data, and children’s income was not separated by sex in the 1890 data. The Increasing Superiority of Men’s Wages Beginning in 1878 the Ohio Bureau o f Labor Statistics asked large employers to report the numbers of persons under their employment and the wages they paid. These employer surveys allow us to chart the wages of men, women, boys, and girls for the years 1878, 1891, 1914, and 1923 for Ohio’s metals, mining, textiles, glass, and manufacturing industries. Table 2.1 shows annual wages in constant 1890 dollars. Between 1878 to 1923 the roughly parallel growth in the wages of men, women, and children in these industries resulted in a dramatic increase in the absolute gap in earning power by sex and age. Averaged by industry, in 1878 a woman earned an average of 45 .5 % of a man’s wage, a boy under 16 could earn an average of 49.7 %, and (in 1890-91) a girl averaged about 37.9%. By 1923 these proportions had risen to 5(. .continued) report using analytical methods, nor do they appear to have used a selection procedure to deal with the fact that the two surveys were drawn from fathers who worked in overlapping, but not equivalent ranges of the occupational hierarchy. My selection criteria outlined in Appendix A resulted choosing only about one-third of the 1918 cases as capable with the 1890 data. Thus, it is difficult to assess their quantitative claims. See Carole Haber and Brian Gratton, Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 65-87; Brian Gratton and Carole Haber, “Rethinking Industrialization: Old Age and the Family Economy” in Voices and Visions o f Aging: Toward a Critical Gerontology edited by Thomas R. Cole et al (New York, NY: Springer, 1993). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 35 TABLE 2.1 Real Wages in Ohio Industries by Sex and Age, 1878-1923 •See table A.3 in Appendix A for a discussion of methods and listing of the figures graphed in this chart co OJ o O c s I «2 rS ? 5 as ' CO IT 5O o o CM M W P M ti an* Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 Ia 5 Ad* o< majority IncraaMd from 16 ot 18 fcx boy» and 15 ot 18 for girl* r® 36 59.6, 53.4, and 43.4 percent respectively. The fact that the age of majority rose from 16 to 18 over the period mitigates against the apparent rising percentage of a man’s wage obtained by children.6 More importantly, the overall growth in real wages during the period was so large so as to discount the proportionate gains of women and children. Between the 1878 data and the 1923 data, the real dollar differential between men’s wages and everyone else’s wages in constant dollars had grown from $187 to $389 for women, from $200 to $413 for boys, and from (1890-91) $305 to $500 for girls. The purchasing power gap between men’s and women’s (and children’s) wages in 1923 was more than the entire mean annual wages of men ($379.82) that were employed in the same industries in 1878. The implications of the growing real value gap between men’s wages and those for women and youths in heavy industries and manufacturing are far from simple. This was only one sector o f the economy. Wages in these industries do not tell us about the broader relative earning capacities by age and sex in other types of wage work. Wages are only one type of income earning. Women and youths, as well as men, occupied themselves in a variety of paid work that was not wage labor. Finally, even if one could know the cash income levels of men, women, and children in all sectors of the wage, piece, trading, and barter economies, one would still not have reconstructed 6A woman’s percentage of a man’s wage by industry was less than a boys even though women on a whole earned more than boys for these industries; this is possible because women did not participate in all industries and in these industries boys earned more relative to men. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 37 the economic exchanges between fathers, mothers, and their children within households. This is true for three reasons. Income levels by age and sex do not necessarily correspond to those by status positions of father, mother, son, daughter, and so on. Second, these relations change over a family’s life-course. Third, household members do not labor to the same degree in the paid and unpaid sectors o f the economy. Thus, shifts in the gender and generational allocations between paid and unpaid labors, and those between production and consumption (which are central to household operation) are beyond the reach o f employer wage labor surveys and the U.S. Census. Fortunately, the household budget surveys help us address all but the last o f these issues. The earnings reported in these surveys included both wage and non-wage sources o f cash such as income from homework, street trading, and boarders. The surveys did not account for unpaid labors in the household, but since the cash elements o f the household are separated by each member, we can follow changes in which members reported bringing cash income into the household. In this chapter consumption has not been explored, although the surveys contain potential sources for future work in this area. These observations about the complexity o f change in households are not intended to imply that changes in the relative strength o f men’s wages in industrial occupations were unimportant for household economics. Rather, they simply point-out that charting wages in larger industrial enterprises by age and sex can not replace the analysis of household economics. To move forward we need to ask how fathers, mothers, and their children earned income relative to one Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 38 another over their life-courses, across various demographic groups, and through historical time. I have used fathers’ ages at ten year invervals to group households and create a life-course proxy. Life-course proxities are quite different from longitudinal tracking o f individuals or families over historical time, but they do provide a sense of how the life course was related to household organization at a given point in historical time.7 Comparing Table 2.2 to Table 2.3 allows one to observe changes in the life-course of the households of industrial wage-eamers through historical time between 1890 and 1918. The most noticeable feature shown in these charts is the improvement in the fathers’ abilities to provide the vast majority of household income in their forties, fifties, and beyond by 1918. In the 1890 survey, the children’s income contributions rose as they and their fathers’ grew older. Their contribution was crucial to the survival of these households because in the late nineteenth-century wage earning men 7 In a 1985 essay, Michael Haines touched on the imaginative leap that is taken in the life-course method. But, he defended it by writing that “despite the fact that the data are cross-sectional and hence create “synthetic” life cycles, valid inferences can be drawn, appealing to such things as from reference-group theory to condition behavior.” This is an interesting point, but it might be said with more caution that (1) age-grouping at one point in time is the best we can do given the available quantitative evidence. Even though the recently available linked micro-data from the census will allow better longitudinal work, it will not include the detailed variables of the household budget surveys used here; (2) As long as one does not make the error of thinking about the life-course at one point in time as a demonstration of change over historical time, a comparison of two cross-sectional age-groupings is a valid way to examine change in generational relations over the period; (3) Even if one tracked the economic behaviors of a cohort through time, unless one also tracked their relations with other cohorts, one would not be able to make better quantitative claims about generational relationships than the ones offered here. Michael Haines, “The Life Cycle, Savings, and Demographic Adaptation: Some Historical Evidence for the United States and Europe,” in Gender and the Life Course edited by Alice S. Rossi (New York, NY: Aldine Publishing Co., 1985), 60-61. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 39 TABLE 2.2 Sources of Household Income by Member Status across Age Groups, 1890 •see Table A.2 in Appendix A for the figures graphed in the chart below. I 1 1 * i 1 T3 <0 & 3 s o om> 0 £ o0 < <0 2 a (0 £ E 0 2 0 E o o _c _£CB O ■D sCO c o o > co o> •*r i o > co co £n 0 »* 2 o 0 JC £ 0 M 3 0 £ 1 CO 8 3 O (0 (N o o o o •uiosui lanuuy o umw Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 40 TABLE 2.3 Sources of Household Income by Member Status across Age Groups, 1918 ♦in 1890 dollars. See Table A.2 in Appendix A for the figures graphed in the chart below. 5o to oW O 0 £ - P. e i 0 £ E 1 £ 0 E oo c ■ o ■o s GO c 53. O) a i o> 2 o x: s 3 O X "o Fattwr* Age Category £ o w 3 O to o o CM o oo CO o o o o • ukmui p n u u y o uhw Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 41 had great difficulty sustaining their income over the second-halves of their lives. Few of the surveyed households could have survived on their father’s wages in the later stages o f his life without substantial earnings from children and mothers.* Fathers’ income per household member in 1890 fell from $134.31 when they were in their twenties, to $118.56 in their thirties, to $91.45 in their forties, to $85.17 in their fifties, to $61.71 thereafter. By 1918 the fathers’ earnings were not only stronger relative to other members, but they were more reliable across their lives. In 1918 their earnings per household member in real 1890 dollars across ages groups were $213.81, $187.09, $164.50, $151.95, and $126.47’ 8 Two-tailed t-test showed that mean differences in fathers’ income by nativity in the 1890 data to be statistically insignificant (.18), but the regional mean differences in fathers’ income were significant at .000. The same test reveal that fathers’ income mean differences by race and region were both significant at .000 in the 1918 data. Multiple Classification Analysis that included the variables of income by industry, age of father, region, age of eldest, nativity (in 1890), and race (in 1918) showed industry was the factor most highly associated with father’s earnings after adjustment (.44 beta) in 1890. According to MCA industry and race were found to be equally associated with fathers’ income at .23 beta in the 1918 data. Because the variables available make the models differ for each year it is difficult to know if industry was more determining of a husband’s wage in the earlier year. This issue must be confronted by adding an occupational status variable to both surveys —a time costly but possible transformation. Region was weakly associated with fathers’ income in the 1890 model, adjusted .12 beta, and in 1918 adjusted .04 beta. Nativity’s 1890 adjusted beta was .00. 9 In his 1979 essay, Michael Haines stressed the decline in husband’s wages after his 30s and the vital importance of children’s income to fill the gap. He speculated that husband’s drop in income could be explained in two ways: aging (containing a combination of ideas about falling output, discrimination, and the problem of outdated skills) or a decline in effort Haines dismissed the choice between the two explanations as irresolvable because of a lack of evidence recording hours worked per week. And he continued his analysis by assuming that the former was the case. Another way of phrasing the alternative explanations is that the former assumes men will earn all they can regardless of the place in their life cycle and the dependents in their households. Thus, if their earnings declined significantly it must be because of aging, age(continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. While fathers’ earnings grew stronger and steadier between the 1890 and 1918 surveys, mothers’ income became weaker.10 What I have called “total adjusted mothers’ income” (a summation o f income reported from mothers’ earnings, boarding, gardening, chickens, fuel picking, and “other” income) declined.11 The mean real adjusted mothers’ income was lower in every fathers’ age category in 1918 (-$25.11, 9(...continued) discrimination, or a loss of competitive skills. The second explanations allows the possibility that men’s cash earning efforts were contingent upon domestic context —for example, they may depend upon expectations of contribution from older children. If the first alternative is correct we should expect the age of the eldest to be more weakly associated with the father’s income than the association between the father’s income and his age. To test this hypothesis, two models were run for each year. One included all major demographic terms and the other dropped the non-comparable terms. Father’s age and age of eldest are collinear because older fathers have by definition have older children. Certainly this is true in a sample of households selected by the criteria of having children. Both father’s and eldest’s age were entered into the variance model, but the interpretations of the adjusted means and associations is tentative here until I better understand the influence of collinearity on MCA. With industry, age of husband, and age of eldest the adjusted association between father’s income and father’s age dropped from .22 to .11 in 1890 and from .21 to .17 in 1918, while the adjusted association between fathers’ income and eldest's age dropped from .20 to .10 in 1890 and from .19 to .10 in 1918. These are less than clear results, but they might be construed to mean that age of eldest child was as strongly associated with father’s income as was his own aging in 1890; but by 1918 the age of the children had ceased to be as strong as age of the father. Thus, the aging explanation applies more strongly to the 1918 and the generational expectations one to 1890. This speculative finding would compliment the idea that generational interdependency was becoming a one way dependency of children upon their parents. Further work is need here through occupational status and moving industry and occupation in and out of the model. Michael Haines, “Industrial Work and Family Life Cycle, 1889/1890,” Research in Economic History 4 (1979): 289-356. 10Women’s economic contributions were likely under-reported in these and other surveys. See Nancy Folbre, “The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Economic Thought” Signs 16 (Spring 1991): 463-484. " For essays on the non-wage, but cash earning strategies of working-class women during this period see, Margaret Walsh, “Women Outworkers in Industrializing America in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Labour History Review 56 (no. 3 1991): 17-22; Nancy Folbre, “Women’s Informal Market Work in Massachusetts, 1875-1920" Social Science History (Spring 1993): 135-160. with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 43 -$18.82, -$29.08, -$76.98, -$86.80) than it had been in 1890. This took place even though her mean real ‘earnings’ (primarily a wage variable) were about the same in each survey (+$0.06). Ironically as women’s, especially mothers’, “formal” employment participation was on the rise in the new century, mothers reported less total cash earnings. This apparent contradiction was probably related to the fact that married women were losing their ability to earn cash through “casual” selfemployment. Over the period the surveyed mothers earned less through boarders, lodgers, and probably so too through selling vegetables and small animals, laundry, and scrounging for fuel and discarded durables. Married women’s greater access to the wage-labor economy in the early twentieth century may have resulted in a decline in the cash they controlled independently from their husbands and children.12 The increasing obtainability of a family wage was widely, but not identically, experienced by groups accross father’s nativity, region, and race. The households of immigrant fathers relied more on boarders and children’s income to finance larger and more complex households. Yet few households surveyed, whether native or immigrant, could have survived solely on the earnings o f a male wage-eamer over their life-courses. Southerners were poorer than northerners, but their fathers’ incomes 12On women’s participation in the “formal” wage labor market see Elyce J. Rotella, From Home to Office: U.S. Women at Work, 1870-1930 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 18; Frances Hensley, “Women in the Industrial Work Force in West Virginia, 1880-1945" West Virginia History 49 (1990): 115-124. On the earning strategies of women more broadly see Walsh, “Women Outworkers,” 1991; Folbre, “Women’s Informal Market Work,” 1993; Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology o f Labor in the Early Republic (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 44 TABLE 2.4 Sources of Household Income by Member Status across Age Groups for African-American Households, 1918 •in 1890 dollars • I'll ? & 3 o w © £ 3 £ £E £ o E o o S. 2 o .e s 3 O £o o X c •sc © E 5c «0 1 C © £ -O N. 5 e i i £ CO X co o CO o co o CM o CO o o CM •U J 0 3 U I p n u u v i " * f i Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 45 rose considerably relative to other members between the surveys. In the 1918 data, African-Americans were generally poorer than whites in the survey, but their lifecourse earning patterns were roughly the same as those of white households. Table 2.4 shows that African-American fathers’ mean annual earnings were substantially greater than other household members throughout the age-groupings. The most notable difference by race was that African-American mothers reported about twice the annual earnings of their white counter parts. Their earnings also exceeded the overall mothers’ mean income for the 1890 data in the first three age groupings. After their husbands reached age 50, African-American mothers reported earnings less than the overall mean for the same age group in 1890.13 In sum, the surveys show a trend toward households where the generations were less economically interdependent over the life-course. Children’s earnings were less important, mothers directly controlled less income, especially later in their lives, and fathers established an earning pattern that was more reliable into early old age and far superior to other members at all ages. 13The most significant group difference in mothers' earnings was found in African-American mothers, who earned about twice what white women across each decade of their husbands’ age in 1918 and immigrant mothers taking in more boarders than their native counterparts in 1890. The mean adjusted deviations in adjusted mothers’ income from the grand means found through MCA were far greater by race in 1918 than they had been by nativity in 1890. Differences by region became significant only in 1918, but the deviations from the grand mean by region had flip-flopped. In 1890 northern women earned more; southerners did so in the 1918 data. Again the mean difference by region were only a fraction of the racial variation found in 1918. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 46 The Declining Value of Children’s Earnings Between the surveys, the number of earning children per household fell from .71 (22 % of all children) in 1890 to .31 (12 % of all children) in 1918. The number of families reporting employed children dropped from 2,027 of 5,896 ( 34.3 %) to 912 of 4,505 (20.2 %). The reported siblings’ combined mean earnings were cut in half from $120.94 to $60.55 per year. In both surveys siblings’ combined earnings in real dollar amounts were lower in 1918 than they had been in 1890 for each fathers’ age category. During the middle part of their father’s lives the decline in the number of children earning income per household became even more dramatic. Between the surveys the number of children reported earning per household fell from .23 to . 10 with fathers in their thirties, 1.17 to .60 with fathers in their forties, 1.63 to 1.10 with fathers in their fifties, and 1.49 to 1.21 when they were 60 or over. As was suggested in the Ohio wage data presented in Table 2.1, the decline in children’s contribution to their households took place at a time when their wage earning potential had grown. The real income per earning child actually increased in those households with fathers aged over forty-nine because older teenagers who earned income at all in 1918, earned considerably more than they had in 1890. In households with an eldest child from 15 to 19 years old, the mean children’s income per working child was $159.00 in 1890, but this mean increased to $194.76 for the same households by 1918. For households with an eldest over 19, the means were Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 47 $215.14 in 1890 and $277.77 in 1918.u The reasons youths exited the wage earning market during an era of increasing real wages were undoubtedly numerous, but they were probably associated with the increasing stability of fathers’ wages. In both surveys the amount of children’s earnings were negatively correlated with the amount of their fathers’ earnings. As fathers earned more, their children aged 10 to 19 were likely to earn less. Table 2.5 shows the correlations between the earnings of mothers and children aged 10 to 19 were many times weaker in both surveys and not statistically significant in the 1918 data. In 1890 the households with fathers who earned in the lowest 20 percent reported children earning income almost three out o f four times (72 %). This was a little more than twice the proportion of children reported earning in the survey at large MThe survey questions that allow the measure of children working were not identical between the two data sets. The 1890 survey asked the families how much all the children earned and classed them by the number working, at home, and at school; the 1918 survey asked the dollars and cents that each individual child earned. See the note under chart 2.7. Because the 1890 data does not differentiate children’s income by the individual, I was not able to differentiate boys and girls earnings. This is a considerable disappointment. As with other methodological issues, I have converted the 1918 data to maximize comparability to the more limited 1890 data. When determining the number of children working or in school this difference between the ways the surveys asked the question becomes significant because the earlier survey does not allow for the multiple counting of the children who also attended school as “working” children. It is impossible to discern how families gave priority to the three categories in 1890, but if they gave priority to school, or only counted as “working” children who held full-time formal market employment, then the enumeration of earning children in the 1890 survey would under-estimate the number of children who contributed money to the household. Thus, it is likely that the enumeration difference between the two surveys understates the degree of the decline in number of earning children. If this is so than the families in 1890 would have undercounted the numbers of children involved in some earning. This would produce a systematic underestimation in the growth in the real wages of children between the surveys. Both these possibilities would make the conclusions given here stronger. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 48 (34 %) in 1890. In 1918, thirty-six percent of the households with fathers’ earnings in TABLE 2.5 Pearson’s R Correlation Coefficients for Sources of Household Income by Member Status for Families with an Eldest Child Aged 10-19,1890 and 1918 father’s income 1890 N=2720 father’s income 1918 N=1901 XXX sibings’ combined income -3187 p=.000 -3121 p=.000 tot adj. mother’s income -.1497 p=.000 -.1576 p=.000 siblings’ combined income total adjusted mother’s income 1890 N-2720 1918 N-1901 1890 N=2720 1918 N=1901 -3187 p-.OOO -3121 p-.OOO -.1497 p“ .000 -.1576 p=.000 .0507 p=.008 -.0369 p=.108 XXX .0507 p=.008 -.0369 p-=.108 XXX “N" is the number of households with eldest from 10 to 19. “P” is the probablity value or statistical significance. The correlations between children’s income per earning child and fathers’ earnings were .2456 in 1890 and -.1861 in 1918 both at .000 significance level. the bottom fifth of all fathers reported income earning children. This was a little less than twice the proportion of children reported earning in the survey at large (20 %) in 1918. These aggregate figures and bivariate measures only suggests what the following sections will show to have been a broadly shared trend toward economically worthless working-class children and youths across regional, racial, fathers’ birthplace, and industry variations, children’s earnings by region Northern and southern children commanded about the same annual earnings per earning child ($59.19 and $61.28 in 1890, and $41.15 and $42.84 in 1918 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 49 respectively), but in 1890 northern siblings combined to earned less for their families ($116.80 annual average) than their southern counterparts ($137 01 annual average).15 As this regional difference converged between 1890 and 1918 (1.12 to .37 in the South and .60 to .31 in the North), the north-south mean difference in children’s income contributions narrowed and were no longer statistically significant. By 1918 the northern siblings combined to bring in $66.71, while their southern counterparts combined to earn an average of $62.24. Thus, the regional convergence in combined siblings’ earnings was also part o f a dramatic decrease that cut the value o f their TABLE 2.6 Children’s Combined Income by Region and Eldest’s Age for 1890 and 1918 in constant 1890 dollars Region and Eldest Child's Age 1890 total Number of families 1890 mean children's income 1918 total Number o f families 1918 mean children's income Change in age distribution of families Change in children’s income North 0-9 1857(39.6%) S.00 1556(54%) S.38 + 14.4% + S J8 North 10-14 961 (20.5%) SI 1.56 707(24.5%) S3.88 + 4% -$7.68 North 15-19 1161(24.7%) $204.27 459(15.9%) S224.82 -8.8% + $20.55 North 20 over 681 (14.5%) S438.10 150(5.2%) S560.31 - 9.3 % + $122.21 South 0-9 404 (33.3%) S.04 431 (50.5%) S.31 + 17.2% + $.27 South 10-14 232(19.1%) S33.66 222 (26%) S8.83 + 6.9% -$24.83 South 15-19 366 (30.2%) $234.03 144(16.9%) $220.86 -13.3 % -$13.17 South 20 over 203 (16.7%) S352.60 54 (6.3%) $331.09 - 10.4% -$21.51 combined earnings in half.16 15Western states’children in 1918 (who were not comparable by region to the 1890 survey) earned a significant amount less per year at $25.03. 16The variance in children’s combined income by region was significant with a f-ratio of .006 in (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 50 Table 2.6 suggests that the source of the greater southern siblings’ earnings in 1890 was related to residential patterns and workforce participation of children by age. Older children earned more than younger ones, and southern households retained older children within their households for longer periods of time. In 1890 forty-seven percent of southern families had at least one child over 14, whereas the same was reported for only thirty-nine percent of northern families. Multi-variable analysis suggests that the regional differences in child income in either year were statistically insignificant after accounting for the age of the eldest, nativity, race, and industry.17 children’s earnings by fathers’ birthplace and race Forty-six percent of the fathers in the 1890 survey were bom in either Europe (41%) or Canada (5%). In this survey, siblings with foreign-born fathers earned a mean o f $162.43 per year, while their native-born counterparts only earned $84.95.18 Tthe mean differences in siblings’ earnings by their fathers’ birthplaces weres greatest 16(...continued) 1890, but the 1918 mean differences were not significant with a f-ratio of .537. 17 ANOVA and MCA reported mostly insignificant and only weak associations in children’s combined income by region. Significant interaction between made the interpretation of ANOVA difficult MCA for 1890 found region associated weakly with children's combined income at .04 eta and after adjusting for age of eldest, nativity of father, and father’s industry the value dropped 1/100th reporting a .00 beta. For 1918 MCA revealed that regional variation was only weakly correlated with children's combined income at .01 eta unadjusted and only slightly less weak .03 beta when adjusted for age of eldest, race, and fathers’ industry. 18The mean differences of siblings’ income by the birthplace of the father were significant according to two-tailed t-tests at the .000 level. The variance of siblings’ income by fathers’ birthplace was statistically significant against the main effects when analyzed with age of children, industry of father, and region, but the meaning of this result is obscured by significant interaction with age and industry categories. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 51 in households with an eldest child of at least 15 years. In the households with an eldest child 15 to 19, the children of native families earned $186.77 while their foreign counter-parts earned $235 .81. In families with a youth over 19 years of age, siblings of native fathers earned $320.35, while their foreign counter-parts earned $485.56. Siblings’ earnings were more strongly associated with their fathers’ nativity than to region after accounting for the eldest’s age and the father’s industry.19 African-American households made up six percent (271 families) o f the 1918 survey. In this data, white siblings’ income per year (in constant 1890 dollars) was $62.17, while their African-American counterparts earned $33.32.20 Children in African-American households with the eldest between 10 and 14 earned ($6.99 per year) whereas their white counterparts earned ($5.02). However, in households with an eldest over 14, the racial mean differences were reversed ($158.91 to $209.43 in the 15 to 19 group and $149.88 to $505.36 in the 20 and over group).21 Analysis 19This pattern was present in the household where father’s worked in all industries (metals production, mining, and textiles), except glass where the relationship is reversed in the 15 to 19 age group ($139.41 to $129.52) and was narrower than the grand mean differences in households with an eldest of 20 or older ($216.71 and $297.33). 20 Seven families did not report race. Mean differences in both combined children's income by race were significant according to the t-test at .009. The variance in children's combined earning mean by race was significant against the main effects when analyzed with the eldest’s age and industry of the father. There was significant interaction between race and eldest’s age for children’s earnings, but no significant interaction with industry. 21 This age-pattem was repeated in the general manufacturing industries and metal production, but in mining, textiles, and glass, white children in families of all age groups earned more on average. Why this is so is unclear. In mining, textiles, and glass industries there were also fewer African-American families surveyed (1%, 3%, and 4% respectively). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 52 showed that in the 1918 survey, racial differences in siblings’ combined income were larger than those by region, but less than the those by fathers’ place of birth had been in the 1890 survey.22 children's earnings by fathers’ industry of occupation Siblings’ income was more strongly associated with the industry of the father’s occupation than his race in 1918 or his nativity in 1890. Households where the father was employed in textiles reported the greatest dependence upon siblings’ earnings. In 1890 siblings’ income for textile families soared above all others at $194.89 per year as compared to $48.75 steel and iron production, $74.96 for mining, and $57.60 for glass. In this survey, siblings in textile households combined to earn more than their age-group counterparts in every industry. The textile families were the only ones where native-fathered children earned more on average than immigrant-fathered ones. The mean for eldest 15 to 19 households in textiles exceeded the means in those with children over 19 years old for all the other industries. By 1918, the greater dependence o f textile families on children’s earnings had been reduced considerably. Siblings’ income for textile families had fallen to $90.43 per year as compared with $39.86 for metals production, $42.31 for mining, $25.48 for glass, and $66.44 for 22After multi-variable adjustment (for age of eldest, industry of father, region, and race) both region and race were weakly associated (.03) with siblings’ combined. However, the adjusted deviation from the grand mean of children's combined income by race was much greater (white + $1.63: African-American - $20.83) than the adjusted variance by region (north + $2.67: south $9.04). The adjusted means by nativity were greater 1890 (- $16.63 for natives and + $19.08 for immigrants) than those for race in 1918 or region in either year. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 53 other manufacturing industries.23 Multi-variable analysis supports the conclusion that between the surveys the association between father’s industry and his children’s combined earnings weakened many times over.24 Declining Dependence on Children’s Earnings The household significance of the decline in the amount children earned and the lowering of their rates of participation in cash earning becames more clear when it is held relative to the growing size of the cash elements of the household economies o f the surveyed families.25 Table 2.7 shows that this was especially true in households 23 They still earned more than their peers in families with fathers in other manufacturing and heavy industries in the age-groups 15 and over, but they had become the lowest earners in the 10 to 14 age group, and their 15 to 19 group earnings means only exceeded the 20 and over group for the glass industry. For both data sets the variance in children’s income by industries was significant against the main effect with age of eldest, region, and nativity (in 1890) or race (1918). Variance in siblings ’ income by industry interacted with nativity and eldest age categories. 24 MCA of siblings income adjusted for eldest’s age and region, revealed that the association between industry and siblings’ income declined from .30 to .20 in 1890, and from .07 to .05 in 1918. Analysis of variance showed industry to be significant against the main effects in both the 1890 and 1918 data sets with eldest’ age, region, and with or without race in 1918 and nativity in 1890. This is also confirmed by the adjusted deviation from the grand mean for textile families children's income declining from + $47.83 in 1890 to + $20.38 in 1918. 25 The 1890 data set does not give individualized income data for each child, but only the total children's income and individualized work participation, sex, and age data on each child. It should be noted that this way of calculating the percentage of their own support groups earning siblings (who were in different age groups) under one family average and will only provide a proxy for individual children's contributions by age. However, because this bias is a systematic underestimation, we can know that more detailed survey information in 1890 would have revealed even higher percentages for older children. The fact that this type of evidence is insensitive to the control of funds that would have allowed some members to consume more and (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 54 where the eldest child was from 10 to 14 years old. For households with an eldest of these ages, the interdependency ratio declined in the 1918 data to about 20 percent of its 1890 level. Where the eldest child was from 15 to 19 years old, the interdependency ratio declined to about 77 percent of its 1890 level. These aggregate ratios were shared across the various demographic groups. TABLE 2.7 Generational Economic Interdependency in Households with Wage-Earning Fathers, 1890 and 1918* Eldest Child's Age Interdependency Ratios Siblings' Portion O f Household Income 1890 1918 1890 1918 0-9 years old .0001 N-2261 .0020 N-2363 .0000 N-2261 .0003 N-2363 10-14 years old .1 4 5 4 N —1 1 9 3 .0 2 8 9 N -1 1 6 4 .0289 N=1193 .0058 N=1164 15-19 years old 1 .0 1 9 8 N -1 5 2 7 .7 9 0 2 N -7 3 7 3774 N-1527 .1829 N -737 20 years old and over 13424 N-884 1.2305 N-231 .4684 N-884 3843 N-231 ♦Excluded cases due to insufficient data: 1890 = 31; 1918=10. The “interdependency ratio” is the children’s income per earning child divided by the total household income per household member. It is a rough measure of whether children are supporting the household or if it is supporting them. When the interdependency ratio is less than one the average household member expended more than the average employed child earned; if more than one then the average employed child earned more for the household than the average member expended. “Siblings’ Portion of Household Income" is a simpler measure of children’s combined income divided by the total household income. This ratio tells us what percentage of the household income all the children combined to earn. When it equals 1 the children earned the entire household income; when it equals zero they earned none of it. Note that classing siblings’ combined earnings by age of the eldest child in the family it should not be interpreted as mean income for children in that age group. continued) differently than others should encourage caution. The 1918 survey could produce more exact figures of children's earnings at the individual level, but this would not be comparable to the 1890 data set, so at this time the later survey was transformed to produce children's income per earning child in the same fashion. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 55 interdependence by father's birthplace In the 1890 survey, siblings of immigrant fathers earned more than their native counterparts as they got older, but this does not confirm that their households were more dependent upon them. As is shown in Table 2.7, one can measure a household’s dependency upon children’s earnings by comparing their income to the total size of the cash elements of the household economy. On average children of immigrant fathers provided 17.7% of their household income, whereas children of native fathers provided 12.2% of their household income.26 A good part o f the variation in percentage of household income contributed by children was tied to the residential patterns of immigrant families with whom older children lived more frequently; 11.4% of native households contained a child over 19, while 19.1% of immigrants had TABLE 2.8 Generational Interdependency By Birthplace of the Father from 1890 Household Budget Survey* Age o f the Eldest Child Immigrant Children's Income Per Earning Child Immigrant Household Income Per Member Native Children's Income Per Earning Child Native Household Income Per Member I m m ig r a n t Inter­ dependency Ratio Native Inter­ dependency Ratio 0 -9 S .00 S 140.11 S .01 S 144.11 0.000 0.000 10-14 S 13.80 S 122.60 S 11.62 S 122.09 0.143 0.147 1 5-19 S 129.75 S 132.64 S 98.17 S 121.98 1.095 0.945 20 and over S 202.62 S 153.12 S 154.18 S 143.98 1.438 1.202 •See note in Table 2.7. The deviation from the grand mean of children’s income per earning child by nativity after being adjusted for the age of the eldest remained a considerable - $7.47 for children of natives and + $8.59 for children of immigrants 26 The mean difference by nativity of the percentage of household income contributed by children was significant according to the two-tailed t-test at the .000 level. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 56 children of this age group. In these older-child households, immigrant families relied upon their children for 50.2% of their income, while native families relied upon the children for 39.2% of their income.27 The “generational interdependency ratios” by fathers’ nativity which appear in Table 2.8 suggest that across nativity in households with the eldest aged 10 to 14 years, each child earned about a seventh o f what the average member in those households received (economically) in return. In immigrant households with older teenagers, earning children paid about 110 percent of their way and their native counterparts paid about 95 percent of their way. Analytical measures support the possibility that the slight differences between native and immigrant families reliance upon children’s earnings was related to older and better earning youths staying with immigrant households.2* The data suggest that older immigrant-household children worked only slightly more often, but they earned considerable amounts more for their 21 This interpretation is bolstered by MCA. The variance of immigrant children’s income was adjusted substantially when calculated with age of eldest from + $41.72 (unadjusted) to +20.33 (adjusted. For native children the adjustment was from - $36.26 to -17.66. MCA also revealed that by nativity the share of the household income provided by children was very much tied to residential pattern differences for older youths. The deviation from the grand mean fell for immigrants and natives to below one percent after adjustment for the eldest’s age (the strength of association for nativity fell from. 11 to .02). 28 Analysis of average earning child's share of household income showed variance for nativity to be significant against the main effects with region, eldests’ age, and industry of father. Nativity only had significant interaction with the eldest age. MCA found that the adjusted association dropped from . 13 beta to .06 beta when eldest age was included in the analysis, but when the eldest age variable was excluded the adjustment for region and industry increased the association coefficient from .13 to . 16. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 57 families. Perhaps, this was because they were less likely to use their wages to leave their family o f origin.29 A comparison Tables 2.7 and 2.8 suggests that teenaged youths of both immigrant and native fathers contributed more relative to the size of the cash elements o f the household in the 1890 survey than would the same aged youths from all backgrounds in 1918. interdependence by race In the 1918 data, the children’s income per earning child mean was $39.59 for white households and $23.73 for African-American ones. In households with an eldest child over 19 years o f age, the racial gap between average earning-child income was the largest ($272.96 for whites and $109.93 for African-Americans).30 Unlike the differences in the proportion of families with older children by nativity found in 1890, the 1918 survey did not detect large disparities in the age composition of households by race.31 The results o f analysis showed that racial variation in siblings’ economic contribution was not associated with region, industry, or age of eldest child. This 29Children of immigrants were also reported working more often than those of native families. Immigrant families reported .83 children working per household with 3.52 children (23%); natives reported .60 children working per household with 3.01 children (19.9%). The mean difference in children working per family was statistically significant according to the two-tailed t-test at .000. 30The difference by race was significant according to the t-test at .016. After MCA adjustment for eldests’ age, industry of father work, and region the deviation from the grand mean was + $1.07 for whites and - $13.67 for African-Americans. 31The percentages of cases by eldest age for whites and African-Americans respectively were: 0-9 (52%, 50.1%); 10-14 (25.5%, 29.5%); 15-19 (16.4%, 15.1%); 20 over (5.4%, 4.8%). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 58 finding is consistent with the idea that racial differences in children’s contributions were determined by race-based (and racist) differences in the amounts they could earn at various stages of their working lives, more so than differences in the residential patterns. Although these two factors were interrelated.32 African-American siblings contributed smaller dollar amounts than their white counterparts, but did their families depend upon them less? Over all age groups, African-American children contributed 3.8 percent of their household incomes; white children earned 5.2 percent. But unlike the variation by nativity found in the 1890 TABLE 2.9 Generational Interdependency By Race from 1918 Household Budget Survey in 1890 dollars* Age of Eldest AfricanAmerican children's income per earning child AfricanAmerican household income per member White chikfren's income per earning child White household income per member AfricanAmerican hlerDependency Ratio White InterDependency Ratio 0 to 9 S 0.04 S 156.48 SO-33 S 217.27 .000 .002 lO to 14 S6.2 5 S 146.90 S 4 J0 S 187.88 048 .028 IS to 19 S 109.70 S 156.86 S 146.13 S 196.18 .747 .792 20 end over S 109.93 S 137.06 S 272.96 S 223.09 .753 1.26 •see note in Table 2.7 survey, the mean difference by race in the 1918 survey was not significant with an fratio o f .087. This means that even though the absolute dollar amount differences of siblings contributions were statistically significant by race, one cannot conclude with 32ANOVA and MCA showed that when analyzed with age of eldest, industry of father, and region, the f-ratio for the variance in the child dependency ratio by race was .129 (not significant). Removing age of eldest from the factors did not improved the significance measure as it had for nativity in the 1890 survey. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 59 95 % confidence that African-American families depended any less upon their children’s earnings as scaled to the household’s total earnings. Moreover, the difference of 1.4 percent of the household income does not seem very great. Comparing Tables 2.7 and 2.9 suggests that generational interdependency over the life-course was different for whites and African-Americans, but that both racial groups’ mean interdependency ratios were lower for each age category in 1918 than in the racially undifferentiated 1890 survey, interdependency by fathers’ industry Although there were two slight deviations in the many cells shown in Table 2.10, in almost every industrial category the child dependency ratios and siblings’ portion o f household income declined for households with teenagers. Analysis of variance revealed that the association between industry o f father and the household’s child dependency ratio declined between 1890 and 1918.33 This might be a result of 33 When the eldest was 0 through 9 years of age the children earned a minuscule amount on average and the rise of the period was very small —less than two-tenths of a percent for the dependency ratio and three-hundredths of a percent in the siblings' portion. Analysis of variance for child dependency ratio revealed that when modeled with eldests’ age, region, race in 1918, nativity in 1890, industry maintained significance in the 1890 data, but the f-ratio for it fell to .055 (below the .05 level standard) in the 1918 data. So too MCA returned associations much stronger between industry and children's dependency ratio in 1890 (.27 unadjusted; . 15 adjusted) than in 1918 (.06 unadjusted; .03 adjusted). Removing the non-comparable terms of race and nativity did not considerably alter this finding. Analysis of the dependency ratio followed the finding with children's combined income that industry of the father was of shrinking importance in determining differences in the economic role of children. Tentatively, one might suspect that fathers’ industry became less determining as the worthless child pattern of behavior and ideology spread. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 60 convergence in the earning experiences of working-class youths, but fathers’ industry is difficult to interpret because each industry is a gathering of many persons o f various TABLE 2.10 Generational Interdependency by Fathers' Industry and Eldests' Age 1890 and 1918 H 1 1 1 Eldests’ A*e A Fathers’ Industry Interdependency Ratios 1890-191* Siblings' Portion Of Household Income 1890-1918 1 0-9, metab production .0000 - .0018 N-557 N-42I .0000 - .0004 N-557 N-421 0-9, mining .0000 - .0002 N=314 N=246 .0000 - .0000 N-314 N-246 y °-9* II textiles .0003 - .0048 N-906 N-168 0-9, class Eldests’ Age & Fathers’ Industry Interdependency Ratios 1890-1918 Siblings' Portion O f Household Income 1890-1918 I 15-19, metab production .6007 - .6758 N -3I9 N-106 .1182 - .1429 N -3 I9 N=106 15-19, mining 9989 - .6258 N-198 N-101 .1988 - .1205 N-198 N-101 .0001 - .0014 N-906 N-168 15-19, textiles 1 J 2 2 8 - 1.1574 N-755 N-50 .4101 - .2878 N -755 N -50 .0000 - .0000 N-484 N - ll .0000 - .0000 N-484 N - ll 15-19, glass .6620 - .5014 N-255 N-2 .1451 - .1131 N -255 N -2 0-9, ■ssanufactn ringdc extraction xxxx - .0020 N=0 N-1517 xxxx - .0002 N -0 N-1517 15-19, manufactur ta g * extraction xxxx - .8125 N -0 N-478 xxxx - .1942 N -0 N -478 10-14, metab production .0473 - .0291 N=299 N-202 .0076 - .0056 N-299 N=202 20 over, metab production 1.1833-1.2108 N-124 N-29 .26 52--3113 N -124 N -29 10-14, w lphff .1375 - .0187 N-178 N-167 .0225 - .0042 N-178 N-167 20 over, mining 1 .2 6 6 7 -1J518 N-89 N-18 J4 4 7 -J1 9 4 N -89 N -18 10-14, textiles .2583 - .0183 N-467 N-73 .0540 - .0035 N-467 N-73 20 over, textiles 1.4649-1.4615 N-568 N-23 .5778 - .4864 N -568 N -23 10-14, glass .0574 - .0960 N-249 N=11 .0121 - .0149 N-249 N - ll 20 over, glass 9218 -1.5510 N -I03 N=1 .2167 - .2585 N -I0 3 N - l 10-14, manuCsctu ita g d extraction xxxx - .0313 N -0 N-711 xxxx - .0063 N -0 N-711 20 over, manufactur tagdc extraction xxxx - 1.1853 N-0 N-160 xxxx - .3909 N -0 N -160 * Excluded cases due to insufficient data: 1890 = 31; 1918 = 10. See Note in Table 2.7. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 61 skill-levels without an easily identifiably common characteristic.34 While the associations between the children’s incomes and region, race, and nativity fluctuated in the weak range usually well below .20 (industry was generally below .30), children’s income variables were associated to the age of the eldest child in the moderate to strong range (.60 to .70). Thus, the age of youths probably had a great deal more to do with their contributions to the households in both 1890 and 1918. The generational interdependency ratio’s association with age of eldest climbed from an adjusted beta value of .64 in 1890 to .72 in 1918 (rising from 38% to 52% of the variance).35 This suggests that over these three decades age became more determinant in the share children would earn for their own support. This interpretation is complimented by the finding that the bivariate correlation between fathers’ income and children’s income was weaker in the 1918 data than it was in the 1890 data. Although the household budget surveys of 1890 and 1918 reveal interesting and important variations in children’s economic contributions to their households by race, fathers’ nativity, region, and fathers’ industry of occupation, a common trend toward a less economically useful 34 At a later date occupational status could be coded from the thousands of individual job titles given for the father in both surveys. For this study job titles and industries were selected from the 1918 data set for comparability with the 1890 survey. So too, cases include skilled and unskilled manual laborers, but not any worker from in small shops, included are foremen and overseers in appropriate industries, but not superintendents or managers, clerks are included, but not book-keepers, auditors, or accountants. Professionals, salespersons, and agents were also excluded from the 1918 survey. For a more complete explanation of the data transformation procedures see Appendix A. 35 See7711720c.lstand8299720c.lst Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 62 children was found. Conclusion This analysis has shown that there was a change in the economic relations between the generations during the early twentieth century within the households of fathers who worked in heavy industry and manufacturing . The decline in children’s work participation and the decline in the household importance of their income appears to have been widely shared across region, race, fathers’ place o f birth, and their industry o f work. In both surveys the amount of children’s earnings were negatively correlated with the amount of their fathers’ earnings. As a result of improvements in real wages, fathers were able to earn enough across their life times to sustain households with lighter dependence on their wives’ and children’s paid labors. This transformation probably could have taken place only in an era with a general surge in fathers’ real wages. But this is not an explanation of why these transitions took place because folks, including youths, worked not only to earn their daily bread, but as part of a way to establish and define their places and identities in the world. In order for household contribution to have been de-centered from entering the world, the definition of youth had to be transformed among the working-classes. The next chapter begins our exploration into this area by examining the claims youths made for compensation for injuries suffered at work around the turn of the last century in the state o f Ohio. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER THREE CLAIMING INCOMPETENCE: Age, Liability, and the Exodus of Youth from Ohio’s Mills and Factories, 1889-1930 In eighteenth-century America, colonial courts enforced the responsibilities of masters to provide care and work for disabled servants. But in the mid-nineteenth century, as wage laborers became more predominant, the courts grew reluctant to acknowledge that employers and workers owed each other reciprocal responsibilities beyond the cash nexus. In the North, a new law of employer liability was bom which reconstructed labor relations according to an ideal of freely contracting individuals and used the doctrines of assumed risk, contributory negligence, and the fellow-servant rule to help employers avoid responsibilities for injured workers. A worker could not receive compensation for an injury if it had been caused by a fellow worker, even if that worker was a supervisor. If the injured worker’s negligence contributed to the accident in any way, the worker could not successfully hold the employer liable, even if the employer was directly negligent. Finally, under the assumption of risk doctrine, workers were responsible for all dangers of the job that could not be avoided by extreme care. Even if they reported a danger, their supervisors could demand that they return to work on the threat of dismissal, and if they continued working, they had assumed the risks of the new danger. As “masters” became “employers” and “servants” became “employees,” the costs and cares o f dealing with sick or injured, dependent or destitute workers shifted from employers to the counties where the 63 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 64 laborers lived or where they had been injured.1 The above account of the rise of common law employer’s defenses applies mostly to adult white men (both as owners and workers) in the nineteenth century. Slaves, children working for their parents, domestic servants, or apprentices were exempted from these rules, because they continued to be considered the paternal responsiblity o f their masters.2 By the latter part of the century, industrial and market 1The precedent setting case for the development of the common law defenses of assumed risk, contributory negligence, the fellow-servant rule was Farwell v. Boston and Worcester Railroad, 4 Mass 49 (1842). Judges in Indiana and Ohio diverged from the application of these defenses in the 1850s, but Christopher Tomlins showed that they were applying them in step with the rest of the states by the 1870s. See Little Miami Railroad Company v. John Stevens, 20 Ohio 415(1851); Gillenwater v. Madison and Indiana Railroad Company, 5 Indiana 349 (1854); Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati RR Company v. Keary, 3 Ohio St Rep. 202 (1854); H.G. Wood, A Treatise on the Law o f Master and Servant: Covering the Relation, Duties, and Liabilities ofEmployers and Employees (Albany, NY: John D. Parsons, Jr., Publisher, 1877); Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 333-335, 373-375. On bailment, master-servant, and the transition from 18th- to 19th-century employment relations in the law see Christopher Tomlins, “Law and Power in the Employment Relationship,” in Labor Law in America: Historical and Critical Essays edited by Christopher Tomlins and Andrew King (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 2While advancing this point, Christopher Tomlins explained the 19th-century continuation of the “... legal responsibilities of the master to sick and injured apprentices derived from a specific responsibility levied on masters to act in loco parentis, rather than from any general residual rights of servants. ...Prior to 1794 an apprentice deprived of maintenance by the death of his master could become the responsibility of the master’s estate, to be maintained by the estate's executor until such time as the indenture agreed that it should be annulled. After 1794, however, the indenture was held to be annulled automatically by the master’s death, and the apprentice was returned to his parents or to the Overseers of the Poor to be bound out afresh.” Thus, the permanence of the bind of apprentices to the master’s household was eroding in the late- 18th century, but the rights and responsibilities of masters in loco parentis of apprentices remained important in the courts. For example, in a 1824 case of Power v. Ware that appeared before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts (19 MASS 51), the justices ruled that a master could not nullify an indenture due to an apprentices’ illness because the “master took him for better or worse, and was to provide for him in sickness.” Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, 333-337, 366 and note 17. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 65 development had wrought far reaching changes in the paternal order. During the Civil War, employers began using apprenticeship indentures to control pools of young unskilled male factory workers between large orders. In the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, a Pennsylvania court ruled that indentures could not be transformed into wage labor agreements which restricted the boys’ freedom to contract for work with other employers, unless their masters provided the “mutual benefit” of education and protection during downturns o f work and the hardship of illnesses. The mutuality o f apprenticeship was not saved, rather indentures were discarded altogether. In industrial states such as Ohio, large employers hired armies of youths according to “free” wage-labor relations and under the protections of common law employer defenses. This was particularly true in the most de-skilled processes such as those involved in the making of glass, paper, shoes, and woolens where about 35-40 % of the workers in 1878 were under 16 years of age (see Table 3.1).3 During the 1880s and 1890s, wage-workers (both young and old) and their lawyers challenged common law defenses in the courts, and humanitarian reformers and labor unions lobbied for statutory reform in the state legislatures. These efforts reaped rewarding changes in case outcomes, jurisprudence, and legislation in the new 3According to W.J. Rorabaugh, by the mid-19th century the “parental nature of apprenticeship” was destroyed by the “market economy, the cash wage, and competition for partly trained, semiskilled labor in the labor market. The boss wanted to keep the apprentice not to teach him a trade but to exploit his labor, and the apprentice wanted to earn a journeyman's wage as soon as he could.” W.J. Rorabaugh, The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1986), 139, 203. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 66 century.4 By 1911, fourteen states had passed statutes abolishing the fellow-servant rule. Seven other states changed employer liability by substituting “contributory negligence” for “comparative negligence” —a standard whereby a lower contribution of negligence by one party to the accident would leave the other liable. Others shifted the burden of proof for contributory negligence from the plaintiff to the defendant or limited assumed risk by making it void when negligence of the employer could be 4Several studies have brought forth convincing evidence that after the Civil War, particularly in the early twentieth century before the enactments of workmen’s compensation laws, injured employees fared better than the doctrines of employer’s liability would lead one to believe. See Richard A. Posner, “A Theory of Negligence,” The Journal of Legal Studies, v. 1, no. I (1972): 29-96; James L. Croyle, “Industrial Accident Liability Policy of the Early Twentieth Century” The Journal o f Legal Studies v. 7, no. 2 (June 1978): 279-297. For analysis of employer liability jurisprudence before workmen’s compensation see the works by Tomlins cited above; Robert Asher, “Failure and Fulfillment: Agitation For Employers’ Liability Legislation and the Origins of Workmen’s Compensation in New York State, 18761910" Labor History v. 24 (1983): 198-222; Karen Orren, “Metaphysics and Reality in Late Nineteenth-Century Labor Adjudication” in Labor Law in America: Historical and Critical Essays edited by Christopher L. Tomlins and Andrew J. King (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 160-179. Before accepting the proposition that case law practice was not as draconian as legal doctrine, two points should be made. The studies of case outcomes I have found focus on the years after the middle 1880s when common law defenses were challenged by unions and labor reformers. Between 1892 and 1910, in states such as Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, these groups lobbied effectively to reform the advantages employers had previously held in the common law of liability. Studies showing the success of workers in tort cases do not always acknowledge the pre-workmen’s compensation shift in doctrine. Secondly, tabulations of case outcomes do not allow scholars to account for the relationships between case results, legal doctrine, and the perceptions by workers and employers of their rights and responsibilities, because they do not examine the ideas and assumptions that framed the decisions workers and employers made to enter the shadow of the law, much less the contests that resulted. For examples of work that contextualize case law and jurisprudence in the history of employer liability see Paul Bellamy, “From Court Room to Board Room. Immigration, Juries, Corporations, and the Creation of An American Proletariat, A History of Workmen’s Compensation, 1898-1915,” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1994); Robert Asher, “The Limits of Big Business Paternalism: Relief for Injured Workers in the Years before Workmen’s Compensation” in Dying For Work: Workers ’Safety and Health in TwentiethCentury America edited by David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 19-33. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 67 shown.5 This chapter takes up an ignored aspect of the decline of common law employer’s defenses by examining the twenty-four Ohio appellate court cases involving injured youth workers between 1889 and 1930. The history o f liability for injuries to minors was related to the general trends described above, but it was carried on through a legal discourse that was in many ways distinct from that governing adults. For minors, demands for compensation were made by admitting their incompetence in productive processes that used hot, poisonous, heavy materials worked with new rapid machinery. For generations the common law had exempted children under the age of seven from the responsibilities of “due care" (the opposite of negligence) and required an unspecified lesser degree of due care for those under 14 years of age. Beginning in 1889, the case law and legislation in Ohio obliterated the concept of “due care” for all workers under 18 years of age, and reduced it for all those under 21 years of age. As a result the liabilities taken on by employers o f youths rose, and there emerged a significant differential between the risks of hiring youths versus adults. Even in cases when proper safety precautions had been taken, or the youthful worker had disobeyed safety rules without reason (events that would have negated adult claims during the era), employers were made to pay awards in the thousands of dollars for single accidents. While Ohio 1913 workmen’s compensation 5See James H. Boyd, “Some Features of Obligatory Industrial Insurance” Annals o f the American Academy o f Political and Social Science 38 (July-Dee 1911): 23-30. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 68 law reduced the liability risks for accidents to adults, it was increasingly difficult for employers to avoid the liabilities for accidents to youthful employees until 1925 when the courts included all Ohio youth workers in the workmen’s compensation act. The greater liabilities accompanying the employment of youths gave employers strong economic reasons to avoid hiring them. All the while, the courts created a formal setting where youths were encouraged to play the role of an impulsive incompetent child. These performances provided a way for jurists, employers, parents, professionals, and the youths to learn a key rule of the new structure of dependency — wage-earning in heavy industries and manufacturing was inappropriate for increasingly older grades of young people. By the time liability for injuries to youths at work were rationalized by workmen’s compensation in 1925, employers in the “primary” sectors of the economy would no longer hire minors. Youths who sought employment did so increasingly in what economists have dubbed the “causal” parts o f the employment market, that is the often part-time, poorly paid, non-union, unregulated work in small businesses, stores, garages and gas stations, and street trades. Workers in these jobs did not share equally in the benefits of the labor movement’s agitation for better wages, benefits, and conditions, or state regulation. This was one way that the visible hand of public policy helped shape the decline in generational economic reciprocity and rise in the attainability of the male-breadwinner ideal measured in Chapter Two.6 6 Paul Osterman offers other explanations for youths’ movement out of factories and mills by proposing that these sectors of the economy had fewerjobs for youths and that Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 69 Age & Negligence in Ohio Courts before Workmen’s Compensation In the middle 1880s a boy less than 14 years old named John Corrigan was employed by the Cleveland Rolling Mill to turn a valve that controlled steam powered belts. To do his job, Corrigan was required to reach over his head awkwardly in a narrow space between belts swiftly passing close to his face, torso, and legs. One day a belt came loose, and seeing this, Corrigan’s foreman told him to continue with his work. As the boy continued to work, a loose belt entangled his foot, dragged him to a shaft driving the belt, and so completely crushed his leg that it needed to be amputated just below the knee. On the boy’s behalf, his father sued Cleveland Rolling Mill and the jury awarded him $5,000 compensation. This was about ten years’ earnings for an adult male steel worker.7 During the trial, the lawyers for the Mill took exception to the trial judge’s instructions to the jury and on this basis appealed the case to the circuit court and then to the Ohio Supreme Court. The trial judge had instructed the jury that if Corrigan had exercised “ordinary care and prudence” expected of a boy of his age in similar employers preferred immigrant adults. These explanations are not without merit, but it should be noted that the number ofjobs in these industries was expanding throughout the period. It is also unclear that immigrant adults would make better employees, and it is impossible logic to presume that youths (especially those aged 15-18) could not perform many of the jobs that were being so de-skilled during this era It is simply unsubstantiated that employing youths was less profitable. To his credit Osterman acknowledges that the movement was not purely a rational economic trend, and documents well the causalization of the youth job market. Paul Osterman, Getting Started: The Youth Labor Market (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1980), 55-70. 7Rolling Mi11Co. v. Corrigan, 46 Ohio 283 (1889). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 70 circumstances, and if Cleveland’s Rolling Mill through its foreman had not properly advised and instructed him about the dangers of the job, then the boy was entitled to recover for his injury. The Mill’s lawyers argued to the Supreme Court that the judge had given the jury too much latitude in determining the boy’s negligence, and that Corrigan’s “understanding” o f the danger was irrelevant. The only question, they wrote, was whether he had contributed to the proximate causes o f the accident. Counsel for Corrigan argued at the trial that “youth, immaturity, and inexperience” were all relevant factors, because due care by the employer would require accounting for the employee’s competence. The justices ruled in a split verdict to uphold the award and the lower court’s instructions to the jury. The dissenting opinion took no account of Corrigan’s age, but listed cases where negligence had been unrelated to the worker’s “understanding,” and where the employer’s duty to give instructions was not measured by the employee’s competence.* The majority opinion acknowledged precedents for disregarding age in negligence, or in exempting children completely from negligence. However, they favored a course whereby a minor was liable to use no more care than is “usually possessed by children of the same age.” And they gave the jury responsibility for adjusting the concept of “due care” to age for both the 8The dissenting opinion cited Sullivan v. India Mfg. Co., 113 Mass. 396, Fortes v. Phillips, 39 Ark. 17; 26 Am. Law Reg. 737; Breese v. State, 12 Ohio 155; Bain v. Wilson, 10 Ohio 15. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 71 employer and employee.9 Corrigan saddled employers with negligence if they did not take extra care in training and monitoring their minor employees because it established the presumption that youths could not be expected to comprehend dangers. The presumption of youth incompetence increased the definition of “due care” as applied to their employers.10 In the late 1890s Ohio’s high court strengthened this presumption of incompetence in a wrongful death case involving the Cincinnati Street Railway Company. This case involved a fourteen year old foundry worker named Joseph Wright. One night in 1894, he and his friends hitched a ride on a dray without the driver’s knowledge. While aboard Wright suffered fatal injuries when the cart was struck by a streetcar. Wright’s parents and six siblings were largely “dependent upon him for support,” and so they brought suit against the street car company for damages. Following the ruling given in Corrigan, the street car company argued that Wright was guilty of contributory negligence that prevented a claim for recover because, “it is impossible 9They majority opinion cited treatise by Beach on Contributory Negligence, sec 46 and Whittaker’s Smith on Negligence, 411. And cases Railroad Company v. Stout, 17 Wal. 657; Whitelaw v. Railroad Company, 16 Tenn. 391; Jones v. Florence Mining Co., 66 Wis. 268. 10See E.P. Breckenridge v. Kittie Reagan, 22 Ohio Circuit Court Reports 71 (1901); Jacobs, A Minor, By Jacobs, His Next Friend, v. The Fuller & Hutsinpiller Co. 67 Ohio 70 (1902). In only one case was action by a trial judge that was adverse to the plaintiff upheld by higher courts. In this case a boy died from a lack of medical attention after taking ill at work and being denied his request to leave. The trial judge supported the defendant’s demur against the charges and accepted their claim that only the boy could know the degree of his illness, while the employer could not have perceived the danger. Thus, even against the threat of dismissal, it was the boy’s responsibility to leave. The circuit court upheld the lower court see Samuel Rohrer, Admr., x.J.C. Culbertson, 3 Ohio Nisi Prius Reports New Series 197 (1906). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 72 rationality to suppose that [a person capable of supporting his family] did not fully understand the peril of his situation.” The trial judge was persuaded by this reasoning and instructed the jury that they must reach a verdict of contributory negligence if they found that Wright, “was fourteen years old and upwards at the time o f the accident, and was entrusted with the performance of work so that he was earning ordinary wages of such a boy, and was accustomed to going without guidance or assistance of his parents to and from his place o f business and employment” because he displayed the “ordinary acts of care” performed by adults. By this interpretation of the law, the jury could only find for the defense. On appeal, both the circuit and supreme courts declared that the trial-judge’s instructions to the jury were erroneous. The high court wrote that they knew of no law that imposed upon a wage-eaming boy a higher standard of care than a “boy o f the same age and equal intelligence who, unattended, may go to and from school, or roam about the streets unemployed.” They noted that the case offered no evidence that Wright was particularly bright, and reasoned that employment did not bring an assumption of competence. The jury could only hold him to a standard of discretion found in “other boys his age.”11 By this reasoning the chronological age began to transcend other factors of determining the relationships between competence, due care, and negligence. After Corrigan and Wright, using the defense of contributory negligence 11 Cincinnati Street Railway Co. v. Wright, Adm'r., 54 Ohio 181 (1896) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 73 against the claims of young injured workers in Ohio became very difficult. The State’s Supreme Court had given juries a great deal of room for determining whether a minor could be negligent in any set of events.12 For example, the attorneys for E. P. Breckenridge Company o f Toledo succeeded in getting fifteen-year-old plaintiff Kittie Reagan to testify that she may have stepped on a lever that caused a stamping machine’s blade to remove her index finger when she was attempting to clear the target area. Reagan even admitted that the supervisor told her not to place her finger near this part o f the machine, yet the jury awarded her $300.00 in compensation. Breckenridge appealed the judgment as against the weight of evidence that showed Reagan had contributed negligently to the accident, but the Circuit Court was unsympathetic to the defense and supported the jury. Six years later, Luther Watson (at 14 or 15 years old) won an award of $2,587.96 from a Cincinnati veneer mill. The four feet, six inch tall Watson was instructed to not go near the blade of a 68 inch, 1,000 pound circular saw. He had been reprimanded several times by his supervisor for emulating the men who stopped the blade by jamming a piece o f wood in the opening between the disk and the floor. Yet, the jury held that Watson had not contributed to the accident that cost him his arm when he tried to stop the saw in this manner. In a third example, a 1920 Federal court upheld an Ohio jury decision that a boy under 14 had not contributed to an accident that killed him even though he had 12Other often cited similar cases were The LEL & Railroad Co. v. Mackey, 53 Ohio 370 (1896); K.D. Box & Label Co. v. Tommie Caine et al., 20 Ohio Circuit Decisions 511 (1907). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 74 “disobeyed the superintendent, and was playing about other parts o f the factory at the time he received his injury... [because this] is just what a child of this age might have been expected to do...”13 From the appellate cases reviewed here one can make claims about jurisprudence that might not correspond to general trial outcomes. Yet, it seems likely from the appellate record that as the latitude given to injured youth workers by judges and juries increased, the ages o f plaintiffs claiming youthful incompetence rose while the standard of due care applied to their employer became more rigorous. In the first half o f the cases between 1889 and 1910, three of the minors were under 14, six more under 16, one was 16 years old, and none were 17 years or older. In 1911, the first case involving a 17 year old was appealed. Including this case and those until 1930, in only one case was the minor under 14, five more were under 16, one was 16, and four involved 17 year olds. When the first case of a 17 year old reached an appeal, the main issue was age. The defense claimed that Corrigan, Wright, and the previous twenty years of cases had applied to children sixteen and under. The employer objected to the use of the term “child” to refer to their employee during the trial because he was a coal loader, who was “a man, doing a man’s work and earning a man’s wages.” But this reasoning had failed in Wright, and it failed to sway either the 13E.P. Breckenridge v. Kittie Reagan, 22 Ohio Circuit Court Reports 71 (1901); Frank Unnewehr Co. v. Standard Life & Accident Inc. Co. 176 Federal Reporter 16 (1910); Star Fire Clay Co. v. Budno, 269 Federal Reporter 510(1920). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 75 circuit or the supreme court justices in this case. They ruled that a worker between 14 and 21 was “presumed to be sui juris [on their own responsibility in the law] in the sense that he is chargeable with negligence, but the measure of his capacity in the regard is a question for the jury.”14 Negligence, Statutory Regulation, and Insurance In 1897 Martin Uhas was injured while working near an open circular saw for the Ohio Moulding Manufacturing Company in Cleveland and he subsequently won a judgment of $756.56 against his employer. After the trial, Standard Life and Accident Insurance company, which had represented the moulding company in the law suit, refused to pay the settlement. Uhas had been illegally employed in a “dangerous” occupation under the age of sixteen, and according to Moulding’s insurance policy this nullified Standard Life’s responsibility. Ohio Moulding sued Standard Life and claimed that the non-violation clause of the policy should be waived. They argued that the non-violation clause created a conflict of interest because the policy also included a guarantee that the insurer would provide legal counsel to the policy holder. Ohio Moulding reminded the court that Uhas’ age and whether he was employed in a “dangerous” job was the main point of contest during the trial. If Uhas was found not 14New York, C. & St. L. Ry v. Paul Gulla, 24 Ohio Circuit Decisions 101 (1911); the judges cited Wright and the above quote from Columbus Ry v. Connor, 27 Ohio Circuit Court 229. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled on Gulla without opinion, see 86 Ohio 341 (1912). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 76 to be working under age in a dangerous job, Ohio Moulding was not negligent, and the case was won. If Uhas was found under age in a dangerous job, the case was lost, but the insurance company would not have to pay the award. Either way, the insurance company could not lose. The circuit court rejected the moulding company’s argument and ruled that defending a client in a case where one’s own liability was at stake did not constitute a need to waive the non-violation clause of the policy.15 At the time that the Ohio Moulding case was being decided, an Ohio trial judge used the ruling in Breckenridge v. Reagan to instruct a jury that a violation of statutory child labor regulations, regardless of insurance policies, was evidence of employer negligence. But the Ohio Supreme Court overturned these instructions and the jury verdict based upon them. According to the justices, employing the minor illegally was a separate act. The distinction between employer negligence for work accidents and the violation of age standards remained strong until the 1911, when the Ohio legislature passed a bill denying employers common law defenses in all cases where they had violated any statue regarding the employment of minors. The courts followed by affirming jury awards based on the instructions that employing a minor in violation of the statute relieved the minor from contributory negligence and assumed risk.16 15 The Ohio Moulding Manufacturing Company v. The Standard Life and Accident Insurance Company, December 1903, 24 Ohio Circuit Court Reports, New Series 603 (1915). 16 See Jacobs v. The Fuller & Hutsinpiller Co., 67 Ohio 70 (1902). See E.P. Breckenridge v. Kittie Reagan, 22 Ohio Circuit Court Reports 71 (1901). In 1910, the Circuit Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 77 Since there were any number of situations where a minor appeared to be legally employable at the time of hiring, but after an accident the jury might construe the job as “dangerous” or the plaintiffs attorney might find that the complex system of age-certification with the schools had been violated, the liabilities assumed by those who hired workers under 18 years of age became more difficult to assess. For example, delivery service operator John F. Guenther sued his insurance company because they refused to cover the liability on an accident involving one of his drivers. The employee was a 17 year old boy who was old enough to drive in Ohio, but not in the municipality o f Lakewood where the accident occurred. A Federal Circuit Court supported Guenther’s claim that the words “by law” in the policy referred to the legality of the driver in Ohio. But the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the circuit court saying that Lakewood was empowered “by law” to deny the minor the right to drive. Thus, the policy was void and Guenther had to pay the settlement. The great increase of regulations controlling the behavior of minors during this period complicated the question of whether a minor’s work was “legal.” These complications provided incentives to avoid hiring them altogether.17 After Ohio Moulding, the issue of the proper way to instruct juries on what Court of Cuyahoga County heard the last appellate case that followed Jacobs when they ruled in Schaberv. Edwin David Hinig, 18 Ohio Circuit Courts Reports (New Series) 414 (1914), that a minor held special status relative to negligence, but rejected the argument that an age violation in child labor law could be the proximate cause of an accident. 11 United States Fidelity & Guaranty Co. v. Guenther, 50 The Supreme Court Reporter 165 (1930). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 78 constituted “dangerous” work became a main point o f law in appellate cases. As with other issues involving injuries to children and youths, juries were given wide latitude regarding danger to a minor. In 1910, a Federal Circuit Court ruled in an Ohio case that dangerous work should not be determined by the location or the tasks required of the minor. Citing Corrigan and Ohio Moulding, the Federal Court constructed a vague definition of danger by writing that juries should consider whether, “the wear and tear of the strain of the position and the indifference to danger that would naturally follow from childish curiosity and inexperience, rendered the position dangerous.”1* Faced with a very difficult position regarding the liability for injuries to young employees, some employers claimed that they had been deceived by the youths about their age. In a 1916 case, the Cleveland Worsted Mills Company claimed that Joseph Scheverell, who was fifteen years o f age when he lost his right hand in a machine, had lied to them about his age and therefore had contributed to the accident. The Circuit Court ruled against the defendant, and wrote that even if Scheverell was a “nimble witted” boy who went to work underage, it did not constitute contributory negligence or assumed risk. The court castigated the defendants and lauded their social duty to withhold common law defenses from employers of children. They proclaimed that it 18 Frank Unnewehr Co. v. Standard Life &Accident Ins. Co., 176 The Federal Reporter 16(1910). The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed wide latitude for juries in these matters in The Collings-Taylor Co. v. American Fidelity Co., 96 Ohio 123. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 79 was socially “cheaper” to protect children than to support “a citizenship made up of cripples.” The law should inhibit “conscienceless and unfeeling greed” that “must result in a distinct loss o f public manhood and an enormous subtraction from the resources and earning power of our people.” In cases that followed the Worsted Mills’ case, appellate judges ruled that being deceived by a youth as to his or her age was only a defense (if they could prove it) against a violation of the statute. Thus, it was irrelevant to the issue of a youth’s contributory negligence in accidents.19 In 1923 the Ohio Supreme Court went a step further and ruled in a case involving a minor that “violation o f a statute defining a duty or obligation, proximately resulting in injury and damage, constitutes [employer] negligence per se.” Ohio Iaw-makers and jurists not only supported insurance companies’ non-violation clauses, but by 1911 they had linked child labor statutes to the jurisprudence of negligence.20 19 Cleveland Worsted Mills Company v. Daniel C. Coates, 26 Circuit Court Reports (New Series) 353 (1917). The first time this counter-claim appears in the appellate court record was in Anna Brunet v. The Holden Paper Box Company; And Frank PJ. Brunet, an infant v. The Holden Paper Box Company, 16 Ohio Nisi Prius Report - New Series 465. In this case the Superior Court did not rule on the counter claim, but only approve of a procedural matter of how it was submitted to the trial court. See Lockwood et al. v. The Aetna Life Insurance Co., 8 Ohio Appellate Reports 444 (1919); Eyman v. Meuller, 2 Ohio Law Abstract 490 (1924). 20 See Page’s Ohio Revised Code, G.C. 6245-2 (1945); Star Fire Clay Co. v. Budno, 269 Federal Reporter 508 (1920); The Hadfield-Penfield Co. v. Shelter, 108 Ohio 106 (1923). The fact that tort law was used enforce statutory regulations regarding minors suggests that Richard Posner’s economic theory of negligence does not explain how jurisprudence developed regarding liability for injuries to minors during this era of Ohio’s history. See Posner, “A Theory of Negligence” 29-50. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 80 Age, Liability, & Workmen’s Compensation In Toledo during the summer of 1916, fifteen year old Walter Kutz worked nights from 6 P.M. to 5 AM. for the Acklin Stamping Company carrying small pieces o f steel called “yoke ends” to the stamp machine operators. One night while reaching into the barrels that contained the yoke ends, Kutz caught his hand in a newly installed ventilation fan which lacked a safety guard. When he sued for compensation, the trial judge ruled that in choosing a trial over filing through the new workmen’s compensation law, Kutz had forfeited the special protections minors enjoyed in such cases. Kutz would have to conduct his prosecution according to the stipulation of the workmen’s compensation law. Adult workers who chose trial over the compensation commission assumed the burden of showing willful disregard for safety by the defendant, while defendants regained the full power of the common law defenses. The trial judge further instructed the jury to disregard Kutz’s age in considering the questions of negligence and assumed risk. The jury found for Acklin, and Kutz appealed the case. The Supreme Court of Ohio ruled that the trial judge had erred in his instructions to the jury. Because Kutz was illegally employed, he was not covered under the workmen’s compensation act and thus the previous standards of negligence and due care applied. The court cited the 1911 statute that stipulated that in cases of illegal employment of a minor, the employer could not use the common law defenses.21 21 See Kutz, etc., v. The Acklin Stamping Co., 8 Ohio Appellate Reports 70 (1919); 98 Ohio 61 (1919). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 81 In Kutz, Ohio’s high court preserved the previous employer liability law in cases where youths were illegally employed, and thereby maintained the judicial mechanism for using tort law to enforce child labor codes. The legislature responded to the Kutz verdict by amending workmen’s compensation to include illegal youth workers that same year.22 However, this 1919 amendment to workmen’s compensation was not applied for years and cases continued to be appealed according to the previous standards.23 It is possible that the delay was caused by a contradiction between the statutes. The 1911 law that had disarmed employers of common law defenses in cases with child labor codes was left intact by the 1919 law that included youths’ employed illegally within the 1913 workers compensation act which had re­ armed employers with their common law defenses when workers chose to go to a trial. The Ohio Supreme Court resolved this conflict in a 1925 case, Foundry Appliance v. Ratliff. They ruled that the workmen’s compensation act encompassed the 1911 law, and thus all minors who were employed in places covered by the act, legally or illegally, were under the compensation act. The silence in the appellate 22See 108 OL 316 (1919) amendment of 103 OL 77 (1913). 23 See Hadfield-Penfield Steel Co. v. Shelter, 108 Ohio 106 (1923); In Eyman v. Meuller, 2 Ohio Law Abstract 490 (1924). It is unclear why the Ohio Supreme Court in Hadfield-Penfield and the Appeals Court in Eyman did not take notice of the implications of 108 OL 316 for these cases, when the Common Pleas Court of Clark County had reasoned in a 1921 case that due to this statute a minor did waive the right to a trial (as was the same for adults) if she or he received a claim through workmen’s compensation. This was a basic part of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Foundry Appliance v. Ratliffin 1925. See Robert Hartley v. The Victor Rubber Company, 23 The Ohio Nisi Prius Reports, New Series 593 (1921). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 82 record after 1925, speaks the loudest as to the combined affects of workmen’s compensation and the Ratliff ruling. Between 1925 and 1938, only two cases regarding minors and injury appeared in Ohio’s appellate courts; one case was an insurance dispute and the other did not involve work. Workmen’s compensation gave employers a predictable way to deal with the liabilities for injuries to workers by routing the vast majority of cases through administrative channels, rather than through the adversarial law o f torts.24 Youth workers in Ohio joined this rationalization of TABLE 3.1 Youth Workers as a Percentage of the Work Force by Industry in Ohio's Large Firms, 1878-1937* carriage making cooperage audm shop* planing mills steel A 1878 22% 11% 8% 9% 1914 2% 3% 1% 1923 3% 3% 1937 1% 1% I Year tanneries 8 1 a t a P a P e r w 0 0 1 e n 8% 2% 29% 35% 42% 1% 0% 1% 3% 0% 5% 1% 1% 1% 1% 2% 1% 2% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% 1% ITOQ * As given in the Ohio. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Annual Reports, 1878-1937. See Table A.4 in Appendix A for a discussion of the enumeration of workers and a more comprehensive list of industrial categories and a breakdown by sex. In 1878 boys < 16, girls < 15; and in 1914,1923, and 1937 boys & girls < 18. liability in 1925, but by this date most of them no longer participated in the sectors of 24 See Patrick D. Reagan, “The Ideology of Social Harmony and Efficiency: Workmen’s Compensation in Ohio, 1904-1919" Ohio History 90 (1981): 317-331; Daniel Polisar and Aaron Wildavsky, “From Individual to System Blame: A Cultural Analysis of Historical Change in the Law of Torts,” Journal o f Policy History 1 no. 2 (1989) : 129-155; Bellamy, From Court Room to Board Room, 1994. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 83 the work force where workmen’s compensation applied. Table 3.1 was compiled from surveys of Ohio firms that employed more than five workers. It shows a dramatic decline in the dependence o f employers on youth workers, especially in de-skilled processes such as the making of glass, paper, and woolens. Of course youths did not leave all types of work, but only those places where men were forming unions, and fighting to raise wages, improve conditions, and obtain the protection of the state. These events contributed to the growing differential between men’s wage earning capacities and everyone else’s wages discussed in Chapter Two. Youths continued to work in the “casual” areas o f the workforce that included the street trades, agriculture, filling stations, restaurants, hotels, and other services. These places allowed them to combine school and work, but often lacked minimal fair labor standards and union action during this era. Conclusion If the exodus of youths from Ohio’s factories and mills was in part prompted by the rational economic decision of employers to lower their liabilities (and of course there were many other factors), this chapter suggests that the age-grading o f liability was not in-and-of itself a rational market mechanism. In Ohio, legal doctrine tied the concepts of due care and negligence in matters involving youthful employees directly to statutory provisions. More subtly, the decisions that appellate courts rendered contributed to and were influenced by the cultural redefinition of suitable labor for Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 84 youths. This process of redefinition was contested, and employers did not always fare as poorly as those involved in the appellate cases reviewed here. For example, in 1934 a newspaper lawyer named Robert Furman addressed the Central States Circulation Managers’ Association and reminded them o f the importance of excluding newsboys from the entire category of “employee,” Whether the newspaper is liable for injuries to the carrier depends upon whether the carrier is an employee of the newspaper or whether he is an independent merchant If the former, then the newspaper is liable for injuries to the carrier while in the course of his employment If the latter, then there is no liability and the independent merchant pays for his injuries and injuries to others through his own negligence the circulation department should be very careful in its distribution and delivery of papers that nothing is done that will permit the offering of evidence to indicate control over the carrier. A number of things can be done that will lessen the amount of such evidence.. 25 As happened throughout the twentieth century, the newspapers were able to valorize the boys as “little merchants.” This helped them avoid liability and almost all labor standards, and allowed them to bust newsboys’ unions legally under anti-trust law.26 Yet, the contradiction of holding newsboys to be independent contractors (retailers) while newspapers (wholesalers) were allowed to control times of delivery, collection o f payment, and retail prices could only be maintained if by the term “little” merchant, 25 Jane WhitBread, “What’s a Leg to a Newsboy?” The Christian Century, January 6, 1937, 13-14. Furman’s point was not a new one in 1934, but the New Deal’s increasing intrusion into the employer-employee relationship raised the stakes of keeping the state out of the newspaper delivery business. See a similar warning in W. Scott, Scientific Circulation Management For Newspapers (New York, NY: The Ronald Press Company, 1915): 96-98. 26 For an excellent essay on the legal paradoxes of the law surrounding newspaper sellers see Marc Linder, “From Street Urchins to Little Merchants: The Juridical Transvaluation of Child Newspaper Carriers” Temple Law Review 63 (Winter 1990): 829-64. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 85 one meant that the newsboys really were not merchants (or employees or workers) at all, but that they were dependents like all other appropriate child workers. They were not “laboring,” but were learning the responsibilities of “adult” life. This was precisely the way the little merchant newsboy myth evolved in the early twentieth century. The next chapter will continue the inquiry into the new structure of dependency by examining how the meanings o f newsboys’ work and their places in city life were transformed under the combined influences of publishers who wanted to defend the virtues o f newspaper selling and reformers who wanted to abolish it. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER FOUR URBAN RETREAT The Ideological Origins of Newsboys’ Clubs and Camps In the summer o f 1899, striking newsboys crippled the New York World and New York Journal, owned respectively by two of the nation’s most powerful media moguls, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.1 The newsboys were upset over a price hike that increased their losses on any copies they failed to sell. During the high-sales period o f the Spanish-American War, Hearst and Pulitzer had squeezed an extra penny out of every ten papers the newsboys purchased. When the war ended and sales returned to previous levels, the boys felt the pinch. Their dissatisfaction was galvanized into action on July 18, when a group of newsboys tipped over a Long Island delivery wagon and stole its newspapers after discovering that the driver had 1The term “newsboys” was almost always used in the period instead of the gender neutral term “newsie.” The vast majority of those who sold papers on the street were males, and it appears that most newsboys’ unions and associations from the era excluded females. A National Recovery Administration Study from the 1930s found that over ninety-nine percent of newspaper sellers were boys. See Todd Alexander Postol, “Hearing the Voices of Working Children” Labor’s Heritage: Quarterly of the George Meany Memorial 1 (no. 3 1989): note 4, 19. Although substantial proportions of adult males have sold newspapers on the streets, from stands, or delivered them to homes, they too referred to themselves as “newsboys.” This adds some confusion as to who was a newsboy. According to studies from the early twentieth-century most newsboys were between the ages 10 and 16. There is also a question as to whether home deliverers should be called “newsboys.” It seems to me that the distinctions between street sellers and deliverers should not be drawn tightly because newsboys often did both types of work. See Jon Bekken, “Newsboys: The Exploitation of “Little Merchants” by the Newspaper Industry” in Newsworkers: Toward a History o f the Rank and File edited by Hanno Hardt and Bonnie Brennen (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), note 2,216. When I use the term “newsboy” I am referring to both street sellers and carriers, but will be concerned only with the outreach and organizational efforts for boys, not men or females. 86 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 87 been shorting them on papers. The story of the Long Island incident soon spread to Manhattan, and the next day a large crowd of newsboys gathered at City Hall Park. They voted to halt the circulation of the World and the Journal until prices were lowered to pre-war levels. They elected officers and sent delegates to organize nearby cities. On the following mornings, boys carrying clubs and throwing rocks harassed the W orlds and Joumars deliverymen at the row where they loaded the newspapers. At first, the boys were quickly dispersed by police. But when the drivers got to the delivery points, police protection was thinner. Five-hundred boys descended on 59th street carrying protest signs and covering newsstands and street-lamp poles with antiJourrtal and anti-World placards. When the wagons arrived, the police tried to disperse the strikers, but the boys formed a circle and refused to let anyone get the banned papers. When one man tried to oppose them, they yelled “Kill the scab!”, ripped the papers from his grasp, tore them into pieces, and stomped the shredded newsprint into the dirt.2 This riotous scene was repeated in Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Yonkers. The boys pelted deliverymen with food and rocks, assaulted scabs, were arrested by police, and sentenced to the juvenile asylum. All was not chaos. The boys organized a successful media campaign by parading in the streets and using the Joumar s and 2See David Nasaw, “Dirty-Faced Davids & the Twin Goliaths” American Heritage 1985 36 (3): 42-47; David Nasaw, Children o f the City At Work and At Play (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), 167-186. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ss World's competitors to get their labor issues before a wider public. Five-thousand boys massed at New Irving Hall to rally support for the strike. Over the following week newsboys joined the strike in Harlem, Mount Vernon, Staten Island, as well as ten cities in upstate New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. Pulitzer and Hearst hired men to beat the boys in the streets, and they offered homeless men two dollars a day to sell the papers. These tactics do not appear to have worked, and the buying public along with newsstand owners supported the boys by refusing to purchase the papers. Many even gave spare change to the picketers. By the second week of the strike the World was forced to drop its press run from 360,000 to 125,000 copies. Even so, the numbers of returned papers increased from 15 percent to 35 percent. When advertisers asked for money back on their contracts because of the strike, Hearst and Pulitzer compromised with the boys. The strike ended on August 2. Prices were not reduced, but the publishers agreed to buy back all unsold copies at full price. This removed a newsboys’ risk in buying these newspapers and insured that their earnings would match the numbers of copies they sold. Thirteen years later the victory the boys won to return unsold Worlds and Journals was still in force.3 The New York City strike of 1899 did not produce a permanent labor organization, but it demonstrated that a united front of newsboys backed by favorable publicity could threaten the viability of a given newspaper, and thus that the boys s Bekken, “Newsboys,” 208-209; Nasaw, “Dirty-Faced Davids,” 42-47. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 89 could wield enough power to negotiate improvements in the conditions of their labor. No less than twenty documented newsboys’ strikes hit newspapers in thirteen cities around the nation between 1893 and 1948. In at least nine cities without recorded strikes, the newsboys organized unions.4 These manifestation of newsboys’ power should not be surprising when one considers that few newspaper owners enjoyed a monopoly on a city’s readership. Newsboys constituted one-half million workers nationwide and they were absolutely vital to the sale of a product with a very short shelf-life.5 In historian David Nasaw’s judgment the New York newsboys were “virtually irreplaceable.” Yet, their unions were almost always short-lived. Some of the boys wanted their labor actions to be sustained, and did their best to bring permanent organization. In Boston (1901), Chicago (1912), and Detroit (1914) the boys sought to join or gave support to adult (mostly male) unions. The Boston newsboys sent a representative to the 1906 American Federation of Labor’s Annual Convention and called on the men to “make a special endeavor during the coming year to organize the 4Jon Bekken counted strikes in Boston in 1901 and 1908, Chicago in 1912, Cleveland in 1934, Des Moines in 1922, Kansas City in 1947, Lexington, KY in 1899, Minneapolis in 1918, Mobile in 1942, New York City in 1893, 1899, 1918, 1922, 1941, and 1948, Oakland in 1928, Portland in 1914, St Louis in 1945, and Seattle in 1917. In addition to these cities he found unions in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Houston, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Newark, San Diego, and Providence. See Jon Bekken, “Newsboys,” 208, note 22. 5The figure one-half million is based on a 1933 estimate by the American Newspaper Publishers Association in 1933. See Bekken, “Newsboys,” 190. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 90 newsboys throughout the country.”6 Apparently no such effort was made. Given the demonstrated power of newsboys to effectively oppose newspaper owners even when they were not supported by other newsworkers, why were they only rarely organized in coordination with or by adult newsworkers?7 Most historians o f this subject have acknowledged that the fluidity and parttime characteristics of newsboys’ work were impediments to their labor organization. David Nasaw argued that newsboys remained unorganized because they did not want a permanent labor structure to infringe upon their freedoms as “independent contractors.”® Other historians have concluded that the boys lacked the power to do 6Nasaw, Children o f the City, 181. 7Newsboys have been involved in some strikes by adult newsworkers including most recently the Wilkes-Bares Newspaper Strikes in Pennsylvania. And in some cases minor newsboys were lead by adult newsboys. The strongest youth-adult newsboy union appears to have been in Seattle where a unique type of comer ownership through the union was established in the 1890s. See Roger Simpson, “Seattle Newsboys: How Hustler Democracy Lost to the Power of Property” Journalism History 18 (1992): 18-25; Thomas Keil, On Strike! Capital Cities and the Wilkes-Bares Newspaper Unions (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1988), 156-158. Also see Nasaw, City o f Children, 181-183. But, the general trend since the early twentieth century has been for newsworkers’ unions to exclude them. According to Marc Linder, newsworkers have excluded newsboys and in order to maintain a viable claim to non­ management status for adult employees who in fact do ‘supervise’ the boys. See Marc Linder, “From Street Urchins to Little Merchants: The Juridical Transvaluation of Child Newspaper Carriers” Temple Law Review 63 (Winter 1990): 849-859. 8In Children o f the City Nasaw wrote that newsboys, “As independent contractors they did not have to accept management control of the workplace or work routines. They were free to set their own schedules, establish their own pace, and work when and where they chose On the street there were no parents, teachers, bosses, managers or foremen to tell them what to do or how to do it.” (66-67) Here Nasaw is writing about street sellers in the early twentieth century. Carriers experienced more constraints. He argued that the early decades of the century were special times when child labor on the streets was “almost a pleasant interlude between a day’s (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 91 very much about the horribly unjust working conditions that cheated them of a childhood.9 Contrary to the framework of the current literature, this chapter will argue that newsboys were in fact successfully organized by adults in the early twentieth century. However, these organizations were not unions lead by newsboys or fellow newsworkers. They were the newsboys’ associations, clubs, and camps paid for by newspaper publishers and operated by social workers.10 The quiet victory of 8(...continued) confinement in school and an evening in cramped quarters at home.” (43) 9 For the view that many injustices have been done to newsboys since the early twentieth century, but that they have had little power to do anything about it, see Jeremy Felt, Hostages o f Fortune: Child Labor Reform in New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1965) 41, 159-167; Walter I. Trattner, Crusade for the Children: A History o f the National Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970) 109-114; David E. Whisnant, “Selling the Gospel News, or: The Strange Career of Jimmy Brown the Newsboy” Journal of Social History 5 no. 3 (1971): 269-309. Felt, Trattner, and Whisnant generally assumed the point-of-view of the reformers, who believed children had no business being on the streets. To Whisnant’s dismay, it took over thirty years to “establish the simple fact that selling newspapers on the city streets was not good for children.” These historians assumed, as did the reformers of the era they study, that newspaper carrying in the suburbs was less reprehensible than street trading. More recently Todd Postol put more emphasis on what newsboys thought about their work, but did not disturb the idea that they were powerless. See Postol, “Hearing the Voices of Working Children.” Bekken and Linder, unlike other researchers listed here, asked why newsboys’ labor conditions were/are poor without assuming it was/is because they were/are minors. They uncovered the political maneuvering and legal precedents by which publishers avoided granting standard workers rights to the boys. See Bekken, “Newsboys.”; Linder, “From Street Urchins to Little Merchants.” Felt, Trattner, Whisnant, Postol, Linder, and Bekken all showed that the conditions of newsboys’ work to have been more abusive than Nasaw’s Children o f the City admitted. Trattner was especially baffled by Nasaw’s portrait of children’s agency on the streets, called Children of the City “bazaar,” and accused Nasaw of romanticizing their plight and accepting the little merchant myth. See Walter I. Trattner, “Street Traders: Little Merchants on the Road to Success? or Exploited Youngsters on the Road to Oblivion?” History o f Education Quarterly 26 no. 3 (Fall 1986): 407-411. 10Note Nasaw observed that prior to 1920 street trading youths were less supervised by adults than their predecessors had been on farms or in factories during the nineteenth century, or (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 92 newsboys’ recreational and citizenship clubs over newsboys’ labor organizations did not take place because the boys were too independent, nor because they had few complaints, nor because they could not comprehend their economic interests, nor because they lacked power. Indeed, they did experience hardships and were able to articulate dissatisfaction with labor relations. They may have valued their freedom, but they were not opposed to the discipline of group activity. Rather, they were disciplined by their participation in boys’ clubs to believe that class action was unnecessary and irrelevant in America, particularly for them —children and youths. This chapter examines writings published by newsboys’ club operators and reformers who worked to outlaw child labor in the city streets during the half-century before 1945. First, it deals with a reform tract entitled Boyville written by John E. Gunckel, who founded o f the National Newsboys’ Association in 1904. Next the writings of child labor abolitionists associated with the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) will be examined. Particular attention will be given to Edward N. 10(...continued) those who joined little leagues, boy scouts, girl scouts, school extra-curricular activities or summer camps between and after the World Wars. Nasaw, Children o f the City, 24-25. Because he focused on this interim period and wanted to demonstrate the liberating qualities of the street and children’s agency, Nasaw did not connect the rise of these recreational institutions, (which were led not by the working-class adults who were their parents, and who had often supervised children working in textile mills and on farms but by middle-class professionals), to the maintenance of and subtle changes in the “little merchant” ideal. Had he done so, Nasaw may have paid closer attention to the ideological tensions between the “little merchant” idea and union activity. As Marc Linder pointed out, Nasaw did not explain how becoming “independent merchants ... did not prevent the children from patterning their organizations after labor unions, calling them ‘unions’, and applying directly to local and national federations for certification and support.” Linder, “From Street Urchins to Little Merchants,” 864, note 223. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 93 Clopper’s 1912 tract Child Labor in the City Streets. Finally, Harry E. Burroughs’ portrait of his Burroughs Newsboy Foundation of Boston published in his 1944 book Boys in M en's Shoes will be examined. As one would expect, publisher-funded newsboys’ clubs undermined labor action and the class consciousness it might have fostered. But, newsboys’ clubs were not just one of many anti-union measures taken by corporate leaders. They offered positive agendas designed to shape the boys’ consciousness into individualistic modes. John Gunckel worked to save the city from vice by teaching the newsboys to be manly and virtuous through the experiences of their street labors. He hoped he could turn the individualistic pluck that he believed resided within all newsboys toward the goal o f securing a family-wage by doing respectable work and by maintaining a paternal sense of social responsibility. In the midst the rise of Gunckel’s newsboys’ association movement, the National Child Labor Committee began a sustained attack on child labor. The reformers of the NCLC could not imagine that the boys had any real business on the streets, and so they attempted to outlaw street trading by youths. Between the world wars the newsboys association began providing greater recreational, educational, medical services to the boys under the influences o f the professional growth of social workers and other care givers. The trend toward a therapeutic approach to the boys was in line with the child labor abolitionists advocacy for a childhood protected within nurturing households bolstered by professional care. Under these circumstances the ideal that newsboys were “small” capitalists subtly Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 94 shifted to the ideal that they were “play” capitalists.11 During the 1930s, Harry Burroughs’s Boston club encouraged the newsboys to play at handy-crafts, or pioneering, or exploring, or soldiering, or any number of “unreal” versions of adulthood. The Burroughs Foundation provided the nostalgic camp retreat and the expressive activities designed to help the boys locate what made them feel good underneath the tough exteriors required to survive the bustle of street life. The texts analyzed in this chapter suggest that the conflicts over newsboys’ street work and the recreational clubs that emerged out of them was part o f a larger transition to more therapeutic approaches to social work and fostered individualism within the boys. Newsboys’ Associations and Saving the City Streets In the middle 1880s a ticket agent named John E. Gunckel began giving aid to newsboys and bootblacks of Toledo, Ohio. One autumn day he found a newsboy-gang leader named Jimmy spreading hickory nuts under a tree. Gunckel was intrigued by this strange behavior and asked the boy why he would do such a thing. Jimmy answered that some of the younger school children of the neighborhood like to harvest nuts, but the tree was too old to produce its own. Jimmy’s thoughtful charity impressed Gunckel. He got acquainted with Jimmy and his gang. Gunckel told them 11When faced with Federal intrusion into their dealings with the boys through the National Recovery Act, the Social Security Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of the 1930s, the newspaper publishers argued that the boys were not small businessmen or even minor employees at all, but just kids learning to be businessmen and good citizens. See Bekken, “Newsboys,” 212; Linder, “From Street Urchins to Little Merchants,” 839-849. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 95 that he would help them if they were ever in trouble; “I say when you are in trouble, because when you are doing well and everything comes your way, you need no assistance. You can take care of yourselves.” Soon after Gunckel made his pact with the boys, one came into his office. The boy told him that a man had pushed him off the sidewalk “into de gutter and me foot struck a piece of glass.” So, Gunckel took the boy to a nearby hotel, cleaned his wound, and sent him out to sell the remainder of his papers. The idea that newsboys could help themselves if adults would give personal (not professional) guidance developed into the Boyville Newsboys’ Association of Toledo, Ohio.12 Boyville was founded during the winter of 1892. As Gunckel told it in Boyville, the Association arose rather spontaneously. Gunckel was doing his personal outreach work and was able to procure fifty new coats for the newsboys and bootblacks of Toledo in December of that year. But, he found more than fifty boys who needed coats. Timmy identified forty-five boys in the most need, and with the remaining five coats he gathered the twenty poorest street boys. Timmy asked the boys to select among themselves those who needed the coats most. Without a scuffle or arguing the boys divided the coats. Gunckel was so pleased that he told the boys to invite every bootblack and newsboy in the city to a Christmas dinner. He said, “I don't want a good boy in the crowd. I want only boys who are bad. I want all the 12John E. Gunckel, Boyville: A History o f Fifteen Years' Work Among Newsboys (Toledo, Ohio: The Toledo Newsboys’ Association, 1905), 1-18. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 96 gang and their friends. I want poor boys... not a boy must come in a dress suit.” On Christmas day 152 newsboys were treated to a feast. They formed the Boyville Newsboys’ Association and elected Gunckel their President. The members o f Boyville donned badges reading: BOYVILLE No.......... THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT (boys' name) is an active member for life of The Boyville Newsboys' Association. He does not approve of swearing, lying, stealing, gambling, drinking intoxicating liquors, or smoking cigarettes, and is entitled to all the benefits of said association, and the respect and esteem of the public. Signed by the officers. The boys selected officers whom they empowered to confiscate the badges of members who broke the code printed on the badges. After the officers had collected about fifty badges from transgressing boys, Gunckel made a deal with a local theater owner to give a free show to boys with badges.13 These benefits attracted new members and kept existing ones in line. In a couple of years Boyville grew to include 250 members and 66 officers. They established a governing committee o f five, branched out into neighborhood auxiliaries, and wrote a constitution. GunckePs version o f the origins of Boyville, like all stories, was selective. He omitted that prior to the Christmas dinner, he had visited the Toledo Bootblacks’ and Newsboys’ Union which was bom out of dispute with a city 13Gunckel, Boyville, 19-42. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 97 newspaper. He asked the union boys to dissolve the union and form Boyville. The Christmas dinner was a ploy to launch his competing association and he succeeded in directing the newsboys o f Toledo away from union activities and into a quite different brand of citizenship training. Perhaps it was a disagreement among the boys over the character of their association that sparked a riot at this Christmas dinner. We know that fifty newsboys where taken away by police in wagons.14 Boyville was designed to teach the newsboys not the lessons of union action, but the rules of middle-class respectability as Gunckel defined them. For obvious reasons, local newspaper owners supported Boyville.15 On June 12, 1904 at the St. Louis World’s Fair, Gunckel reached beyond Toledo and convinced the National Association o f Managers of Newspaper Circulation to endorse a National Newsboys’ Association.16 Soon a substantial media campaign began to circulate stories of newsboys as self-made little merchants. A Toledo daily claimed the newsboys were united across race, religion, and class because, “every boy who belongs to it is better for his membership. He is taught to travel 14 LeRoy Ashby documented this visit to the bootblack and newsboys union, but did not note the discrepancy between it and Gunckel’s account in Boyville. See LeRoy Ashby, Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children. 1890-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984) 108. 15For the financial connections between newspaper owners, Boyville, the National Newsboys’ Association, and newsboys clubs generally see Bekken, “Newsboys,” 205-208; Whisnant, “Selling the Gospel News,” 287-289. 16Gunckel, Boyville, 51-52. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 98 on his own merits and not lean on his papa. He is taught that he must paddle his own canoe; and that he will be judged by what HE does, not by his father's success.” In 1905 the National Association sent the Toledo newsboys’ band to the parade in Washington for the inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt. When they left Ohio, Governor Myron T. Herrick addressed them by saying, “I consider it a very great honor to the state of Ohio to send from its commonwealth such a bright lot o f boys, and boys who represent our little street merchants, boys who are destined to be the good men of the future.” Newspapers around the nation happily reported stories to the effect that the “general appearance and manly conduct of the young gentlemen elicited many favorable comments. They were an object lesson of a very remarkable character, which is calculated to arouse in them a higher degree of patriotism and love for their country.”17 By 1913 the National Newsboys’ Association included 28,000 members and over 200 affiliate organizations. Gunckel was working as their full-time president in offices valued at $100,000.'* The newsboys’ association movement rose to such heights under the rich support of newspaper owners just when the boys were beginning to organize on one side, and the National Child Labor Committee was beginning to lobby in state legislatures for the abolition of street 17GunckeL, Boyville, 55-60. 18 Who's Who in America: a biographical dictionary o f notable living men and women o f the United States, vol. VI, 1910-11 (Chicago: A.N. Marquis & Company), 804; Ashby, Saving the Waifs, 126. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 99 trading by children on the other. The newsboys’ associations gave the newspapers positive “news” to report on the boys while simultaneously distracting the boys from labor actions. However, Gunckel’s dealings with the boys, his years of work with them before Boyville or the National Newsboys’ Association, cannot be dismissed as a veneer or strategy for seeking his own career success.19 His program had deeper ideological roots in American individualism and the difficulties of squaring them with the rise of industrial capitalism. In 1905 when Gunckel recalled the origins of the Boyville Newsboys’ Association, the story he told fit into an existing literature on the lives of newsboys. Beginning in the 1840s and throughout five late-nineteenth-century novels by Horatio Alger, the outline of a recognizable newsboy figure much like GunckePs “Jimmy” was formed: newsboys were poorly clothed and often supported their widowed mothers; they were energetic and survived through their ingenuity; they might be sarcastic, but they told the truth when it counted; they might be wise and were quick to take advantage of a business opportunity, but they always helped those weaker than themselves.20 Gunckel was undoubtably 19 Because Gunckel’s understanding of the newsboy issue was at odds with the child labor abolitionists that he identified with most, Whisnant dismissed GunckePs program as a “veneer” to “channel them into a narrowly self-interested commercial-industrial system.” While there is good reason to concluded that just such a “channeling” was one result of GunckePs work, it does not follow that he lacked sincerity. Whisnant, “Selling the Gospel News,” 288. 20 David Whisnant offers an excellent review of this literary development in “Selling the Gospel News,” 274-284. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 100 influenced by previous novels about newsboys and his plan for Boyville was likely derived from William George’s Junior Republic -- particularly its stress on manly character building through physically vigorous work.21 As the badge for the Boyville announced, the focus of his plan was to help newsboys rise above the vice o f the city streets, not despite the streets, but through conducting business upon them. Joining his contemporaries in the boys’ club movement, Gunckel asked who was to blame, “if Christian people do not find time, amid the rush and roar of the city, in their mighty struggle for wealth,” to “take time to get into the real life o f a boy...” For Gunckel, the “real life of a boy” was physical and often violent. Men needed to “work for the time to come when there will be no ‘bad company’ on the streets.”22 So, Gunckel encouraged the boys to take quick justice on transgressors against property, temperance, and civility by punching them, rolling 21 See William R. George, The Junior Republic: Its History and Ideals (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1910). 22For other contemporaneous boys’ club tracts see Charles Stelzle, The Boys o f the Street: How to Win Them (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1904); Winifred Buck, Boys Self-Governing Clubs (New York: The MacMillian Company, 1906); Lilbum Merrill, Winning the Boy (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1908). Gunckel believed that street trading youths were “surrounded on every hand by degraded and vicious men, with drunkenness regarded as a desirable condition, and the indulgence in drink only limited by the ability to procure it. Among many, robbery is regarded as a fine art, and the tribune of praise bestowed upon rascality.” Gunckel, Boyville, 11-12. Gunckel’s approach to urban problems were in step with what Historian Amaldo Testi has described as the masculine reform politics of Theodore Roosevelt. T.R. appeared in a photo speaking to the boys and is quoted on the inside cover of Boyville. Amaldo Testi, “The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Culture of Masculinity” 81 Journal o f American History (March 1995): 1509-1533. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 101 them in the mud, banging their heads against brick buildings, and making them beg forgiveness on their knees from those they offended. Officers could seize badges, which would make it impossible for a boy to sell papers on the street safely. Boyville fleshed out his vision of street justice with a series of vignettes. For example, when a nine and twelve year old found a fifteen year old smoking a cigarette in an alleyway, they demanded that he put it out. This had “little effect until the two boys began to take off their coats. When donned for the prize ring, the boys walked to the violator, presenting a bold front...” The bigger boy asked what they thought they were going to do and they said, “We will trow you down, take your badge frum youse an' take it to the president [Gunckel].” A crowd of boys gathered and began shouting “throw it away.” The bigger boy backed down.23 According to Gunckel, domesticity would not prepare men for the moral challenges of the street, because sooner or later a mother would have to release her son into the world with the plea, “Don't go into bad company.” He thought true “education cannot be given, it must be achieved.” His newsboys’ association was “a kindergarten in the great school of business and citizenship; [it proved] not only that the boy of the street is capable of conquering himself, and of mastering his own will-power, but also that he can assist his companions, to be honest, a Gunckel, ■fioyW/Ze, 71-75, see similar stories on pages 100, 118-121. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 102 patriotic, and self-reliant.” Gunckel asked, “Do you believe a boy that is good at home, one who is cared for and loved as we often see an only child, could possibly do anything bad on the streets, away from home influence?” The parents of one profane little dandy certainly believed so according to Gunckel. They sent him to Boyville to learn to be a man. Timmy took him under his wing and taught the boy the relationship between courteousness and sales, and reported to Gunckel, “he cut out swearing de furst thing. . . . When I puts twenty cents in his hand, an' says this is youm, he gets wise, he gets next to a good thing and is now working on de square. He is de boss seller on de street an* no boy kin sell on de corners and swear, or steal. He fights'em.” With the power of male bonding and “a warning by a fellow companion with a little authority,” this boy grew into a man earning 800 dollars a year in “an important commercial position.”24 The threat o f physical violence was an ever present part Gunckel’s masculinist lessons to the boys, but the center of his program was to intensify their desire for, and to help them find, a man’s job at a family-wage. The denouement of newsboy parables as recorded in Boyville hinged on whether the newsboy obtained a “good position.” In 1917, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of Gunckel’s Boyville, they proudly reported that among the 102 charter members there were twenty-seven doctors, five bankers, two ministers, seven 24Gunckel, Boyville, 195-198,71-75. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 103 newspaper managers, twelve traveling salesmen, eleven warehouses workers, fifteen skilled tradesmen, eleven navy seamen, and one circus clown. Only eleven were unaccounted. In Boyville Gunckel explained that the “only way to give substantial assistance to the poor boy is to give him a start in life, helping him to work his own way through a hundred little temptations that would easily lead him wrong.” As if he was recounting this story to a group of newsboys, Gunckel wrote: An old lady was standing on the corner waiting for a street car. In her hand she held a small package, a Christmas present for someone. A boy, about fourteen years of age, darted out from a door-way, grabbed the package, hastened down the street and dodged into an alley. A newsboy who saw the act started after the thief, and as he ran several other newsboys joined in the chase. While they were gone another newsboy went to the lady expressing regret at her loss, but assuring her the boy who stole the package would be caught. With tears in her eyes the old lady told the newsboy that the box contained a number of presents for a little girl who was confined to the house on account of being a cripple for life. That the purchase was the result of many weeks’ hard work, sewing for some of her neighbors, that she might earn the money to get a present for the little girl. “Now, my lady,” said the newsboy, “don’t you worry for a minute, one of our officers started in a dead run after him and I know he will catch him. We don’t allow anything like that to happen. That boy don’t belong to the association.” The lady was escorted to a drug store where people wait for cars, and advised to remain there until the newsboys returned. She did not have to wait long, for, in a short time, the officer returned with a dozen newsies all trying to push the “grafter” ahead of them. When in front of the lady, he was made to hand her the package, and get down upon his knees and ask her forgiveness. The old lady was placed upon a street-car, and the officers took charge of the boy. They brought him to the president’s office.25 In Gunckel’s imagination newsboys were a means to restore urban order. Old 25 Gunckel, Boyville, 11-12,73,172-174, 195; 105-106. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 104 ladies could be defended, reassured, “escorted,” “advised,” and put “upon” a streetcar home to safety by the chivalrous street boys. This boy had turned to thievery because he had no sense o f community; the “neighbors paid no attention to him or his family, except to say, ‘That boy ought to be turned over to the police.’” The newsboys’ association did what the police could not. When the captured thief appeared before Gunckel, he challenged the boys’ sense o f manhood by informing him that he stole a Christmas present purchased for a “crippled girl”. The boy confessed his shame and said his parents were drunkards who sent him out to steal. Boyville took him into their fraternal warmth and he was reformed into an honest heroic newsboy. When he graduated from selling newspapers, the association helped him find a job in a warehouse and soon he was clerk. Stories like these soothing the tensions between nostalgic hopes for a paternal urban order along with helping boys find positions in corporations filled the pages of Boyville.26 26Gunckel, Boyville, 110. (135-136) Newsboys, as Gunckel wished to see them, learned hard-charging capitalist business ethics without sacrificing property honesty. He was very proud of the habit they made of returning items they found. In a speech to his fellow newsboys officer explained to the younger boys, “rain or shine be at your post, at your comer. Never be out of papers, and never be out of change. Many a good boy who needs money loses a sale for want of having change. Keep your eye peeled. If a man wants a paper, you should see it, though he is a square away. I know of one little boy, smaller than those who were selling with him, who always saw a customer a block away, and when the evening's work was over he generally had ten to twenty cents to the clear more than others. Be polite and always cheerful. Keep your face and hands clean, and you will get many an extra nickel. If you are polite and civil you will get a regular line of customers who will always wait for you. Thank everyone who buys a paper. Tip your hat to the ladies and they will speak well of you when they get home. Any little (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 105 As with other urban reformers following the pioneering work of Charles Loring Brace, John Gunckel believed that the “crowding of populations to the cities, is gradually destroying the home feeling.” But unlike Brace, Gunckel did not send street waifs to the West, nor did he want to protect children by isolating them from public life. He believed “city people should make the city life purer.” This was especially true in the case of newsboys, because “you cannot reach a boy unless you get near him, are of his kind; [and are able to] place the boy under personal obligation to you...” For Gunckel it was not good enough to protect children from a vicious economy because they must also be armed to resist the temptation to exploit others. “The man who fails to rise above the level o f his own selfish interests is the man to whom,” should hear “(James IV - 17): ‘To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is a sin.” The National Newsboy Association was his attempt to institute “a new doctrine, not a new law, that will bring people back to the Simple Life that demands some self-sacrifice.” Gunckel’s nostalgic version of a paternal moral order that could co-exist and even encourage commercial careers in the boys was widely acceptable to circulation managers and newspaper owners, but it was squarely opposed by the National Child Labor “ (...continued) favor you can do for a man or woman on the street (and not look as though you expect something), will always bring you business. The wind blew off the hat of a gentleman one day, and a Little seller saw it. Quick as a flash he ran after it, took his own cap to wipe the dirt off the gentleman's hat, and handed it to him. The gentleman said: how many papers you got? 'Twenty-four, sir,'said the boy. 'Give them all to me.” (135-136, see also 149-150) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 106 Committee (NCLC).27 Outlawing the Newsboy and Removing Children from the City Streets In December of 1905 the United States Commissioner of Labor, Charles P. Neill, called for higher age restrictions on street trades and told a Washington D C. audience that, “unless the child is cast in the mold of heroic virtue the newsboy’s trade is a training in either knavery or mendicancy.” The newsboys’ job was “demoralizing” and the messengers’ job was “debauching”.2* These were the sentiments that John Gunckel unexpectedly met when he was invited as a guest speaker at a conference held at Chicago’s Hull House in 1906. He left in disgust just prior to his own lecture because the other participants had equated the abolition of street trading by children with reforming the moral character of the street.29 His belief that domesticity could not prepare boys to properly confront the vices of city life set Gunckel apart from dominant reformers of his day. 27 Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, Publishers, 1872), 97-122, 234-279. Gunckel, Boyville, 168-171; 213-214. 28Charles P. Neill, “Child Labor at the National Capital,” Annals o f the American Academy o f Political and Social Science 27, no. 2 (March 1906): 270-280. The next year Wallace E. Miller, Secretary of the Ohio State Child Labor Committee, claimed that citizenship was at risk when street trades went unregulated and “a boy of twelve years be sent nightly to disorderly places with telegraph messages, where vice is flaunted in his face and he is made familiar with its poisonous details.” 29LeRoy Ashby, Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children, 1890-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 125-126. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 107 Florence Kelley, the leader of the Consumers’ League, called the idea that newsboys were small merchants, “perverse.” According to Kelley, newsboys, “who are allowed to sell papers at any age are going to be important citizens, for they are going to be very expensive convicts later on.” She told the audience at a 1911 NCLC symposium that the newsboys’ associations were wrong to give theater tickets and holiday dinners to newsboys because most of them had “a father and mother who prefer that he should eat Christmas dinner at home.” At the same symposium, George Hall echoed Kelley’s sentiments and called for abolition of newspaper selling by children under twelve and licensing of twelve and thirteen year olds. A third member of the symposium, Richard K. Conant, Secretary of the Massachusetts Child Labor Committee, was more sympathetic to Gunckel’s methods. He reported that Boston’s juvenile court had used the idea of “selfgovernment” and created a newsboys’ court presided over by a lawyer and two older newsboys. Conant said the court worked to steer boys away from law breaking and out of night messenger service before they found themselves in the reformatory. He hoped the NCLC would see that the “point of attack is not to stop the work, but to regulate it, to put it under good conditions... [only] the final resort [was to] prohibit the work.” Conant’s message did not hold sway at the NCLC.30 30 See Florence Kelley, “The Child Breadwinner and the Dependent Parent” Child Labor (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 108 The fourth member of this 1911 symposium was an NCLC regional secretary named Edward N. Clopper. Clopper did more than anyone else to convince the Committee that abolition of street trading by children was the only solution to the problems these children faced.31 In his 1912 book Child Labor in the City Streets, Clopper attacked Gunckel’s image of the street as a place of paternal sociability. He told his readers, we must bear in mind that the real purpose of the street is to serve as a means of communication, a passageway for the transit of passengers and commerce. It was never intended for a playground, nor a field for child labor, nor a resort for idlers, nor a depository for garbage, nor a place for “(...continued) Bulletin 2 no. 1 (May 1913): 3. Florence Kelley, “Street Trades,” delivered as part of “Symposium - Child Labor in Street Trades and Public Places”Annals o f the American Academy o f Political and Social Science supplement (July 1911): 108-110. George A. Hall, “Newsboy,” delivered as part of “Symposium —Child Labor in Street Trades and Public Places” Annals of the American Academy ofPolitical and Social Science supplement (July 1911): 100-102. Richard K. Conant, “Street Trades and Reformatories,” delivered as part of “Symposium -- Child Labor in Street Trades and Public Places” Annals o f the American Academy o f Political and Social Science supplement (July 1911): 105-107. 31 On this occasion Clopper talked about night messengers. He reported that after 9:00 P.M. the street trades ceased to be part of legitimate business and became dominated by gambling, drinking, and prostitution. The boys of the night messenger services ran drugs and alcohol and food in the darkest parts of the city and often practiced these vices. He asked that enforcement be bettered and the age limit for day trading be set at 14 and that night work be prohibited to those under 21 years old. Edward N. Clopper, “The Night Messenger Boy,” delivered as part of “Symposium —Child Labor in Street Trades and Public Places” Annals of the American Academy o f Political and Social Science supplement (July 1911): 103-104. Also see Clopper, “Children on the Streets of Cincinnati” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science supplement no. 22 (July 1908): 113-123. Clopper chastised the many states which restricted newspaper selling for females to ages 16, allowed bootblacking for girls as young as 12. He ridiculed the “opening of a new field of usefulness for all the little girls who wish to follow the dainty, dignified and essentially feminine profession of shinning shoes at the gutter’s edge.” Thus, Clopper urged that street trading be restricted for girls to age 18, day or night. Edward N. Clopper, “The Proper Standard for Street Trades Regulation - Ways and Means to Secure it” Child Labor Bulletin I, no. 2 (August 1912): 114-115. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 109 beggars to mulct the public. The fungous growths from civic neglect ought to be cut away. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place’ would be an efficacious even if old-fashioned remedy: playgrounds for the children, workshops for the idlers, reduction plants for the garbage and asylums for the beggars.32 Clopper’s impersonal city was hardly an “old-fashioned remedy.” His solution to an economy that abused children was to remove them from it, rather than morally reform the economy of the city street. In Clopper’s view, the city street was only a technology in the heartless world of commerce that he clearly distinguished from intimate social relations. He criticized newsboys’ associations as “not practicable as an absolute preventative” or “cure for the evil” for the abuses o f child labor.33 Clopper questions Gunckel’s competence when he remarked that, in the city of Toledo there is an active association organized for the benefit of newsboys, which openly encourages street work by boys from eight to seventeen years. The manager [Gunckel] insists that such work affords the means of alleviating the poverty in the families of these boys, but upon inquiry it was found that he had never heard of the provision for the financial relief [in the form of scholarships] of such cases of child labor, which is made by the Ohio law, and which had been, at the time, most successfully administered for three years by the Board of Education of his own city.34 In fact, newsboys’ scholarship programs were too limited in scope to do much about hunger among the newsboys’ families.35 But, not all of Clopper’s arguments 32Clopper, Child Labor in the City Streets, 17-20. 33Clopper, “The Proper Standards,” 117 34Clopper, Child Labor in the City Streets, 66. 35The scholarship idea began as a pledge by the New York City Child Labor Committee (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 110 against Gunckel’s program were unfair. To his credit Clopper exposed aspects of the political economy on newspaper selling ignored in Boyville. On the streets, older boys did much more than teach younger boys how to become effective salesmen. Elaborate systems o f turf protection organized selling on the busiest comers. Some comers were purchased for over a thousand dollars around the turn o f the century. The older boys who ran these choice comers employed younger boys to sell papers, kept most o f the profits for themselves, and paid gangs of bullies to punish interlopers. Circulation managers were also part of the system. Managers set limits on the numbers of opposition papers that a boy could sell and employed larger boys to beat up sellers who carried more than the limit. Clopper estimated that the system of exploiting the younger boys allowed newsboys in their middle-teens to command twice the incomes o f unskilled laborers, apprentices, and office boys.36 Their employment would not, however, lead to respectable careers. 35(...continued) in 1905 to reward parents who kept child of age 12 and 13 in school with from 1 to 3 dollars weekly compensation. Homer Folks’ study of the spread of the program to St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Indianapolis, and Baltimore showed convincingly that very few families were actually aided through this method. See Homer Folks, “Poverty and Parental Dependence as an Obstacle to Child Labor Reform” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 29, no. 1 (January 1907): 1-8. 36Clopper, “Children on the Streets of Cincinnati,” 115; Edward N. Clopper, Child Labor in the City Streets (New York: MacMillan Company, 1912), 52-60. Clopper called newspaper selling, “a blind alley that sooner or later leaves its followers helpless against the solid wall of skilled labor's competition. An occupation that fits a boy for nothing and is devoid of prospect, is a curse rather than a blessing in this day of specialization.” (73-74) He explained that unlike the street trades, even in coal mines, factories, or department stores a boy or girl “has at least a fighting chance for acquiring a trade... or a better position.” And yet policies controlled (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ill According to Clopper, they did not learn thrift, foresight, and honesty, but only “tricks.” Newsboys were conspicuously out of change or paused needlessly while making change for a hurried customer in the hopes o f earning a tip. They became “short change artists.” They learned to play on the sympathies of pedestrians at dusk by saying, “please, mister, buy my last paper?” After the good Samaritan had purchased the unwanted merchandise the boy would hurry around the comer and grab another “last” paper from his stash, and run the ruse once again. Worse still, newsboys were on a career path that led to running narcotics and selling prostitutes.37 Clopper’s expose on the street trades were the most extensive in a steady stream o f similar investigations. Mrs. W.L. Murdoch, chair of the Alabama Child Labor Committee, claimed that neither the mill nor the mine was as great a danger to southern children as the street trades. She claimed news-selling and bootblacking led to messenger service and that this work had created “a history of crime and physical and mental degeneracy so great as to make us feel that in this continued) child labor in these places, but not on the street. Clopper could not see his way to make a critique of the unfair labor relations of newspaper distribution, but centered it all around the fact that children were doing it. The problem would be solved if misfits were allowed to do the job. He explained there was, “no reason why newsboys should not be replaced as the medium for the sale and delivery of newspapers by old men, cripples, the tuberculous and those otherwise incapacitated for regular work.” (75) Suddenly the unjust class-character of street trading would be erased if natural deviants labeled with medical and psychological diagnosis became the victims. 37 Clopper, Child Labor in the City Streets, 64-66, 159-189. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 112 line o f work the age limit should be 21 years!”3* In 1911 Zenas L. Potter of the New York Child Labor Committee was sent to investigate street trading in Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. She found that “street trading tends to make boys ungovernable in schools” and reported that they had higher incidences of truancy, poor deportment, and lower grades than other children.39 Ohio child labor reformer Wilma I. Ball lamented that the public held delusions about street trading. She claimed the pressure to sell demanded that the boys belt out “the lusty cry” and perfect “the experienced gesture of the dirty little hand held up for pennies.” All had seen the newsboy’s “intense face, with its roving, calculating eye, his ever open mouth, with lips distorted for the next call...” These children were learning to be beggars and the only solution was to remove them from city streets. More than any set of statistics or sociological reasoning could tell, Ball’s depiction of the heartless child, her smooth substitution of “its” for “his” roving eye, helped readers locate their fears about city life in the children who mingled with adults on the 38Mrs. W.L. Murdoch, “Conditions of Child Employing Industries in the South: A Symposium” Child Labor Bulletin 2, no. 1 (May 1913) 124-127. Also see Felix Adler, “The Abolition of Child Labor, A National Duty” Child Labor Bulletin 3, no. 1 (May 1914): 20-24; Anna Rochester, “Newspapers and Child Labor” Child Labor Bulletin 3, no. 1 (May 1914): 137-140; the review' of Anna Y. Reed’s Newsboy Service in “News Notes” Child Labor Bulletin 6, no. 3 (December 1917): 141-142. 39Zenas L. Potter, “Street Trading and the School” Child Labor Bulletin I, no. 2 (August 1912): 119-121. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 113 streets.40 Sarah N. Cleghom wrote a poem to express the views of the NCLC:41 “The Child in the Street” Does the Man in the Street see the Child in the Street, Shrill calling his papers in slush and in sleet, Through deep gutters splashing at passers-by beck, And turning his soaked collar up ‘round his neck; And gambling his pennies in alleys at noon, And snatching free lunch in the comer saloon? Or running with parcels from wagon to door, (Too late for his supper, as often before)? Or leaving the milk on the doorstep at dawn,A thin, darting shadow —how swiftly he’s gone! Yet into his schoolroom at nine did we look, We’d see him too tired to open his book. Does the Woman at Home see the Child in the Street? She keeps her own darlings so sheltered and neat, And studies their comrades and watches their play; Does she think of the boys out by night and by day? Of the cigarette cough, and the face aged so young, And the cynical knowledge at the tip of the tongue? Of the houses they enter, the people they meet, When, late in the night, still the child’s in the Street? Do the People in Church see the Child in the Street? Have they looked down the pathway before his young feet, How it leads due away from skilled labor and trade To where the Reform School looms darkly ahead? When the list of lost children at length is complete, Will the People at last take the Child from the Street? The street and paid work was for men; nurturing children in the home was for 40Wilma Ball, “Street Trading in Ohio” American Child 1, no. 2 (August 1919): 123. 41 Sarah N. Cleghom, “The Child in the Street” Child Labor Bulletin 2, no. 3 (December 1913): 48-49. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 114 women.42 It was certainly more difficult for reformers to affect change on the city streets through cooperation with multiple groups of people than to publish studies or poems in the journals of the NCLC. In 1916 the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago sent Elsa Wertheim into the news alleys to help enforce an ordinance prohibiting boys under sixteen from selling papers after 8:00 P.M. She found that at about 6:00 P.M. forty to eighty men and boys would begin congregating where the newspaper wagons received their shipments of the evening edition. Here they found free coffee and rolls, and a place to lay down. Wertheim reported that “they drink, gamble and swear the time away and frequently large sums o f money are lost.” She saw the foolishness of vice, rather than generosity and solidarity, when a boy put ten dollars in a hat being passed to pay for a child’s funeral. Reportedly the newsboy said, “I would just as soon give it to help bury a dead kid as lose it at crap.” She uncovered shoplifting schemes and prostitution rings. She recounted the lurid story of a boy who “accused another of attacking him and committing a perverted act upon him. The younger boy is now in the hospital being treated for venereal disease...” and his attacker was sent to the institution for the feeble-minded. In their first seven months in the news alley, 42The NCLC also published one act plays to dramatize their portrait of street trades. See Lydia Hale Crane’s “The Messenger Boy” and “Newsboys” in Child Labor Bulletin 3, no. 2 (August 1914): 23-30. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 115 Wertheim and other investigators removed 120 underage boys. Their work reportedly helped secure promises from the newspaper, the juvenile court, and the police department to enforce the age restrictions on night selling.43 Although there are specific accounts of local success, such as this one in Chicago, it is difficult to measure the general impact o f the NCLC campaign against the street trades. It did coincide with a peak o f legislative change in the states between 1911 and 1915. Prior to the founding o f the NCLC in 1904, only New York state and a few municipalities had placed restrictions on street trading. Lillian A. Quinn found that widespread sympathy toward the newsboys’ poverty undermined enforcement of this New York law. In 1911, 304 New York City children were arrested and taken into court, but only 12 were fined and 8 sent to institutions. Quinn warned that if the, “spirit of fairness, and o f self-government, which the Newsboys’ Association in [Boston] seeks to foster and develop... militate in any way against strict enforcement of the law, it defeats its own end.”44 By 1915 the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and nineteen states joined New York, and prior to the Second World War five more states passed restrictions. The states of Ohio, Kentucky, and Oklahoma regulated only girls’ street work and twenty-four other states set 10 to 14 year age limits for daytime 43 Elsa Wertheim, “News Alleys” Child Labor Bulletin 6, no. 1 (May 1917): 45-46. 44 Lillian A. Quinn, “Enforcement of Street Trades Regulation,” Child Labor Bulletin 1, no.2 (August 1912): 122-124. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 116 street trading and 16 to 21 year limits for the nighttime.45 Most states and many municipalities tried to use badges or work permits as a means of enforcement, but reports from the period suggest that police departments and juvenile courts were reluctant to apply the law when underage newsboys asserted the right to work the streets. Local drives to licence street trading children were difficult to sustain. A 1909 study of New York City, Buffalo, and Rochester reported that over half the children employed in commercial enterprises were working illegally at a time when only eight percent of the children found in factories were employed in contravention of the law. Early in the century, Buffalo forced at least 300 underage boys out of the business, but within ten years a study revealed that the law was no longer heeded. During the 1920s the Buffalo Children’s Aid Society found that the number of street trading children increased by 161 percent.46 The events following Cleveland’s first (1910) regulation of street trading by age suggest that the links between local newspapers and local authorities were strong enough to dampen the implementation of initially successful reform drives. Cleveland’s Consumers’ League worked to pass and secure enforcement of the 45U.S. Dept of Labor, Growth of Labor Law in the United States (1967), 25-26. 46Jeremy Felt concluded that the New York city police essentially refused to cooperate with the enforcement of the 1903 state law presumably because newspapers could intimidate local politicians and local politicians had influence in police departments. See Jeremy Felt, Hostages o f Fortune: Child Labor Reform in New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1965), 159-161. Also see Charles L. Chute, “The Enforcement of Child Labor Laws” Child Labor Bulletin 1, no. 2 (August 1912): 108-113. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 117 ordinance. Mayor Hariy L. Davis promised to authorize an official of the Board of Education to issue permits and badges; the Superintendent of Schools and head of the Board o f Education each promised to issue permits and badges if they could raise the money. The Chief of Police promised to detail officers to enforce the law. The juvenile judge agreed to see the cases prosecuted. However, the local papers opposed the ordinance. No money was appropriated for badges or permits. No special squad o f police officers was ever formed. In 1920 anyone walking in downtown Cleveland could see that the restriction on the ages of the street sellers in the city was a dead letter.47 This appears to have been the case in most cities during the interwar period. When Chairman Homer Folks addressed the NCLC in 1938, he concluded that the number of street traders had not decreased over the 41 Florence V. Ball, “Children and Industry” in The Cleveland Health and Hospital Survey (1921), 598-599. In 1918 the Ohio Consumers’ League met a similar fate. They had obtained the cooperation of Boyville among other local organizations to support a bill to include street traders within the labor regulations on factories. But, the legislative committee, according to Wilma Ball, “wobbled in the presence of the newspaper delegation which was large and impressive and at last convincing” in the defeat of the bill. See Wilma I. Ball, “Street Trading in Ohio,” 127-128. In the 1920s, entrenched opposition to child labor abolition defeated the ratification of the NCLC’s constitutional amendment. Charles L. Knight, a former Ohio congressman, told the Ohio Chamber of Commerce in Columbus on December 5, 1924 that child labor reformers, “propose to spend enormous sums here in the state so they can watch our children... The papsuckers of psychology will supervise our children’s play, and when some youngster doesn’t act just to suit them, they’ll decide his complex isn’t just right and place him in one or two human canneries run by more papsuckers. They’ll turn him out when he’s old enough with a tag around his neck marked ‘citizen’.” Knight would have probably agreed with John Gunckel’s anti-intellectual sentiments. Gunckel concluded Boyville by advising the reader that the “simplest methods are always adopted, keeping in view the wishes of the boy. Not by advanced theories that reach beyond the comprehension of the boy, but by gradually introducing good principles that have a tendency to uplift the boy.” Gunckel, Boyville, 217. Ray Osbum Walker, “Ohio and the Child Labor Amendment” (M.A. Thesis, Ohio State University, 1932), 72. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 118 preceding decades.4* Similarly, historian Jeremy Felt concluded that street selling o f newspapers by children did not go into sustained decline until the suburbanization of the early 1950s. He reported that in 1955 only 634 street selling badges were issued in New York state down from over 12,000 in 193738.49 Although the legislative efforts of the NCLC failed to reduce newspaper selling in the streets prior to the 1940s, the bald political power of newspaper publishers to block legislation or enforcement does not fully account for the reasons why it was a mainstay of city life. The newsboys’ associations provided recreational and other services that were enjoyed and needed by the boys and their families. Boys could sell newspapers and still attend school. Educators, juvenile courts, and civic organizations were receptive to the little merchant image o f the boys offered by the newsboys’ associations. More social workers were needed to operate newsboys’ associations than could be used in the effort to outlaw newsboys. Thus newspaper selling did not interfere with the services professionals offered. This is slightly ironic considering that John Gunckel was an avowed amateur and Edward Clopper, Ph.D., was a professional reformer and social worker. As newsboys’ associations spread Gunckel’s moral paternalism (even in 48 Homer Folks, “Changes and Trends in Child Labor and Its Control,” (New York: National Child Labor Committee, 1938), 16-17. 49 Felt, Hostages o f Fortune, 165. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 119 his own Toledo club) faded. The recreational treatment programs that emerged within newsboys clubs brought together individualistic elements of Gunckel’s antimodem nostalgia and Clopper’s sacred childhood. Recreational Newsboys’ Clubs and Therapeutic Retreat from the City In 1915 the Newsboys’ Club of New York announced a campaign to raise a million dollars for new recreational facilities for newsboys. Child labor reformers opposed the fundraising drive because “the money would be spent simply to perpetuate a form o f child labor now commonly recognized as undesirable, and which is indeed gradually passing away...” They claimed that the money should be spent to build a boys’ club to “benefit all the boys of a community and at the same time be free from any attempt to glorify newspaper selling as an occupation for young boys.” The newsboys’ campaign collapsed after raising 100,000 dollars. The boys yielded to the child labor reformers, surrendered the money for boys’ club construction, and were soon incorporated into the Boys’ Club of New York.50 The transition from newsboys’ associations to boys’ clubs was more 50 Edward N. Clopper, “Street Trades Regulation” Child Labor Bulletin 5, no. 2 (August 1916): 98-99. It is possible that the newspapers in New York were willing to see the Newsboys’ Club lose its autonomy given that during the previous year (1914) in Portland, the newsboys had used a club donated by a philanthropist to organize a strike. Local social workers wanted to merge the newsboys club of Portland with a nearby facility but the newsboys refused. This is evidence that as long as newsboys ’ club retained any labor identity there was the potential for action. When they became recreational, this possibility was reduced. See Bekken, “Newsboys,” 208. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 120 gradual in John Gunckel’s Toledo, Ohio than in New York City. Through his local influence with Toledo philanthropists and his national prominence, Gunckel was able to raise the funds to construct a recreational center for his newsboys in 1908. It included a swimming pool, gymnasium, shower facilities, billiard room, kitchen, library, meeting hall capable of seating 1,200 persons, and private offices for the leaders of the association. These facilities shifted the focus of Boyville from purifying the city streets to enjoying recreational shelter from them. After John Gunckel died in 1915, Alice Gunckel, his widow, and his friends lead the Association until the last of them passed away in the 1930s. Just prior to the Second World War, Boyville admitted boys who were neither newsboys nor bootblacks, and became the Boys’ Club of Toledo.51 Some of the social implications of this transition in the programs offered by newsboys’ associations and clubs between the wars can be explored through the Burroughs’ Newsboys’ Foundation o f Boston, founded in 1927. At the age of twelve in 1903 Harry Burroughs immigrated to America from Russia and took up selling newspapers. He worked on the streets for nine years and managed to make his way through college and passed the bar in 1912. His was a story o f success, but he understood that his fortune had been unusually good. Few newsboys would become acquainted with Governor Curtis Guild or Mayor John F. Fitzgerald. 51 Ashby, Saving the Waifs, 120-122,126, 128, 130-131. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 121 Burroughs believed that his early years in the Russian countryside and the subsequent special interest taken in him by chance meetings with cultured adults had expanded his horizons and allowed him to become a successful attorney. He concluded that if more street boys tasted the purity of country living and received counsel from able adults, that their “life could be richer than anything we found on the streets of Boston.”52 Like John Gunckel, Harry Burroughs was “not a professional social worker and [had] no desire to be one.” Sounding every bit as unprofessional as Gunckel, Burroughs explained that he started his outreach work because, “I was —and am - that boy.” When he established his programs he was selective in choosing who would have contact with the boys, but he cared little for professional credentials because “many such persons come to us from schools and colleges, from the ministry and from social agencies, to apply for positions... but actually have no capacity for leadership, and sometimes they need guidance more than the boys.. ”53 Burroughs’ lack of respect for professional social workers led to conflicts with them. Like Gunckel, he overcame their resistance because he worked from a strong base in local politics and business.54 5* Harry E. Burroughs, Boys in Men's Shoes: A World o f Working Children (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1944), 3 53 Burroughs, Boys in Men's Shoes, 7-11; 36-37. 54 Unidentified groups and persons in Boston tried to exclude or reduce the Burroughs’ (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 122 Burroughs also admired the ambition and loyalty that he saw in the newsboys. He thought that their individualism could be shaped by the proper lessons in manliness. He praised their honesty in returning lost items and thought their turf systems were legitimate business practices. Although he did not associate his efforts with organizations like the American Newspaper Publishers Association, he did undercut union action by newsboys who opposed price increases in newspapers. He testified against the National Recovery Administration’s temporary prohibition of newspaper selling by the “little businessmen.” Sounding like John Gunckel, Burroughs proclaimed, “I am not asking pity for these little fellows, and certainly I am not seeking to take them off the street, for there is much that they can learn —good as well as bad —in mingling with adults.”55 For all their likeness, Gunckel and Burroughs operated very different *(...continued) Newsboys’ Foundation from receiving monies through associated charities fundraising. It is likely from the text on page 29 that Walter F. Downey, a high school principal and commissioner of education, was one opponent who needed to be won over. Burroughs, Boys in Men's Shoes, 25-3S. Burroughs had close relationships with many prominent persons from Boston and other cities. Among them were Martin Lomasney, Curtis Guild, Lincoln Steffens, Eddie Keevin, Adolph Ochs, Cyrus H.K. Curtis, Max Agassiz, Fred Cabot, Henry L. Shattuck, William Cushing Wait, Andrew Peters, Herbert C Parsons, Henry Parkman Jr., Sheldon Glueck, J. Willard Hayden, Edgar A. Doubleday, H. LeBaren Simpson, Adolph Ehrlick, Godfrey M. Hyams and many others. For Burroughs rejection of the idea that one could learn counseling in books see pg. 7-11,22, 26, 36-39, 73, 79, 101, 106, 146. 351. 55 Burroughs, Boys in Men’s Shoes, 20-24; 268, 272-275, 284-285, 287-288; 266-278; Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 123 programs. Whereas Gunckel claimed in 1905 that through self-government and street activism “the boys were working out their own salvation;” when Burroughs opened his facilities in 1927, he consciously modeled them after the self-controlled parlors of the Bostonians who had sheltered him and advanced his rise to prominence. His newsboys were not allowed to run or shout and they were required to comb their hair, scrub their finger nails, and brush off*their coats before participating in the club events. Burroughs’ complemented his recreational facilities with teams of medical and social personnel. Before a boy could become a member of the Burroughs’ Foundation, physicians measured his height, weight, and chest expansion; they examined his bone structure, lungs, genitals, legs, and feet. The boy gave a urine sample for analysis. A spirometer was used to rate his lung capacity, and dynamometer judged the strength o f his grip. Strength tests were performed on his back, legs, and arms. The results were correlated with the boys’ age and size, and the physicians tabulated a “physical fitness index.” Boys with low scores were referred to the physical education director, who would prescribe corrective exercises. Most boys were treated by the Harvard Dental Clinic. A “medical social worker” was assigned to boys with more serious medical problems. This worker visited the home, explained the problem, and tried to set­ up hospital treatments.56 On matters concerning delinquency or psychology, 56Gunckel, Boyville, 80; See Vinson Strohman, “Guarding the Health of the Street (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 124 Burroughs cooperated with the Habit Clinic for Child Guidance, The CambridgeSommerville Youth Study, Judge Baker’s Guidance Center, and the nine different colleges who sent interns to the Foundation.57 The centerpiece for Burroughs’ treatment program was a nostalgic retreat on 600 acres o f land near West Poland, Maine called Agassiz Village. Each summer the Maine camp was visited by about a thousand boys (250 in four twoweek intervals). Agassiz Village had fifty-two cabins, a large meeting and dining hall, a lake, boating and swimming equipment, four craft shops, a store, two garages, a town hall, a newspaper, three athletic fields, a tennis court, a library, an infirmary, and stables.5* Complete with log cabins and shops with names such as “Ye Village Blacksmith,” the camp truly created a village retreat from the city streets for the boys. In Burroughs’ own words it was designed to make sure the boys “would feel the romance of distance.” But, maintaining this escapist romance required an ongoing series of retreats, even from the Village itself.59 More primitive camps were built and selected boys were detailed to live at “Indian ^C...continued) Trade Boy” Hygeia 19 (1941): 457-459 57 Burroughs, Boys in Men's Shoes, 340. 58 Agassiz Village was funded by Maximilian Agassiz a descendant of Louis Agassiz. See Vinson Strohroan, “Agassiz Village - A Boys’ Community” Recreation 35 (July 1941): 265-268. 59 Burroughs, Boys in Men’s Shoes, 67; Burroughs believed boys needed to get outside of the city and their everyday lives to get in touch with themselves. See pg.. 119-125. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 125 Village” and “Covered Wagon Community.” At these camps “braves” and “pioneers” had passed tests in woodcraft, camping, and sports. All this was not enough to keep the romance going in Burroughs’ mind, so counselors led small groups of boys on canoe trips. From their canoe-trip camp sites they took hikes over open mountain terrain and walked barefoot in the morning dew where Burroughs finally found the innocence to “relive [his] childhood.”60 Agassiz Village provided a setting for Burroughs to practice his unique conversational therapy and gave him ample opportunities to build the boys’ sense of self-esteem. He searched for healthy activities that would satisfy the boys’ egos.61 The ego was “the motivating power of achievement.” Desire in-and-of itself did not need to be governed because although “no one wants to be called an egotist” a person without a strong ego was likely to be a delinquent and would never succeed. According to Burroughs the main counseling task was to overcome the “inferiority complex” that newsboys covered with a tough exterior. He would find out what craft or sport or chore made the boy feel important and loved, and would praise the boy for it.62 The content o f the activity that built self­ 60 On Burroughs’ search for cultural authenticity see Harry E. Burroughs, Tale o f A Vanished Land: Memories o f a Childhood in Old Russia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1930); Burroughs, Boys in Men's Shoes, 122-123. 61 For examples that display Burroughs’s idiosyncratic therapeutic style see pg... 86, 168, 170, 177, 191, 249, 352 of Boys in Men s Shoes. 62 Burroughs, Boys in Men's Shoes, 352. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 126 esteem was inconsequential as far as Burroughs was concerned. For example, a newsboy named Carl Bichofsky enjoyed sounding taps on his trumpet during sunset at Agassiz Village, so this became a regular part of his summer camp. When asked why he liked to sound taps, Bichofsky said, “it makes me feel the way I do when I hear the colored boys sing or the sound o f the shophar.” Carl had subtly interpreted his need to play the trumpet not in terms of a tough exterior, a true interior, or self-esteem, but as a way of dealing with the social relations of his life. Burroughs’ recognized this and praised Carl’s somber music for expressing the “oppression” and “pathos of his people.”63 But, his therapeutic approach to Carl and all the boys led Burroughs to conclude that social injustice was, “beyond our power to remedy.” So, his Foundation focused on providing the new technologies for treating the problems that could be located in individual newsboys. Without a doubt, the attention to newsboys’ medical conditions improved their health in important ways, particularly in those cases where treatments had been developed such as eye glasses for poor vision. However, the focus on the boy also encouraged professionals to collapse social and political issues into medical and psychological concepts. For example, a large poster announced to the boys that, 63 Burroughs, Boys in Men s Shoes, 156-159. A “shophar” is an ancient Hebrew musical instrument often made of curved ram’s horn for religious services. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 127 Science has at last got round to defending the always hungry boy. No longer can Aunt Emma, if she wishes to appear well informed, look askance at Jimmie when he passes his plate for a third helping or another piece of pie. Even raids on the icebox and pantry will henceforth be less serious offenses for the boy who is smart enough to connect calories with cookies. All that he needs to do now when he finds himself in a tight place is to produce a certain one of those statistical-looking Government bulletins, and turn to a statement which plainly asserts that many a boy actually requires more food than does his father.64 A boy named Tommy pointed to this sign and asked one of the Foundation’s counselor for food to take home. The counselor was puzzled at this request, and so Tommy explained that he and his family of eight were all hungry and asked, “Doesn’t it say that nobody needs to be hungry now?” Tommy was not merely ‘misreading’ the sign, he was reading it so as to give it some relevance to his life. He did not recognize the difference between providing advice and providing food to eat, but he learned it on this day. The counselor sent Tommy to the Foundation’s nutritional clinic to get further dietary advice. The Foundation’s vocational education provided another side to their developmental approach to the boys. Burroughs’ newsboys learned to recite definitions for labor, work, and service. The Christian Science Monitor's Pearl Strachan recorded a lesson in the Foundation’s word study class. Mrs. Agassiz:... I think we should ask Arnold to define labor, work, and service. Arnold: Labor is toil... Mrs. Agassiz (to Joseph)'. Perhaps you remember it from last lesson. Joseph: Labor is unthinking, it is manual, like digging a ditch. Work receives 64 Burroughs, Boys in Men's Shoes, 130-131. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 128 recompense, you are achieving something. Service -- the objective is important, if you were building something without recompense. Harvey: Labor - sort of a job that enslaves you, like the ancient Egyptians. There is no end to it. Is it strictly physical? (Someone says “Yes ’’) Because I find some of the boys find it labor to think. Mrs. Agassiz: Labor is toil and drudgery, unpaid. Work is employment with some compensation. Service is work too, but once you become really interested, it is service. I think of that young man at the Village last summer who was passing by a cabin and heard someone say he wished he had some cold water. He went to the kitchen and got a pitcher of ice water and carried it to the guests. They asked how he knew what they wanted, and he explained that he had heard them speak as he passed. Now that service gained him work, for one of the gentlemen gave him a position some time later.65 Like John Gunckel, Mrs. Agassiz stressed that boys who were polite and cooperative would obtain a good “position.” But, she also impressed upon the boys the distinctions between service, work, and labor so they could understand the Foundations’ motto “strive--serve--save—study” that appeared on their buildings, in their newspaper, and on their membership cards. Burroughs’ “service” was intimately connected to the ideals to “strive” and “study.” Together these three terms were very much like Edward Clopper’s concept of “developmental work.” Clopper had written that, “developmental work is desirable for children,” but labor is “injurious work... Proper work is disciplinary and educational, improper work is preparation for knavery. The one is necessary to the building of the physique and character, the other must be suppressed.”66 For 65 Burroughs, Boys in Men's Shoes, 47-48. 66 Clopper, Child Labor in the City Streets, 116. Edward N. Clopper, “The Status of Child Labor in Ohio: Administration of School and Labor Laws Needs to be Harmonized” The Nation's Health 5, no. 2 (Feb. 1923): 101-102. Also see Wallace E. Miller, “The Child Labor (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 129 Clopper saving children meant dismissing them from work, and for Burroughs it meant showing them that meaningful work was obtainable. Their focus on nurturing the individual child allowed Clopper and Burroughs to overlook the alienating implications of these definitions o f labor for working-class adults. Unfortunately many of the working-class youths to whom Burroughs taught his definitions o f work would become laborers digging ditches and the like. Never would they reach the calling of “service.” For example, a boy named Fred who carried a gun, told Burroughs that his brothers were out of work, his mother was sick, and he could not make enough selling newspapers to buy medicine and food for the family. He said he would become a thief before his mother would starve. Burroughs told the boy that he could pay him to do work around the Village and Fred took to scrubbing the floors at the Village “with a zest that could only come from a heartfelt desire.” Soon Burroughs found Fred a job working for the Converse Rubber Company and a letter arrived from the factory Superintendent, “If you can get any more Fred’s from the Burroughs Newsboys Foundation, bring them around and I will put them to work.” Burroughs’ intervention probably saved the boy from prison or death, but Fred’s youth had ended before he could enter the world of work as service. O f course, that world “ (...continued) Situation in Ohio and Boarder States” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 29, no. 1 (January 1907): 72. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 130 was always exclusive. If he had learned the differences between labor, work, and service in one of Mrs. Agassiz’s word study classes or by studying the Foundation’s motto, scrubbing floors or working in a factory with “heartfelt desire” would be difficult to maintain over a lifetime.67 Conclusion The retreat from the city so obviously manifest in Agassiz Village, more subtly penetrated Harry Burroughs’ entire therapeutic approach to the boys’ problems. Under the Foundation’s programs, Carl’s, Tommy’s, and Fred’s nascent efforts to expand the boundaries of their troubles into wider social categories were reconstituted as matters o f individual enrichment, education, and adjustment. This was a way of handling the boys that was both harmless enough to newspaper owners because it separated the boys’ problems from the ‘real’ world of market and politics yet, sophisticated enough to require the expertise of social workers, psychologists, physicians, dentists, and other professionals. Recreational newsboys’ clubs furnished common ground where the opposition between newspaper publishers and the National Child Labor Committee could be resolved. Shifting the newsboys’ job from street hawking to home delivery in the suburbs after the Second World War was the market manifestation of this 67 Burroughs, Boys in Men's Shoes, 217-220. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 131 synthesis. All that was left of GunckeFs moral criticism o f urban anonymity was adjustment to it through periodic nostalgic retreats from the city. For all his bristling against the professionalization of care-giving, Harry Burroughs was a partisan among those, mostly professionals, who transformed social work into a more therapeutic endeavor. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PART II: LESSONS OF LIBERATION, WELFARE AND SCHOOLING IN CLEVELAND, OHIO 132 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER FIVE FROM CHARITY TO THERAPY Youth and the Definition of Poverty during the Depressions of the 1890s and 1930s In 1877 S. Humpherys Gurteen founded America’s first charity organization society in Buffalo to fulfill his hope that the “fundamental law” of poverty relief would be “expressed in one word. INVESTIGATE.” The founder of New York’s charity organization society, Josephine Shaw Lowell, agreed with Gurteen and explained that giving alms indiscriminately was reprehensible, because a good society must “refuse to support any except those whom it can control.” Gurteen, Lowell, and other charity organizers believed that population growth and immigration had ruptured the social cohesion maintained by systems o f deference and obligation. Investigating poor families was designed to reestablish “the personal intercourse of the wealthier citizens with the poor at their homes.” Visiting them was supposed to help immigrants enjoy “self-help, respectability, and multiplying opportunities,” while bringing harmony to the bustle of urban life by “the firm though loving government of heroic women.”1 Most historians o f welfare have remembered the words of the Gurteens and Lowells, and investigated how policy elites and intellectuals have made decisions and 1Gurteen and The Head of the Minneapolis Charity Organization Society as quoted in Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 149-151. Josephine Shaw LowelL, Public Reliefand Private Charity (New York: Anno Press & New York Times, reprinted, 1971, c.1884), 93-95. Also see Joseph M. Becker, In Aid o f the Unemployed (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), 12. 133 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 134 understood poverty relief.2 These were the types of questions and methods that were used in Part I of this study to explore work accident claims and newsboys’ clubs. Part II will provide a closer examination of the relationships between professionals, youths, and their families. Through case notes and student writings we will explore poverty relief foster care, and high schools in Cleveland, Ohio in order to gain a better understanding of how these institutions shaped growing up working-class. This chapter compares poverty relief through case notes in the 1890s and client-interview based Master’s theses from the 1930s.3 It has been divided into two sections. 2 For a discussion of the historiography on reformer motivations in this era see the introduction to this study. Works by Michael Katz and Linda Gordon have most influenced the social history of policy methods that I have used in this chapter. See Michael B. Katz, Poverty and Policy in American History (New York: Academic Press, Inc, 1983); Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History o f Family Violence, Boston 1880-1960 (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1988). As the discussion Chapter One suggests, the argument chapter runs counter to Theda Skocpol’s story of transition from paternal to maternal social policies in the early twentieth-centuiy. See Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins o f Social Policy in the United States (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). This chapter owes a debt to Andrew Polsky’s The Rise o f the Therapeutic State, but there are significant differences between Polsky’s arguments and methods, and those given and used here. Polsky followed Gordon's insistence that the “powers of the weak” are crucial to comprehending policy. However, unlike Gordon, Polsky did not examine the cultural meanings of clients’ “own purposes,” and therefore his critique of therapy was reduced to the assertion that it is undemocratic and that it does not “work.” On the contrary, I have found that therapy does “work,” in all sorts of undemocratic ways. Therapy “works” to radically individualize the poverty experience and to crush the roots of communitarian sentiment among the recipients of relief by making cultural heritage irrelevant and generational continuity undesirable among the poor. Andrew J. Polsky, The Rise o f the Therapeutic State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 3This comparison was chosen for three primary reasons. First, these rare sources of case notes and client-interview based theses were available for Cleveland from the 1893-1898, 1934 and 1939. Second, the two depressions of these years are considered the two worst in American history and they have been viewed by historians as impetuses for change in the organization of poverty relief. Third, much like the comparison between John Gunckel’s Boyville and Harry (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 135 The first section deals with the negotiation o f poverty relief. It reveals that there was a significant gap between how charity organization leaders imagined the investigations o f poor families, and what friendly visitors could do or say in the doorways, homes, or relief offices where they met the poor. The meetings between visitors and families during the 1890s were far too impersonal to re-establish deference and obligation as the leaders of charity organization imaged it. The evidence suggests that the urban poor and friendly visitors followed a needs-based relief agenda that was unrelated to the moral discipline championed by charity organization elites. By the 1930s professional social workers had created the organizational technology to establish long-term relationships with their clients, but personal obligations and deference did not emerge. Instead, these extended relationships gave social workers and clients a framework for using newly invented therapeutic concepts of personal development and mental health. Therapeutic social work focused attention on children and youths in unprecedented ways. The second section examines changes in how friendly visitors (and later social workers), parents, and youths construed the problems of growing-up poor. Child rearing advice is virtually absent from the 1890s case notes. Relief workers and those they visited in the 1890s appear to have shared the assumption that a child’s lot was 3(...continued) Burroughs' Foundation in chapter four, poverty relief exposes the nexus between the rise of the helping professions and growing-up working-class. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 136 cast with his or her own kind. The definition of poverty was intertwined with one’s ethnic, religious, and class identities. By the 1930s, workers and clients alike voiced a clear distinction between parental poverty and the potential of childhood and youth. Unlike the paternal relationships that preserved cultural continuity by exalting and defining the trans-generational categories of gender, class, race, and religion, therapeutic relationships renovated these categories. Therapy created new stigmas, embarrassments, and secrets which fed upon and fueled generational discontinuity. The isolated fatalism of being poor in an industrial society —that is poverty amid weakened cultural identity -- was relieved by promises and dreams for the next generation. The ideals of youth liberation and their unfettered future became the modem way to rationalize a grotesque maldistribution of wealth.4 4 See Appendix B for a more lengthy discussion of methodology and the comparability of the families from the 1890s and the 1930s. Briefly, case records, student analysis of case records, and interviews of relief families provide the evidentiary basis of this chapter. From over 3,600 cases of the Bethel Associated Charities during the years 1893-1898,1randomly sampled every seventh family with children over 9 years old (269 cases) to construct a database of relief families with youths. Then, I randomly selected five of thirty-two casebooks and read every case note intently, noting cases were youths were mentioned- For the Great Depression of the 1930s, I consulted the interview-based theses, “The Client Speaks,” were written from 117 interviews of relief clients conducted by eight Master of Social Work students in 1939-40 who were attending Western Reserve University’s School of Applied Social Sciences (SASS). I was able to locate three of the theses covering 43 families. The theses included detailed analysis and long quotations from interviews and case records. “The Record is Closed” by Roberta Vance was another SASS thesis study which I culled for information on client-provider relationships. Vance read the case records of all 65 families whose records were closed by the Associated Charities in November and December of 1934. Like the students of “The Client Speaks,” she reported statistical data, quoted at length from case notes, she also interviewed case workers, and used their closing summaries to categorize families. See Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, boxes 8,9, and 10. Western Reserve Historical Society. Roberta Vance, “The Record is Closed: The Theory and Practice of Closing as Revealed in a Project Study of the (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 137 From Mercenary Relief to Therapeutic Care The ladies of Cleveland’s Bethel Union, an evangelical refuge house, became the city’s first ‘friendly visitors’ in 1870 when they gathered clothing and donations for distribution to poor families at their homes.5 In 1884 the Bethel Union merged with Cleveland’s Charity Organization Society to form the Bethel Associated Charities (BAC).6 By the depression of 1893 to 1897, the BAC had established several standard charity organization procedures. For example, in return for charitable donations they distributed tickets like the one shown in Table 5.1. The tickets were intended to ‘'(...continued) Cases Closed in the Associated Charities During a Two Months Period” (MS Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1935), 11. University Archives, SASS Theses, Box 9. Hereafter cited as “Record is Closed”. “The Client Speaks” has a different citation for each thesis: Alexander Horwitz, “The Client Speaks. A study of the reactions of 15 clients of the division of relief city of Cleveland, to the policies and practices of that agency” (M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1940). Located at Case Western Reserve Archives, SASS theses, box 5; Josef L. Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks: A study of the reaction of fourteen clients of the Division of Relief, city of Cleveland, to the policies and practices of that agency” (M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1940). Case Western Reserve University Archives, SASS Theses, box 9; Kathryn S. Weitzel, “The Client Speaks: A study of the reaction of fourteen clients of the Division of Relief, city of Cleveland, to the policies and practices of that agency” (M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1940). Case Western Reserve University Archives, SASS Theses, box 9. Hereafter cited as author’s last name, “The Client Speaks.” 5By 1873 the Bethel Union had expanded visiting efforts to cover the whole city. A notice in a Cleveland newspaper from the BAC in that year instructed the readers, “If you are called upon by a beggar, and cannot investigate his case yourself, send him to the Bethel Relief Association, where his case will be thoroughly investigated, and if you have anything to give to the povertystricken, send your donation to the treasurer of the association, Loren Prentiss, Esq., and you can rest assured that your money will be placed “where it will do the most good” in relieving deserving cases of charity.” Cleveland Leader July 23, 1873, p. 1/8. 6 In the late 1870s prominent Clevelanders wrote and spoke approvingly of efforts to organize charity in Buffalo. See Miggins, “Uplifting Influences,” 150-152. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 138 TABLE 5.1 Referral Ticket from the Bethel Associated Charities, 1893-1898 r y Orders a re to lic ite d w ood a t tbe BETHEL W O O D YARD. Good hard wood d eliv ered to a o r p a r t o f tb e city . £5 . s. c 00 w - i: **a ®;5 ~ - 09 ■c CD © Ml cc <c i1 o Q Dd i i | ^ i < s £ OC — c id oz <c c ---- 1 7 o Z f l. „ o 00 ■ J• < i - 0 00 30 ? < *fc * K ■== Cx3 ZC * c i■“ ? * “ Od PQ * - r t 50 66 H *• j:rc I t .( jjw a j.^ q n a O i aqi .{ |d d n a i |i * •> * ^ jo a C aw j o j ;o o a jj iu * « X oq j o a e n o q j o J i u i q r a * ‘F a u t a e j u j u w o i o m f jo o w c o « \ 8 a t u w e |0 io fjb qi j j Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 139 discourage indiscriminate alms giving and offered clearly printed instructions according to the official ethic of the charity organization movement. The ticket read, “Instead of giving to unknown persons at the door, please send the person with this card to our office, that the case may at once be investigated, and if desired, report sent to you.” Theoretically, after the case was reported through a ticket, the BAC would send a friendly visitor to determine the family’s worthiness for aid. This visitor would bring along a case-sheet like the one shown in Table 5.2. The sheet provided not only a place to record information, but also a format for the investigation. The first twelve questions established the family’s demographic profile. Questions numbered 13, 1827, and 32 detailed their potential sources of income. The bottom section, questions 28-32, defined the “CAUSES OF DESTITUTION” in terms of health, habits (a euphemism for whether they were temperate), and debt. On the final line the capitalized word, “WORTHY?” posed the question that was supposed to frame the purpose of the visit. Forms like the donor tickets and case sheets are well known to historians of poverty relief. And they have encouraged the conclusion that “worthiness” was determined by temperance, industry, and thrift, and that these ideals were in turn reinforced by the disciplining power to give or withhold poverty relief.7 However, the case notes made on the sheets of the BAC in the 1890s strongly suggests that friendly 7See Boyer, UrbanMasses, 150-155; Katz, Poverty and Policy, 90-133; Miggins, “Uplifting Influences,” 152. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 140 TABLE 5.2 Case Investigation Sheet From Bethel Associated Charities, 1893-1891 BETHEL ASSOCIATED CHARITIES. / N u. o r c a s k . .... _________ IS O tM S T K IC T ____ w.tim I i- — ............ I N am * • S. K aaH lcnor * ------— s. T im e o f H e a h le o e r * ---------- *. f r t * totis K n h l t f l f f ' i. T im e a t P re»*oua K eshleom *- a T im e o f N e aale n ce io City * .— t .H aiivii) ««> A f r * ----------- -------- j • tlewd *»c W r it e * . — «. J lir n M u r — t • ------ i. — ................... • - j hl N 'rnnbrr *n*J A a r e o f I t o y r II. \ u i t « b r r a n d A r*s»«f fjiru* I: M u ia lie rio II |! i i i i> l o r i u # f l t - l n r T r* d e * . Fam ily’ ... N um ber re c e tu r g — so . ~. t»n ........ u. So— .. A re * . — ------ C. N« A lo .fa — : . .... — . T o ta l . j .... .— ■ i n m i s i o f W age* Wees* — 4 ify n r ho in K m p fc tritO ----- ! W h y W o r t w o a le ff. ar»i when*— j 1 T I m i - w h e n o u t a i » « r t ' ------- ---I*. C h u rc h C onnection**- t.V S a m e o f D octor* - ---- •— te A m o u n t o f Kent* IT. So. o f Il o o m < .to y Hue* --- IS. ikx-upied* A re a o y O cO let' — — la M. —— -- Li­ IT. — • •• S a m e o f t h e Landlord'* ..Is. , ANleO t f City* I! O u r r h ’ -----------— . «*-o | " U vtlef Society* - ^ j “ In d iv id u a l ?. .*— ' “ F ello w sh ip Society* i - 9. A n y H eU O eea io O t y ...............- :J . A ny B t t a i H t i Elacw her** S H a * e a n y Pena**® • a . Hy wtHim I U | e n H * — . — . — r». T o w hom Ite f e rw l* S i. K m u i a f o r n m i m t Ai«f* • - 3. K in d o f I tr lic f aik e d * -7 . W liat 3uH » < ie * ft« rt» ’ 3. Health*. — - .... != •,a' .JL *,SS. ------- C.ALSES o r D E S T IT U T IO N . 3. H ataw * ft ji. !D A '■e- ^ • - — :*• — *• A a y th l n r bw ogitt o h lOdiaJUtKwi# *, JD. U o n g s r e o n C h aitcla * A nything In Pawn* W O R T H VV— a. •*. -- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 141 visiting did not operate in this way. First, the ticketing strategy failed to bring new cases to the agency. In only a very small proportion of the 269 cases sampled from the 1890s did the BAC obtain clients through donor ticket referrals. Perhaps the ticketing strategy failed because donors felt odd about this intrusive, contingent, and decidedly uncharitable approach to giving alms.* Whatever the many reasons, immediate members of the households themselves requested the visit in 95 (63%) of 151 cases with this data (the proportion rises to 85% if one interprets the ambiguous word, “self’ as the family). Friends, neighbors, and kin reported the problem seven 8 Some professionals believed that industrial organization was the problem, not the solution. For example, Louis Bryant Tuckerman, a physician and the editor Cleveland’s one cent labor journal the Workman, responded to a solicitation from the Bethel Associated Charities in the early 1890s by sending them a letter proclaiming, . . . I do not believe in the organization of charity. Charity cannot be organized like the Steel Trust, or run by paid clerics. Charity means love; it is a personal thing, one of the beautiful things that Christ gave the world .. Can you picture Christ organizing love, card-indexing the good and bad as you are doing on your basis of worthiness measured by business standards? Your society' with its board of trustees made of steel magnates, coal operators and employers is not really interested in charity. If it were, it would stop the twelve-hour day, it would increase wages and put an end to the cruel killing and maiming of men. It is interested in getting its own wreckage out of sight It isn’t pleasant to see it begging on the streets. You say that by giving to the society I can relieve myself of the burden of investigating cases. But I ought not to be relieved of this burden. The responsibility for poverty should not be taken from me. It were better if it were kept before our eyes. Nor do I like your thriftiness. Your circular tells me that I will receive a certain number of cards in return for my contribution. I may give them to people who apply to me for aid. They in turn present them at your office and an investigator is told off to ascertain whether the applicants are worthy. If they are discovered unworthy, you are elated, and the tickets are returned to me.. . . Christ himself might have been turned over by you to the police department as a ‘vagrant without visible means of support’. See Frederic C. Howe, Confessions o f a Reformer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925), 75-79; David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski, eds. The Dictionary of Cleveland Biography (Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 1996). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 142 percent of the time; churches, doctors, police, teachers, the city, other agencies, and professionals reported another seven percent. Inter-agency systems of monitoring and referral (functionally speaking) did not exist. TABLE 5.3 Who Reported Poor Families To The BAC, 1893-1898? Who Reported Number of Cases out of 269 Case Sample Mother 63 “Self” (meaning unclear) 34 Father 23 Neighbor 5 Daughter 4 Church 4 Friend 4 Both Parents 4 Kin 2 * The following were listed each once as the referral source: Son, Infirmary, Doctor, Police, the Visitor, Humane Society, Teacher, and City. There was, though, a more fundamental flaw in the charity organization rhetoric. Friendly visitors were charged with the task of judging unworthiness and withholding relief accordingly, but to do so would require that they treat families so brutally as to destroy any hope of guiding the poor to better domestic living. Moreover, there is little in the notes to suggest that giving aid allowed friendly visitors to engage the poor in discussions about their “habits.” For example, the most Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 143 important source of unworthiness was the habit of intemperance.9 About a third of families were judged to be intemperate.10 Among the seven families declared “unworthy” two were temperate and five where intemperate. Of the “worthy” 104 were temperate and 32 were intemperate. This suggests a weak to moderate positive relationship between temperance and worthiness.11 But, there was no statistically significant association between either temperance or worthiness and the decision to give or deny relief.12 Friendly visitors did not enforce their moral judgments by withholding relief. For example, Catholics were more likely to be found unworthy than Protestants, but paradoxically, Protestants were less likely to receive relief.13 9 The ladies of Cleveland's Bethel Union had joined forces with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to defeat a municipal ordinance that proposed to legalize liquor sales on Sundays in 1885. Miggins, “Uplifting Influences,” 152. 10In twenty-three cases intemperance was noted in the “Habits” line with explicit terminology. The word “fair” was written 15.8 percent of the time and “not good” was written 5.7 percent. “Good” or “say good” was recorded about sixty-five percent of time. 11 The Pearson’s r correlation coefficient between them is . 1767 with a p-value at a significant .032. 125 of 7 (71 %) unworthy families and 118 of 146 (81 %) worthy families received relief; 65 of 76 (85 %) intemperate families received relief 121 of 161 (75 %) temperate families. The associations between relief and worthiness or temperance were weak: .0494 and -.0978 respectively and the p-values were insignificant at .544 and .125. 13There was very little religious difference in noted temperance/intemperance. But, six of the seven families judge “unworthy” were Catholic and the Pearson’s r correlation was calculated at -.1398 with a p-value of .089 (significant only at the 10% level). Thirty-two percent of the Protestants did not have their relief request met, while this happened to only 15 % of the Catholic families. The correlation between religion and the provision of relief was .2193 and significant at .000. Analysis of Variance showed that religion did not have significant interaction with temperance or worthiness and it had the only significant F-value at .018. Multiple Classification Analysis confirmed that religion explained more of the variance in giving (continued..) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 144 The notes the visitors made suggest an explanation of why this was so. There were two types of notations on the case sheets. On the front of the sheets visitors filled the blanks that asked for a determination of the causes of destitution and a judgment of worthiness. Then, they turned their case sheets to the backside, and apparently forgot the prescribed course o f questioning on the front of the sheet. These “backside” notes exposed the tenor o f their meetings with poor family members. Mercenary questions guided these less constrained jottings. What does this family need to survive in the short-term? Can they get their request from another source? It was as if two disconnected conversations have been recorded in the case books. On the front of the sheet visitors answered to their bosses, but the more important notes were made on the backside because it was here that the decision to give or refuse relief was noted. The existence of two parallel discourses on relief within the case sheets is less surprising if one imagines that visits were not constituted as lectures to the poor as Gurteen, Lowell, and other elites had hoped, but as economic exchanges negotiated on the poor families’ turf. These families were diverse and there was a significant cultural gap between them and their benefactors. The 269 sampled families lived in twentyseven different wards of the city and were part of eighteen ethnic groups. Thirty different occupational titles were given for fathers, but almost two-thirds reported 13(...continued) relief both before and after adjusting for temperance and worthiness; Eta = . 19, Beta = .20. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 145 being unskilled laborers. Among mothers who listed occupations, forty-three (88 %) of them were unskilled laborers such as washers, scrubbers, or day workers.14 If these mothers and fathers were able to set an agenda where differences in domestic behavior were difficult to broach, the unreliable association between moral judgments and the dispersement o f relief begins to make sense. The recipients of relief were not passive and friendly visitors usually granted their requests. Poor persons asked for work, food, fuel, clothing, medical help, and rental or debt assistance in at least sixty percent of the visits. In only eight cases was no request noted. A tangible need was met in the vast majority of these cases. The BAC seems to have been best prepared to give clothing or offer work for goods inkind. The notes suggest visitors and families shared this understanding. Clothing was mentioned in over seventy percent o f the cases and among these 194 cases, only six requests were refused. Three times clothing was given without request and three other times it was offered but refused. Sue clothing requests were referred to the 14 124 or 65.6 % of cases with this information reported unskilled laborers. Irish Catholics were the largest ethnic-religious group served (63 cases or 23.4%). The most common nationality was German, but these were divided among 42 Protestant, 24 Catholic, and 8 not listed. Other large groups were English Protestants (16 cases), Polish Catholics (28 cases), and native-born white Protestants (30 cases). There was only one Jewish family and seven Protestant African-American families in the sample. Hough has shown that between 1890 and 1900 over three quarters of Cleveland's population was either foreign-born or second generation immigrants and that after 1890 the immigration from Poland, Slovenia, Russia, Italy, and Hungary increased greatly. The Poles lead the eastern and southern European migrants and they were early enough in Cleveland to be a large group in the 1893-1898 BAC sample. See Leslie S. Hough, The Turbulent Spirit: Cleveland, Ohio, and its Workers, 1877-1899 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991), 36. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 146 office. In over ninety percent of the cases where clothing was mentioned, the notes suggest that the visitor and family successfully negotiated its disbursement. Work for relief was noted in 111 cases. Nine times (8%) the work was refused by the family and three times it was not requested but given and accepted. In thirty-one cases the notes recorded a request by a family member to work for goods in-kind. The visitor was unable to write an order for work immediately in only twelve cases, and in 11 of these 12, a member of the family was referred to the office. The transaction for work was usually completed on the premises (88 of 111 or 79.2%). In the 144 notes on food exchanges, and 102 notes on fuel exchanges, only six requests went ungranted and just sixteen cases were referred to the office. Only in the areas of cash rental assistance and debt repayment was there a divergence between the clients’ requests and the disbursements given. Only two of forty-one requests for direct cash relief were met. In eighteen o f these forty-one cases, the visitor arranged work in order to pay cash for rent directly to the landlords, but in eleven other cases rental assistance was refused altogether. In ten rental aid cases the visitors wrote referrals to the central office. All this suggests that visitors and clients generally understood the limits o f what could be had and that the boundary was kept at the point of cash relief passing directly into the hands o f the family. The purpose of the visit (as negotiated by visitors and those they aided) was to show that the requested relief was truly needed. “Worthiness,” as defined by policy elites, was largely irrelevant in the work of the BAC during the depression o f the 1890s. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 147 It is probably true that denying relief could be only the most brutal, final, and therefore least effective way to ‘improve’ the habits of the poor. Tracking records and building case histories were two more subtle methods o f outreach that historians often cite as part of the innovations of late nineteenth-century charity organizers. However, in the 1890s sample o f families, nearly two-thirds of them were visited only once. In a little less than a third, one follow-up visit was noted. No visitor noted more than five TABLE 5.4 The Number of Multiple Visits Noted in BAC Case Books, 1893-1898 Number of Visits Frequency Percentage I 160 59.5% 2 7* 29.1% 3 21 7.8% 4 7 2.6% 5 2 0.7% 1 0.4% | missing data visits. This does not mean that most relief families were only visited once or twice, but that there was not a reliable procedure by which visitors and families could maintain long-term relief relationships. Casebooks circulated among friendly visitors walking contiguous wards. Once in a great number of cases a visitor would remember that a new referral had been visited before and write a note o f reference to a previous case sheet. In the absence o f a system for keeping case histories or sharing interagency information, visitors entered most households without the prior knowledge that was needed to subtly question the stories they heard and to police Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 148 domestic habits. The organizational technology o f social work became more sophisticated in the twentieth-century. Cleveland’s relief agencies developed a “clearing house” by the interwar period so that families could be tracked. The multiple agencies serving poor families freely shared detailed reports. This allowed social workers to construct histories. During the same era, Western Reserve University opened a department of sociology in 1907 and a school of social work in 1916, and began producing a cadre of trained professional social workers. By the 1920s Cleveland’s professional social workers were typing voluminous weekly notes and compiling “family files” that included years of interagency correspondence, medical, psychological, and vocational guidance reports, and even photographs and letters from the clients. Case work regularly extended over a period of years. During the depression of 1930s Ohio law further systematized social work by mandating home investigations prior to relief disbursement, re-application at three month intervals, and registration at the Ohio State Employment Office among nine requirements.15 15A pivotal figure in both the increasing organization and professionalization of social work in Cleveland was Janies F. Jackson who came to Cleveland to head the Associated Charities in 1900. Jackson inaugurated formal training of visitors in 1905 along with the first “Charities Clearing House” in Cleveland. He, Mayor Newton D. Baker, Martin Marks, and D.A. Warner of Lakeside Hospital helped set-up the School of Applied Social Sciences at Western Reserve University in 1916. See Miggins, “Uplifting Influences,” 160. C.H. Cramer, Case Western Reserve: A History o f the University, 1826-1976 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), 331-337. See “Family Files” at the Cuyahoga County Archives. Although most cases closed by the Associated Charities in November and December of 1934 had been opened after 1930 (46 or 71 %), eleven of the case records (17%) extended back 5 to 25 years “Rjxord is Closed”, 11. (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 149 The progress of organization alerted professional social workers to cases that would have neither been noticed nor constituted a problem for friendly visitors in the 1890s. Take the case of Mrs. L who was a trained nurse. She separated from her disabled husband, sent their two children to the care o f her sister-in-law in Ortonville, and came to Cleveland to look for work in the early 1930s. She found no work as a nurse and began housekeeping. The Big Sisters of Ortonville became involved with her children, and they asked the Associated Charities in Cleveland to investigate the fitness o f Mrs. L for Aid for Dependent Children in an attempt to reunite the family. Mrs. L was judged fit to mother and an application for cash aid was soon prepared, save one small detail. Mrs. L never expressed the desire to regain custody of her children. Thus, this provider-generated “need” did not exist, contact with Mrs. L lapsed, and the treatment plan was never realized.16 Of course, misunderstandings between the poor and their benefactors did not originate in the 1930s. A native-born white woman, living near the west bank of the Cuyahoga River in 1893 was struggling to care for a sick daughter and a husband suffering from an eye disease. She told a visitor that they wanted a doctor not “an investigation.” According to the visitor’s note she was “more than angry. She [was] profane when excited.” This mother probably shared sentiments with a mother who ,s(...continued) “Emergency Division of Charities and Relief Department of Public Health and Welfare City of Cleveland, February 13,1940,” Appendix II in “The Client Speaks,” 77. 16“Record is Closed,” 29-33. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 150 told an interviewer in 1939, “Most workers are young and inexperienced. They was never poor. What do they know about family life? What do they know about poor people?” A father said of the welfare office during the 1930s, “You feel good on the outside. Then you get in and that smell hits you.” The existence of pain in poverty and social failure was not new, but its character was altered subtly by the ambitious TABLE 5.5 Why was the Case Closed? - According to the Social Worker of the Associated Charities in 1934 Reason Given in Closing Summary Number of Cases Percentage | Insufficient entree into the family 2 3% J Family not amenable to treatment 4 6% | Situation improved until no further need 10 15.3% Environmental Adjustment Plan Made 11 17% Lapse of Contact 11 17 % | Re-employment of family member 13 20 % | Client not wanting the assistance offered 14 21 5% (I goals o f professionals service providers who often attempted to engage persons in long-term relationships. In sixty-five cases closed in November and December of 1934 by the Associated Charities (AC), a direct descendent of the BAC, the family either openly rejected service or contact lapsed in thirty-one (47.5 %). In the 1890s, before referral became institutionalized and when it still relied on self reporting, this problem could not exist (see Tables 5.3 and 5.4). Moreover, the very terms “close” and “open” were not applied to the visits o f the 1890s because a “case” was a household visit for Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 151 relief workers, not a therapeutic relationship.17 In addition to new organizational technologies, professional social workers also fashioned more sophisticated causal concepts in the new century. When Bethel Union became the Bethel Associated Charities in 1884, it penned a new motto, “To reduce vagrancy and pauperism and ascertain its true causes.” The meaning of “true cause” underwent great change in the following half-century. The growth of the disciplines o f psychology and sociology encouraged professional social workers to renovate the meanings of assistance. A “therapeutic” approach to social problems emerged under the presumption that some individuals had not developed the ability to function according to the society’s rules. These maladjusted persons needed treatment to learn how to think, feel, and behave in situationally appropriate ways. This would make them less vulnerable to and dependent upon others.1* Tables 5.6 and 5.7 tabulate how the problems’ of relief families were understood by the workers in both depressions. The incommensurability of the 17 Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 37. Family Service Association (f. 1867) Records. MS 3920, Western Reserve Historical Society, Container 8, folder 23, #6252. Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 37-38. “Record is Closed,” 18. It is possible that more unsuccessful cases were unloaded at the end of the year and thus biasing Vance’s study in a negative direction, but this distortion might be balanced by the fact that workers may have shaded their cases positively in the closing summaries. It is difficult to answer such questions without access to a truly random selection of relief case records during the 1930s. 18Polsky, The Rise o f the Therapeutic State, 3-7; Christopher Lasch, “Life in the Therapeutic State” in Women and the Common Life: Lave, Marriage, and Feminism edited by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 161-186; Jacques Donzelot, The Policing o f Families, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 112. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 152 categories found in the charts reveals a transformation from the direct, material approach o f the friendly visitor to the psychological approach of the professional case TABLE 5.6 Problems and Causes of Poverty Assigned by the Visitor from the BAC cases, 1893-1898 ----------------------------------- — : ----------- ------------ Cause primary problem secondary problem tertiary problem tt of cases percentage 4 ofcases percentage 4 of cases percentage 146 54.3% 20 7.4% 4 1.5% parental death 22 8.2% 0 0 0 0 desertion or non-support 20 7.4% 1 0.4% 2 0 .7 % sickness 15 5.6% 34 12.6% 9 3 .3 % son’s unemployment 6 2.2% 20 7.4% 2 0 .7 % <kunkenness 6 2.2% 4 1.5% 0 0 disability 5 1.9% 11 4.1 % 2 0 .7 % mother’s unemployment 4 1.5% 8 3% 3 1.1 % old age ' Urinrss 3 1.1% 0 0 2 0 .7 % 3 1.1 % 6 2.2% 2 0.7 % daughter's unemployment 2 0.7% 3 1.1 % 2 0.7 % parent in jail 1workhouse 2 0.7% 1 0.4% 2 0.7% buying on credit 2 0.7% 2 0.7% 2 0.7 % children away 1 0.4% 5 1.9% 1 0.7% fire 1 0.4% 1 0.4% 0 0 physical abuse 0 0 1 0.4% 0 0 31 11.5% 150 55.8% 236 87.7% father’s unemployment No Cause Given * Problems assigned by friendly visitors as noted in casebooks as categorized by author, see Family Service Association Records, MS 3920 boxes 8, 9, 10 at the Western Reserve Historical Society. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout permission. 153 TABLE 5.7 Problems and Causes of Poverty Assigned by the Worker from 65 Cases Closed by Cleveland Associated Charities Nov.-Dee. 1934 Primary Cause or Problem # ofcases percentage Individual Conflict 13 2 0% Unemployment (adult) 11 16.9% Child Placement S 12.3% Family-Relative Conflict 6 9.2% Marital Incompatibility 5 7.6% Juvenile Delinquency 4 6.1 % Health 3 4.6% Desertion 3 4.6% Alcoholism 3 4.6% Mental Diseased Diagnosed 2 3% Imprisonment 2 3% Regressive Behavior in Child 1 1.5% Conflict over Inter-Racial Marriage 1 1.5% Re-establishment of Home 1 1.5% Forced Marriage 1 1.5% Over Protection of Child 1 1.5% * Problems assigned in case note closing summaries as ca egorized and reported by Social Work Student Roberta Vance, “Case is Closed,” 52. worker. For the friendly visitor, most problems arose when income was missing due to unemployment, desertion, death, or sickness. By the 1930s terms such as “paranoia,” “neurosis,” “anxiety hysteria,” “deep-seated,” “intelligence quotient,” “environmental adjustment,” not found in the 1890s friendly visitors’ vocabularies Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 154 appeared commonly in the case records, interviews, and student analysis.19 Under this therapeutic language, “unemployment” was hardly an explanation at all. Although unemployment probably existed in almost all cases, professional social workers were likely to view it as a symptom of some deeper “individual conflict.” The term “Individual Conflict” shown in Table 5.7 above was defined as “overwhelming to him that he is unable to adjust either to an acceptance of his own limitations or to a satisfactory group life.”20 Changes in the ways workers constructed drunkenness reveals part of the texture o f the rise of therapeutic treatment. Though they rarely construed it as a primary cause of poverty, friendly visitors delivered their judgement against drunkenness with little interpretive finesse. Take the German Lutheran family, who had four boys o f 23, 18, 16, and 4 years and five girls of 19, 14, 12, 8, and 6 years. They had owed a small four room house for 19 years and were said to be in good health, good habits, and worthy o f relief when visited on November 16, 1893. But on the 22nd the visitor learned that the, husband deserted —property mortgaged - Oldest boy and girl married -- Boys are home and not working —wants shoes for boys and girls —gave them order. The father was put out by the boys last Spring. Always drunk when he came 19 See “Family Files,” Cuyahoga County Archives. SASS Theses, Case Western Reserve University Archives. 20 Roberta Vance, “Case is Closed,” 52. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 155 home.21 In contrast, by the 1930s case workers were more sympathetic to the alcoholics’ inner struggle. Mr. SM drank too much, so his wife of sixteen years forced him to live in their garage and refused to cook meals for him. The social worker reported that his wife rejected him because, “he does not earn enough to buy her all the things she wants.” A master o f social work student reviewing this case’s records concluded that the women’s “peculiar behavior may have been driving Mr. Sm to alcoholism.”22 The sophisticated reasoning that allow this student to blame a man’s drunkenness on his wife’s domestic failures can not be found in the casebooks o f the 1890s. The transition from venal to psychological terminology does not encompass the entirety of what was important about poverty relief in either depression, but it did contribute greatly to changes in how relief workers and members of poor families understood each other. In 1932 Mrs. R told an interviewer that she was angry because her social worker said she should sell her sewing machine and electric clothes washer. Mrs. R complained that the social worker had entered her home for the first time with the query, “how many illegitimate children do you have?” She advised the interviewer, “If you ever need help, go to the Church and not the Associated Charities.” The interviewer discovered later that Mrs. R indeed was hiding income from an illegitimate eldest son and dismissed her grievances by writing, “Mrs. R ’s own guilt had invented a 21 Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 8, folder 23, #6123. WRHS. 22“Record is Closed,” 48-49. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 156 story which she projected onto the case worker... This doubtless explains the community antagonism to the Agency which the case history revealed.”23 This social worker’s friendly visiting forerunners would have likely used simpler terms and called Mrs. R. a sexually immoral liar. As tables 5.6 and 5.7 suggest, adult-male unemployment was a primary area o f concern in the negotiation of relief during both depressions. Friendly visitors dealt with this issue by giving 64 of 104 work orders to fathers; ten went to sons, nine to mothers, and two to daughters. The 1890s case notes suggest subtle bargaining over the norms of a father’s responsibilities and the legitimation o f relief through men’s work. For example, an unemployed fifty-seven year-old German Catholic laborer with a family of four including a son of twenty-six years and a daughter of twenty-five owed a month’s rent of eight dollars on five rooms. They told the visitor that they were “not drunkards,” and had not received aid before. The visitor judged them worthy and noted, “son gets $16 a month. Works [illegible] frt house. Say if they had coal they could get along. Told them it would be better for father to work for rent.” A shared value in work and a willingness to cooperate with friendly visitors’ expectations may have been part of the interaction that prompted a visitor to note, 23 Lillian L. Otis, “Unemployment and its treatment in non-resident families. A study of fifty non-resident white...” M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1932. Case Western Reserve University Archives, SASS Theses, box 7,38. My italics. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 157 “Man & boy want work. Order given, need clothing.”24 By the 1930s professional social workers and their clients built more complex explanations for and probably felt higher anxieties about the unemployed father. An interviewer concluded, “in many instances the problem most talked about was probably symptomatic behavior covering up deeper-seated conflicts.” One family reported using the children’s income to supplement the father’s earnings, so they could avoid relief. As a result the father was described by the social worker as “apathetic to much that goes on” and “took pride in his garden.” Unemployed Mr. F was a “meek appearing little” man who was “out-talked by his wife in the interview” had “adjusted comfortably to the role o f a child who enjoys being given to ...” These characterizations by case workers and interviewers suggest that there were heightened social consequences for a man’s failure to live up to the male breadwinner ideal. One father said when he was unemployed he could, “not act the part of a man.” Another explained that his, “family doesn’t act the same way they would if I was working.” The working man was “still part of society” in the words of one client. While sitting beside her unemployed husband Mrs. B, stated, “If a man is able to work he should be made to work. If he doesn’t want to work he should be put in an institution.”23 24Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 9, folder 5, #6749. WRHS. Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 8, folder 23, #6287. WRHS. 25“Record is Closed,” 45,50; Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 15-25; Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 17, 24; Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 26,29, 34, 39; Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 41,45. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 158 Professionals, unlike friendly visitors, expressed a desire to comprehend and shape the “feelings of inadequacy [rooted] in culturally created values associated with work and money.” For example, the unemployed Mr. ST was diagnosed with an “inferiority complex” by one worker, so she found employment for him at a hospital under a secret agreement that the agency would pay half his wages. When the job ended the social worker hurriedly closed the case so that when he re-applied for aid he would not find that his case had been open all along and discover her scheme. Such machinations would not have been conceivable forty years earlier.26 For all their scientific language the ways social workers understood problems such as male unemployment often depended on racial or ethnic stereotypes or their adaptation to more sophisticated terminology. An unemployed Italian Catholic father was thought by his social worker to be an old-fashioned bully for expressing resentment toward the Division of Reliefs policies that encouraged married women to continue working and “holding down jobs they don’t need.”27 In contrast there seems to have been a common belief that African- American male unemployment resulted in infantilized fathers in their families.2* When ten year old J was hauled into the Juvenile 26 Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 53; “Record is Closed,” 22-29. 27 Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 45. 3 The opposite of the Italian father was the African-American one. Milton Paley’s thesis introduced the study of ten African-American families with unemployed fathers by claiming that slavery had established a maternal family order. After 1863, Paley argued, freedmen failed to property gender their household economies through the adult male breadwinner ideal. Thus in (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 159 Court for staying out at nights with her boyfriends, the probation officer concluded that the unemployed father had lost control of the family. His economic impotence had allowed an incestuous relationship to develop between the mother and R —the eldest boy. This boy was no longer under his father’s control and began beating his younger sister J. According the probation officer this was why J became delinquent.29 The point is not to blame professionals for ethnic, racial, and religious stereotypes, but to suggest that psychological science did not supersede them. More importantly there was not always a clear line separating the imposition o f distinctions or stereotypes by those who were outside the target group and being sensitive to differences in habits and experiences between groups. For example, it is unclear whether it was sensitivity or imposition of gender differences by religion that caused friendly visitors to give Catholic families forty-four (71 %) work orders for fathers and only one (1.6 %) for a mother, while they gave Protestants seventeen for fathers (48.5 %) and six (17.1 %) for mothers. What is much less ambiguous is that when friendly visitors of the 1890s called apparent group differences in domestic behavior ‘immoral’, they did so in a fleeting case-work setting. By the 1930s, an elaborate system of social M(...continued) the twentieth century, African-American poverty was perpetuated by black female dominance, not white racism. See Milton W. Paley, “We Can’t Work: A study of ten Cleveland families whose male heads have been classified...” (M.S. Thesis, School of Applied Social Sciences, Western Reserve University, 1942). Case Western Reserve University Archives, SASS Theses, box 7. 29“Record is Closed,” 20-21. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 160 monitoring and sophisticated psychological theories had emerged. Thus, professionals had the organizational and linguistic tools to demand that poor persons participate in the process of naming their supposed ‘pathology’. This was and is still the special power of the therapeutic approach to poverty to discipline the masses. Modem case work methods armed social workers with new techniques of social discipline that were suited to the modem city. But, the therapeutic approach to poverty was not merely a new way to structure or justify age-old systems o f domination. There was a liberating vision within the therapeutic outlook. If adults on relief could be treated by helping them to develop proper associations or resolving deep-seated conflicts, then their children who had neither ‘developed’ nor buried ‘conflicts’ so deep could be saved from the ‘culture of poverty’ altogether. For those therapeutically-minded social workers who rejected the eugenicist’s claim that social pathology was inherent in the poor, children and youths became the keystones for building a healthy society without poverty, inequality, or social problems. Saving Youths From Their Heritage In the 1870s the ladies of Bethel Union taught the children, youths, and adults who worked the street trades and frequented their eating halls to sing a song. Go bring him in, there is room to spare, Here are food and shelter and pity And we’ll not shut the door ‘gainst one of Christ’s poor Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 161 Though you bring every child in the city.30 A ‘child’ was more pitiful than an adult, but the Bethel’s ladies helped them not because they were children and not to get them off the streets but because they were poor and trampled upon. The transformation of poverty relief work from Christian evangelical charity into therapies designed to cure poor children o f the habits of their parents was both slow and contested. For example, the students from Hiram College near Cleveland learned about the powers of the poor to resist intrusion the hard way in 1896. The students attempted to open Cleveland’s first settlement house in the heart o f an Irish Catholic neighborhood overlooking a place aptly named “Whiskey Island.” They boldly followed the spirit of the reform tracts o f the day into a hostile neighborhood and aimed their program directly at children. Catholic clergy opposed the settlement’s kindergarten, day nursery, and planned night school. Perhaps this was part of the reason why the residents stayed away. The project collapsed in less than a year and the students moved their settlement to a more amenable neighborhood.31 The BAC’s friendly visitors took a less intrusive approach than their bolder 30 Florence T. Waite, A Warm Friend For the Spirt: A History o f the Family Service Association o f Cleveland and its Forebears (Cleveland, OH: Family Service Association of Cleveland, 1960), 4, 7. 31 The students relocated in a more diverse neighborhood where over one-third of the men were skilled and only 8 % of them were unskilled laborers. Hiram House experienced great success at the new location and its leader reflected on the move by explaining that the first neighborhood was occupied by “vicious” people, while the move gave them “a splendid army of industrious, hard working immigrants” to help. John J. Grabowski, “From Progressive to Patrician: George Bellamy and Hiram House Social Settlement, 1896-1914” Ohio History 87 (Winter 1978): 38-40. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 162 settlement house contemporaries. The visitors did not focus on children. In fact they tended not to mention them at all. The youngsters’ needs were unnoted in 228 of 269 or 84.8 percent of sampled families (all of who had children older than nine). Visitors reserved meddling into child custody for egregious transgressions of cleanliness, industry, sexual norms, and drunkenness. One friendly visitor wrote: This family is the worst off financially and morally of any I have ever seen in all my investigations —8 persons are able to work, but all are idle. Two twin girls aged 15 are on the streets begging and was reported to us by GEC who gave them a 1.00 —Their house is in a fearful condition no shingles on the roof to keep the rain out and everything very dirty inside & it looks as though they live like hogs —Neighbors say they are a bad lot & drink all the time -- have made complaint to Humane Agent P. & asked him to see what could be done with the 4 girls 15-15-13-9.32 Friendly visitors’ judgments might be suffused with moral approbation, but their case notes do not show the tinkering with family and kinship that would come later. Eight o f sixty-five cases or 12.3 % from the 1934 sample involved child custody. In the 1890s only one of the 269 cases sampled mentioned child custody. By the 1930s, a master of social work student wrote lucidly on the worker’s responsibility to break­ down the bonds of solidarity and fear of social reproach that made families loathe to allow a member to be institutionalized; “...it may take a caseworker months to bring the group to the place where they are willing to probate the mentally ill person. After institutionalization has been accomplished, casework service may be needed to help 32 Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 10, folder 7, #10515. WRHS. Although only one case in the random sample used to build the database was found, the author also read entire casebooks in order to read the notes more closely. In this second method similar approaches to child custody were discovered. See box 9, folder 15, #8445, for a similar case. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 163 the family accept it without a guilt reaction...” In the case o f child placement the professional social worker needed to get the family to “recognize that the children would have a much better chance for normal growth elsewhere...”33 A friendly visitor probably could not have imagined spending “months” of therapeutic persuasion on a single family. The great expectations that they could shape family norms and attitudes, even though it was often repelled by clients (see Table 5.5), carried social workers into the business of families that their non-professional forerunners never broached. For example, twenty year old LS was referred to the county social worker by a settlement house in the late thirties because he was reputedly “maladjusted” in his gender orientation to peers and vocation. LS’s mother had died when he was and infant and his father when he was twelve. The deaths of his parents were not merely construed as financial catastrophes for the S family as they would have been in the 1890s. Now they were given greater import for L’s maturation into a man. The S children avoided institutionalization or foster care because their eldest brother and LS held the household together and raised their younger sister. This household adaptation created a problem according to the social workers because it required L to do “the housework and cooking,” and he was “so thoroughly accepted in this role that the family expects him to continue it indefinitely.” This would prevent LS from becoming a man in the 33“Record is Closed,” 48,50. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 164 eyes o f many, including the social workers. The case worker convinced LS to go to the Civilian Conservation Corps camp in May of 1934 where he could leam to do men’s work and find adult-male role models. LS reported upon return from camp that he felt better about himself and his case was closed.34 The process of referral that defined LS’s household role as a violation of gender order and as a subject for treatment not only gave social workers a new set of reasons to intrude on family privacy, but new ways to shape the domestic habits o f the poor. Children and youths were the primary targets o f the social workers’ public tutelage. For example, when Mr. D became unemployed in 1931, he applied for relief. Mr. D wanted help finding a job, but when the social worker discovered that his two sons (aged 16 and 19) had problems with police and the juvenile court, her attention turned toward them. The social worker wanted to affect a change in his “old country idea o f demanding complete obedience and subservience from his children.” But, as soon as Mr. D found a job, he broke relations with the agency. The eldest D boy spent some time in the Ohio boys’ reformatory as had several boys in the notes o f the friendly visitors of the 1890s. But, the friendly visitors merely recorded that the household missed their income without further comment. In the winter of 1893 an Irish Catholic widow who could not find work washing and was in great need according to the visitor because her “...mother lives with her and helpless. Son 19 is in 34“Record is Closed,” 34-36. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 165 Pen. Gave orders for groceries and clothing.”35 A new sensitivity to children’s recreations had come under the social worker’s purview by the 1930s as well. One worker felt compelled to open a case because the neighbor of a client had problems “playing with other children and shyness in the presence of adults.” The worker diagnosed this family with “over-protection” of the child. She attempted to enroll the child in clubs and to send him to camps, but his mother rejected the idea that the boy’s difficulties stemmed from her faulty mothering. “Over-protection” o f the child was not in the vocabularies o f the friendly visitors. The closest approaches friendly visitors made to parental counseling were the four cases (of 269) where they told children to stop begging in the streets. This happened to a 13 year old girl in the winter of 1893 whose father, a native Clevelander of English descent, had been ill for a long time. To compensate for his lost wages and support her mother and four younger brothers, the girl began peddling pencils. Coolly, the visitor noted she “earns very little" and a month deeper into the winter the worker noted, “Girl reported begging & was told to stop it.”36 In the 269-case sample only 22 families (8.1 %) reported parents earning anything at the time o f the visit, while 20.8 % of the notes reported that the children 35Though in only 1 of 269 cases did friendly visitors list the absence of a youthful child as the primary cause of the poverty, in 6 cases (2 %) such as this one, it was a contributing factor. Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 9, folder 5, #6778. WRHS. 36“Record is Closed,” 45-46. Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 9, folder 2, #6611. WRHS. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 166 were earning income.37 More importantly, when children’s earnings were mentioned TABLE 5.8 Which Children Earned Among the BAC Families, 1893-1898? •O f 269 families with a Child Over 9 yean Old Which Children Earn? Number of Cases Percentage Entire Sample In the 73 Cases with data 192 71.4% -------------- No Child Earns 21 7.8% 28.7 % Some Child Earns, but Who Not Given 10 3.7 % 13.6% Only Eldest Boy Earns 21 7.8 % 28.7 % Only Eldest Girl Earns 16 5.9 % 21.9% Boys Earn 6 2.2 % 8.2 % Girls Earn 3 1.1 % 4.1 % Not Mentioned in Notes they were categorized, lik j those of their parents, as a source of family income. For example, a friendly visits,r noted that a family o f six, headed by a Polish Catholic laborer who, at sever.ty years of age, was “too old to work,” but had a “Boy 17 wants to work for rent i.i his father’s place. Gave Card.” In another family, an unemployed native-born white traveling salesman with sons aged twenty-four and twenty, and four daughters aged 16, 14, 12, and 10 years owed a month’s back rent often dollars for five rooms. They were judged “worthy” when visited on December 16, 1893 it was 37 Only 10 fathers or 4.9 % of families with them and 13 mothers (also 4.9 %) reported earnings. One must not consider the number of cases of noted youth earnings as a measure of the likelihood that a marginal families would have wage earning youths. First, most notes do not speak to the point. Second, families with earning children were of course less likely to need assistance and therefore, youth earnings would be a negative selection factor. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 167 noted, “Idle since July -- wants Boys to work for rent. He [the father] is not able to shovel on account of lame arm. They are short of coal and food. Boys are able and willing to work. Gave card for work.”38 Although girls were noted as having jobs less often and were given workorders less often than their brothers, when they earned wages there was no evidence in the notes that visitors or parents considered it a problem. In an Irish Catholic family of unemployed parents in their late forties with sons aged 16 and 14 and daughters aged 20, 18, and 11 years, the friendly visitor noted, “girl gets $3.00 per week” and “ 18 year old girl at home and claims she is not able to work. She looks as though she could earn her own clothes. Oldest boy wants pants, overcoat, and underclothes. Gave order for clothes. This woman is a good beggard.” In a German family o f six girls aged 15, 14, 12, 8, 6, and 2 years and a boy of 10 years, the father was unemployed all summer and during the fall he earned only 14 dollars. By December 5 he was noted as “begging from house to house for food and clothing saying the city did not help them. The girl 14 yrs. is working - gets a $1.00 per week. Put this in south side Com. hands at once. They are unclean.” In another family which was about to lose their house for being behind on mortgage payments, the worker calculated that without the father’s wage it would be hard for the family to pay their yearly mortgage and survive. The man was “Idle 4 mos - Boy 19 gets 3.00 per week - 38WRHS. Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 9, folder 5, #6718. WRHS. Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 9, folder 2, #6637. WRHS. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 168 Girl 16 gets 3.00 per week. They are to pay $200.00 per year...” One 49 year old Irish Catholic woman who was dependent on sons aged 19 and 15 and daughters aged 20 and 13 owed three months back rent at eight dollars a month for seven rooms, one o f which they sublet for $1.50. Her health was poor and the worker judged their habits as “none too good.” Her eldest daughter was, a cigar maker. Gets $4.00 week —Boys loafing —Don’t think they try to get work. Boy 19 wants shoes ~ Told them to bring back clothes that they claim they cannot use and we would exchange for shoes. Room renter does not pay rent —If you give work, the ck ought to be payable to FB about 1800 Lorain St, owner of property.39 These examples suggest that visitors and recipients assumed that sons and daughters in their middle to late teenage years would help support their families. In this sense these families were doing their best to organize their households along the same generationally interdependent lines as those the 1890 data set examined in Chapter Two. They almost never turned-down work orders for youths, and if they did they were likely to be labeled shiftless.40 39 Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 8, folder 22, #6172; Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 8, folder 22, #6132. WRHS; Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 9, folder 2 , # 6613. WRHS; Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 9, folder 5, #6750. 40 In the unusual event that a family from the 1890s was recognized as being a class above their poverty they might be called “proud” and the assumption that their children should do any type of work might not be applied. This occurred in the case of a large native white Protestant family with ten children. Mr. X was called a “canvasser” who earned about three dollars per week for an installment house. They owed two months back rent at eight dollars for five rooms. The X’s had a saloon in Massillon, Ohio prior to going bankrupt and moving to Cleveland. The visitor described them as, “an intelligent family above the average are very musical and have given several concerts. Boy 9 years old is elocutionist & quiet a bright little boy. They came (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 169 Likewise, during the depression of the 1930s social policies were built upon the assumption that employed youths of families on relief would contribute to their households. Income from poor youths working in private industry and all youths employed through the Works Progress Administration, National Youth Administration, or Civilian Conservation Corps came under strict household budgetary regulations during the 1930s. The policies in o f Cleveland’s Division of Relief demanded that from fifty to seventy-five percent of the youth’s income from private employment be counted into the household pool. Youths on jobs for the Works Progress Administration were expected to contribute all of their earnings into the household pool except for allowances of 19 cents for carfare per days work, 15 cents for lunch per days worked, $3.65 a month for clothing, and five dollars a month for “personal needs.” National Youth Administration jobs also required part of the $20 to $23 dollars earned per month to be committed to the household budget minus, transportation, lunch, $3.65 for clothing each month and $2.50 for personal needs. The Civilian Conservation Corps sent $22 a month to the enrollees family to be applied to their budget.41 '“(...continued) here thinking they could get some engagements at some of the church entertainments. I spoke about the oldest girls getting some employment in house work but they are too proud to take that. I told them I would speak to W.E. and have them appear at some e n te rta in m e n t so that they might get before the public. Ask for shoes for 6yrs old boy which I left card for.” Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 9, folder 15, #8513. WRHS. 41 Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 83. Appendix I is a copy of the budgetary policies given by (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 170 Yet, the details of the budgeting policies that outlined youths contributions to their households had subtly shifted the incentives for poor families to rely on youths’ income and for youths to earn income. By the 1930s each family on relief reported their income, the number and ages of members, and through a standardized procedure was allotted an amount of cash or stamps for food, clothing, rent, mortgage payments, utilities, transportation, and even shoe repair. The more income reported, the less aid one was eligible to receive. One age-old purpose of the tight system of budgeting was to insure that families were receiving only their share of relief by counting all their resources and subtracting them from very minimal survival needs. This was nothing new in the history of welfare. As we have seen, a main function of friendly visiting was to see that only those who were on the fringe of survival would get help. However, the implementation of household budgetary policies altered the etiquette of relief by bureaucratizing it. And in the process these policies encouraged the decline of personal economic reciprocity between the generations. For example, Mr. G was a miner and joined the WPA when he became unemployed. Mrs. G resisted the plans that social workers suggested for sending her children to work. Her sons were completing their technical high schooling and her daughter was learning bookkeeping and typing. Mrs. G could not see the benefit in shortening their education because to 41(...continued) the Cleveland Division of Relief. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 171 do so would only increase their earnings an amount equal to the loss in relief.42 Budgeting amplified a distinction between the present fact o f parental poverty and the hopes that youths would enjoy better material futures than had their parents. A student interviewer observed that “older children were often resentful of the limitations and restrictions of relief assigning the blame to their parents.” One boy interviewed refused to admit that his NY A earnings were in any way part of his family’s household budget. A father worried that economic dependency on his children would turn them into economically vicious adults because they would learn “the habit of getting what and where they can and will try to beat the other fellow before he beats them.” The appropriate use of children’s earnings became limited to peer-centered recreation and luxury like the occasional movie that ten year old F earned for helping to haul coal, rather than paying for bread or rent.43 42 Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 31-40. Undoubtedly the budget policy was not easily enforced and some workers probably had agreements with families such as the Js, whose daughter was allowed to funnel her contribution into household items such as curtains, furniture, appliances, and linoleum that were not strictly on the budget Josephine S. Bauman, “Children Yesterday, Adults Today? A descriptive study of 70 cases active with Aid to Dependent Children, Cleveland Ohio, in which there are children 16 to 18 years old living in the home, who left school between September 1945 and September 1946; and an analysis of 8 working children with emphasis upon the children’s attitudes toward’s financial responsibility and his total adjustment since leaving school,” M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1947,22-26. Case Western Reserve University, MSASS library, MSSA B. Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 31,35. Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 31,35. Relief agencies’ state mandated interference with insurance was also resented by many persons such as Mr. B. who asked pointedly, “What do they expect clients to do when someone dies, just go out and dump him?” Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 31,35,40. Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 78. Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 78. Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 40. 43 Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 51-52; Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 40-41; Tamovitz, (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 172 By the 1930s poverty was less o f a shared identity among the family and more a matter of fatherly failure. One father confessed that his children no longer respected him and later (in a separate interview) his daughter confirmed his fears and said, “you don’t feed us well, so why should we obey you?” When a child’s family obligation was expressed in the thirties, it was to emphasize the exceptional nature of a depressed economy. Parents like the K’s and H ’s whose sons paid them part of their income thought that budgeting was unfair because it made youths pay for their parents’ poverty.44 The emerging boundary between the fixed poverty of adulthood and the universal potential of youthfulness was demarcated by new behaviors and attitudes toward educating the children of the poor. School attendance was noted in only 12 TABLE 5.9 Friendly Visitor’s Prescriptions for Youths’ Life-Course Needs, 1893-1898 Prescription Needs for Future Not Mentioned # of Cases % of Sample 228 84.8 % Boys Need Work 25 9.3 % Girls Need Work 8 3.0 % Children Need Work 3 1.1 % Children Need State Custody 1 0.4 % Begging Must Stop 4 1.5% °(.-continued) “The Client Speaks,” 40-41; Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 20-21. ** Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 27. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 173 (4.5 %) of 269 cases sampled for the BAC in the 1890s. Of those twelve notes, five stated that the children did not attend school while seven noted they did attend. Thus, notes displaying any particular concern about the education of youths were quite rare. One native-born couple (a fifty-eight year-old upholsterer and a fifty-four year-old seamstress) were five dollars behind in rent. Their piano was about to be repossessed because the debt on it was due and they were 24 dollars short. The visitor came to their aid. She noted, “A worthy case. Man is idle. Daughter [17] is not strong. Wife does sewing makes about $2.00 per week. One son in asylum at Newburgh. Are trying to keep their girl in school.” If keeping the girl in school was a virtue, it was rarely so noted in the case records. There was not a single case note found which implied that laboring youths ought to be in school. In thirty-six o f forty-one cases when youths’ needs were noted, the visitor recommended the virtue o f work. Since children’s lots were cast with their parents, the goal was not mobility through education, but to direct them away from the ranks of beggars who shirked work.45 Twentieth-century professionals put far more effort into the task of schooling the children o f the poor than had benevolence workers of the nineteenth-century. The Cleveland Board of Education established a Division of Truancy in 1888. In the 1890s, the Division began pursuing street waifs, sending them to special schools, but 45 Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 9, folder 15, #8415. Only once was learning a trade mentioned. Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 8, folder 23, #6263. WRHS. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 174 they were largely ineffective until after the turn of the century. Between 1891 and 1906 the number of cases they handled in Cleveland per annum rose from 770 to 4,752. In 1902 Cleveland’s truant officers were given authority to issue work certificates to release children from attendance laws. This was not a relaxation of enforcement, because it gave officers discretionary powers which made long ignored statutes easier to apply. It gave them bargaining power with parents and helped them make the transformation from the mocked “hookey cop” into care-giving professionals. In 1905 they succeeded in seeing the opening a City Farm School for truants. Attendance rates for Cleveland public schools grew handsomely between 1871 and 1925. The percentage of 12 year olds in Cleveland attending public schools grew from 53% in 1871, to 66% in 1891, to 69% in 1909, and 67% in 1925. The growth rate for 14 year olds was steeper from 31%, to 38%, to 52%, to 74% respectively. Between 1871 and 1925 the proportion of sixteen year-olds attending more than quadrupled from nine percent to forty-one percent and it rose from five percent to twenty-three percent for seventeen year-olds. These figures are only for the public schools; private school attendance also grew. State legislation between 1911 and 1921 appears to have been particularly important in encouraging attendance and giving school authorities more control over youth labor. Laws extended the age of compulsory education to sixteen and required work certification for exemption from Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 175 attendance to age eighteen.46 Whereas in the 1890s it was an expected virtue that the boy of an aged immigrant laborer would go “in his father’s place,” by the thirties a social worker could note with lamentation that if a father was unemployed, “children would have to seek work as soon as they finished school.” Hardship was noted when an interviewer reported that the daughter of a carpenter now employed with the WP A “had taken a commercial rather than an academic course, knowing that upon graduation she would have to prepare to help the family.” This sentiment was shared by the recipients of aid. Mr. D, a German night watchman who was proud of his “gymnasium education,” blamed the depression for the fact that his bright daughter would have to “work her way through college.”47 46In her study of Cleveland school attendance of the early 20th century, Uma Venkateswam argued that compulsory education legislation did not bring more children into schools because economic conditions had transformed the laboring and training behavior of children prior to the policy reforms. She says that the compulsory education law of 1921 in Ohio was important because it reformed and standardized a “compulsory guidance policy toward youth” between WWT and the Great Depression. Her claim that compulsory education followed the market was not essential to her more convincing argument that compulsory education changed guidance policy. Her most compelling evidence suggests to me that there was a long-term increase in the effectiveness of truancy enforcement and vocational guidance. Venkateswam concluded that school attendance showed the strongest association with the variables of child's age, father’s occupation, family size, and ward location in city. The weakest associations were for mother's ethnicity, family status (headship), home ownership, employment status of father, father’s ethnicity respectively. Uma Venkateswam, “The Bing Law and Compulsory Education in Cleveland, Ohio, 1910-1930” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1990), 29, 87101, 103, 127,136-140. Also see David Tyack and Michael Berkowitz, “The Man Nobody Liked: Toward a Social History of the Truant Officer, 1840-1940" American Quarterly 27 (1977): 31-54. 47 Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 20,28; Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 46. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 176 As the twentieth-century wore on, working-class youths earned less and schooled more. More schooling reversed the flow of resources between teenagers and their parents in poor families. A Jewish mother in the 1930s was held in great esteem by the interviewer for testifying, “I will scrub floors if my children want to go to college.” An African American woman felt cheated by budget policies which required that she cash-in insurance policies that she had taken out to send her eldest boy to college. Making premium payments for a child’s education does not appear to have been practiced by laborers prior to the twentieth century.4* The new educational opportunities were widely shared, but as chapters six and seven will make clear, even this victory for working-class families was fettered by and maintained ethnic and racial divisions. Mrs. F, a European immigrant who had not yet established citizenship, told an interviewer that “education was the one thing they [were] able to give the children.” She expected all her children to get high school diplomas. The interviewer thought this was an unreasonable goal because they had, “low intelligence quotients...” Just as the rising ideal of youth promise and liberation gave professionals their guiding sensibility, it also made the lack of equality more difficult for them to explain. Why were schools unable to use the unsullied potential of childhood to wash children of their parent’s poverty? Most seemed to have turned to 48Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 23, 36. For more on insurance and parent-child relations see Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value o f Children (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 74-113. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 177 environmental determinism, but others added a clearly racial and biological twist to their thoughts. Social work student Josephine Bauman offered separate answers for African Americans, European immigrants, and native whites in her 1947 study of ADC youths aged 16-18. In the native white group, the predominant reason for leaving school is financial necessity of the home, but in the Negro group the outstanding reasons are mental limitation of the child, pregnancy, and lack of interest. However, in the foreign group, attitude of the parent and lack of interest are the major reasons for the child having left school. Rarely did professionals combine their interpretations with a direct acknowledgment of power as was implied by the African-American father who asked an interviewer, “if the children did get an education, what chance would they have?”49 The relationship between poverty relief and the experience of schooling also changed in more subtle ways. In the 1890s requesting clothing “for the children” was the most common way to ask for that item. In only twelve cases did a clothing request not include children. Five cases noted “shoes for school” as an added justification.50 Even schools with poor students were likely to require that children have shoes to attend classes in the late-nineteenth century. In the 1930s clothing continued to be an important issue for school-going youths. But, their concerns had shifted from 49Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 23-24. Bauman, “Children Yesterday, Adults Today?” 1516. Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 44. 50Remember that the 269 case samples only included children over 9. I have no doubt that families with younger children who attended more often made more frequent requests for shoes to attend school. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 178 protecting one’s feet to meeting the imperatives of peer-group popularity within schools. Even families who were reluctant to complain, reported one interviewer, felt that relief clothes provided by the W.P.A. were insufficient and that store bought clothes were necessary for “what the kids wear” because they needed a “differentiation o f style...” One mother explained that the, “sizes are bad... the whole family feels like they wear a prison uniform... everybody on relief has the same clothes and people can tell right away... I met a woman friend wearing the same dress I wore. It was the first either o f us knew the other was on relief.”51 For youths, revealing the relief secret was more crushing than for this woman. They admitted to the interviewers that relief clothing caused them to have “no status at school.” The relationship between a poor youths “status” and school popularity can not be found in the case notes of the 1890s. Two parents told an interviewer that they “saw their children standing apart from others by virtue of the obvious relief clothing they wore.” One mother said her daughter, “will not wear clothes which she knows have come from D C .” Another mother explained, “my girl cries when she gets her ‘new’ clothes” from the sewing center. Two young women, a recent graduate and a current high school student, “stated that clothing was a big problem to them when attending school.” The eldest girl in the K family who attended high school explained, 51 Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 24; Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 33. This was a common lament; hardly anyone had a good word for relief clothing. One mother concurred that “all the clothing is the same and marks those receiving it” Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 20-21. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 179 “there are cliques in school.” The V’s said their children were poorly dressed in comparison to their classmates, and thus their eleven year old son had been asked if his family was on relief by his teacher “in front of the entire class.” A parent pleaded for policies to be changed so she might buy clothing for her “school girls at the store.”52 The pressures on poor families to keep pace with fashions that they could not afford structured the secrets they kept and the embarrassments they felt. Parents reported keeping relief unknown to their children and having, “skimped in order for the children to have necessities and minor luxuries.” Clients told an interviewer that, “children requested items the father felt powerless to give, and while they might be too young in some instances to realize what was happening, they might ask embarrassing questions as they grew older.” Another interviewer noted, “several families felt badly that their children could not attend movies more often.” Mr. B expressed regret over the Christmas of 1939 when his children, “got a couple of toys but they were broken before they got them.” Mr. P said, “I feel better about [being poor] when I am on WPA and the children have a few extra nickels.” Without ready cash families were reduced to “staying at home and listening to the radio... The working boys could go out, but for the children there were no movies, roller-skating, ice cream, few of the desirable things...” Two families felt that their children were educationally 52Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 40; Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 19; Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 31; Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 28; Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 48; Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 30. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 180 disadvantaged because budget policies made no allowance for school movies, art museum trips, or plays.53 During the depression of the 1930s the Cleveland Division of Relief required families on relief to turn in their vehicle license plates. Working youths, who owned a car and earned enough to maintain it after contributing their mandated percentage of income to the household, were exempt from this policy .54 Many of the 43 pairs of parents interviewed in 1939 disliked the automobile policy. Mr. V explained that “a car may be a ten-dollar junk to the agency, but to the man who owns it, it’s worth a million.”55 The interviewer cast Mr. V as a case of arrested development motivated by, “youth and natural desire to have some pleasure in life.” The license plate policy helped establish an association between youth, irresponsibility, and luxury consumption.56 Just as parents on relief in the 1930s believed that their children needed toys to have a childhood, they equated youth with peer-center socializing, partying, and 53 Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 27; Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 22-23; Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 44-45; Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 23-24; Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 28; Tamovitz, “The Clients Speaks,” 37. MHorwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 78. The other exemptions were for work and health. The family did not have to turn over the licence plates if they obtained income from the operation of the vehicle, a member was employed at a place inaccessible by public transportation, a member of the family was ill such that public transportation was a hardship or health risk. 55Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 18-19. 56In contrast the virtue of Mr. C was extolled by Weitzel because he merely wanted to have a car for emergencies such as the one that recently befell his son and to drive to work. Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 18-19. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 181 dating. Mr. D, whose family lived in four rooms above a store, said they needed more room. This was not for him or his wife, but so that “his oldest daughter could bring friends home without everybody crowding into the kitchen and dining-room...”57 Certainly, the desire for living space was not novel to the interwar period, and justifying the desire for it through a daughters’ social life might be viewed as merely a newly acceptable rationalization. But, rationalizations are not just excuses for getting what one has wanted along; they are part of the way people sketch the cognitive maps necessary to give meanings to the world and to articulate their desires. Changes in the relative position of youth on the cognitive map of poverty altered both the meanings of poverty and youth. The changes in the meanings of growing-up poor were not experienced the same way by all youths. The C girls explained that even if they did not have to pay for amusements as the boys did, they needed the right clothes. The gendering of boys’ and girls’ consumption was more profound that directing them to focus their attention on different objects because it objectified their own bodies for consumption in different ways. For example, one girl told the interviewer that she stayed away from the settlement house because she “didn’t want them [her friends] to know I am on relief.” The interviewer thought that as a “very large and overweight girl, she may unconsciously not be desirous of going to a group gathering because of her 57 Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 45. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 182 condition.”5® The interviewer did not note this girl’s race or place of birth. We do not know her religious or ethnic background, but he did give us the two key details to understand her problems as he understood them: her parents could not afford to fund teenage recreation and she was fat. Whomever’s version we accept of why she avoided the settlement house, her own expressed fear of the stigma her peers would attach to the social activities o f a poverty organization or the interviewer’s contention that she was ashamed of her body, several points of commonality remain. Her troubles were articulated as a result of a weakened self-concept that resulted from her individual appearance among peers. Both explanations were matters for therapeutic care. And they both exposed the difficulties poor youths faced in constructing a sense o f themselves in a social milieu that created particularly intense fetishes for body shapes and styles of consumption.59 58Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 31; Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 36- 37. 59Clients usually did not speak about themselves as a class and repeated vehement rejections of the Worker’s Alliance (a socialist relief advocacy group); one client called them, “Bolsheviks,” another exclaimed they were just a “bunch of blanks, Polacks, Hungarians, and niggers.” The cult of youth and consumerism have beat just as important as race-ethic hatred and vigilantism in dividing the diverse American working-class. And this new element to suppress meaningful dissent was fully present by the depression of the 1930s. One interviewer observed the clients were, “unwilling to become class-conscious on the principles of deprivation. They want to get away from the years of relief...” He hoped that free movie tickets could be given out, not only to children as they had been during Christmas, but also to adults and year around to lift sullen spirits because, “Christmas 52 weeks a year would not have such a strange sound then.” Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 38-39,48. As a whole in the interviews from 1939, members of families on relief expressed an intense desire for privacy. They expressed favor for food stamps over government surplus foods, but cash was preferred to stamps because as one father explained “stamps put me in a class with drunkards and bums.” Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 20. Budgeted cash payments allowed, in the words of one father, “relief [to (continued..) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 183 Conclusion The family-centered notion of childhood that encouraged a boy to go “in his father’s place,” should not be romanticized. It allowed friendly visitors and those living amid enormous material deprivation and uncertainty to accept that poverty would be handed-down through the generations. This is why friendly visitors could find children and youths desperately walking the streets and respond with a simple admonishment to “stop begging.” However, the inability o f friendly visitors to seek social justice beyond immediate mercenary aid to the poor should not cause us to accept uncritically a therapeutic ethos or a child-centered ideal of family life. The professional social workers’ belief that poverty could be prevented by enriching childhood assumed that social troubles were a result o f individual pathologies and 59(...continued) become] more private than it used to be when you went to get flour. Now you don’t even have to go to the store with a relief order.” Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 15. What a distance had been traveled from the time when charity organizers issued cards to break-up giving between those who shared the streets to the point where the poor themselves needed to obscure their failures to achieve respectability. The need for privacy had personal consequences. A father explained that without cash to go out the family “stayed home like hermits.” Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 37. The As withdrew from friendships because they could not afford “reciprocating visits and entertainments.” Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 37. Also see Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 28; Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 24. An interviewer noted that most siblings played among themselves and “did not concern themselves with neighbors.” Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 20-21. Higher boundaries were rising between kin; Mrs. H. was reported as “objected to the agency contacting relatives, because they have no obligation to support another person’s family, implying that this obligation belongs to her husband.” Weitzel, “The Client Speaks,” 16-26,30. A desire to keep relief secret from relatives was widely expressed, see also Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 33; Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 31. In 1885 the Cleveland Leader called workers striking against the Cleveland Rolling Mill, “mostly Poles and Slavs, ignorant and bigoted and without any responsibilities to check their acts of violence.” As quoted in Miggins, “Uplifting Influences,” 144-145; Horwitz, “The Client Speaks,” 44-46. Also see Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks,” 38-39. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 184 deficiencies. The therapeutic approach blunted their comprehension of the difficulties that their clients faced. More importantly, the reordering of the definitions o f youth and poverty created novel discourses within the disbursement of relief. The evidence presented here suggests that the relationships between professionals and relief families heightened anxieties about failed male-breadwinners, reinforced the growing irrelevance cultural heritage, and supported a cult of youth centered on consumerism. Chapter six will draw greater texture into this analysis of therapeutic welfare relationships through an extended comparison of two families of foster children during the 1920s and 1930s. The racial and gender dynamics of treatment will take center stage. We will see that even in cases where social workers exercised the full extend of state power to save children from their heritage by taking custody of them, children and youths actively shaped the contents o f their treatment. Through close bonds with their foster parents and participation in high schools, youths contested and manipulated the meanings of the individualism that social workers tried to instill within them. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER SIX CONTESTED TREATMENT Individualism, Fostered Youths, and Case Workers between the World Wars Foster care provided one o f the most intensive settings in which social workers tried to save children from their parents’ legacies of social failure.1 In one sense, foster children and youths were exceptional because they became wards o f the county. It was precisely their special status that allows us to delve into the ways youths, parents, foster parents, and case workers negotiated the terms of how these children would come of age. Among these actors contests unfolded over what opportunities and domestic situations would be provided to whom based upon often differing, and always gendered and racial, versions of a youth’s future. For this chapter I have 1The case records used in this chapter are located at the Cuyahoga County Archives under the label “family files.” Access to them is restricted, but I received permission to examine files from before 1945. The files include medical, psychological, and vocational guidance reports, interagency transfer reports, family histories, interagency correspondence, along with occasional letters and photos from clients, in addition to daily or weekly notes made by case workers. The files correlated the records from all siblings who were fostered from a single family. They appear to have been organized in rough chronological order. There are probably between six and seven thousand “family files” in 273 boxes with the earliest documents being from approximately 1919 and extending through about 1970. However, the vast majority of children with records became youths after 1945. Because this project concerns itself with an earlier period of time, I selected the forty-nine earliest families containing records from 108 youths in order to construct a data set This selection criteria insured that I would only be reading cases from my period of time. Adding more cases to the data set may improve the confidence that one can place in the frequencies and mean values I will be citing, but as it stands the p-values were quite acceptable. They generally were better than the one percent level. Instead of adding more cases to the data set, I read thoroughly the voluminous notes and reports on thirty youths. The stories of the Sorrentos and Johnsons were chosen because they contained both males and females and because they were from two of the most numerous ethnic, religious, and racial groups in both the data set and in the waves of migrants that came to Cleveland during the era. 185 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 186 reconstructed the stories of two families each having three children who were fostered out in Cleveland, Ohio between the world wars. I will tell their stories against the backdrop of a sample of forty-nine families with a total of 108 fostered children. The structure of placement policy reveals a great deal about the gendered ways that case workers handled foster youths. There were two types of foster placements: board homes and wage homes. Board homes were households where the county paid the foster parents a sum each month in addition to medical and clothing aid. Wage homes were places where the youths, usually 15 or over, worked for all or most of their board, and might receive a small wage controlled by their county case worker. Many times wage home placements were made for the summer, so that the youths could attend school during the other seasons. This was especially true for boys who were frequently placed on farms in their middle and late teens. Girls were generally placed as domestic servants in city households during the wage-home stage o f their youth. The transition from a board placement to a wage placement served as a rite of passage designed to separate, rather than integrate, youths from the families with whom they had boarded, often for many years. The wage placement forced youths to break free from the domestic relations of their childhood through a relocation o f their place of residence and a fundamental reordering of the commodity exchange among youths, the county, and the heads o f foster households. As will become clear in the stories that follow, case workers almost single-mindedly demanded that youths Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 187 maintain stable jobs and seek economic independence without consideration of the importance of personal relationships with their biological parents, foster parents, or siblings. Their placement and vocational plans generally followed the most utilitarian interpretation of matemalism. Manhood was defined by the ability o f boys to obtain employment providing a family-wage to support a wife and children. Womanhood was achieved by girls who had learned the unpaid labors o f household keeping and had married a bread winning male. For them job skills were treated as a fall-back plan should they fail to secure a dependable man. Youths, their kin, and foster parents often contested these courses to adulthood and the utilitarian definitions of maturity they entailed. Often youths and foster parents worked out meanings of individual success of a more expressive and personally fulfilling variety.2 THE SORRENTOS AND JOHNSONS: Domesticity and Keeping Failed Male-Breadwinners Away Beginning in the 1890s and continuing until the First World War thousands of Poles, Italians, Slovaks, Hungarians, and Russians arrived in Cleveland, Ohio each year. Antonelli and Maria Sorrento were just one couple in this great search for a better life in America. They and their six year-old daughter Lucille left rural Italy in 21have not been able to locate any historical studies of foster care. See the introduction to this study for definitions of matemalism and individualism. Molly Ladd-Taylor, MotherWork: Women, Child-Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Robert N. Bellah, et al. Habits o f the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1985). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 188 1909.3 Antonelli, who had been a farm laborer, found a steady job paying good wages in Cleveland. Maria gave birth to Josephine, Dean, and Thomas. They baptized their children at Holy Rosary Church in a neighborhood called “Little Italy.” After Thomas was bom in 1922 they purchased a house in a new neighborhood on the Eastern edge o f the city shared by Catholics o f Irish, Slovenian, and Italian decent. In the 1920s the Sorrento’s road to prosperity ended. Antonelli lost his hearing to an ear infection and the next year their eldest child, Lucy, died of tuberculosis. Soon the tuberculosis made Maria too ill to care for the remaining children and they were placed in a Catholic orphanage. In April of 1925 Maria died and Antonelli soon lost his job. He failed to find steady work and so the children were fostered out by the Cuyahoga County Child Welfare Bureau (CCCWB) in 1927. After World War I federal laws put a virtual end to the largely Catholic and Jewish European immigration of the previous three decades. But the movement of peoples into Cleveland continued. In the eleven years prior to 1927, over a million African-Americans left the Jim Crow South. Cleveland’s African-American population increased more than seventeen fold between 1910 and 1950 from 8,448 to 147,850/ 3All names of people used in this chapter are pseudonyms to protect their privacy and in accordance with an access agreement with the Cuyahoga County Records Manager. They have been chosen in keeping with the religious, ethnic, or racial identities of the characters. See “Family Files”, restricted, no manuscript number, Cuyahoga County Archives. 4Leslie S. Hough, The Turbulent Spirit: Cleveland, Ohio and its Workers, 1877-1899 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991), 36. See the entry on “Immigration and Migration" by John J. Grabowski in The Encyclopedia o f Cleveland History edited by David D. Van Tassel (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 189 A decade after the Sorrentos arrived in the ‘new’ world, Hanna and Ben Johnson moved north from Georgia in search of a new life with their three young children, Mary Jane, Lew, and Carter. Ben found a job with the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, but soon after they arrived, Hanna died of an infection. Hanna’s sister Sary took the children into her home. Six months later when Sary’s husband was sent to the state penitentiary, Ben asked family friends to make a home for his children. Ben disappeared in 1923. At the ages of 10, 8, and 6, the children were fostered out by the county in December o f 1925.5 As in the Johnsons’ and Sorrentos’ cases, it was rare for both parents of foster 4(...continued) and John J. Grabowski, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). In the 1890's Italian immigration to America surged to 604,000. In the first decade it peaked at 2.1 million before subsiding to 1.1 million in the teens, and less than a half a million in the 1920s. J.N. Hook, Family Names: The Origins, Meanings, Mutations, and History o f More than 2,800 American Names, (New York: Macmillian Publishing Company, 1982), 195. In 1910 only 1 in 10 African-Americans lived outside the former slave states, but by 1930 half of them had left the South. See Part III of Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (United States of America: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992) and Kimberly L. Phillips, ‘“ But it is a Fine Place to Make Money’’: Migration and African-American Families in Cleveland, 1915-1929,” Journal of Social History 29 (Winter 1996): 393-413. 5Four out of five children fostered by Cleveland’s Cuyahoga county were bom in the city according to a sample of 108 cases (49 families) from the interwar years. But, many of their parents had been bom elsewhere. Eleven percent of foster children were bom in the South, while only 6.5 percent came from places (excluding Cleveland) in America outside of the South. African-Americans made up a third (36 youths) of the sample, and they were the single largest racial/ethnic group followed by American whites (15), Italians (14), Irish (9), Germans (9), English (7), Slavic (7), Hungarians (4), and Croatians (3). Other ethnic groups represented by one youth were Galatians, Swedes, and Bohemians. Of the youths of specified European heritage, 30 were identified from Southern and Eastern European nations and 26 from Northern and Western European nations. Fifteen were called “American white” or “white.” There were no Jewish families found in the records. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 190 children to die (3 of 49 families). Taking custody from living parents required justification. These justifications were the first lessons foster case workers taught the working-classes. Of the forty-nine families sampled, the most common circumstance for custody came through a mother’s death and a father’s chronic unemployment. As Table 6.1 shows, the patterns for mothers and fathers disposition upon custody action diverged greatly. Most mothers (69 %) either died or were put away in mental or penal institutions. Most fathers (76 %) lost their domestic responsibility and authority to professionals under circumstances varying between and often combining outright desertion and contested court-ordered removal of the children. When a father died TABLE 6.1 Justification for Talcing Custody of Foster Youths Mother’s disposition upon custody Father’s disposition upon custody deceased deserted unfit because unemployed unfit other than unemployed institution­ alized Row Totals unknown I 0 0 0 0 1 deceased 3 I 0 2 3 9 deserted 2 4 0 4 6 16 unfit because unemployed 9 0 0 0 3 12 unlit - other than unemployed 3 1 1 1 2 8 institutionalized 0 0 0 1 2 3 Column Totals 18 6 1 8 16 X Note: The figures in the squares represent the number of parental-sets that fall into the category defined by the row (father) and column (mother). “Unfit other than unemployment” includes reasons such as sexual immorality, mental defect, physical disability, and alcoholism. The Cramer’s V for Mother’s disposition by Father’s disposition is a moderate to strong .519 at the .0001 significance level. Cramer’s V measures the strength of association for two nominal sets of categories; a result of 0 shows no association and 1 shows perfect association. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 191 there was a presumption that he could be replaced with money and therefore, better means existed through mother’s pensions, local charities, and male relatives for getting cash to mothers. This helped mother’s keep their children off the foster care rolls. When a mother died, there was no presumption that she could be replaced with cash or that fathers might undertake the normally unpaid labor of household keeping. When fathers lost their wives to death or institutionalization, the common course was to divorce the children from him and foster them out to new mothers. Accordingly, a father’s unfitness to parent was often (12 of 20 cases) attributed to his unemployment, while unfit mothers were hardly ever (1 of 9 cases) thought so because of unemployment. The gendered treatment of parenthood affected mothers as well. A mother’s unfitness was assigned when she failed to maintain cleanliness and control over households, sexuality, narcotics, or alcohol.6 While fathers were able to escape 6 Several studies have documented the ideological relationships between programs of involuntary sterilization or sex-segregated incarceration and professionals’ anxieties about the sexuality and domestic habits of the underclasses. Historians call this ideological complex “the myth of the menace of the feeble-minded.” In this era many thousands of women of child­ bearing age were incarcerated for mental illness or feeble-mindedness. The menace myth is alive today in the form of books such as Murray’s and Hermstein’s The Bell Curve, but clearly it was most legitimate among prominent social scientists and reformers between about 1910 and 1920. What has not been established is the degree to which the menace myth penetrated social case work education and practice or the various peaks and valleys in eugenic efforts by agencies. Although it was not the purpose of this study to measure determine such things, among the CCCWB workers between the World Wars, I was overwhelmed upon reading the case notes by the consistency to which the women who were incarcerated were profiled in case summaries with the characteristics of a sexually promiscuous, unclean, feeble-minded mother. See my essay, “Unnatural Selection: Intelligence Testing, Eugenics, and American Political Cultures” Journal o f Social History 30 (Spring 1997): 669-685. For a particularly good description of the (continued...) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 192 through desertion, mothers were far more likely to be locked-up in institutions for the feeble-minded or the mentally ill. In fact, the second most likely circumstance for fostering children followed upon the father’s desertion and the mother’s commitment to an institution. African-American mothers were more likely to face institutionalization than their white counterparts. Perhaps the harsher treatment experienced by African-Americans at the hands of authorities caused these fathers to desert more often than white fathers.7 We do not know why Ben Johnson left his children, but he (as most fathers) did not simply leave them on the street or at the doorstep of strangers. He made sure that family friends would take care o f Mary Jane, Lew, and Carter. The children were “well mannered and obedient” with these friends, the Rhodes, and over two years they became part of a new family. But in 1925 the authorities caught the Rhodes making 6(...continued) narrative qualities of the menace myth see Nicole Hahn Rafter ed., White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1887-1919 (Boston, 1988), 1-30; James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History o f Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). For evidence of the menace myth in The Bell Curve read the first pages of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles A. Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York, NY: Free Press, 1994) and then compare it to Henry H. Goddard, “The Menace of the Feeble-Minded,” Pediatrics 23 (1911): 1-8. 7Of the demographic groupings, race was the only one with suggestive frequency differences and it showed the strongest associations and p-values across different measures. Seven of fifteen African-American mothers were placed in institutions, while only 9 of 34 white mothers faced this situation. Likewise, 7 of 15 African-American fathers deserted, while only 9 of 34 white fathers took this route. Analysis of Variance and Multiple Classification Analysis showed that sex and race of the parents were clearly the most important factors. But, there was significant interaction between them and thus it is difficult to determine the strength of variance. MCA gave adjusted associations o f.15 for sex and. 10 for race when sex, race, and religion are built into the model. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 193 and selling liquor and seized the children. Case workers almost always placed children with foster parents of the same race and religion, but maintaining the broad distinctions between blacks and whites, Protestants and Catholics should not be confused with fostering rootedness within community and kinship networks. For example, when the Johnson’s children were taken from the Rhodes, the case worker noted that Mary Jane was “very fond o f her foster parents” - referring to the Rhodes. Of course, the Rhodes had not been “foster parents” chosen and paid by the county; they were an unpaid surrogate family chosen by the children’s father. Perhaps misnaming the Rhodes allowed the social worker to blur the meaning o f taking custody from them, and to pretend that the Johnson’s children were simply being placed in a new African-American foster arrangement. Mary Jane understood the difference and reportedly walk away in stiff silence. She did not adjust well to the new home and began wetting her bed at night. In response her new mother denied her water after 4 P.M. and whipped her for her disobedience. The Johnson’s kin and family friends were allowed to see them twice before the case worker “advised that these visits be discouraged.”8 Case workers not only had little respect for kinship and non-kin community ties, but they also discouraged the reestablishment of nuclear families. Ten years after the Johnson children were taken from the Rhodes and separated from their relatives, 8“Family Files,” box I, 1st folder, eldest child, “Family and Personal History of a Child” (a transfer report), July 1925; case notes, 4-14-26 and December 1926 to January 1927. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 194 Ben reemerged and told Mary Jane’s case worker he wanted to reestablish his family. Ben said he was trying to find work. The social worker let him know what she thought of his efforts by telling him the “story of an old man, who was always looking for work, but praying to God that he wouldn’t find it.” She laughed and said she hoped this was not his case. Being on the bad end of the nation’s worst depression, Ben did not laugh. His scowl, she thought, stemmed from the “quite a bit of truth” in her joke.9 The Sorrentos’ attempts at reunification were also discouraged by case workers. The physician who examined Josephine Sorrento while she was living at St. Joseph’s Orphanage in 1927, recommended that the County attempt to reestablish the Sorrento household. But, the case worker placed the Sorrento’s children in a foster home on West 129th Street about as far as possible across the city from their home in Collinwood. Nevertheless, Antonelli regularly made the journey across town to see his children. Even after he went deaf, Josephine was able to communicate with him. But her younger brothers forgot what Italian they knew. The case worker called the make-shift sign language between the boys and their father “pitiful” displays, but admitted “nevertheless the boys are both glad to see their father, and he seems very happy whenever he comes to call on them.” 10 In her late teenage years Josephine repeatedly voiced her wish to reestablish a 9“Family Files,” box 1, folder 1, eldest child, case notes, 5-7-34. 10“Family Files,” box 1, folder 14, second child, case notes, 11-26-30. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout permission. 195 home with her father and brothers. The case worker discouraged her filial piety by telling her “she must first support herself and could not consider M [her father] and her brothers at the present time. She should go to see them, but should not give them money.” A week after she was instructed to substitute polite visits for sharing income, Josephine paid a visit to her father’s boarding room. That day he was robbed of 140 dollars by another roomer and so Josephine dutifully waited for the police to arrive in order to translate his Italian. The robbery convinced Antonelli to return to the country of his birth. Josephine begged him to stay. The social worker advised her that “it would be best for him to return to Italy” and when he finally left the worker extracted a “promise [from Josephine that] she will not worry about him any more.” Fostering economic and emotional individualism in girls like Josephine loosened the binding power of kinship.11 Nuclear family reunification (before children grew into adults) occurred only one in the forty-nine families sampled. It was a common syntax for caseworkers to refer to the fathers and mothers of foster children as “M” and “W ” denoting them as the “man” and the “woman” o f the case rather than the father and mother. The case notes were typewritten in standard English and abbreviations were rare. Even the foster parents received “fos. mo.,” “fos. fa.”, or “fos. pars” -- fuller and more sensible abbreviations. These discursive practices contributed to the discounting of the 11 “Family Files,” box 1, 14th folder, eldest child, case notes, 5-13-31 and 8-1-31. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 196 parents’ stakes in fostered children’s lives. Foster case workers took children, not because their parents were deceased, not because in-kind or cash aid would not suffice, but in order to enforce their own ideals of domestic life. When fathers could not earn a family wage, foster care workers stripped them of their parental rights, roles, and authority; when mothers failed to control their habits and households, they were incarcerated. These families stories reveal hard truths about the ways poverty policies have enforced dominant domestic ideals. The case notes suggest that social workers were committed matemalists who believed they were acting in the children’s best interests. If fathers and mothers did not fulfill what they thought were minimal domestic expectations, the children were being abused, and the social workers were confident, over-confident, that they could offer ‘healthier’ childhoods. JOSEPHINE AND MARY JANE: Ordering a Girls’ Career — Household, Work, Marriage, and Sex Case workers used placement decisions and vocational guidance to gender the transitions from childhood to adulthood according to a largely utilitarian interpretation o f matemalism. As Table 6.2 suggests, foster girls were usually made into domestic servants on a road to unpaid mother-work. African-Americans girls had even fewer choices. But they more vehemently rejected the ideal course from household work to wage-labor, to marriage, sex, and children (in that order) by refusing to remain in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 197 TABLE 6.2 Highest Status Occupational Title Achieved Prior to Discharge by Sex and Race Occupational Title in Order of Status by (18 to 21 years old) African • American Girls (Unk/misang = 4) African-American Boys (Unk/missing = 2) White Girls (Unk/missing = 2) shoe-shining White Boys (Unlc/missing = 12) 1 street trading 3 dishwasher domestic servant agricultural laborer 1 15 13 1 odd jobs cafeteria service 7 2 4 1 1 bell bop 1 porter or waiter 1 elevator operator 1 warehouse worker factory, unskilled 2 I 1 1 2 2 truck driving 6 1 dressmaking 1 salesclerk 2 nurse-aid 1 1 1 autobodywork 1 sheet metal work I secretary 3 radio repair 1 welding 1 inspector 1 tool repairer 1 primer 1 foundry, skilled 1 ink mixer 1 lithography 1 nurse 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 198 domestic service, having children before marriage, and starting their own families while they were still wards of the county. These two stories will remind us not to underestimate the severe consequences that girls faced for violating the proper feminine life course.12 They will also suggest that successfully opposing the case worker’s ideals often required at least partial pursuit o f economic individualism and observance o f domestic proprieties. After Josephine’s father left for Italy, she persisted in her efforts to form a household with kin. She told the case worker that she “had no one in the world to help her except CCCWB [the county] and that is not like having her own people.” She wanted to move in with her married cousin Carla Toscanini, but her cousin could only afford to take her in if the county agreed to continue paying foster board. Case workers would not usually allow payments to kin, but Josephine’ worker agreed to at least inspect the household. During her visit, the case worker asked about the sobriety o f Mr. Toscanini. Carla claimed her husband had sobered-up after the recent death of a child and that the household was without strife. She added that she wanted to “do for Josephine as she had no mother.” The case worker countered that Josephine was no longer a child and stated that the county would not pay her board if she left the 12 For the history of attempts to use public policy to order women’s sexuality see Mary E Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 199 foster home to live with cousins.13 It appeared that Josephine’s plans to reunite with her “own people” would fail until, her foster parents moved away suddenly a few weeks later. Under the pressure of this crisis, the case worker agreed to pay board to her cousins. The board payments to the Toscanini’s arrived just after Carla’s husband lost his job. His heavy drinking resumed as did his violent outbursts against the women of the household. When Josephine reported the beatings, the case worker told her the Detention Home was her only immediate alternative. So Josephine ran away to a former foster mother, but her board payments did not soon follow. During this period of crisis, the case worker extracted a concession from Josephine that “she was sorry she had not taken c.w. advice in the first place and kept away from relatives if they could not take her without pay.” The case worker hoped Mr. Toscanini’s abuse would be an object lesson for her client that healthy families are founded on love, not economic exchange. If the domestic sphere was a sacred, non-economic haven in the case worker’s world view, then the job market was a heartless place o f competition. A girl could only survive if she was armed with marketable skills. For Josephine this was especially true because a spinal deformity had made the heavy work o f domestic service too difficult and tarnished her appearance in the market for a husband. Therefore, other 1931. 13“Family Files,” box 1, 14th folder, eldest child, case notes, 7-16-31 and October Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 200 occupational skills were fostered. She attended John Marshall High School from 1927 to 1929 and then at age seventeen entered the Darvas Professional Dressmaking School. In 1931 she graduated from Darvas as “one of the best students with good speed, design ability, and excellent hand work.” The Principal printed 1,000 business cards and promised to give Josephine “publicity.” Graduation from Darvas was supposed to launch her career as a dressmaker. She was introduced to many of the case worker’s personal friends to see “how she would meet the public.” After she had graduated, the case worker gave her a ledger to keep her accounts.14 Unfortunately Josephine was not able to secure enough orders or turn out the work fast enough to survive as a home dressmaker. She failed to hold a job at a dressmaking shop because customers disliked her appearance. Josephine walked with a slight limp and hunched back, and peered through glasses that distorted and enlarged her eyeballs. She tried a job on a power machine in a clothing factory, but the work was too heavy. She survived through the county’s board payments and by taking in homework repairing tom stockings, making artificial flowers, selling toiletries, and dressing the hair o f women in the neighborhood. In 1932 at the age of twenty, Josephine was given a chance to learn another skill. Her foster mother (who was retiring from wage work) agreed to pay Josephine’s tuition in a beauty school, if the case worker would place two more girls in her home u “Family Files,” box 1 ,14th folder, case notes, 1931. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 201 with cash payments for their board. In the Fall Josephine began a course of instruction at the Cozy Beauty Shop. As it turned-out the Cozy “course” was more or less onthe-job training from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M. where they did not pay a wage. She tired of this arrangement and quit. This infuriated the case worker who had gone to some lengths to help her enter the school. In what was noted as a tirade by the case worker, she read a vocational report aloud to Josephine which predicted that she would fail in cosmetology for lack o f “personality and beauty manners”. The reference to her mannerisms reportedly made Josephine red with anger. The case worker lectured on that if she did “not cooperate with CCCWB -- follow advice, wear shoes for the benefit of her health and occupation, and that if she felt she could do as she pleased, that she could start January first and pay her own board.”15 Josephine had not quit Cozy without understanding the potential for the case worker to retaliate against her both verbally and economically. But, Josephine had a plan. Sometime before this episode, she learned of a life insurance policy that awarded her $170. As a ward of the county, she could lose these monies because they could be applied to her board payments to the foster family. Josephine wanted to keep her board payments and use the insurance money to open a shop. So she called upon her uncle to assume guardianship of the funds without the case worker’s knowledge. When the case worker berated her for quitting her Cozy ‘job,’ Josephine was one step 15“Family Files,” box 1,14th folder, case notes, 4-25-32,6-30-32,12-19-32. 12-27-32, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 202 ahead. She held her temper, looked at the worker and knowingly “sneered and laughed.” A month after the Cozy ‘school’ episode, two men from the Sorrento’s old neighborhood in Little Italy came to the social worker and told her about the insurance money. Confused by contradictory information, the social worker hesitated to cut off board payments. When she finally found Josephine’s uncle and called him into the office to demand the funds, Josephine came along with him and told her it was none of her business. At this time Josephine lost her board payments, but she was nearly twenty-one years old anyway and had received all the payments that the law would allow.16 Josephine’s case worker did her best to undermine Josephine’s attempts to establish household-based economic reciprocity with her father and other kin. But at a crucial moment in her struggle to establish her place in the world, Josephine called upon the resources of kinship in the person of her uncle to balance the case worker’s power. As Josephine fought for autonomy over the course of her life, she could not ignore the larger political economy of wage-earning. She tried to negotiate the best terms for selling her individual labors by gathering the resources to open her own shop. For white girls like Josephine, seeking the highest skilled training and remaining single with no children in their young adulthood was one way to seek independence. The same was not true for African-American girls. 16“Family Files,” box 1, 14th folder, case notes, 12-19-32. 12-27-32,4-4-33; family record, January 1933,1-14-37. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 203 TABLE 6.3 Fostered Youths’ Occupational Status Upon Discharge by Race Occupational status upon discharge, usually 18-21 African-Americans Whites unknown 0 (0%) 3 (5%) no occupational experience 6 (17%) 11 (15%) unskilled 28 (78 %) 40 (55 %) skilled 2 (5%) 17 (24 %) professional 0 (0% ) 1 (1 %) •The Pearson’s Chi-Square for occupational status by race gave a p-value of .079 and Cramer’s V association of .278 with p=.079. Among whites, youths of Northwestern European descent had the highest proportion of skilled workers (10 of 26), but the Southern and Eastern Europeans and American White groups also had high proportions of skilled workers than African-Americans. Religion and place of birth were not significant factors. Placement and board decisions were also the major point of contention in Mary Jane’s relations to case workers. And like Josephine, the longer Mary Jane remained in a school or training program the longer board payments were maintained by the county. Yet, Mary Jane and other African-American foster youths simply did not receive the job placement opportunities offered to white youths like Josephine. Thus, they did not have the same basis upon which to negotiated their life-courses. As Tables 6.2 and 6.3 show, domestic service was the highest status of work obtained by African-American girls in 15 of 17 cases with this data (88 %), whereas the frequency for white girls was 13 of 25 cases with this data (52 %). Because case workers offered them so little in terms of training and placement, African-American girls had considerably less incentive to follow the case worker’s domestic ideals or the life Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 204 course of household labor, wage labor, marriage, sex, and finally children. As Table 6.4 below shows, African-American girls more often created their own families while they were still wards of the county, even though it meant severe censure and frequently an end to their board benefits. By age thirteen, Mary Jane was waking at six each morning, cooking breakfast for the foster family of seven, and cleaning her room before she left for school at 7:30 A-M- After school she did her homework, often fixed supper, washed the dishes, scrubbed floors, and did the laundry. The case worker did not see this as a problem because such a regime prepared Mary Jane for a wage placement as a domestic servant and acclimated her to a rigorous schedule o f unpaid female labor.17 By the time she was in her middle-teen years her case worker hoped to move her into a wage placement. This required that a girl leave full-time school attendance, and in Mary Jane’s case, it would require separation from her younger brothers. When the time came neither Mary Jane or her foster mother, Mrs. Allen, was interested in the plan. Mary Jane was a good student. She wanted to stay in school and was willing to work hard at her foster home while attending school. Mrs. Allen benefited from this arrangement. By weathering a series of contests with the case worker, Mrs. Alien succeeded in retaining Mary Jane for over seven years when the average duration o f a 17“Family Files,” box 1, 1st folder, case notes, eldest child, 11-11-29. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 205 foster placement was just under three years, two months.1® By 1933 Mary Jane was bringing to the Allens a payment of 17 dollars per month from the county in addition to her unpaid labor.19 The first conflict over Mary Jane’s board came when she was fifteen years old in 1930. Each summer Mrs. Allen visited her relatives in Detroit and Mary Jane looked after the work of the household. This seems to have particularly irritated the case worker, so she scheduled Mary Jane for the Friendly Inn Settlement’s summer camp in conflict with the foster mother’s vacation. Rather than object openly, Mrs. Allen simply scheduled Mary Jane’s camp-required medical exam on the morning the 18 Placement duration and total custody time per child had very large deviations and ranges such that mean values are somewhat deceiving. Respectively the standard deviations were 2 years, 8 months and 3 years, 11 months and ranged from 6 months to 15 years and 1 year to 20 years. The sex, race, ethnicity, religion, and place of birth of the child did not significantly alter the mean duration of placements. African-Americans children and children of Southern/Eastern European heritage had statistically significant longer total years of custody by CCCWB. The means for total years custody for African-Americans was 11.28, for S.E. Europeans it was 10.47, for N.W. Europeans it was 8.19, and for American whites it was 9.60. 19 Cuyahoga county spent more on African-American foster children sampled than on their white counterparts. The average cash spent directly on a foster child per year was $ 194.32 and the mean total cash spent over the whole custody period was $2,140.73. Most of this expenditure was for board Boys, Catholics, and African-Americans received more than their counterpart groups of girls, Protestants, and whites. Two-tailed tests showed that only the sexbased difference was statistically significant below the. 10 level. When Analysis of Variance and Multiple Classification Analysis was used with sex, religion, and race-ethnicity built into the model, religion explained very little of the variance and had an insignificant p-value. Both sex and race-ethnicity showed significance at the .01 level, but the MCA association for sex was a weak .22 while ethnic-race categories were more strongly associated at .41. The gender-gap between boys and girls might be explained by the fact that girls’ household labor gave case workers a stronger card in reducing or eliminating their board more than could be done for boys’ farm labor. American whites were the racial-ethnic group that diverged below the grand mean most, but the African-American mean was also higher than the means for the other white ethnic groups. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 206 bus was to depart for camp. That morning she caused Mary Jane to miss the exam, but the case worker countered by having the Friendly Inn hold the bus. She sped out to the Allen’s in her car to pick-up Mary Jane and asked Mrs. Allen “why so much commotion about Mary Jane going to camp?” Mrs. Allen claimed that Mary Jane did not want to go to camp and that she thought her wishes should be considered. The case worker turned to Mary Jane and asked her what she wanted. According to the case notes, Mary Jane said, “I should be delighted to go, because I have not been to camp for several years.” At this the case worker pronounced that the “county would not allow” Mrs. Allen to leave Mary Jane at the home while she enjoyed a vacation. Mrs. Allen defended herself by saying she was planning to take her along, but the case worker asked who would care for her husband, Lew, Carter and the other foster child. The case worker proudly recorded that the “Fos mo. studdered [sic] out that ‘they could stay alone’ and their fos. fa. would be home at night.” The thought o f a home without women was too absurd for the case worker to entertain. The worker told Mary Jane to pack and drove her to the exam. By this time the bus had left, so she drove Maiy Jane out to camp. At the end of the week the case worker drove out again to see if the Friendly Inn could keep Mary Jane at camp for another week. They could not, so she found a second week for her at the Playhouse Camp.20 The case worker was able to disrupt Mrs. Allen’s vacation plans and deny her 20“Family Files,” box 1, folder 1, eldest child, case notes, July and August 1930. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 207 two weeks of Mary Jane’s board while she was at camp. Removing a child from a home even for a short time was a powerful weapon, but it was only the most blunt way to influence foster families. After her time at camp, the same arrangement resumed with Mary Jane doing most o f the household labor and the county paying board. When Mary Jane turned 16 in the spring of 1931, the case worker “demanded the following program” for her care: That every other day ch be relieved from washing supper dishes, that her home work be done after supper instead of early afternoon, when she first returns from school, that ch be allowed to go to a moving picture show once a week...21 Mrs. Allen apparently took this forceful advice without comment, but when the case worker asked Mary Jane about her recreational life some time later she reported that she had “none.” Next, the case worker gave Mrs. Allen a giant chart to schedule daily chores. Mrs Allen put it in the comer and the children reported that they never used it. It was very difficult for case workers to micro-mar.age the ways foster youths would be treated on a daily basis in the home without cooperation from foster parents. Foster parents could not float the social workers powers completely. In late summer o f 1931 Mrs. Allen began boarding men in the foster home. This was both illegal and forced the five children to move into a cramped attic without windows, heat for the winter, or a fire escape. Mary Jane was also approaching “ 17 years old, and is 21 “Family Files,” box 1, folder 1, eldest child, case notes, 4-29-31, 10-19-31, 10-29-31, 11-4-31, and 12-3-31. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 208 beginning to think of boys and to enjoy their company.”22 Alarmed by the multiple issues o f law, safety, and sexuality, the case worker demanded that Mrs. Allen either surrender the children or end her boarding business. After a few months of stalling and deception Mrs. Allen sent the adult boarders away.23 According to the case worker, by her middle teenage years Mary Jane had become a “very pleasing person, tall, beautiful, friendly” and “quite popular with the boys. Whenever there is a neighborhood party, she is accompanied to the party by several boys, usually...” Yet, she had the responsibilities of “undressing, bathing, and putting chn to bed every night” while Mrs. Allen was away from the home at “car parties” and lunches with her friends. Mary Jane told the case worker, “I do not get to visit my girl friends any more.” These generational relations o f labor inverted the cult o f youth and bothered the case worker to a great extent. So, after Mary Jane turned eighteen years old, the case worker enforced the age limit policy for board placement 22“Family Files,” box 1, 1st folder, eldest child, case notes, August, September, and October 1931. 23 The placement power could also be used temporarily as it had been with Mary Jane’s camp episode. In the summer of 1932 the case worker removed Lew and Carter to temporary farm placement while Mrs. Allen was on vacation. When she returned to find that she had lost their board payments for the summer, the case worker lightly explained that the opportunity came up at the last minute. Then she bated the foster mother by asking in an off-hand way if Mary Jane would like to join them for the summer. Mrs. Allen “flew into a rage” and threatened to throw all the foster children out at once and replace them with adult boarders. Before the yelling could continue, Mr. Allen came into the room and told both women that he wanted the children back when the school year started. Mary Jane left for a two-week respite on a farm with her brothers where neither household nor agricultural labor was demanded.“Family Files,” box 1, 1st folder, eldest child, case notes 7-12-32. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 209 by moving her into a wage home which would allow her to remain in school. To the case worker’s satisfaction, Mary Jane’s responsibilities were unusually light at the wage placement home and she was allowed the proper liberties o f youth, “... to read, recreate, attend picture shows, go out with fos. mo. and really enjoy herself...”2* Mary Jane was a good student and a cooperative youth. Thus, even though she was eighteen and placed in a wage home during the summer, the case worker arranged board payments in the fall of 1933, so she could complete her final high school semester. But, in the middle of August Mary Jane was found to be pregnant. The case worker asked her if she wanted the “boy arrested or go immediately to the boy’s home and talk things [over] with his aunt.” Mary Jane said she wanted to speak to him herself. The expectant father was a high school student and a fellow foster child named Walter. He told Mary Jane, the foster parents, and case workers that getting married was “the only gentlemanly and logical thing that could be done.” But in the case worker’s estimation, Walter could not support a family and thus he was an obstacle on Mary Jane’s road to a proper life. As foster case workers did with most failed male breadwinners, she went to extraordinary lengths, including lying and trickery, to keep Walter away from Mary Jane and his child. He resisted these efforts by legitimating his devotion and love for Mary Jane. To do this he also called upon the discursive resources o f the male breadwinner ideal to fortify his sense that he was 24“Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, eldest child, case notes, 3-14-33,3-14-33,4-12-33, 5-10-33, 6-8-33,6-23-33, and 8-1-33. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 210 partially responsible for the child within Mary Jane and that he should defend their reputations by giving the child a name.2s Soon after the news of the pregnancy broke, Mary Jane’s foster father and Walter almost came to blows when he denied Walter the right to see Mary Jane. The case worker told the foster parents they were going about things the wrong way and to “leave the handling of the case to the agency.” Her way was more subtle. She called Mary Jane and Walter into a conference. Here they were met by a panel of experts including a lawyer and a social worker from the Humane Society, the agency that organized adoption and fostering of babies. Mary Jane was asked to confess the nature and amount of her sexual relations. The lawyer questioned the expecting parents about how they intended to support the coming child. Walter responded by saying that “it was his object to marry Mary Jane, that her child might be a legitimate child and that Mary Jane might be protected from the public criticism that he was sure would be heaped upon her.” The lawyer answered back that “under no consideration would the Human Society or CCCWB entertain a thought of his marrying anybody until he proved that he was competent to support and take care of a wife.” They demanded that Walter sign an agreement to pay for Mary Jane’s “confinement.” The professionals wanted Mary Jane to stay away from Walter, give up her baby, become a single worker, abstain from pre-marital sex, and marry an employed man who was 25“Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, eldest child, case notes, 6-9-33 and 8-17/19-33. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 211 earning a family wage. This would allow her to re-enter the ideal life course for fostered girls, but Mary Jane and Walter had other ideas.26 After the meeting broke up, the young couple held a separate consultation with the case worker and repeated that they intended to be married. They said Walter could drop out of school and look for work, but they wanted Mary Jane’s board payments to be continued so she might finish high school. In early December of 1933 when Mary Jane gave birth to a baby girl, she realized that her foster parents had agreed with the case worker to keep Walter away from the baby and thus demanded to be moved to a new home. Unfortunately the case worker simply moved her to a new home with a foster mother who agreed with her ideas about what was best for Mary Jane. Worse still, during the move Walter was unable to secure Mary Jane’s new address. He came to the case worker’s home in a panic, “said something very arrogant and imprudent” and demanded Mary Jane’s new address. The case worker refused to release the information and told him to leave. She told him that “she would try and reach him through the court.” This reference to her power to take his child or jail him for non-support enraged Walter. The worker slammed the door in his face. He continued to shout from her front steps, denounced the agency, and yelled that “he had gone from under their jurisdiction and was out for himself now and that he was independent of any agency and that he had to take care of 26“Family Files,” box 1, 1st folder, eldest child, case notes, 10-16-33. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 212 his baby and that he was going to see [them].” He went on to list the “things he hated about social workers...” Days later Walter had not been able to find Mary Jane and so he called to apologize, but the social worker refused to speak with him. So, he slipped into the child welfare office when the case worker was away from her desk and tricked an uninformed supervisor into surrendering Mary Jane’s address.27 That night Walter went to the place where the case worker was hiding Mary Jane. He overcame the new foster mother’s objections and stayed for hours at Mary Jane’s bedside. As he left, the foster mother took him aside and quietly told him he should not stay more than a few minutes because “it taxed the nerves of the child and also disturbed the mother’s rest.” Walter countered this feminine tact with an “ugly answer and slammed the door as he went out.” He returned each of the next three nights for long visits. The foster mother and case worker decided together that he would not be allowed in the home unless he had a pass from the agency. They could not have “some one running into the room, when it was raining and snowing... [they feared] it might cause a draft and possibly might give both the baby and the mother pneumonia.” He was not able to obtain a pass and the door to Mary Jane was locked to him once again.28 Frustrated, Walter stayed away for a couple of weeks. During this time old 27 “Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, eldest child, case notes, 12-1-33, 12-9-33, 12-1433, and 12-15-33. 28 “Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, eldest child, case notes, 12-15-33 and 1-12-34. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 213 love letters to Mary Jane were discovered by a former foster mother (the one that followed Mrs. Allen). She reported to the case worker that the letters “explained everything” and “were very incriminating as far as Walter was concerned and [they] proved that both Walter and Mary Jane had used her house in an unbecoming way...” Mrs. Telling would not reveal which rooms they used nor the precise sexual details. With peaked interest, the case worker paid a visit to Mary Jane and “tried to draw out of ch some of the things that were said in the letter and the reason why...” She instructed her “for more than an hour about using her will power and not allowing her mind to dwell on sex relations and that it was only a part of life and not the whole.” Mary Jane did not want to share her sexual secrets. The worker “hoped that later on, ch will be very frank and tell of the immoral things that Walter had proposed to her.”29 After another week passed, Mary Jane said she was hurt that Walter had left her and still the case worker did not tell her he was locked out. Before the end of January he succeeded in forging a pass from the agency and getting the foster mother to unlock the door. When he came into Mary Jane’s room, an argument soon broke out between them, but Walter was able to explain himself. The social worker called their make-up “childish and silly.” In the spring Walter dropped out from East Technical High School and took a job. He asked again if the case worker would keep board payments coming, if he and 29“Family Files,” box 1, 1st folder, eldest child, case notes, January 1934. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 214 Mary Jane got married and he moved into the foster home. The case worker told him that the county “would not by any means continue to pay Mary Jane’s upkeep with the foster family and that the case would likely be transferred to the Associated Charities [a poverty relief agency] with [the county] keeping custody o f the baby.” The case worker berated Walter for being so foolish as to, “not understand why the CCCWB would not continue to take care of Mary Jane if he could scram around and take care o f himself. Vis. tried to explain to him that he was the father of his ch and that if he were willing to get married, he must assume a married man’s responsibility.”30 Walter had repeatedly professed that he too wanted “a married man’s responsibility” through work, but the jobs he could get were temporary or poor paying. In February he found work as an automobile mechanic, but by April he was working at a car wash. Knowing that slight wages would not carry the load for the family, Mary Jane and Walter delayed marriage and suffered the case worker’s interference. Walter refused to be wamed-ofF by deception, threats, and angry lectures. In August of 1934, the young couple asked one last time if financial support could be continued after they married. The case worker said no once again, but did not say she would try to take their child. So, the next month when Walter got a job as a musician in a local night club, Mary Jane ran away and married him. The club was soon closed down for operating without a liquor license and he lost his job. The case 30“Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, eldest child, case notes, January to April 1934. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 215 worker tracked them down and “was surprised to find the baby asleep on a bed that had nothing but a soiled mattress, no linens, no covers, no pillows. The only thing in the room was this mattress and bedstead and a dresser with an odd mirror hanging above it and Walter’s wardrobe trunk and his guitar.”31 Withholding board payments and placement was one of a social workers most powerful weapons. Mary Jane, Walter, and their child suffered under its use. Their and Josephine’s stories reveal that case workers went to great efforts to foster girls who would remain chaste, unmarried, and willingly work in wage-earning jobs. Domestic service was an easy way to meet these requirements simultaneously and it TABLE 6.4 Girls' Living Arrangements at Discharge by Race Youths’ life-course status at their discharge from custody (usually 18 to 21) AfricanAmerican Girls White Girls unknown or deceased I (5 %) 0 (0 %) under state program 2 (9 %) 3 (11%) single, no children 4 (19%) 22 (82%) j created own family 14 (67 %) 2 (7 %) • “Under State Program” includes military service, federal work programs, state mental institutions, jails and reformatories. The Pearson’s Chi-Squared returned a p-value of .00000 for youths’ lifc-course by race and sex. Cramer’s V association was .4385 at a p-value of .00000. See Table 6.6 for the boys’ frequencies. would also prepare them for the unpaid labor of mothering when they were older. These stories also show that foster mothers and girls did not passively accept guidance 31“Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, eldest child, case notes, August-October 1934. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 216 from case workers. Josephine strung her board payments out to the maximum age of her eligibility and kept the case worker ignorant of insurance monies that otherwise would have been used for board. Hiding the insurance policy was not merely a way to maintain board, but it was a way to control the money necessary to get out o f the exploitative labor relations of the Cozy “school” and open a beauty shop of her own. Josephine may have also taken solace in the bond that formed with her uncle against the case workers; it may have been a way for her to confirm a tie to her “own people.” Mrs. Allen formed an alliance with Mary Jane (or maintained enough control over her) for over seven years that kept board payments coming even though she was TABLE 6.5 Employment Status at Discharge by Race and Sex Youth’s employment status at their discharge from custody (usually ages 18 to 21) AfricanAmerican Girls White Girls AfricanAmerican Boys White Boys unknown 1 0 (0 %) 1 (7 %) 2 unemployed and not in school 17 (81% ) 7 (26 %) 3 (20 %) 12 (27%) in school or training 1 (5 %) 2 (7 %) 0 (0 %) 7 (15%) work program 0 (0%) 0 (0 %) 1 (7 %) 3 (7 %) military service 0 (0%) 0 (0 %) 4 (26 %) 3 (7%) (5 %) (4%) private employment 2 (9 %) 18 (67 %) 6 (40 %) 18 (40%) •The frequency difference of African-American girls’ employment status was great enough to make for significant bi-variable Pearson’s Chi Square p-values at .05 for race and sex. Cramer’s V concurred with p-values o f .012 and .056 and associations of .318 and .264 for race and sex respectively. We can be confident that the measured differences for African-American foster girls are not a matter of chance. clearly doing the work o f domestic servants placed on a wage basis. This allowed Mary Jane to avoid a wage placement as a live-in domestic servant. However, as she Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 217 approached the end of high school, the question of what occupation she prepared to undertake confronted her? For most fostered African-American girls, the answer was none (see Tables 6.2 , 6.5, and 6.10). As table 6.5 shows o f the twenty-one AfricanAmerican foster girls sampled, only four remained single dependents or boarders in households at the case closing. Fourteen married to bring their cases to a close; sue of these were married with children. As chart 6.4 and 6.5 show white girls (offered better opportunities) were more able to conform to the individualist pattern. AfricanAmerican girls were virtually restricted to placement as domestic servants. Because they had little interest in this option, they rejected it and created families of their own even though it meant losing financial assistance. LEW AND DEAN: Resisting and Enduring Therapeutic Treatment The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a headline in December of 1927 that read, “3 Young Rebels Flee Psychology: boys 9, follow girl 7, skip from Child Welfare Clinic.” The “Rebels” were foster children subjected to a psychological study against their will. After fleeing the clinic, they found a five dollar bill on a park bench and used it to buy food. This money lasted a few days, but when they got hungry the boys surrendered. The girl held out a few days longer. A doctor at the clinic explained these events as the result of a “runaway complex” that spread among the patients and culminated in waves of attempted escapes. Using diagnostic labels to obscure political acts is a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 218 trademark characteristic of therapeutic outlooks.32 In this case it allowed the doctor to avoid questions of power by making them irrelevant and dismissed any objection to the politics of his study, the clinic, and the psychiatric profession. The reporter offered an alternative explanation. The children did not want the doctors to “probe into their subconscious minds” and thus they escaped and were now “sought by police as rebels from modem psychiatry.”33 By calling the children “rebels” and evoking the image of police pursuit with a bit of humor, the reporter provided a way for newspaper readers to comprehend the escape as a demand for self-determination and thus as a political act. As in the story of the “rebels from modem psychiatry,” therapeutic language and concepts were used to neutralize Lew Johnson’s and Dean Sorrento’s rebellions against the programs that case workers constructed for them. More than their siblings, they struggled in school and were assigned low I.Q.’s by psychologists who predicted bleak occupational futures for them. As Tables 6. 7 and 6.9 suggest, intelligence test scores were an important factor in the ways case workers decided how much education a child would receive, and what type of vocational advice and support they would be offered. In fact, only two pieces of information were typed in red ink amid the black-inked foster case notes: juvenile court actions and I.Q. scores. When 32 See page note 9, page 8-9 of this study for the therapeutic outlook defined. 33 “Family Files,” box 2, 18th folder, correspondence, “3 Young Rebels Flee Psychology,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 4,1927, 6A. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 219 paging through the notes one can not miss either one. Only once was a test score found in normal black ink, and in this instance it was circled in pencil with the word “red,” scribbled next to it. Youths assigned lower I.Q.’s were less likely to receive a vocational interview. If they did, it was often an exercise in justifying their removal from regular schools into “special classes”, work programs, or job placement. Youths such as Lew and Dean rebelled against this course of action and were forced onto farm wage placements. When they rebelled further, they were punished by being put under tighter forms of state control in a work camp and a mental institution respectively. Their stories make plain that low test scores were not the “cause” of their troubles, but that tests served as key cultural levers that case workers and teachers pulled to rationalize the limited training afforded these boys, to forget the horrendous economic conditions they faced, and to dismiss their resistance to professional authority. Lew Johnson was a troublesome child. In the second grade he refused to admit that he was in the same grade as his younger brother. The case worker tried to comer him with logic to the following effect: Are all the children in the same class in the same grade? Yes. Is Carter in your class? Yes. Then is not Carter in the same grade as you? No, Carter is younger than me. Such obstinate talk annoyed Lew’s teachers and social workers a great deal and often led to a series o f punishments, retaliatory crimes, and harsher punishments. One day the teacher locked Lew in a closet for being naughty. In the darkness he found a pair of scissors and cut the buttons off the teacher’s coat. The principal promptly called in Mr. Allen, Lew’s Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 220 foster father, to strike the boy, which he readily did. Violence against Lew by adults punctuated his power struggles against them, but the problems would continue. Soon after the button incident, Lew reportedly cut up his classmates’ school work, clothes, and hair. For this Mrs. Allen whipped him and told him that Santa Claus would not bring him any presents. This worked during that month between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but in the next spring he began skipping school.34 Lew’s case worker, foster parents, and teachers were too consumed with punishing his transgressions to provide much of an education for him. He was the leader of a “gang” o f children who ran about the neighborhood. One day Lew received a beating for stealing a small amount of change from his foster parents to buy candy for the gang. After this he learned to make a little money hustling on the streets and concealed the little toys and foods he purchased. In the summer of 1929 at eleven years of age, Lew took on his first regular job doing housework for a neighbor lady earning about 2 dollars a week. The neighborhood gang teased him about doing women’s work. He promptly quit his job, lead the boys to destroy his previous employer’s wooden fence, and joined them in trampling her com garden. About this time the case worker asked Lew about his employment future, he hesitated, and his clever, eavesdropping little brother chimed in, “Lew is going to be a tramp, and do nothing.” Lew denied this but laughed. Lew’s teacher lacked this good humor, but * “Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, second child, case notes, 3-26-26,5-27-26, October and November of 1926, 10-11-27,11-27-27,6-14-29. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 221 echoed Carter’s assessment by saying that Lew thought the “world owed him a living.”35 About this time the school psychologist assigned Lew an I.Q. of 76 and recommended that he be moved to special classes. Between 1929 and the end of his schooling in 1932, Lew was sent to a school for “overaged” boys. His behavior in school did not improve, but now whipping him ceased to be an effective way of punctuating the ongoing struggles. The school’s Principal advised the case worker to discourage him from enrolling when he was fourteen and the worker concurred that “school is out of the question as he has probably reached his learning capacity and too he is so overgrown that it might be more or less fatal to approach him with the idea.” Test scores provided the terminology and categories for the educators and social workers to comprehend their inability to socialize Lew. If his problems were simply a matter of limited brain capacity, forcing the boy into tightly controlled, unpromising labor relations would be justified. As with most boys that failed in school and were unable or too young to find employment in the city, Lew was moved to a wage home placement on a farm. But the farm family was not satisfied with his work and so he was sent back to the city. There he did odd jobs around the neighborhood and found trouble for petty delinquencies. When he turned seventeen in 1934 the county sent 35“Family Files,” box 1, 1st folder, second child, case notes, 7-17-29. 8-6-29, 8-22-29, 10-7-30, and 10-8-30. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 222 him to the Civilian Conservation Corps.36 At the Corps, Lew named Carter his allottee, the person who received his paychecks, and wrote a letter instructing him to take some for pocket money and send the rest back to him in cash. Because Carter was a minor and a ward of the county, the authorities were able to seize the checks each month to pay Carter’s board. Carter asked why Lew had to pay his board. The case worker avoided the question by claiming that it was an “office” decision. So, Lew filled out a form to make Mary Jane, who was now an adult, the new allottee. This way the county could not intercept Lew’s wages and spend them to meet their responsibilities to Carter. Unfortunately, the case worker found out about the pending change of allottee and wrote a letter to the CCC camp requesting “no changes be made regarding the allotment o f Lew Johnson’s, as Mary Jane cannot take care of total expenses of Carter neither can she be depended upon to apply money toward his expenses.” The conflict over Lew’s wages did not go away and six months later in October of 1935, Carter’s foster mother (no longer Mrs. Allen) asked the social worker why Lew’s wages went to Carter’s board. The case worker again hid under the cloak of bureaucracy and said “that [it] would have to be taken care of in the office and that it was absolutely up to the office to dispense with Lew’s money as they see fit.” Just as Josephine’s case worker warned her about sharing income within kin networks and tried to collect her 36 “Family Files,” box 1, 1st folder, second child, case notes, 9-28-34, 11-20-34, and 12-18-34. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 223 life insurance award, Lew’s isolation in the CCC camp would not be complete if he was allowed to share and pass his wages through Carter and Mary Jane.37 The dispute continued even after Lew’s own death of meningitis at the work camp in late October, 1935. The agency buried Lew so efficiently that Carter and Mary Jane were not allowed to plan the funeral. The case worker mocked their protests by noting only “Lord knows what” they might have suggested. Carter’s foster parents supported his request that Lew’s unpaid wages be put toward a drum he needed in order to continue playing with a school band. The case worker stalled by saying the decision was caught up somewhere in the bureaucracy, but later noted that “After several weeks the interest seemed to die down to the extent that it was all applied on Carter’s board and nothing was allowed him to have bought the drum.”3* Intelligence tests are not purely apolitical scientific measures. The particular tests given to foster youths in Cleveland between the world wars appear to have been biased to literary achievement and a social knowledge in tune with urban white middleclass life. Lew’s early exit from school and entrance into a work program was related to his frequent refusal to submit to the authority of others, his low test scores, and his race. These three factors blurred into each other to such an extent that it is folly to imagine them as distinct variables. We do know, however, that mean differences in 37 “Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, third child, case notes, 5-1-35, 10-8-35, 10-29-35; CCRA to CCCWB 3-27-35 and CCCWB to CCRA returned memo. 38 “Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, third child, case notes, November 1935. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 224 I.Q. scores by race were greater than they were by other variables.39 The white mean I.Q. score was 92 and the African-American mean was 85, while mean differences within other demographic groupings were much smaller and it is more likely that they resulted from random chance. As Table 6.6 shows, African-American foster boys continued in state programs after discharge more often than white foster boys. And boys and girls of both races that ended-up under state supervision had been assigned intelligence quotients (79.7) that were almost one standard deviation lower than those given youths who were single with no children at the end of their cases (92.7).40 Low test scores increased the likelihood that professionals could justify removing the child from school which might facilitate entrance into a state work program or institution (see Table 6.9). Ohio laws during this time provided an exemption from compulsory 39 The two-tailed test revealed .048 p-value for I.Q. by race, while by sex the p-value was .627 for the small mean difference 1.5. Catholics scored a mean I.Q. of 90 and Protestants (including African-Americans) scored 89.6 (p=.896). A word of caution is in order before one places too much confidence in the multivariable results that follow. Analysis of Variance in I.Q. scores by race, sex, and vocational counselors recommendation reported a significant probability of three- way interaction at .036. This reassures my intuition that it is unlikely that these variables operated independent of one another as factors influencing LQ. scores. When other factors were built into the analysis, interactions could not be calculated due to the presence of blank cells. Analysis of variance (without interaction tests) for I.Q. score gave p-value of .055 for race with sex, religion, and place of birth in the calculation. MCA revealed and moderate adjusted association coefficient of .35 (for example sex and religion returned adjusted associations of .00 and .09 respectively). The importance of place of birth is difficult to know because all the Southern bom foster youths were African-Americans. These African-Americans did not diverge from Cleveland bom African-Americans in mean I.Q., but without a white Southern counterpart it is difficult to be sure about nativity. Although a large sample may improve confidence, these results suggest that race was more important than all other factors in determining I.Q. scores. 40Two-tailed test p-value = .001 for mean I.Q. by these life-course categories. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 225 TABLE 6.6 Boys’ Living Arrangements and LQ. Scores at Discharge by Race Youths’ life-coursc status at their discharge from custody (usually 18 to 21) African-American Boys frequency mean LQ. LQ. mean above or below race-sex group mean frequency unknown or deceased 2 (13% ) 76 - 7 (1 tested) 4 (9% ) 97 under state program 7 (47 • /.) 79 - 4 (7 tested) 10 (22%) 85 single, no children 3 (20% ) 85 - 2 (3 tested) 31 (69%) % White Boys LQ. I.Q. mean above or below race-sex group mean • 4 (4 tested) -8 (10 tested) • 3 (25 tested) 90 •7 (3 tested) na na 0 (0 %) • “Under State Program” includes military service, federal work programs, state mental institutions, jails and reformatories. Pearson’s chi-squared for frequency differences boys’ living arrangements by race returned a p-value at .0009 and Cramer’s V association was .52 at a p-value of 0009. Thus we can be confident that the frequency differences are not a matter of chance. created own family 3 (20% ) TABLE 6.7 Youths’ Living Arrangements, Educational Outcomes, and LQ. Scores at Discharge Youths' Living Arrangement at Discharge unknown less than 8th grade 8th grade some high school high school graduates some post­ secondary unlc/deceased I 2 0 3 1 0 state program 0 11 2 6 2 1 single, no children 6 5 4 25 15 5 created family 1 1 0 13 4 0 Educational Outcome totals 8(I.Q.=91) 19(LQ.=75) 6 (I.Q.=78) 47 (LQ.=90) 22<LQ.=98) 6(LQ.= 108) • Pearson’s chi-squared for living arrangement by educational outcome gave a p-value = .0074 and Cramer’s V association was .54 with a p-value of .0074. Using high school graduation as a dividing line to create a dichotomous educational outcome variable allows one to run bi-variate analysis with I.Q. They were found to be associated at .41 with a p-value of .000. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 226 education at age fourteen for youths deemed “uneducable.” However, I.Q. tests were not used disproportionately to remove African-American foster boys from high schools. As Table 6.8 shows, with the exception o f their exclusion from post­ secondary education, African-Americans were able to maintain comparable levels of school attendance as their white counterparts. The relatively slight frequency advantage maintained by the white boys shown in the table returned high p-values (not statistically significant at the 1, 5, or 10 percent levels). This means the frequency differences in education by race and sex may have resulted from chance. A larger sample may return more sure results. It seems likely, as the stories of Carter and Thomas below will highlight, that the frequency differences by race are lower in educational outcomes than employment ones because schools were more open to TABLE 6.8 Boys’ Educational Outcomes by Race (number and percentage are additive of all lower educational categories) Educational achievement at discharge African-American Boys White Boys some post high schooling 0 (0 %) 5 at least high school graduates 3 (20%) 12 (26%) at least some high schooling 9 (60 %) 28 (62%) at least completed the 8th grade 10 (67%) 31 (69%) some schooling 14 (87%) 40 (89%) (11%) amount unknown 1 5 •Pearson’s Chi-Squared test for significance of the frequency differences in educational outcome by race and sex reported p-values at unacceptably high values of .34 and .21. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 227 African-Americans than well-paid jobs.41 Statistical methods do not allow one to fully explore the ways in which racism, rejection of authority, and I.Q. scores mixed together in cases like Lew Johnson’s. One way to explore the social significance of Lew’s poor test score performance for the treatment he received in combination with the simultaneous importance of his race and his rebelliousness is to compare Lew’s troubles with those of Dean Sorrento. Dean shared neither Lew’s uncooperative attitude nor his race, but like him, he scored low on intelligence tests and at a critical moment in his life violently rejected the authority of case workers to determine the relations of his labor. Case workers and teachers came to believe his case and his life was hopeless, ignored his wishes and his foster parents’ assessments of his abilities, and worked toward his incarceration. At the age of twelve, after two years in a Catholic orphanage, Dean joined his siblings Thomas and Josephine at the O’Brien’s foster home in 1927. Dean enjoyed life. He “plays hard out of doors every day, rain or shine, cold or hot” with his younger brother or other boys in the neighborhood. By the age of fifteen he kept a workbench in the basement and was doing odd jobs around the neighborhood to earn enough to see a picture show every week. He often treated Josephine and Thomas to candies or fruits. The O ’Briens liked him and the case worker complimented the 41This would explain why the measures of statistical significance report that differences in educational achievement by race were likely a matter of chance, while racial differences in employment outcomes were larger and more reliable. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 228 foster mother because she “does not take Dean too seriously” and allowed him a great deal of freedom.42 School was a more troubling matter for Dean. He had progressed to the fifth grade at St. Vincent DepauPs School before he left the orphanage. That summer the Children’s Aid Society assigned him an intelligence quotient of 58. He was moved to the “Opportunity Class” at Nathaniel Hawthorne school and later to the “Special” class at Orchard School in his middle teens. At Orchard he had nearly perfect attendance and no disciplinary problems, but they tested him again and found an I.Q. of 65. Soon professional predictions began to infringe upon the course of Dean’s life. His teacher informed the case worker that he “will be able to make his own living, eventually, but feels that he should do routine work in a factory.” This was a way of explaining that more school was unnecessary. At the end of the school year, school officials informed the case worker to discourage Dean from enrolling in the fall. Soon Dean turned sixteen and became eligible for a work permit that would remove him from the compulsory education law. His case worker told him to find a job. He walked the neighborhood and downtown stores, but jobs were not easily found in the summer of 1931. Dean did not want to work in a farm wage placement so in the fall he enrolled at the school anyway. Orchard accepted him, but cut off his bus fair to school. His case worker increased his board to cover the difference, but this only lasted a semester before the board of education’s 42“Family Files,” box 1,14th folder, second child, case notes, 05-12-25, 09-20-25, 8-227, 2-27-29, 8-18-30, 10-31-30, and 11-26-30. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 229 “employment counselor” wrote another letter indicating that Dean, a student with near perfect attendance and good behavior, was no longer welcome.43 In January of 1932 the case worker met secretly with the O’Briens to enlist their support in convincing Dean to submit to a farm wage home placement. The case work told the foster parents that it was not Dean’s fault that the job market was depressed, but since work could not be found it was best to keep him busy. They felt badly for the boy, but agreed to encourage the plan. Dean resisted the move for three months by stepping up his efforts to find work and applying for a job through the State-City Employment Bureau. On April 18 he reluctantly went to a farm in nearby Lorain, Ohio. Within three days the farmer telephoned the case worker complaining that when Dean was “given some work to do, he lies down beside it and refuses to go ahead with it.” A few days later the case worker drove out to investigate. Dean repeated, what he had always said, that he did not like farm work. He wanted to return to the O’Briens and his siblings, and would do any type of work in the city. Then he said he was sorry for his disobedience and began to cry. The case worker demanded that he follow the farmer’s instructions and claimed that if Dean had made his wishes known reasonably he could have soon arranged a way for him to return to the city. The case worker left telling Dean to be cooperative and patient. Once back in the city the case worker called a meeting o f the “Adolescent Committee” o f no less 43“Family Files,” box 1 ,14th folder, second child, case notes, 11-6-30,12-23-30,4-1731,1-12-32, and 1-14-32. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 230 than eight professionals. They decided that Dean would either accept another farm placement or be probated to the Institution for the Feeble-Minded in Columbus. A couple weeks later Dean’s patience with life on the farm ran thin. He rebelled by breaking farm equipment and using the drinking-well for a toilet. The farmer demanded that Dean be remove from his property and action followed quickly on the eighth of June 1932.44 Once Dean was contentedly back with the O’Briens, the case worker visited infrequently and bided his time until court proceedings. Dean was on his own to find a job and could only get temporary unskilled positions. Before his rebellion his employment problems had been written about in the case notes primarily as a result of the economy. For example, in a letter dated August 14, 1930 the Deputy Clerk of the Humane Society reported to the county case worker that “Dean has shown quite a little initiative in finding odd jobs and with the proceeds, looking after small expenses.” And the case worker had joined this assessment and repeated it in his notes. However, after Dean’s bold resistance, his character was reconstructed in a poorer light. He had a “lack of initiative” due to a “slow” mentality. The case worker’s therapeutic world view encouraged him to direct the social criticism inherent in Dean’s rebellion (a rejection of the relations of labor that demanded he live among strangers) inward toward a problem with Dean’s mind. Focusing on the boys’ test scores allowed the 44 “Family Files,” box I, 14th folder, second child, case notes, 5-18-32, 5-24-32, 5-2832, and 6-8-32. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 231 case worker to ignore the ironies of mass unemployment amid droves of willing urban workers like Dean. A problem so constructed was neither economic nor political, but a pathological condition or spot in the brain of the individual. Calling a boy unfit for society in therapeutic terms was a way to lock the meaning of his rebellion away with him when he was carted off to the institution.45 The summer o f 1932 marked the beginning of an extended effort to ascertain the foster parent’s attitudes toward and if possible to enlist their support in the plot to institutionalize Dean. At first the worker merely “suggested” to Mrs. O’Brien that he needed “definite vocational training.” Soon a nameless “institution” in Columbus was introduced into the weekly talks with the O’Briens. And finally the case worker “intimated” to the foster parents that “some sort of institutional placement might be resorted to a little later in order to give Dean some training along the lines o f manual work.” In March of 1933 the case worker sent Dean to the recently founded county vocational guidance department. There he was told he had six weeks to find a job or he would be sent to a farm. Behind the scenes the case worker and vocational counselors exchanged letters to the effect that they had no intention of either sending him to a farm wage-placement or helping him find a city job. They were in fact trying to soften the boys’ expected resistance to institutionalization by making it appear that he had no other options. On March 17 the case worker informed another employment 45“Family Files,” box 1, 14th folder, second child, correspondence at the rear of file is a letter from Humane Society to CCCWB, dated 8-14-30. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 232 counselor, the one who had kicked Dean out of school, that they were beginning probate proceedings. She assured the case worker that “if CCCWB wanted to bring any additional pressure to bear in order to have Dean institutionalized, that the Board of Education would be glad to cooperate with [them] in any way.” The next day papers were filed in Cuyahoga County probate court and Dean was placed on a waiting list for commitment one month later. In his report to the court the social worker claimed that Dean had never accepted work or school, but only wanted “to play.” He would never succeed in any job, because he would throw “temper tantrums” and was “not ‘work-conscious’ and has no desire to be motivated for work.” The case worker claimed that in his professional opinion the Institution for the Feeble-Minded was the only alternative because the boy, “cannot be satisfactorily motivated to take his place in society. It is very doubtful that he could be placed in industry, due to his low mentality.” In short, Dean’s “retardation” prevented him from growing-up in a world of independent actors. Neither Dean and the O’Briens were aware of these proceedings and so the case worker presented his carefully edited version of Dean’s life as an uncontested advocate for his client’s best interests.46 The court was convinced by the social workers arguments, but Dean’s incarceration was delayed because the institution for the feeble-minded was overwhelmed with commitments. In the interim the case worker continued to suggest 46“Family Files,” box 1, 14th folder, second child* case notes, June-August 1932, 3-1733,3-18-33; correspondence, commitment report draft 3-18-33. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 233 during his conversations with the O’Briens that Dean needed a more structured placement. They became suspicious and began defending him. Mrs. O ’Brien claimed the boy was anything but lazy. He helped fix the family car and painted their house in the Summer of 1933. When the Fall came she reported that Dean had scraped together jobs hanging wall paper, painting houses, and servicing neighbors cars. Mrs. O ’Brien asked the case worker to help Dean find steadier work. He agreed, but no vocational counseling followed. At the end of 1933 and throughout 1934 Dean worked as a mason’s laborer, delivered newspapers, and held a series of other short­ term jobs.47 Instead of scheduling Dean for vocational counseling as he assured Mrs. O ’Brien he would, the case worker wrote letters to Dr. Keiser, the superintendent of the Institution for the Feeble-Minded. He detailed Dean’s life history in the most unflattering, misleading terms and pleaded that he be moved up the waiting list. In response to this “favor,” as Dr. Keiser dubbed it, Dean was accepted by the Institution for the Feeble-Minded in January of 1935. Imagine Dean’s bewilderment and frustration when the “training school” that the social worker told him he was going to turned out to be a mental institution. The O ’Briens “complained bitterly” and said they “were going to get him out.” In March they traveled to Columbus. Upon returning, they went to the case worker’s supervisor and said they had interviewed Dr. Keiser who, they claimed, admitted that Dean was 47“Family Files,” box 1,14th folder, second child, case notes, 6-8-33, 7-13-33, 9-21-33, and March 1934. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 234 not “a proper case” for his institution. They informed the supervisor that they had hired an attorney to fight the probate ruling. Under pressure the professionals closed ranks. The case worker sent an emergency telegram to Dr. Keiser to find out what he had “really” told the O’Briens. Keiser cabled back, “D.S. DEFINITELY FEEBLE MINDED WILL NOT RELEASE AT THIS TIME.” The employment counselor from the school district mailed updated summary report to the case worker. When Dean left school, the teacher and the counselor suggested he would end up in a factory job. But, now the report read, “it was the conclusion of the Board of Education that this boy could never take care of himself without supervision and the recommendation was definitely made to the agency that he be sent to the Institution for Feeble-Minded at Columbus.” The day the case worker obtained this supporting report, he wrote a long explanatory letter to Dr. Keiser. He began by quoting Dean’s test scores. The O ’Briens were “well-meaning people,” but ...they cannot understand the difference between feeble-mindedness, insanity and criminality and they feel that Dean is ‘a good boy’ and is ‘locked up with a bunch of nuts.’ They also accuse the Cuyahoga County Child Welfare Board of having railroaded the boy. As a matter of fact, our vocational department has advised that the boy is not placeable in industry and the Board of Education felt very definitely that the boy belonged in the Feeble-Minded-Institution. He concluded by saying that the County would not object to Dean’s release to the O’Briens charge, but reasoned that one day Dean would outlive his foster parents and so “the institution is probably the best place for him.” Keiser wrote back a thank-you letter saying they would consider all they had been told, study and train him, before Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 235 “even considering a trial visit” for the boy outside the institution." After a year behind the walls o f the institution, Dean gathered the courage to escape from the Institution for the Feeble-Minded and found his way back to Cleveland. A few months later the case worker saw him taking lunch in a restaurant. Dean’s hands showed the grime from his job at a tire company. According to the case worker he “was possibly even more greasy than the restaurant... contentedly munching his sandwich and drinking his beer...” As if all previous efforts to cast him out of society should be forgiven and forgotten, the case worker was surprised to find “it very difficult to talk to Dean as he was extremely suspicious that c.w. would attempt to get him back in IFM.” Frustrated that his assurances meant little, the case worker told one last little lie that the “O’Briens were worried about his condition and wanted him examined.” In fact the O’Briens had taken Dean back into their home when he ran away from Columbus. To spite the case worker, Mrs. O’Brien came to his office to tell him that “Dean obtained regular employment at a tire place and probably would become manager of a branch store...” But, she would not give details about his whereabouts because she believed the worker would “interfere with Dean’s adjustment.” Sitting across from him at the diner, the case worker “offered never to see him again if this was his wish.” Dean sat in silence. The case worker left insisting " “Family Files,” box 1,14th folder, second child, case notes, 7-5-34,1-24-35, 2-7-35, 3-7-35,4-2-35, 5-2-35; correspondence, Case Worker to F.L. Keiser, 11-23-34; F.L. Keiser to Case Worker, 11-27-34; Telegram Keiser to Social Worker, 5-21-1935; Board of Education Counselor to Case Worker, 5-21-35; Case Worker to F.L. Keiser, 5-21-35; F.L. Keiser to Case Worker, 5-22-35. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 236 that he “consider the possibility of an examination at Health Center and gave him the address...” Dean moved in with his older sister Josephine who had married a widower with children. A letter from a new case worker dated February 6, 1941 to Dr. Keiser requested a formal end to commitment. Dean got married, had a daughter, and moved with his family into the Starkweather Federal Project. He held steady employment at a tire shop in Cleveland. The O’Briens visited them frequently and regarded “Dean as thoroughly competent to conduct his own affairs.” In March the county‘s “FeebleMinded Committee” formally liberated him.49 At key moments in their youths, more than any of their siblings, Lew and Dean refused to yield to the authority of professionals. If Lew was just plain stubborn, Dean’s misbehavior was more specific. He did not want to be separated from his siblings and the foster family who loved him. Dean did not want to make it on his own, if it mean losing his sense o f rootedness. In both cases the social worker’s cure was to sever these young men from their networks of support. Intelligence tests played a crucial role in justifying this action against them. As Dean’s case showed, the power of the professional classes was formidable, but not absolute. Even when they were able to close ranks and overcome the O’Brien’s objections, Dean’s own persistence outlasted them. After enduring great punishment he was able to slip through their grasp, reconnect himself with his kin, and start his own family. But, it is 49 Family Files,” box 1,14th folder, second child, case notes, 8-13-36; family record, 99-36, 12-22-37, 2-5-41, and 3-15-41; correspondence, Case Worker to F.L. Keiser, 2-6-41. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 237 important to remember that Dean’s ability to sustain his escape from custody was contingent upon his employment, not within a community-based economy, but as an individual wage-eamer. His formal repatriation to society was justified in terms of his status as a male breadwinner providing for a dependent wife and child. Only then could they say he was “competent to conduct his own affairs.” THOMAS AND CARTER: Scientific Vocational Guidance and the Occupational Hierarchy Formal vocational guidance from psychologists was an established part of the services provided to foster youths in Cuyahoga county by 1934. The vocational counselor possessed an arsenal o f weapons for therapeutic work; among them the intelligence test was the most powerful. The mostly male vocational counselors also added a second opinion to reinforce the often female case workers plans for the youths. The vocational interview became a way to lower a youth’s expectations in a one-on-one session without risking the case worker’s supposedly friendly relationships with youths. It was a ‘good cop-bad cop’ strategy. Thomas and Carter were the only Sorrento and Johnson children young enough to face the vocational guidance department when it was fully developed. Like the racial gap in opportunities afforded Josephine and Mary Jane, their stories detail the ways scientific vocational guidance was used to maintain gross racial disparities of wealth and prestige within the workingclasses. So too their stories also tell us that there was more to vocational guidance Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 238 than maintaining racial hierarchy. Youths came to vocational interviews and faced psychological tests alone. The simple act of confronting a defining event (like determining one’s mental prowess) within a professional clinic rather than amid a paternal community through a religious rite of passage, carried enormous and radically individualistic implications. Like their older brothers and sisters, these younger boys did not simply take punishment without fighting back. By so doing they and their peers helped define the limits of professional power and shaped the meanings of individualism. Like his older brother Dean, Tommy was placed in the “Opportunity” classes at Orchard School when he was nine years old after he had scored an I.Q. of 79. The teachers felt “there is very little that they can do for Tommy [at the school], because of his rather low mentality.” Nevertheless Tommy was promoted to John Marshall Junior High School in January of 1936 at the age of thirteen. He earned average grades in junior high school and wanted to be advanced to West Technical High School in the Fall o f 1937. Because of his low intelligence test score, his case worker thought his performance in school was a fluke and that he should enroll in a job training program. Tommy had a low opinion of such programs since one of his friends had to settle for a job driving a truck after completing training for a more skilled occupation. In the wake o f Dean’s troubles the O’Briens were quicker to support his younger brother resistance to the case worker’s plans. In a foster family meeting with the case worker his foster mother (now Mr. O’Brien’s eldest daughter who had taken Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 239 her deceased mother’s role in the home) said that she wanted Tommy to be able to “earn a living” and hope he might be able to go to college. Mr. O’Brien slapped Tommy on the back and exclaimed “there’s not a damn thing wrong with this boy.” Outnumbered in the foster home, the case worker tactfully held back his belief that high school was a waste of time for the boy and suggested that a visit to the vocational counselor might help Tommy figure out what he wanted to do.50 Following this advice, Tommy visited the vocational guidance office in August at the age of 15. The case worker asked the vocational counselor to determine if four years o f high school would be worthwhile in the boy’s case. The vocational counselor subjected him to a series of tests. After the vocational guidance department was TABLE 6.9 LQ. and Vocational Guidance for Foster Youths vocational counselor’s recommendation to case worker number of cases LQ. mean standard deviation min max did not receive a vocational interview 22 82 17 48 118 placement in work program or special school 13 84 9 66 101 job placement 27 90 15 66 114 complete or continue high school 23 97 11 61 113 enroll in post- secondary school 5 107 12 94 120 no recommendation 3 7 90 94 *Two-tailed test revealed an association at .4173 at p=.000; Spearman’s Correlation Coefficient was .4334 at p=.000 102 50“Family Files,” box 1, folder 14, third child, case notes, 5-25-31,10-2-31, 11-17-31, and 3-17-37. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 240 founded, two-thirds of foster youths were given four or more different psychological tests. For their older siblings who turned sixteen by 1932, less than 1 in 10 youths received four or more tests. Tommy told the counselor that he wanted to finish school and study “diesel engineering” and “cabinet making.” He surprised the vocational counselor by scoring 92 on the intelligence test. This score was average for white foster boys, but he was “rather dull” relative to the population as a whole. In addition to his low mentality, the counselor pronounced that it was important to keep the boy under close supervision because personality test revealed that he was a “lone-wolf type” and he had “a bad muscle in his left eye which gives him a rather sinister appearance.” Table 6.9 suggests that foster youths had to score a little higher than had Tommy, if they were to be encouraged to finish high school. The counselor showed him an age-grade chart and told him that “according to the schedule” he would be too old to complete school.51 Tommy enrolled in high school anyway during the fall of 1937, but he admitted to the case worker that the vocational interview had deflated his confidence that he could graduate. In the spring of 1938 he asked for help finding a summer job, but the case worker offered him only a Civilian Conservation Corp placement. Tommy resisted this option until the spring of 1939 when he shipped to Moapa Nevada and was put to work building dams. Entering the work program ended the debate about 51 “Family Files,” box 1, folder 14, third child, vocational report, 8-31-37 and 9-29-37; case notes, 2-16-37 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 241 his schooling. During 1939 the case worker wrote him letters telling grim stories about boys who came home and could not find work and had to spend their savings. In 1940 the case worker applauded him for “having the manhood to re-enlist for a second six months,” and encouraged him to continue to re-enlist until he could assure that he would have a job waiting when he returned. He should not base his decisions upon the needs or resources of kin. “I am glad,” wrote the case worker, “you are keeping in touch with your brother, but I would like to point out that you ought to make up your own mind what you really want to do, and what you think will help you most.”52 Tommy stayed in the CCC until he was 18 in June of 1940 and returned to the O’Briens. In 1940 and 1941 he held jobs making mats for the National Youth Administration, making laundry tags for the National Bias Fabric Company, working for the Collins Machine and Stamping Company, and filling ice bags for the Telling Belle Vernon company. His case was closed in May of 1942 after he had held a job in the ink mixing shop of the Braden-Stuphen Ink Company for six months. In federal work programs and through private companies, Tommy continually asked for training in more skilled positions. He did not always pass key entrance exams. But after he had submitted to the demand that he separate from the O’Briens and become a man under the industrial discipline o f the CCC, his case worker and vocational counselor 52“Family Files,” box 1, folder 14, third child, correspondence, 1939-1940. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 242 repeatedly found good job opportunities for him. Mr. O’Brien also helped change the case worker’s understanding of Tommy’s mentality by explaining to him that “Tommy was not bright and would never be very smart but that he was steady and dependable and got along with people.” The case worker recorded Mr. O ’Brien’s assessment as a way to praise occupational success. Tommy’s status as a semi-skilled breadwinner transformed the meaning o f his test scores in the case worker’s mind.53 The shift in the case worker’s understanding of Tommy was not just a result of the boy’s vocational success, but was part of his access to it. As with most African-Americans, Carter Johnson was not afforded the vocational opportunities given to Tommy Sorrento and thus he could not easily cast himself or be cast by others as the virtuous male breadwinner (see table 6.10). When he was taken from the Rhodes in 1925 at the age of six, the Humane Society case worker described Carter as a favorite of all who knew him. He explored every new thing he found, spoke with an endearing “sort of lisp”, and was the kind of boy who would sit in every open seat on the bus just to experience the differences. When he began the fourth grade at the age of nine he told the case worker he wanted to be a lawyer. Always a good student, Carter gave words aloud to Mrs. Allen when she was learning short hand. He called it helping her with her lessons and when she finished he 53“Family Files,” box 1, folder 14, third child, case notes, 1939-1941. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 243 would say to her, “Now, I’ve helped you with your lessons, you help me with mine.”54 TABLE 6.10 Highest Vocational Training Afforded Foster Youths by Race and Sex Vocational Course African-American Girls African-American Boys White Girls White Boys unclear 2 (9%) 3 (20% ) 4 (15%) 10 (22%) unskilled training 19 (91%) 8 (53% ) 17(63%) 14 (31 %) skilled-semiskilled training program 0 (0%) 3 (20% ) 1 (4%) 9 (20 %) 0 (0%) college-professional 5 (18%) 12 (27%) 1 (7% ) * Pearson’s Chi-Squared p-value was .00001 and Cramer’s V association .41 at .0001 p-value. After Mary Jane left the Allen’s, Carter “inherited” her chores making beds, washing dishes, caring for babies. He did not tolerate the responsibility well and the case worker supported his wish to continue in an alternative board placement so that he could enroll in a city high school. Just days prior to the discovery of Mary Jane’s pregnancy he joined her in the same foster placement. The case worker thought the move was a great improvement. He left the demands of the Allen household for a room at the Telling’s filled with the commodities of youth. His room maximized privacy and “impressed one as being the home o f a college student.” In the place o f a bed was a “modem English couch, that is folded up with three handsome pillows.” Next to this was a large mahogany desk, a magazine rack, reading lamp, and “morris” chair. A family living-room might be superfluous for a boy with such a place. Carter u “Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, third child, Humane Society Transfer Summary; case notes, 8-22-29 and 12-3-29. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 244 liked his freedom at the Telling’s and said he hoped the placement would last. But, when Mrs. Telling telephoned the case worker’s supervisor to complain that the worker had intruded on a gathering of family and friends, she punished the foster mother by moving Carter to a new home. At the next foster home with the Williams’ family, he was the only child and his place with them became permanent. The Williams introduced Carter more fully than before to middle-class family life. Mr. Williams was a Boy Scout organizer and he involved Carter in scouting and paid his dues, uniforms, and transportation costs. They took him to movies and gave him pocket money. Most importantly they supported his extra-curricular activities such as high school band and track and his desire to graduate in search of good paying jobs.55 Mrs. Williams was a good advocate. She challenged the social workers manipulation of Lew’s wages and bought the disputed drum for Carter after their efforts to get Lew’s unpaid wages had failed. When Carter turn fifteen in the summer of 1935, Mrs. Williams asked the case worker to help him find a job. The case worker responded by trying to shift the task to Mr. Williams who worked for a coal company. Mrs. Williams quickly pointed out that it “would be impossible as the foster father is the only Colored help at this coal company.” Carter attended East Technical High School the next year. In the spring o f 1936 he and Mr. Williams studied for and took a civil service exam to become 55“Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, third child, case notes, 2-14-33,5-10-33,7-9-33,818-33,9-1-33, 2-13/14-34,4-6-34, 5-10-34,5-22-34, July of 1934, and 10-6-34. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 245 meter readers. Carter scored well on the exam and was eligible for appointment in January of 1937. If appointed he could earn up to eighty-five dollars a month and finish high school at night. He told the case worker that a “job with the government was his ambition; that if he had this type o f job, he could take care of it and could be assured that he would have a job that would provide him with an income ample to take care o f his needs in the future.” In the mean time he looked for a summer job, but found only temporary positions.56 The civil service job as a meter reader never came through. Carter continued to earn B ’s and C’s in the eleventh grade at East Technical High School and sold newspapers on the streets. In 1937 he washed dishes at a neighborhood restaurant and in July went for testing at the vocational guidance department. He scored only an 83 on the intelligence test. Some months later in the follow-up vocational interview the counselor told him he would need to get a day job to pay his own board at age eighteen in December. Carter did not like this idea and told the counselor that in his Senior year at East Tech they allowed students to attend morning classes and get out early for afternoon jobs. He explained that he had passed a civil service exam once and was preparing to take another to qualify to appointment as a mail carrier. In his report the vocational counselor noted surprise because, “according to psychometric results we would not expect child to have reached the present level in school.” Thus, 56“Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, third child, case notes, 1-15-35,3-20-35,4-2-35,51-35, 7-12-35, 2-8-36,4-3-36, Summer of 1936,9-29-36, 11-2-36, and 3-11-37. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 246 he must be “putting forth a tremendous effort in order to keep up with his work,” and did not have the mental capacity to carry out his plans. The counselor told Carter, TABLE 6.11 Vocational Counselors’ Advice to Foster Youths by Race and Sex vocational counselors’ guidance AfricanAmerican Girls AfricanAmerican Boys White Girls White Boys no report 9 (43 %) 3 (20 %) 7 (26 %) 16 (36 %) leave school for job 8 (38 */.) 4 (27 %) 6 (22 %) 5 (11%) no advice recorded 0 (0% ) 2(13% ) 0 (0% ) 2 (4% ) focus on 1 vocation 3 (14%) 5 (33 %) 7 (26 %) 16(36% ) encourage present or higher goals 1 (5%) 1 (7 %) 7 (26 %) 6 (13%) * Pearson’s Chi-Square returned a p-value of .07 and Cramer’s V association was .24 at a p-value of .07. These significance values are higher than we might like, but the chance of the differences in frequency resulting from random sampling are still less than 10 percent “you must realize that the vocational field for a Colored boy is very limited so in discussing what you would like to be, keep that in mind.”57 Carter and Thomas were hardly the only foster youth discouraged from pursuing their goals during the vocational interview. Counselors explicitly recorded that they thought their clients were too ambitious more than a fifth of the time. Table 6.11 shows that African-American boys and girls were more likely to be encouraged to leave school for jobs and less likely to be encouraged to seek higher goals. Counselors used often used therapeutic terms to dismiss the youth’s goals as improper, but they 57“Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, third child, vocational report 7-24-37 and 10-2-37. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 247 did so disproportionately when dealing with African-Americans. Table 6.12 suggests that white youths’ vocational problems were more likely to be cast in terms of the depressed economy and thus the responsibility for them could be construed as social and political. On the other hand, African-American youths’ problems were construed more often as a matter of improper previous vocational tracking. The youths themselves, as Table 6.13 records, did not lower their vocational expectations based on their race and sex prior to vocational counseling. By dashing dreams in the interviews, counselors helped maintain a race-based occupational hierarchy. This was necessary because some youths, like Carter, took the individualism inherent in county policies to mean that they might “make something” of themselves. About two out of TABLE 6.12 Vocational Counselors* Diagnoses of the Youths* Vocational Problem by Race and Sex Vocational Counselor’s Assessment of the Youths’ Problem to Case Worker AfricanAmerican Girls AfricanAmerican Boys White Girls White Boys no report 9 (43%) 3 (20 %) 7 (26 %) 16 (36 %) none given 0 (0%) 1(7%) 1 (4 %) 0 (0%) improper vocational goal 10 (48 %) 9 (60 •/.) 9 (33 %) 17 (38 •/.) personal or case work problem 2 (9%) 0 (0 %) 2 (7 %) 1 (2%) labor market problem or no 0 (0%) 2 (14 %) 8 (30 %) 11(24%) problem * Pearson’s Chi-Squared returned a p-value of .06 and Cramer’s V association was .27 with a .06 p-value. three o f youths (regardless of race and sex) said they wanted to join the ranks of skilled-semiskilled laborers or better. Vocational guidance allowed professionals to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 248 encourage an ethic of social mobility in some youths and suppress it in others. TABLE 6.13 The Vocational Goals Voiced by Foster Youths by Race and Sex Youths’ Goal AfricanAmerican Girls AfricanAmerican Boys White Girls White Boys no goal reported 8 (38%) 3 (20 %) 6 (22 %) 13(29%) rejected goals 0 (0% ) 0(0) 2 (7 %) 4 (9%) unskilled 1 (5% ) 1(7% ) 1 (4 %) 2 (4% ) skilled-semiskilled 2 (10%) 9(60% ) 9 (33 %) 14(31 %) professionalbusiness-artistic 10 (47 %) 2(13% ) 9 (33 %) 12(27% ) * Pearson’s Chi-Squared and Cramer’s V gave high p-values at .21. Thus there is an unacceptably high probability that there is no relationship between youth’s goals, race, and sex. If there were a relationship it remains likely that youths of both races and sexes usually hoped to be skilled laborers, professionals, business persons, or artists. Carter’s vocational interview capped a series of conversations that his case worker hoped would keep his ambitions down. The case worker tried to get the Williams to take more children, but they refused. The case worker hoped adding children would lessen the attention Carter received because the “fos. mo. is very indulgent and spoils ch ..” Carter told his case worker that he was part of the Williams family and would always be their son and claimed “if he wanted to do anything or be anything or go anywhere” he must “cut loose from [his family o f origin] and try and make something out of himself.” Given the guidance policies o f the agency this should have been model talk from a foster child. But as the vocational counselor pointed out, what was true for white boys was not necessarily so for “Colored” ones. The case Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 249 worker scolded Carter and told him, “he should not get too egotistical and that he should always remember his relatives and friends and that above everything, not to love himself too much; that he should not put too high an estimate on his own value." This was one of the most damaging racial contradictions of American life. When youths’ like Lew and Mary Jane rejected the case workers’ definitions of success, they were severely punished. When their younger brother Carter bought into the middleclass ethic, he was held down and maligned for getting too uppity. From his experiences as a foster youth, Carter had learned to endure verbal assaults and manipulations from professionals. He probably understood the games they played, but the vocational interview rattled him. He had reason to be scared because the vocational counselor’s words often carried weight. Although no single ward’s future was simply a matter of the counselor’s will, eighty-four percent of the time (59 of 70 cases where we have the evidence) the vocational counselor’s advice to the youth became manifest in the youth’s vocational outcome.58 Measuring a similar relationship, almost two-thirds of the time the counselor’s recommendation to the case worker matched the youth’s vocational outcome. Hurt and frightened, Carter went to his foster mother for help and she defended him once again. They called the case worker on the telephone and she quoted the vocational counselor’s racist attempt to ““Family Files,” box 1,1st folder, third child, case notes, 8-1-35. The power of the vocational counselor to influence vocational outcomes as measured by this variable was not differentiated by race or sex. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 250 silence his ambitious talk: “in discussing what you would like to be” remember you are a “Colored boy.” She argued that Carter was only behind in school because o f his many moves and that he earned what money he could selling newspapers and doing other jobs. He spent money responsibly on clothes and other essentials. Then she, with Carter behind her on the phone, made two strategic retreats. She said he would gladly take the night jobs in the racially appropriate occupations as a porter or a busboy that had been recommended by the vocational counselor, if he was allowed to finish school and keep his board payments. Mrs. Williams did not challenge the validity of the psychological tests, but emphasized Carter’s personal drive to overcome his lack of ability. She said he “knew and verbalized that he thought too slowly to take on college. He was interested, however, in getting a high school education and diploma, due to the fact that so many positions, which he might hold, required at least a high school education.”59 The foster mother swayed the case worker to admit that the “tests had not been given to determine his particular ambition...” Board payments were continued past his 18th birthday. Carter earned a “B” average in the fall o f 1937. He quit the band and took only morning classes to allow him to maximize his earnings selling newspapers. He was proud to have saved sixty-eight dollars by the winter of 1938. He found a National Youth Administration job in the spring, but when that ended he had trouble finding summer work. In the fall o f 1938 he resumed band, 59“Family Files,” box 1, 1st folder, third child, case notes, 10-6-37 and 10-18-37. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 251 attended the Prom, and graduated in February of 1939 with a regular high school diploma. Carter triumphed heroically over the racism he encountered, but the consequences of the vocational counselors diagnosis of his mentality lingered on. The case worker began describing him as “slow in academic subjects” and “retarded.” Before the tests he was an overconfident wise-guy who should have been paying his own board when he “walked the streets, parted his hair down the middle and played the drum...” Afterwards the case worker noted that he was, “industrious and although his mentality does not indicate that he should finish high school, the tremendous drive he has to get through, probably is the cause for his passing grades.” The transformation in the case workers image o f him made him a more acceptable AfricanAmerican youth and preserved the justification for his board payments during the final crucial months of his high schooling. In the spring of 1939 he took a job as an elevator bell boy for a downtown hotel. He yielded in part, but with the support o f his foster parents he remained undefeated. In the fall he planned to enroll in night school at Fenn College." Conclusion The first lesson that foster care policies taught the working-classes of Cleveland between the world wars was that fathers who failed to secure a “family " “Family Files,” box 1, 1st folder, third child, case notes, 1938-1939. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 252 wage” would be punished, divorced from their children, and discouraged from reestablishing parental bonds with them. The assumptions of the male breadwinner ideal framed the treatment of foster youths. Wage placements were used to guide girls into domestic service and to keep boys employed on farms if they failed to secure private employment after their schooling. This was supposed to insure that youths would become single wage-eamers until they could create the type o f households that their parents had failed to sustain. At least, case workers hoped placement-guidance would operate in the above manner. All of the Sorrento and Johnson children did their best to avoid wage placements. Remaining in high schools, seeking other training, finding alternative employment, and their bonds with foster parents, kin, and creating their own families helped foster youths subtly alter their case workers’ plans for their life courses and definitions of individualism. The options available to foster youths and the treatment they received from case workers was vastly dependent upon racial and gender distinctions. For girls the key to avoiding a wage placement was removing oneself from candidacy for domestic service. Josephine’s disability removed her, but the most reliable way to avoid it was to do well in school or obtain other job training. Josephine used the skills she learned and the resources of kinship to control funds that allowed her to seek her dream of owning a shop. White girls were given more opportunities than their African-American counterparts to obtain employment outside o f domestic service. Mary Jane was able to avoid domestic wage labor longer than Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 253 most African-American girls by agreeing to do the same labor for free and managing to simultaneously succeed in high school. Like many other African-American girls, she chose to create her family on her own terms rather than accept the poorly paid, little respected wage-earning positions that the county provided. Neither Josephine nor Mary Jane conformed precisely to the domesticity-bound career of household training and schooling, poorly paid wage-labor or live-in domestic service followed by marriage, sex, and children. If school success was the best weapon against unwanted wage placement, then the reverse (failure in school) led to wage placement even more surely. Lew’s and Dean’s stories showed the power of therapeutic language to neutralize resistance to treatment and to justify placing them under the most coercive forms of institutional control. Low test scores were not the “causes” of their problems, but they allowed service providers to rationalize the limited opportunities they were provided and explain away resistance to professional authority. Although Lew and Dean faced more visceral forms of domination, their younger brothers struggled with more finesse and success against the facile therapeutic power o f professionals. Tommy’s and Carter’s experiences suggest that the CCCWB’s vocational guidance department helped case workers move youths from school to employment positions appropriate for their race, class, and gender. Tommy wanted to graduate high school, but the vocational counselor and case worker were able to change his mind. He made the best of his wage placement in the Civilian Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 254 Conservation Corps. As a white male, Tommy had decent chances to join the ranks of skilled and semi-skilled laborers and to earn a family wage by cooperating with case workers, counselors, and other professionals in authority. Until he was injured while serving in the Navy during World War II and suffered from a debilitating condition thereafter, Tommy was able to adjust to the blue-print for manhood that he was given. Like Tommy, Carter struggled to remain in high school because he wanted to obtain a good job paying a family wage. As a smart, likable, and hard working youth who shared the general goals of case work, nothing short of race-hatred under the scientific guise of intelligence testing seems to account for the resistance he encountered. But, there may have been another element at work in the racism he faced and his desire to attend high school. Carter’s high school activities with sports and the arts may have created a conflict with his case worker’s narrower economic approach to life and work. When foster youths avoided wage placements by succeeding in school, they were altering (not merely putting-off) the meanings of individualism that social workers asked them to accept. Participation on high school sports teams, performance groups, debate and literary societies, dances and other social events helped youths transform economic individualism into an expressive individualism. Carter Johnson’s youthful freedom drew his case worker’s resentment and she recorded her emotions by noting that he “walked the streets, parted his hair down the middle and played the drum...” when he was old enough to be a single wageeamer. Only a minority of foster youths between the world wars became immersed in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 255 high school extra-curricular activities. But, this did not lessen their influence upon the Carter Johnson’s among them, nor the millions of other American youths who became high school students during this era. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER SEVEN IN SEARCH OF THE ‘REAL’ WORLD: The Rise of Extra-Curricular Activities as Revealed through Students’ Writings at Two Public High Schools, 1900-1945 If foster care provided a setting for especially intense relations between a limited number of youths and helping professionals, then high schools became the single largest project through which professionals shaped modem youth. Between 1890 and 1930 the number of American youths attending public high schools expanded twenty-two fold from 200,000 to 4.4 million. While most historians have relied on texts written by adults to interpret this growth in secondary education, I have read nearly seven hundred short stories, poems, and essays along with hundreds of newspaper reports, jokes, puns, and cartoons written by the students of Cleveland’s Central and East Technical high schools between 1900 and 1945.1 The discovery of 1An enormous surge in the populations of high schools took place during the 1920s when the percentage of 14 to 17 year-old youths attending school rose from 28 percent to 47 percent of their total population. See Edward A. Krug, The Shaping o f the American High School (New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1964), 169; Edward A. Krug, The Shaping o f the American High School, Volume 2 1920-1941 (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 42. Even though the historical literature on high schools is large, there have been few attempts to approach the subject from the students’ point-of-view and thus examinations of the social and cultural impact of high schooling tend to be quantitative or administrative studies. Certainly, Edward Krug’s finding that educators widely lamented the drop in the intellectual ability of students that they perceived during the 1920s when students of African, and Southern and Eastern European descent first entered the schools in large numbers is important. See Krug, The Shaping o f the American High School, 168-189, volume 2, 107-146. The difficulty of reconstructing students experiences and mentalities has not merely created an omission that can be filled-in without altering our larger historical understanding of the significance of schooling. For example on the front cover of David Tyack’s 1974 The One Best System you will find an undated cartoon from Portland, Oregon’s Teacher's Paper entitled, “What the Students Wanted.” This cartoon showed a series of tree swings designed by different 256 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 257 student writings has allowed me to shift the questions about the history of high schools from why and how professionals and policy elites constructed and monitored them, to questions about what happened in high schools. What meanings did students assign to their high school days, and how did the high school experience alter growing-up working-class? Because student writings are preserved in official school-sponsored publications and because the relationships forged between professionals and youths are central to this study, I have chosen to focus on official extra-curricular activities, rather than the illicit aspects of student life.2 groups of adults and then a simple tire-swing labeled “what the student’s wanted.” The implication was that teachers wanted students the children to swing safely; principals wanted the swing to last; the central office had no idea how to swing; the school board made swinging more complex than necessary, the maintenance department followed their design and created a hazard; the students just wanted to have fun. This may seem to be harmless, good humor, but Tyack’s use of the cartoon uncritically reproduced the early-century professionals’ construction of a childhood defined by innocent apolitical play. As with the presentation of this cartoon, Tyack generally allowed professionals to analyze youth culture for him. David Tyack, The One Best System: A History o f American Urban Education (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1974), cover, 178,286. This inattention to student’s perspective has been carried on by more recent works by both critics and advocates of American high schools. See Stanley William Rothstein, Schooling the Poor: A Social Inquiry into the American Educational Experience (Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1994); William G. Wraga, Democracy's High School: The Comprehensive High School and Educational Reform in the United States (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1994). 2A decade ago William Graebner creatively used court records and interviews to reconstruct student associations that were on the edge or outside the boundaries of legitimate student activities. Graebner argued that high school secret societies during the first half of the century were hotbeds of “teenage populism.” Contrary to scholars like Christopher Lasch and David Reisman who were more critical of youth culture, he portrayed the “fraternal bonds” of secret societies as “participatory rather than spectorial, self-directed rather than other-directed.” In Graebner's reading, the conflict between educators and “teenage populists” mirrored the conflicts between civil service reformers and political parties. At Cleveland’s Central High around 1900 the Gamma Sigma and Sigma Delta fraternities were active in student life. Although they claimed in the student magazine that they were not organized in “opposition to the Senior class” government, and merely wanted to contribute to “social enjoyment,” it seems likely Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 258 Between 1892 and 1906 the authorities at the oldest American public high school west of the Allegheny Mountains, Cleveland’s Central High School (est. 1846), organized an entire slate of extra-curricular activities that included athletics, a monthly literary magazine, four debating and literary societies, a Latin and Greek club, a German club, a French club, a drama troupe, an orchestra, and a glee club in addition to student government and numerous committees for dances, gymnasium policing, and various types of monitoring. Annual football games and literary societies were initiated by groups of boys and girls searching for ways to demonstrate a more vigorous engagement with life beyond the classroom. Ironically, the growing popularity of sports and clubs attracted the attention of school authorities who, over the course of a little more than a decade, subordinated these activities to school bureaucracy, financing, and technology. I will argue that the application of modem organizational techniques to student activities, especially the making of spectator sports and attempts to mass patriotic sentiment, intensified the very antimodem anxieties which gave them rise. In particular, I will examine three sources of tension within the ways middle-class students prior to World War I used extra-curricular that the administration at Central was unfriendly to these fraternities given Graebner’s findings. They ceased to appear in Central’s student publications before the First World War. Graebner’s methods allowed him to uncover illicit aspects of student culture that will not be explored in this chapter. On the other hand, unlike interviews, student writings allowed the analysis of texts constructed by students while they were still youths. Each method has limitations. I have not found evidence of teenage populism, but rather an active embracing of consumerism, nationalism, and cult of youth. See William Graebner, “Outlawing Teenage Populism: The Campaign against Secret Societies in the American High School, 1900-1960,” Journal o f American History 74 (1987-88): 411-435. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 259 activities to engage in ‘real’ life or to seek an authentic sense of themselves: those between scholastics and a physically vigorous anti-intellectualism, those within matemalistic ideals, and those found in the demand for female chastity amid heterosocial liberty.3 When high school opportunities were extended to the majority o f American teenagers after World War I, Central’s and East Technical’s populations were drawn increasingly from working-class Catholic, Jewish, and African-American families. Of course, these new high schoolers did not simply imbibe the old extra-curricula culture 31use the concept of “antimodemism” developed in T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodemism and American Culture (1978). As the term suggests, “anti-modernism” denotes a critique of what one perceives to be modem changes. A central antimodem concern is with the “rejuvenation of the overcivilized personality.” Craft projects, physical exercise, nature walks, primitive camping are all attempts to rejuvenate oneself in antimodem terms. The key to Lears’ insight into antimodemism was the way such sentiments ironically reinforced and shaped the course of modernity. Lears concludes his analysis of The Craftsman by saying, “Only a few craft ideologues tried to stain the image of the artisan as a model ofjoyous labor in a community. For most, the critique of degraded labor and the vision of humane community slipped away; craftsmanship became a means of social control and self-fulfillment in a rationalizing capitalist society.” “At the same time the very stress on escape -- however temporary —from adult constraints suggested that craftsmanship could fit the newer mode of leisure and self-fulfillment. Whether it pointed toward revitalization or transformation, the craft ideal contained a new and secular emphasis on personal well-being as an end in itself. What began in reaction against the ‘morbid self-consciousness’ of the therapeutic world view ended as another self-absorbed therapy, promoting adjustment rather than dissent.” (See pages 91-92) The institutionalization of students’ activities at Central and East Technical High Schools in Cleveland do not appear to have been unique and were likely shared among other urban public school systems. For some parallel developments documented in Michigan see Jeffery Mirel, “From Student Control to Institutional Control of High School Athletics: Three Michigan Cities, 1883-1905" Journal o f Social History 16 (no. 2 1982): 83-100. For remembrances of two students from the 1920s in California see, Bob Wright and Trudie Casper, ed. “Sports at San Diego High School: Two Oral Interviews” Journal of San Diego History 28 (no. 2 1982): 126-142. Also see Mario George Gerhardt, “A Study of State High School Associations and Challenges to Their Authority to Control Interscholastic Athletic Participation” (Ph.D. diss, Kent State University, 1986). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 260 invented by the preceding white, Protestant, middle-class educators and students. They changed literary magazines to school newspapers. To the list o f ancient and foreign language clubs were added science and engineering clubs. Partisans of the vocational education movement were able to focus some schools, such as East Technical, more narrowly on skilled manual training. All of these factors contributed to a shift away from student groups defined by the mastery of rhetoric, language, and knowledge toward groups defined by recreational pursuits, vocational titles, and school governance. Nevertheless, many of the extra-curricular activities in place at the two schools by 1917 survived or were expanded during the 1920s and 1930s. High school dances, plays, and games complimented the emerging cornucopia of amusements available to a growing proportion of American youths.4 Much like their middle-class predecessors, working-class high school students defined themselves as peer-centered, sexually liberated consumers. It was the expansion of the cult of youth, even as the social characteristics o f student populations changed, that gave high schools radically individualistic implications for American culture and society.3 4 See David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall o f Public Amusements (New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1993); Kathy L. Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Tum-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1986). 5 As was discussed in chapter one and explored in chapter six, I use the term “expressive individualism” as it was in Robert N. Bellah et al, Habits o f the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1985). Bellah defined four basic strains of American individualistic traditions: Biblical, Republican, Utilitarian-Economic, and Expressive. Bellah and his team argued that both Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 261 Ironically, the new generational liberation furthered by high schools was accompanied by forms of mass discipline as domineering as any the world has known. I will examine the frightful power o f mass discipline as it was used to rally students for the slaughter of the First World War. Even though the nationalistic, gender, and racial lessons of high schooling were powerful, they were neither seamless nor uncontested. This was true not only because human beings have agency in their lives, but also because there were persistent contradictions built into students’ experiences at public high schools. The student writings reviewed in this chapter suggest that high school life encouraged them to “find themselves” amidst schools that had became massive industrial operations. Students also worked through the ambiguities of liberal promises for equal educational opportunities in the face of bald racial discrimination and gender role policing in the daily workings of the schools. Because authorities generally supported the passive spectator event above all above others, the forums for students to engage in dialogue that could help them raise their consciousness to confront these contradictions dwindled between 1920 and 1945. But, they did not disappear. This chapter will explore some of the ways student writers constructed their identities as youths and how they framed their youth in terms o f generation, gender, religion, and race. I will argue that when students wrote about their lives, utilitarian and expressive individualists are “radical” individualists (the former are sometimes called ‘conservatives’, and later are sometimes called ‘liberals') who often have great difficulty sustaining a sense of meaning, purpose, and social responsibility in their lives. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 262 expectations, and problems between the world wars they did so in distinctly romantic, individualistic terms. Like their middle-class predecessors, they too engaged in a search of the ‘real’ world. They often located reality in a pantheistic naturalism or by witnessing something natural within their own sex or race. The Middle-Class Origins of Extra-Curricula High school sports did not begin as spectator events in Cleveland. In the early 1880s boys attending Central and University School (a private college preparatory school) began playing annual grudge-match games of football. They had no rule books, officiating, uniforms, time clocks, or complex scheduling. The games were initiated through letters of challenge between the boys themselves and resembled rugby more than what was later called “American” football. The first spectators were male students who used the games as a place for sounding “yells, horns, revolvers, rattles, and many other nerve-racking instruments” without regulation from school authorities. The only faculty involvement known in the first decade came about when Central’s boys enlisted the help of a “young and husky” teacher to play with them. During the 1890s, first baseball, and then basketball and track, joined football as the most commonly played games by high school boys. Even after school administrators recognized the teams, they did not immediately create eligibility rules, appoint adult Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 263 coaches, and require practices, but for several years “anyone came out and played.”6 Educators did not begin to impose discipline on sports until the late 1890s when the annual University-Central game joined Class Day and commencement as the three most attended school events of the year. In 1899, the school board established the Cleveland High School Senate, an interscholastic athletic association. The Senate created and enforced rules of eligibility and conduct over the following years. University School refused to submit to public regulation and so the era o f the annual University-Central game came to an end in the fall in 1900 when the private school pulled out of the newly founded Senate. University’s principal claimed that, “University School being a college preparatory school, you know, really can’t be classed among ordinary high schools; its proper sphere is the East.” The student editor of Central’s literary magazine called this, “just plain snobbishness” and reassured Central’s students that many of them would go on to college. He also claimed that University School would be left with “effete” opponents and unmanly graduates if they failed to face the hearty public school boys of Central.7 The claim that masculine development depended on vigorous physical competition was fundamental to late nineteenth-century sports and had undoubtedly preceded attempts by school officials to control them. In Cleveland before boys’ 74-75. 6William Schafer, “A History of Central High School Athletics” The Central (1905): 7 The Central High School Monthly v. 2, no. 2 (November 1900): 13-14. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 264 basketball came into the orbit o f high school authorities, the Y.M.C.A. had organized a league that included Central’s team, Western Reserve University freshman, and private teams called the “Broadway” and the “Colonials.” Before they had constructed gymnasium facilities in 1904, school authorities encouraged all of Central’s boys to join the Y.M.C.A. so they could exercise indoors during poor weather. In turn, the Y.M.C.A. advertisement in Central’s literary magazine and told the boys that, “the time to build is in the Spring; then you are ready for Winter. The time to establish health and muscular power is before twenty years o f age; then you are ready for manhood.” The call for hard work in the present in order to obtain future security echoed the advice given by the Western Reserve Trust Co. in the same publication some issues later: “the young men in your class who will make the greatest success in business will be those who have saved a little Capital during their school days... START WHILE YOU ARE YOUNG.” When Central built a $100,000 gymnasium, Senior Charles Stilwell told his fellow students that it brought the democratization sporting that enabled the school to create the “all-around man” who was “adequate to a complex and strenuous life” of the modem world.* Key phrases like “the strenuous life” w ere used widely to articulate anxieties about the emasculating qualities o f modernity. Ironically, the success o f athletics as a cure for 8 The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 4 (January 1904): 25-27; The Central High School Monthly v. l,no. 1 (March 1900): 28-29; The Central High School v. 1, no. 1 (March 1900): 28-29; The Central High School Monthly-Commencement Number v. 1, no. 4 (June 1900): 36-38; The Central High School Monthly v. 4, no. 1 (October 1902): 2; Charles J. Stilwell, “The New Building,” The Central (1905): 70-73. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout permission. 265 modernity enticed school authorities to subordinate it to modem bureaucracy. Organization transformed sports into spectator events and ultimately heightened players’ and spectators’ need for a “strenuous life” tonic for the anomie of the lonely crowd. The cure became an addiction. For a while student captains and managers continued to share control over teams with teachers and other school officials. They wrote letters that set game schedules, but by 1904 adult coaches began leading practiced teams with reserve players. As the funding and organization of high school boys’ athletics was strengthened and became school-centered, the discursive justification for athletics in the school magazine shifted ever so slightly from Victorian masculine anxieties to sports-hero worship -- from the boys becoming men through competition to heroes and spectators creating “school spirit.” Soon a thousand fans could be regularly found cheering high school football games.9 To understand the implications of “school spirit” one must pay attention to 9 For example, in 1900 the Central baseball team elected a manager and a captain at the end of the season to organize the next season’s schedule that included public high schools, private academies, and colleges from around the Western Reserve. Before high school sports were fully regulated by school authorities, even the coaches of the baseball team at Central were often recent graduates. In 1900 the team was coached by graduates from the 1899 and 1896 teams. The Central High School Monthly v. 1, no. 1 (March 1900): 26-27. See “Athletic Association Notes,” The Central High School Monthly v. I, n. 3 (May 1900): 24. Showers were built for the Central High football team in the fall of 1900; see The Central High School Monthly v. 2, no. 1 (October 1900): 16. In 1904, a new gymnasium at Central not only expanded physical education, but provided indoor training facilities. Charles J. Stilwell, “The New Building,” The Central (1905): 70-73, reported that Central Principal Harris succeeded in obtaining $100,000 appropriation for the 1904 gymnasium and auditorium. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 266 subtle changes in high schooling as well as the more obvious construction of gigantic facilities and new administrative methods. When Central opened in 1846, classes were carried on in the basement o f a Baptist church until a wooden structure was built in 1852. In 1856 a stone building on Euclid Avenue was erected and in 1878 a much larger building was opened on Wilson Avenue. Until 1891 when new buildings were added, Central was not tightly age-graded. Students studied independently for a significant part of the day in a large hall. The school did not even have a distinct administrative office until 1900. When it was added, the new student magazine and student athletic association were headquartered there under the faculty’s watchful eyes. The office was described as the “vortex of our school activities” in a news section of the literary magazine aptly named the “Belfry Owl.” A student gave the editorial section this name after gazing upon the school’s giant clock and noticing that it was sitting like an owl towering over them from the belfry. The clock was a gift to the school from two former students, John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller. The “Belfry Owl” they help inspire evolved into an editorial character with panoptical powers swooping down into staff meetings and the private thoughts of students.10 As the daily functioning of Central became more impersonal, school authorities extended their efforts to regulate student life beyond the classroom. One way they did 10On the name “Belfry Owl” see The Central (1905): 22. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 267 so was by the ways that “The Owl” editorial section, and the news section of the Central Monthly framed issues. The news section o f the Monthly hailed the clock as a way to “urge them to hasten in accepting those advantages [of modem life], and it will show the passing time does not lessen the loyalty o f sons and daughters of old Central who have gone forth to the world’s work...” Yet, within these same student publications, particularly in the stories, poems, essays, jokes, and cartoons submitted by students outside the staffs of the newspapers or yearbooks, students also voiced viewpoints counter to the administration. For example, the metaphorical use of “sons and daughters” for “students” did not eliminate student critique of what one called, the “modem machine methods,” that had destroyed the “closer personal contact” among students and teachers.11 Although, the administration’s power was never total, the importance of their ability to monitor the students’ newspaper should not be underestimated. In the M onthly's first issue the editor told the students that only smaller schools could have “free communication and unobstructed intercourse among its members...” Not to worry though, he said unity could be found in the school’s official motto, “Trouthe and honoure, freedom and courtesie.” The apology for bureaucratic control was immediately followed by the condemnation of a class representative who through “hasty action” had brought “much unfavorable comment... upon our school and its 11 “A Gift for Central High” The Central High School Monthly v. 1, no. 1(March 1900): 26; The Central (1905): 61-62,66-68. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 268 worthy principal, to say nothing of the class itself. Steps have been taken to remedy this, so far as possible, and it is to be hoped that the like will not occur again.” This somewhat cryptic report referred to a dispute between students and faculty over the supervision and location of class parties. The editor repeated the administration’s position by declaring, “the social functions given under the auspices o f the class are beyond doubt highly enjoyed by all - despite any statements to the contrary —no such parties are needed to keep the class intact, and we insist that the class spirit would not be one whit less harmonious if these were discontinued.” However, ‘spirit’ was more difficult to manage than this statement of policy on parties suggested. The Gamma Sigma and Sigma Delta fraternities were part of student life at Central in 1900 and they operated beyond the control of teachers and administrators. The fraternities understood the desirability o f seeming unoffensive to administrative policies. In the student magazine they tried to dispel a rumor that they were founded in “opposition to the Senior class organization,” and claimed they were merely dedicated to “social enjoyment.”12 However, the fraternity’s independence in the area of “social enjoyment” was precisely the way they threaten school administrators’ control over student life, and thus by the First World War evidence of sustained student-led organizations ceased to appear in either Central’s or East Technical’s publications. The “Owl” presented the faculty’s perspective on parties through a student’s 12 The Central High School Monthly v. l,no. 1 (March 1900): 24-25; The Central High School Monthly v. 2, no. 2 (November 1900): 16-20. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 269 voice. But the short stories and poems published by the Monthly also suggest that students obtained latitude for some peer-centered freedom. Freda M. Schwartz’s 1910 “Class Poem” explained that Seniors “did things they’d ne’er dared before,” But their joys no tongue can utter As, with many a flirt and flutter, They presided at their parties like some princely folk of yore. Joy in every heart was master, and it seems a great disaster When as days pass fast and faster they must leave old Central's door. Mem'ries sweet will e'er go with them when they leave old Central's door And will leave them nevermore.13 Dances were important to students and sometimes they disputed the restrictions faculty placed upon them. At Central students dubbed such a dispute the “vexed Senior party question” in 1900. At East Technical ninety-nine students signed a petition in 1914 declaring to, “hereby pledge to come to school on Thursday December 18, 1913 on time and with lessons prepared, under consideration that our formal dance is permitted to be held on Wednesday evening December 17, 1913.” School authorities could only ignore student unity pitted against their policy decisions at their own peril. In 1911 a “Revolt in Study Hall” depicted in East Technical’s yearbook calender by a sketch showing a box of chalk striking a teacher’s ear.14 31. 13Freda M. Schwartz, “Class Poem” Central High School Monthly, (June 1910): 30- 14 The June Bug (1914): 103; “Senior Class,” The Central High School Monthly v. 1, no. 1 (March 1900): 24-25; also see CHSMv. 2, no. 1 (October 1900): 16; The June Bug (1911): 194; The Central (1905): 78. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 270 Student publications and athletic organizations helped school officials quell student objections to their authority. For example, The Scarab, East Technical’s magazine, scolded this unruly 1911 class for lacking “school spirit” and told them to purchase the monthly magazine, tickets to athletic events and movies. School spirit was not “scratching up lockers or throwing paper or food in the halls... The practical way to help [the school] is to boost Tech High and boost some more...” When East Technical’s student athletic association was established at that school’s founding in 1908, the students managed its finances. But, as soon as money enough to purchase equipment was realized, a faculty treasurer took control of the “student” athletic associations funds. At both schools, the student publications and athletic associations attracted hundreds of paying members each year. Profits from other activities, such as one hundred dollars from a school play and another one hundred dollars from the school magazine, were funneled to the athletic association at Central in support of boys’ sports. Central’s student athletic association deployed “room agents” for membership drives and sold photographs of a championship team to students for five cents. In support of the modernization of sporting, Central’s student editor chided those boys who played sand-lot games with “some little second-rate team and are ‘big toads in small puddles,” yet neglected to try out for the school team and pay the association dues. At the same time, administrators gave official recognition to the school’s track team by hanging “Record tablets” in the main hall that displayed the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 271 names and times o f the school’s fastest boys.15 The fall o f 1903 was a particularly telling season for the making of spectator sports at Central. The principal and football coach turned the opening student “rhetorical” (a convocation meeting of Juniors and Seniors dedicated to artistic performance and public speaking), into the school’s first ever “pep rally.” They urged all students to cheer the football team. The school magazine ran a corresponding story describing the fun had by fifty students who made a road trip in a “special car” to an away game in Oberlin, Ohio. After the football team won the interscholastic championship that fall, the “cheering and carrying of the players in the lower hall” was followed by a rally where school authorities praised the boys. The girls from homeroom 7 presented each with a white chrysanthemum and the players donned blue and red sweaters with large “C” on the front. This championship team cleared 150 dollars during the season after buying more equipment than in any previous year. Their fifteen minutes of fame was secured when the team’s portrait appeared in Spalding's Football Guide.16 15 The Scarab v. 2, no. 1 (May 1911): 1; “Athletics,” The Scarab v. 1, no. 1 (June 1909): 16-17; The Central High School Monthly v. 1, no. 4 (June 1900): 32; The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 3 (December 1903): 15; The Central High School Monthly v. 2, no. 2 (November 1900): 21-24; The Central High School Monthly s. 1, no. 2 (April 1900): 22-23. 16In the third week of September of 1903 two teachers gave speeches to an all boys assembly encouraging them to try out for the team even if they only made the practice squad, because it would improve the team. The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 1 (October 1903): 14-16; The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 2 (November 1903): 15-19; The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 2 (November 1903): 19-21; The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 3 (December 1903): 17-20; The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 4 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 272 Even the bureaucratic requirement of class-year membership took on newly significant meanings around the tum-of-the-century. “The Song of the Classes,” East Technical’s 1911 class poem expressed the stereotypical meanings given grade levels. The Freshman were nervous about finding a seat at lunch, brought awkward lunch pails, and grew thin from too much study. The Sophomores acted wise, felt important, but were belittled by their upperclassmates. The Juniors neglected their studies, rolled up their pants, and chit-chatted with “maidens so shy.” The Seniors “ran the whole school” with tacit support from the faculty and could not wait for real life. Yearbooks also advanced class-year distinctions through their format for listing students. In an early June Bug, East Technical’s yearbook, the Senior's names were listed in capital letters next to their photographs, only four to a page, with nicknames, and a caption that apparently summed-up their personality. Only the Junior class officers had their pictures printed, and neither they nor the Sophomores had their names capitalized or nicknames provided. The Freshmen are listed in small point type, all lower case letters, tight line-spacing, and without any space between the first and last name. So, Senior Victor Lister was printed “VICTOR LISTER,” while Freshman Edna Fay’s name was printed “ ednafay.” 17 (January 1904): 15-19. 17 The June Bug (1911): 189. Virtually any yearbook from the period will have a class poem or history which emphasized the development of students by class promotion. A poem written by an unknown Centralite repeated a tired theme by its appearance in The Central High School Monthly, Commencement Number (May 1916): 52-54. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 273 Students did not initiate the class-year hierarchy, but they did contribute to the meanings that would be ascribed to it and thus helped authorities institutionalize it. The early history of scholastic societies at Central demonstrates how class-year membership and extra-curricular activities complimented each other in the modernization of the school around the tum-of-the-century. The first club at Central was the boys’ Philomatheon, a literary and debating society founded in 1890. Little can be learned about the early life of the Philomatheon, except that the boys’ founded it themselves, learned Robert’s Rules o f Order, and debated serious public issues such as monetary policy and the problems o f monopolies. In 1894, the girls created a female counterpart called the Girls’ Literary Society. The same year another group of boys opposed the Philomatheon by founding the Psi Omega debating society. In 1897 the Principal gave the Philomatheon its own room in the school where the club laid a rug, arranged furniture, hung photographs, and kept its gavel. Over the following TO THE SENIORS What were you first? An infant sweet! What were you once? A flatlet meek! What were you next? A sophomore smart! What were you then? A junior sharp! What were you last? A senior tall! What will you be? Nothing at all! This was a general formula. Also see The Central High School Monthly (June 1909): 22-23; The June Bug (1913): 11-67. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 274 years, school authorities slowly forced the Psi Omega to become a “Junior” debating society and later created a Junior girls’ Beta Kappa society to correspond with it. Then authorities simultaneously vested the members of the newly “Senior” Philomatheon and Girl’s Literary Society with the power to pick and initiate the Juniors that would come into the club the next year. Class-year initiation rites helped organized the power relationships between students on a basis of grade promotion that the faculty controlled. The Girls’ Literary Society reported in their “Gossip” column o f the Monthly in 1900 that the Junior inductees “had but little opportunity to show their ability... [yet] At our reception to the Alumnae of the society they proved themselves very efficient waiters, and we hope that in time they will be just as good debaters.” The initiation of two Philomatheon Junior inductees of 1904 required them to sell two-week old newspapers at the school doors in their pajamas one morning. The boys traded wearing a soldier’s cap made of newspaper in a comedy routine that allowed the boys to display their social success under a guise of humiliation.18 As class-year membership became paramount, the potency of cliques based on ethnic or religious groups weakened. Broader social distinctions certainly might have formed around activities such as the Philomatheon’s annual banquet that was held at a 18The subordination of the Psi Omega probably took three full years as is suggested by the fact the school monthly repeatedly reported that tensions between the two boys’ debating societies where gone during the Spring of 1900. See the Central Monthly - Commencement Number v. 1, no. 4 (June 1900): 17-19, 20-31. Class of '04 - Central High School: Its Book, 26-41; The Central High School Monthly v. l,no. 1 (March 1900): 23; The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 7 (April 1904): 16. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 275 first-rate local hotel in the city and introduced its members to Cleveland’s business circles. Certainly religion and ethnicity were important in the early years of Central’s Der Deutscher Litterarischer Verein, a club where students bearing Germanic surnames studied German art and practiced the language. Yet, between 1897 and 1906 Central’s teachers preempted unregulated competition between groups of students by founding clubs and controlling rules of membership for clubs dedicated to foreign languages, ancient languages, and Shakespeare. The appointment of faculty “advisors” became a standard procedure at both Central and East Technical.19 School authorities tried to remodel the scholastic societies on the spectatordriven sports and in so doing permanently disabled them. Writing from the school’s new main office in 1900, the Monthly editor explained that the subordination of the Psi Omega was motivated by a need to prevent clubs from dividing the school’s debating talent because this would weaken competition with other schools. The student editor declared that the “hearty support o f the whole school, just as is given our baseball or football teams,” was due the debate team because, “our honor is just as much at stake, and the opportunity to display ‘school-spirit’ should not be lost.” Of course, the Monthly never legitimated sports in terms of the rhetorical arts. Literary and debating societies were not inherently less “fun” than spectator sports, but scholastic activities 19Class o f '04 —Central High School: Its Book, 43-44; The Central High School Monthly v. 1, no. 3 (May 1900): 17. In 1900 all the boys’ speaking at commencement were Philomatheons and in other years they seems to be well represented The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 1 (October 1903): 14-16. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 276 were not conducive to the fantastic spectator-player relationship. One could not become part of the debate by shouting banalities without disrupting the contest, whereas Central’s football “fans” recorded the first official cheer in 1895 when senior William Downie jumped up and hollered, “Slip!, slam!, bazoo.” Planned nonsensical yelling caught on and by 1900, a song repeating the phrase “Rah! Rah! Rah!” four times, followed by “Tiger! Central! Sis-boom-bah!” became a standard for many years.20 Some of Central’s students held fast to scholastic ideals that clashed with sports-hero worship, but their voices were outnumbered and overwhelmed. For example, when the Junior girls’ debating and literary society held a debate asking if football was detrimental to school work, the affirmative side won. The Monthly reporter diffused the point by asserting that the “club had previously voted, however, that the decision of the debate should be based on the kind of English used and the general air of self possession on the part o f the speakers...” Even jokes that poked fun at athletes also praised them. In “Athletics vs. Grammar,” from the 1905 yearbook, the captain of the school’s State Championship basketball team that went 19 and 1 by outscoring their opponents 636 to 347, addressed the pep rally saying, “You all know what the team done. I think we seen our duty and done it.” He certainly lacked “selfpossession,” but epitomized an anti-intellectual version of masculine directness that 20 The Central High School Monthly v. l,no. 1 (March 1900): 22. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 277 had growing resonance in the new century. Reports such as “Our Athletes Away From Central” glorified the collegiate athletic exploits o f former Centralites. Senior Sutherland DeWitt elaborated on the glorification of boys’ sports in a story called “A Significant Score.” DeWitt’s narrator explained that what “ignorant spectators would say” was “wildly” uncontrolled aggression, the “boys in the stands” understood as a “display of scientific use o f muscle for the glory and name of the school, that glory for which the man under the heap struggled, regardless o f any danger to himself.”21 As the very legitimacy of the school began to hang on the strength of its male athletes, cheers, though sometimes nonsensical, could also serve to define a high school’s identity. When East High School opened in 1900, it became one of Central’s rivals, and in 1902 the boys at Central put them down and gendered the contest by shouting, “Water! Water!; For Central’s daughter!” Interplay through cheers could exist between groups of students at one school. In 1903, a Junior named Ivy Kraft invented the first cheer for the girls who were apparently much quieter than the boys at the games. Kraft’s “Kipity, kipity, kipity, Id! We are the girls from Central High!” was, however, soon appropriated by the boys as a way to mock them. Perhaps this was a way for the boys to quiet the girls. In many ways the rise of spectator sports taught boys to be competitive and aggressive players and girls to remain supportive 21 The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 2 (November 1903): 21; The Central (1905): 79; The Central High School Monthly v. l,no. 1 (March 1900): 29; Sutherland DeWitt, “A Significant Score,” The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 2 (November 1903): 7-9. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 278 helpmates on the anonymous sidelines. In 1905 Centralite Dorothy Smith explained in the school magazine that interscholastic competition between girls would cause, “intense nervous strain” and that “too much publicity and too much excitement engender a sporty spirit entirely at variance with what we are accustomed to call a womanly character.” Smith described two athletic females: the “clumsy” and the “noisy” girl. The first “stands with arms outstretched to catch” the ball, but it rolls away and she “falls on her hands and knees and crawls after the ball. To say the least she is a spectacle.” The noisy girl yells for the ball or cheers a teammate even though speaking is a foul in girls’ basketball. If girls organized and played basketball like the boys, only the best girls would get training and this would lead to “overdo basket ball.” The girls would lose the ability to tell when “they have enough.” Competitive girls lacked the “perfect self-control” of body and mind that marked feminine virtue.22 True to these ideals girls, were generally excluded from interscholastic competition during the first-half of the century. Yet, just as restrictions on competition maintained gender distinctions, the construction of athletic facilities by high schools also spurred an expansion of girls’ sporting activity. In the first year of the new gymnasium at Central (1904-05), over 750 of girls attended physical 22 Ruby P. Brown, “Central High School Yells,” The Central (1905): 76-77. Dorothy E. Smith, “A Word about Athletics for Girls,” The Central High School Monthly - Girls ’ Number, vol. 5, no. 8 (May 1904): 10-11. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 279 education classes and the scope o f intramural girls’ competition expanded. Even as spectators, the presence of girls transformed sports into heterosocial events that encouraged a public sexuality at odds with nineteenth century ideas about feminine virtue. For example, in 1900 Senior George Nathan wrote a poem entitled “A Game o f Football” about a player with a “tackled” heart. He had tried to win favor with “plays to the grandstand,” but this all failed and he pleaded, So now, dear, please make me an opening, That my side may be able to score. I’ve used wedge plays, and mass plays, and end runs, Till the hope, that poised high once, did fall I’ve tried rushes, long punts, and “guard-back” plays, Yet the gains that I’ve made are but small. Then, raising her fair, drooping lashes, She replied, with a glance sweet and shy: I don’t like to claim all the honor, So suppose that we make it —a tie.23 Like Smith’s essay, Nathan’s poem relied upon and strengthened masculine ideals of unabashed competitiveness and maternal ideals of self-control, order, and cooperation. Yet, unlike the repressed sexual images of clumsy girls crawling on the floor, Nathan purposefully sexualized athletics. Other students, particularly but not exclusively males, did the same. In Francis McGrath’s eyes intramural competitions put girls on display in athletic apparel that made fellow classmate, “Hazel Brand... more vivacious than ever.” A short story written by East Technical Sophomore Norwood Ekers in 23 The Central (1906): no pagation; The Central High School Monthly v. 10 (June 1909): 88-89. George Jean Nathan, “A Game of Football” The Central High School Monthly - Football Number, vol. 2, no. 2 (November 1900): 6. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 280 1913, recreated the sexual energy of a track meet by telling readers that as spectators, “pretty girls were in abundance with their usual attendants; flashing eyes and excited faces everywhere... Excitement prevailed; the judges seemed the only sane persons.” The schools’ magazines and the official respectability of sports gave Nathan and Norwood the opportunity, perhaps encouraged them, to share their heterosexuality with the entire student body.24 Much of the sexualization of sports in student writings furthered the sexual objectification of female bodies, but there must have been something liberating in the shedding o f the layers clothing when girls were allowed to exercise. Through intramural basketball, volleyball, baseball, gymnastics, and track competitions, girls competed, sweated, and yelled. These events were widely attended by students and sponsored by school officials in violation of fading nineteenth-century middle-class proprieties. At East Technical, Christina Fitch informed the yearbook readers in 1913 that girls enjoyed sports and physical activity as much as the boys. She was careful to circumscribe her assertion with, “don’t think the girls are rough, though, as we frequently hear of the boys being, we don’t get a chance to be.” The girls were not allowed to perform “stunts” on the gymnastic equipment and the boys were allotted more than their fair-share of time. Centralites Martha Baldwin and Helen Heidtman claimed in 1915 that “the athletic girl is usually more popular than any other type.” 24 Francis McGrath, “Girls’ Athletics” The Central High School Monthly (June 1917): 47; Norwood Ekers, “A Question of Morals” The June Bug (1913): 145-148. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 281 This year the tennis club provided one of the few, if not the only, athletic forums where boys and girls shared the physical playing space, and it consequently boasted a large membership of 110 students.25 The social consequences of the rise of spectator sports extended beyond the fields and courts of play. The “big social event of the year” in 1910 for East Technical’s Palladium girls’ literary society was the football banquet where the girls “prepared a splendid feast” for the players. The author of the Palladium's yearbook summary lamented that the party did not produce closer acquaintance between the sexes, because it was really sad for so many of the girls to “go home alone in the dark.” The unchaperoned boundary of sexuality was the height of excitement. A similar message was delivered by Centralite Lucile Alexander in “Another Entrance,” a short story whose plot structure and language also buttressed the ‘no means yes’ presumption about feminine sexual desire. The story was about boys trying to attend the girls’ literary society’s “spread” uninvited. The faculty prohibited the boys from using the stairs that lead to the banquet, so they decided to buy some fudge as a gift for the girls. They slid down the banister into the girls’ party. O f course, the girls who had spumed them earlier were glad at heart that they persisted and welcomed 25 Christina Fitch, “The Girls’ Gym Work,” The June Bug (1913): 116-117; Martha Baldwin and Helen Heidtman, “Girls’ Athletics,” The Central High School Monthly, Commencement Number, (1915): 31,66. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 282 them once they were inside the room.26 Peer-centered heterosocial interactions subtly challenged female subordination in favor of companionate relations. Ona Kraft defended heterosocial relations in her clever 1903 short story “The Princess -- Viewed and Reviewed.” The story takes place within the dream o f a women’s college president who fell asleep reading Tennyson’s The Princess. In the dream, the Princess toured the college and came to the shocking revelation that the girls were assertive and that their campus allowed boys to roam freely. The president defended the decency of allowing girls to control sexuality with their male peers and explained that it empowered the girls because, “boys always want what they can’t have; while if the same thing is free for them to take, they do not care for it. That is the secret of the whole affair.” Through this didactic short story “The Prince and the Pedestal” Percy Rosenberg told his fellow Centralites that placing a woman on a pedestal created “but a doll” that would soon bore any true man. When he found an equal who would dangle her feet from the pedestal with him and carve initials in wood, a “prince” took her away. Unfortunately for her, the prince lost interest. So she returned and would “have had him on the top [of the pedestal] with her but he stood one step lower. His eyes were on a level with hers.” Central Sophomore Ruth Wilcox expressed her 26 The June Bug: The Annual of the Technical High School, Cleveland, Ohio v. 2 (1911): 100-103; Lucile Alexander, “Another Entrance” The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 1 (October 1903): 8-10. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 283 feminist sentiments more directly than had Kraft or Rosenberg when she wrote in a review essay entitled “The Purpose of Tvanhoe’,” that “a woman can do deeds more heroic than to marry a hero.”27 These feminist sentiments from Centralites ran against the grain o f the curriculum reforms being implemented in the name of “practical” schooling at technical, commercial, and vocational high schools.2* For example, the female students at East Technical were taught to become homemakers. Chemistry for girls was about the composition of foods; physiology was about digestion and health; math was about household budgets. While the boys learned pattern making, wood turning, and machine operation, the girls learned laundry, embroidery, and table service. Each girl learned in succession to make an apron, a hot pad, a dish towel and cloth, underwear, and finally dresses. Girls reportedly embroidered undergarments with artistic designs and marked them with initials. Ruth Dreman explained in the yearbook that all this supported the ideal of chastity until marriage because “a great deal of care and forethought are bestowed upon these garments as the rumor has been going around that these garments are to be worn on a still more important occasion in the 27 Ona Kraft, "The Princess -- Viewed and Reviewed” The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 3 (December 1903): 10-12; Percy V. Rosenberg, “The Prince and the Pedestal” The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 4 (January 1904): 12; Ruth Wilcox, “The Purpose of ‘Ivanhoe’” The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 8 (May 1904): 5-6. 28 Along with my extensive work with East Technical’s documents, I also read some of the records preserved from Jane Addams Vocational High School for girls, and John Hay Commercial High School for both boys and girls that where opened in Cleveland between the world wars. Occupational training was obviously gendered at all three schools. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 284 girls’ lives and are to be very carefully kept in their dower chests until the important occasion arrives.”29 East Technical’s curriculum for domesticating girls to a narrow definition of the feminine sphere was at odds with at least one of its teacher’s matemalist ideas about educating young women. At the conclusion of the school’s first year in May of 1909, a large group of East Technical’s girls, following the lead of a teacher, formed the Girls’ Student Association dedicated to the ideal of student “self-government” and the “honor system.” They elected officers, wrote, and signed a constitution. A student named Jeanette Gaines explained in the school’s magazine that the student association was founded in response to the extreme “segregation of girls and boys” within a technical curriculum unlike the “Academic High Schools” such as Central. The Girls’ Student Association established a framework for the girls to become acculturated to roles beyond serving their husbands and children. In this spirit, Miss Mildred Dole gave a talk on women’s suffrage at one of East Technical’s Sunday afternoon lectures in 1911. With at least the tacit consent of school authorities, the students billed Dole as an expert who “to her credit she has been arrested one thousand seven hundred and forty-three times for raising disturbances.”30 29 The June Bug: The Annual of the Technical High School Cleveland, Ohio v. 2 (1911): 71-97. 30Jeanette Gaines, “The Girls’ Student Association” The Scarab v. 1, no. 1, (May 1909): 13; The June Bug: The Annual of the Technical High School, Cleveland, Ohio, v. 2 (1911): 58-65. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 285 The cultural tension between the East Technical’s restrictive girls’ curriculum and the extra-curricular activities that encouraged girls to participate more fully in society can be read in the writings o f students. In 1911, as a Sophomore, Alice Paddock wrote a creative little dialogue between a Freshman and a Junior. The Freshman exclaimed that she had no use for the laundry class because she was not studying to become a washerwoman. The Junior pleasantly critiqued the wrinkles in the younger’s blouse and a strawberry stain on her sleeve. With subtle correction she noted a minute lime hole in the younger’s dress. Soon the Freshman surrendered under the charge of domestic ignorance, but she still feared there would be no joy in this labor. The Junior assured her, “you are mistaken. You don’t know how good you feel when you hang up a string o f snow white clothes that were just filthy a while before.” The guilt of domestic labors left undone was not all that Alice Paddock learned about mother-work at East Technical. Two years later, after joining in the girls’ literary and debating society, she wrote “Duty and the Tramp,” a parable-like short story about the social duty of women to mend the anomie of city life. The story is about a girl named Margaret who became an advocate of women's right to vote through civics class. One day Margaret came across a tramp named Dingy and tried to lecture him on the social consequences o f his refusal to work. She claimed half of poverty was due to “maiming, poor constitutions, or environment” and the rest to “self-causes” —or a lack of character. Dingy was a self-caused tramp. He had no disability, abandoned three wives, and his main quest in was to find a large well-kept Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 286 house from which to beg that was free of “No Trespassing” signs and menacing dogs. As Margaret began to preach, Dingy told her a lie to change her sensibilities. He claimed that he once was a hard working man, but his wife became a women's rights activist, was arrested for assaulting a police officer, and sent to jail for 10 years. This destroyed his home, so he took to tramping. Margaret was fooled by the story and it sapped her moral consciousness. In the final scene she held her male friend back from calling the police when they witnessed a drunk smashing a street light; “Oh, don't bother,” she said mildly. “That is not our affair is it, John?” The moral of Dingy's story was that meddlesome women created social disorder. The moral of Paddock’s story was precisely the opposite; women were not only responsible for a family’s dirty linen, but society’s too. Paddocked had learned to engage in the primary feminist discourse of her day.31 The lessons of high schooling did not advance a single, coherent world-view. There were contradictions within the lessons of domesticity and matemalism, between the continued honoring of chastity amid unchaperoned sociality and heterosexual display, and between scholastics and the growing popularity o f physically vigorous, non-intellectual activities. The ways students took to matemalism, heterosexuality, and sports revealed their common need to enter or construct a “real” experience when 31 Alice Paddock, “The Laundry,” The June Bug: The Annual o f the Technical High School Cleveland, Ohio v. 2 (1911): 71-97; Alice Paddock, “Duty and the Tramp” The June Bug{ 1913): 120-128. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 287 youths had never been so completely separated from adult economic, political, and social life. Extra-curricular activities were both cause and effect in the social relations that maintained the detachment o f modem youth —as such they functioned as a hegemonic process. Extra-Curricular Activities and the Masses Even though the evolution o f clubs, societies, and teams at East Technical and Central high schools parted ways during the 1920s and 1930s, both schools student activities shared the promise to locate ‘real’ experience. East Technical’s extracurricula was influenced by the vocational education movement and became narrowly occupational. To a much lesser degree, Central shifted away from rhetoric, ancient languages, and knowledge groups, but its faculty and students maintained a relatively stronger commitment to literature and performance arts. Whereas East Technical’s students located the ‘real’ world at sites o f industrial production and natural science, Central’s students found the ‘real’ world in a romantic naturalism. They wrote scores o f poems and short stories where they worked to retain gender, religious, and racial identities by locating them in a transcendent nature. They found a God in nature that would make them feel connected to something eternal at a time when traditions were becoming meaningless. For example, girls tended to construct women as “mothers of the universe” whose natural reproductive capabilities fit them for the helping professions and endowed them with the ability to save the city from masculine Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 288 brutality and modern anomie. The boys’ counter-narratives were formed around Hemingwayesque heroes who tried to retain a simple backwoodsman’s honesty in the face o f feminine manipulations or effete domesticity. Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant students alike, looked to nature when sorting through their anxieties about declining religious devotion or sometimes they used naturalism in an outright rejection of the relevance of such traditions. Finally, some African-American students associated their own blackness with a natural rhythm or soul in opposition to affluent, but artificial white polite society. From the beginning of spectator sports, students wrote “fight” songs that used military metaphors to give these events meaning. In the 1903-04 school year, Civil War General “Fighting Joe” Wheeler visited Central to tell the students that the war had been an opportunity for men like him to go from rags to riches. The same year a student named Annie Koppel wrote “Central’s Football Team,” a song to the tune of “When Johnnie Comes Marching Home Again.” Student newspapers recreated sensational “stonewall” defensive stands and “smashing” offensive plays. A goal was “threatened”; an opponent was “encountered and conquered.” The sheer material violence of football reinforced its discursive treatment. When Earl Flood, football Captain and Class President of East Technical in 1909, was seriously injured in a game, a group of girls collected money for flowers and presented them to him at the hospital. The year “Captain” Flood went down, East Technical’s fight song “Technical For Aye” used the warlike imagery o f the terms “comrades,” “hark!, the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 289 battle cry is sounding,” “heros dashing,” “conflict clashing,” “colors flashing,” and the “Scarab proudly blazing.”32 When war actually came in 1917, it too became a sporting event. At a pep rally in October of 1917 for East Technical’s football team, a manager of the student athletic association and sports editor of the school paper introduced a former football hero of the school who was in the Navy. The editor declared to a packed gymnasium, “if Badke [the serviceman] would undertake to bring home the kaiser, Tech would undertake to bring home the bacon from West Tech Saturday on the field of play.” When the football team won the Senate Championship the assistant superintendent attended the victory celebration rally and explained to the students that, “the war was not necessary to preserve the fundamental virtues -- grit, skill, and self-control —and that the same qualities that go to make a successful soldier also make a football player.”33 The authorities at Central and East Technical put the power of extra-curricular machinery toward mobilizing for the War. In 1917 East Technical’s first party 32 The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 4 (January 1904): 15-19; The Central High School Monthly v. 5, no. 2 (November 1903): 25; The Central High School Annual (1914): 104-109; The Scarab v. 1, no. 5 (November 1909): 14; The Scarab v. 1, no. 6 (January 1910): 27. The relationship between spectator sports and war originated with modem military discipline. See Steven W. Pope, “An Army of Athletes: Playing Fields, Battlefields, and the American Military Sporting Experience, 1890-1920" Journal o f Military History 59 (no. 3 1995): 435-456. 33 The Weekly Scarab v. 1, no. 4 (October 25, 1917): 1; The Weekly Scarab v. 1, no. 9 (November 29, 1917): 1. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 290 followed a theme of war by serving hardtack. One-hundred and seventy-five seniors “marched into the social life of the year,” declared East Technical’s Weekly Scarab. Later that month, the Scarab printed a poem, “On the Field” praising the football team to the tune of “Over There.” For their part, Central’s Glee and Treble Clef clubs sang patriotic tunes at public engagements around the city. Its Garden Club planted “Real War Gardens” and the girls’ literary societies suspended debates so its members could devote time to the Red Cross. Central’s first formal dance o f the year concluded when the orchestra fell silent and all the students were asked to join hands in a large circle to sing the “Star Spangled Banner.” At both schools, teachers and students began organizing military training for the boys. Marching drills were led by the football coach even though they interrupted class work. Final exams were canceled. At East Technical, the students constructed toy rifles and two hundred boys signed up for drill practice. Twenty-three girls enrolled in East Technical’s night school automobile construction class and one took telegraphy reportedly to meet war industrial demands.34 The pep rally for the war reached its highest pitch when Central dedicated a new gigantic American flag. One afternoon the students were called to the lower hall while the Glee club serenaded them with, “A Soldier’s Dream,” a song that recited the 34The Weekly Scarab v. 1, no. 3 (October 18, 1917): 1; The Weekly Scarab v. 1, no. 4 (October 25, 1917): 2; The Central High School Monthly, June (June 1917): 26-27; The Central High School Monthly, June (June 1917): 20; The Weekly Scarab v. 1, no. 2 (October II, 1917): 2; The Weekly Scarab v. l,no. 1 (October 4, 1917): 1. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 291 story o f the American people who “have never unsheathed the sword, save for liberty’s sake.” Before the words of this song had finished, the school’s orchestra broke in with the “Star Spangled Banner.” As the students sang out, the new American flag floated down the stairway, hovered above them, and slowly engulfed their bodies. The Monthly reporter George Grossman wrote that as the folds o f the flag covered them, I pictured myself the sunny fields of the southland. I saw the white, fluffy cotton bowls ripening in the warm sunshine. I beheld these plants picked by negroes, their very fibers absorbing the traditions of the South, with its songs of home, love and freedom. Now came the bailing, shipping, and lastly the weaving of the cloth by New England workers with cheery faces. Truly, I thought, this flag is American to the last thread; for have not North and South, black man and white toiled alike to make this emblem? And as I gazed upon our emblem, I realized that under it, north and south, east and west, peoples of all creeds and nationalities are united. Under it they would live and die; yes sacrifice their last ounce of energy that Old Glory may float forever. Then as I looked about me, I read from the faces of those whom I saw, that they, too, felt the same way toward the Star Spangled Banner.35 During the First World War, educators used the development of extra­ curricular activities like orchestra, the glee club, the large lower hall, and the magazine to stir a mythic sense of American unity in the hearts of their students. For example, one would not have had to look beyond Central’s own list of clubs to see that the national unity authorities propagated, even within Central’s still mostly white, Protestant middle-class student body, was an extraordinary imaginary feat. The school’s Der Deutsche Verein, its German culture society, was the oldest language 35 The Central High School Monthly, June (June 1917): 44. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 292 club in the school and its members were the children and grandchildren of German immigrants that had established a strong ethnic community in Cleveland. Yet, the faculty and students without a deep Germanic identity clearly outnumbered them and they possessed the ability and desire to suppress and deride things German. Central’s publications did so through cartoons such as “Hang the Kaiser? Sure I’ll help!” and poems such as Grace Mullett’s “The Kaiser Starts A Fight.” Mullett indicted the German monarchy and explained the war as a personally irresponsible act of Kaiser Wilhelm, a bored aristocrat, who “tired of social life, Didn’t know what to do.” To survive the Der Deutsche Verein first changed its name to the less provocative “German Club” and switched from holding meetings and writing summaries in German to English. Next, it temporarily suspended meetings, so its members could volunteer for war charities. All this was to no avail, and by the end of the WWI, the German Club ceased to exist without explanation in the school’s publications.36 School spirit is not only the moral equivalent of patriotism, but it also functions in large schools in the same ways patriotism has in modem mass media societies. They both evoke emotional display and make tremendous demands upon individual allegiance without the personal ties of paternal relations. And they both helped produce the cult of youth. A telling example o f this connection appeared in the Liberty Bond drive at East Technical in 1917. The school newspaper asked students 36 The Central High School Monthly, June (June 1918): 42,44,46; The Central High School Monthly, June (1917): 26-27; The Central High School Monthly, June (1918): 15-41. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 293 to buy bonds and told them, “You have always wanted to do something big — something that would make you sweat blood. You have thought: If the opportunity would only come! You have felt that —no matter what the cost —you would instantly respond. You would do anything to save our government from bitter defeat.” East Technical’s students and teachers invested thousands of dollars in the war. The appeal worked not only because serving hard tack at a party, or making toy rifles, or cheering a football team was not enough to make one feel part of the war, but because these protected activities defined youth life and as never before liberated youths from the responsibilities of kinship and the rootedness of community.37 By the interwar period the production of school spirit was an industrial operation beyond the scope of any single school. For example, in the late 1920s the Chicago publishers Reilly & Lee Company printed “The Girl Graduate’s Journal,” a type o f do-it-yourself yearbook with headings and pages for all the proper categories by which to remember one’s youth. It provided six pages for sports’ fan memorabilia. A graduate from Cleveland’s John Marshall High School filled her sports section with ticket stubs, clippings, and a list of twenty-six nonsensical yells like, 1,2, 3,4 3, 2, 1,4 who for, what for who to yell for Marshall Hi School 37 The Weekly Scarab v. I, no. 3 (October 18, 1917): 1. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 294 Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!3* Even though the proportion of students who entertained the crowds at sports’ events leveled at about one out o f eight or nine, the power of sports’ hero-worship continued to mount. Heterosexuality continued to be associated with sporting events in student writings. Girls were increasingly visible athletes and more o f their bodies were revealed at sporting events. Before the First World War, they wore baggy pantaloons with full sleeve blouses or full-length dresses with high collars while participating in athletics. Boys had worn shorts and T-shirts since at least 1900, but by the 1930s girls in gym classes were also clad in short-sleeves and shorts with a buttoned flap over the front. During the Second World War, they began replacing boys as cheerleaders and forming squads attired in tight, silky skirts and blouses.39 38 “The Girl Graduate’s Journal” arranged by Janet Madison and EJ McDonald (Chicago: Reilly and Lee Co., n.<L), John Marshall Alumni Association Archives. 39For example: Edward Burke, “Central Conference” The Parnassian (1936): 5 is a short story about a college track coach and his star half miler, Meyers. Meyers had great talent, but he was cocky and ran hard enough to win, but never to break records. The coach was dumbfounded by this attitude. One of his track men said he could fix Meyers. He brought a sorority girl to practice on his arm. The coach noticed, “she was a pretty little thing, with two flashing eyes and a dressful of frills that made her look like something the wind might blow away at any moment” When introduced to Meyers and the other boys she made a point of saying she and her girl friends were having a party after the biggest meet of the year. She looked at Meyers and asked him what record he broke. This let some of the air out of his balloon. On the day of the meet Meyers was sullen, but as he made the first lap, the same girl’s voice was heard above the crowd and he saw “Leita standing up and waving her arms so the her frilly sleeves made her look like a frantic marionette.” Meyers won the race, broke the record; he scored the winning points for his team and the crowd gathered around him with Leita “clinging to the breathless Meyers’ neck.” Consult any yearbook team pictures to follow trends in athletic attire. On cheerleading during the WWII see the following yearbooks: Central High School, June 1942; Central High School, June 1944; Central High School, January 1945; Central High School, June 1945. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 295 As they had since the inception o f school publications, when Central’s students deviated from the acceptable spectator behaviors, the school’s editor informed them o f the administrations’ displeasure. A Central Clarion from November of 1944 told the mostly African-American students that their behavior at recent football games had not “been any too good” and listed a series of rules: 1. Stay in Central’s stand. Remember, we don’t want the opposite team’s fans in our stands, and they don’t want us in theirs. 2. Don’t throw pop bottles! It’s dangerous to cheerleaders. 3. Be Considerate! Don’t stand up to watch the game when you know there's someone seated behind you. 4. Going home on the street car, think of the other passengers and don’t start a jam session.40 The glorification of sports through wartalk remained a commonplace in the student newspapers between the wars. During World War II, Central may have seemed like a military base since two-thirds o f the Seniors who graduated in 1945 had served as a guard or monitor. As with the first, the Second World War brought a blurring o f the distinction between sports and war heroics. The Central Clarion reported the death of Lieutenant Sidney P. Brooks, a pilot trained out of the Tuskegee Institute; the headline read “Pantelleria Bomber Pilot, Former Central Football Star, Killed in Action.” During the war, Central’s Booster Club raised money for cheerleading outfits in bright blues and reds and also organized a “MacArthur Day Dance” to help buy a bomber for the General. The East Technical marching band was 40 The Central Clarion v. 5, no. 1, November 1944. Found in an untitled scrapbook of Central High School memorabilia. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 296 reportedly “aflame with patriotic fervor” as it sounded “stirring military marches” at football games, lead parades o f volunteers to Terminal Tower, and played programs for defense workers.41 Even though there was much continuity in extra-curricula over the entire era, clearly greater proportions o f Seniors were involved in vocational and recreational activities and smaller proportions were occupied with rhetoric, knowledge, and language between the wars. Table 7.1 classifies extra-curricular activities into six types and compares the proportion of Seniors who participated in the activity at Central and East Tech during six years between 1904 and 1945. “Law and Order” groups existed to bring better order to the school or to help organize events. “Knowledge and Language” groups include debating and literary societies, ancient and foreign language and culture clubs, arts, history, and science groups. “Performance Arts” groups include drama, glee clubs, orchestras, bands, radio, and other performance activities. “Athletics” include spectator sports, cheerleading, and girls’ exhibition. “Recreational” groups are all the hobby clubs such as the ones devoted to chess, hiking, photography, gardening, and intramural sports. “Vocational” groups are those designed to prepare students for particular work roles from home economics 41 The Central Clarion v. 4, no. 1 (October 1943) I; Central High School, June 1942 (1942): 69. East Tech Scarab, Friday, October 2, 1942, 1. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 297 TABLE 7.1 Seniors’ Activities 1900-1945 School and Year of Graduation (# o f grads) Law & Order C T S %sc _ Knowledge & Language Performance Arts Athletics Recreational Vocational C T S %SC C T S %SC C T S %SC C T C T S -U___ _u___ s M Centra] 1904(214) 15 7% 99 44% 72 29% 34 14% Central 1922 (203) 42 21 % 114 38% 40 18% 33 Central 452 92% 42 13% 150 45% E.Tech 1914(158) 6 4% 40 25% 24 E.Tech 1927(377) 325 56% 59 14% 103 E.Tecfa 1939(514) 170 30% 33 6% .iratatn 1 122 %SC _U------- %SC _ 0 0% 0 0% 14% 21 10% 15 7% 47 12% 0 0% 1 0% 13% 28 13% 0 0% 0 0% 24% 58 12% 35 9% 257 61 % 21 % 63 10% 248 44% 260 50% *%SC stands for the percentage of the senior class involved in the category o f activity. CTSM stands for combined total senior membership in the category. This figure can be greater than the total senior class size and does not necessarily correspond to %SC when many students hold multiple memberships in the category. It provides a sense of the size of the societies, clubs, or teams in each category. clubs to trades clubs.42 The trend away from knowledge and language groups toward law and order, 42Certainly most clubs could fit in some way into more than one category. For example, intramural sport was clearly a spectator sport in some years. And ROTC could be a performance art, symbolize patriotism, law, order, or a provide vocational training. Yet, I find the following groupings to express their primary purposes. Law and order groups include student government, athletic associations, freshman sponsor clubs, aalo civics groups, friendship clubs, Hi-Y clubs, guards and monitors, homeroom clubs, victory clubs, booster clubs, and lettermen clubs. Knowledge and language groups are Latin and Greek societies, debating and literary societies, French, German, and Spanish clubs, African-American culture clubs, art clubs, a naturalist club, and a physical science club. Athletics include football, basketball, baseball, track, golf, tennis, wrestling, swimming, hockey, cheerleading, and girls’ exhibition groups. Performance arts are rhetoricals, debate teams, drama, glee clubs and choruses, orchestra, and band. Vocational groups include all the skilled trades, science and engineering groups, ROTC, home economy and secretarial clubs, and an agricultural group. Recreational clubs included photography, chess, hiking, skating, gardening, and intramural sport. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 298 performance arts, recreation, and vocational groups coincided with an increase in the proportions of students at the schools of African, Eastern or Southern European, Jewish and Catholic descent. The two trends were related. The combination of migration, lower youth employment, and rising standards of compulsory education opened new questions about what schools should teach to whom. Advocates for vocational education believed schools for the masses must occupationally sort and track students. In this spirit the Cleveland Educational Survey o f 1916 was undertaken on the assumption that secondary education for the masses should efficiently move them into appropriate jobs. The surveyors believed that they could measure the relative sizes of different occupations in Cleveland and then portion-out the number of students who would be trained for and then obtain a given occupation. They criticized East and West Technical high schools for focusing efforts on the highest skilled positions and non-manual engineering professions when the true problem was lower on the occupational scale. Vocational educators’ attempts to order the American economy by tracking students to occupations was based on the assumption that the problem o f unemployment was a matter o f the technology of sorting and training young persons. Manipulating youths’ occupational futures for the sake o f social efficiency was probably more like trapping moonlight in a box than selecting the brightest stars. Yet, the surveyors’ successfully argued that the schools would be able to tame the industrial economy if (1) experts measured manpower demands, (2) students stayed in schools until they were old enough to learn a trade Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 299 (ages 14-18), and (3) schools provided job specific, 2-year training increased support for compulsory education and centralized administration.43 After WWI and in the wake of the Cleveland Education Survey, there was a noticeable shift to a narrower, vocational definition o f “practical” education in Cleveland’s public schools. Female students were increasingly segregated into new commercial (John Hay) and domestic (Jane Addams) training high schools that opened in the late-teens and twenties. In keeping with the vocational definition of education, as Table 7.1 displays, after 1918 East Technical added a host of vocational clubs to their older applied chemistry and electricity groups. The new ones included the “Caslonian” printing club, the “Seymour Daubers” sign painting club, the “East Tech Typists” secretary club, the “Aggies” agricultural club, the “Pavey Planters” horticulture club, the “Tech Tinners” sheet metal club, the “Tech Monarchs” machine shop club, the “Chippendales” cabinet making club, the “Glider” aeronautics club, and the “Corinthian” architectural drawing club, a graphic arts club, a machine designers club, a foundry club, and an auto mechanics club. By 1927 over half of East Technical’s senior class belonged to a trade or professional club. In 1930 East Technical became a boys only school. Nine years later there was no recognizable descendent o f the literary-debating societies founded in the prewar period. The closest 43There are 25 volumes of the Cleveland Education Survey and they are extraordinary in their consistent sounding of the argument 1summarized. For a statement on the entire project see R.R. Lutz, Wage Earning in Education, The Cleveland Education Survey v. 24 (Cleveland: The Cleveland Foundation, 1916): 13, 60-68,97-100. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 300 club to East Technical’s “Socratian” boys debating society of the teens and twenties was called the “chain gang” club. Its members felt a need to couch their purposes in the language of promoting “mechanical and social discussions.”44 In keeping with the push for vocational schooling, East Technical’s literary magazine, The Scarab, became a newspaper in 1917. In the first issue The Weekly Scarab justified itself as a forum for training future journalists. “The newspaper game is a live one, we think -- The click of typewriters, the smell of ink —A practical study demanding some hustle, And likewise some very conspicuous bustle.” This was no effete intellectual job, it was ‘real’ —“the life if you’re looking for glory.” One that required an “editor trained to growl out brief directions, And always spy out the least imperfections, The cubs’ knees a-shaking as they trot on their beat. Now oughtn’t we, sirs, to get out a real sheet?” These claims were not mere bluster. The physical experience of reading from the new format with narrow columns, large headlines, and photographs allowed one to scan the newspaper without quite reading. The newspaper stressed factual reports and editorials over short stories, poems, and longer essays; information over introspection. This was the inverse of the priorities set by the literary magazine. The order of appearance and the space they allowed for each type o f writing (and reading) demonstrated the change. Fiction did not disappear from the Weekly Scarab immediately, but it became rare after a few years. The shift away from 44 The June Bug (1927): 58-105; The June Bug (1939): no pagation. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 301 fiction narrowed the range of relationships allowed between the author, reader, and subject. School newspaper reports were written as unmediated windows on their subjects which had positions in reality independent of the document or the experience of reading the document. Unlike the previous literary magazines at the schools, The Weekly Scarab became a lesson in journalistic objectivity for both reporters and readers.45 The vocational education movement was not so influential at Central. Table 7.1 shows that the trades’ clubs did not develop and the proliferation of hobby clubs did not take place on the same scale. Central had a chess club and a home-garden club, but East Technical had these and ones devoted to photography, stamp collection, marionette, hiking, skating, and even tea service. East Technical also had more students involved in sports such as tennis, wrestling, hockey, golf, and swimming. In 1939 four out of ten Senior Techites joined intramural athletic leagues. While Techites developed athletic and craft hobbies, Centralites were encouraged to join the booming performance arts venues at the school. Both schools had large singing groups and bands by the interwar period, but during the late 1930s, larger numbers of Senior Centralites participated in radio broadcasting (9.6 %) and drama (14.4 %). Other performance arts such as tapping and dancing do not appear to have been available for East Technical boys (as they were for their counterparts at Central) after 45 The Weekly Scarab, Thursday, October 4, 1917, pg. 2. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 302 the girls were excluded in 1930. The declining proportions of Central’s Senior membership in knowledge and language clubs and societies (44% in 1904, 38% in 1922, and 13% in 1945) shown in Table 7.1 were still about twice the size o f East Technical’s corresponding groups by the Second World War. But, these percentages do not do justice to the continued vitality o f literary groups at Central. When the debating societies founded in the 1890s ceased to exist, they were replaced by a literary society for both sexes called the Parnassian club, a Negro History club, and The Question Mark club for the study of African-American culture. When the German language club had disappeared during WWI, membership in the French club soared, and a small Spanish club was started. Latin studies not only survived, but the Classics club put on dramatic performances and published at least four collections entitled Acta Olympica during the late twenties and early thirties. Acta Olympica included reports on Roman and Greek history, translations of Latin, original poems in Latin, fiction in English, and essays defending the study of ancient languages. There can be little doubt that Central retained a stronger set o f knowledge, language, and arts clubs, and a weaker set of vocational clubs than East Technical mostly because the former was an academic high school and the latter was a vocational high school. It also seems likely that by the late 1930s the divergent extra-curricular activities offered by the schools were interrelated with racial segregation; in the late 1930s Central became almost exclusively an African-American school, while East Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 303 Technical was mostly white.46 The greater proportion of students in the performance arts at Central, and the lack of vocational clubs, or rather the disproportionate exclusion of African-American boys from East Technical, was undoubtedly related to larger racial opportunities and expectations. It is also important to note that when African-Americans and working-class whites began receiving high school diplomas in greater numbers between the world wars, high school ceased to be a key into the better paying sectors of the job market. For African-Americans this situation was compounded by the fact that they were also widely excluded from the technical training that the working-class white boys were able to obtain.47 For example, the two graduating class when curriculum tracks were recorded in the yearbooks and both races were represented in the student body, 1927 and 1939 at East Technical, AfricanAmericans were placed in the lower categories of the curriculum relative to the distribution of whites. The unfair treatment experienced by African-American students in curricula tracking was reinforced during many o f their extra-curricula experiences. Table 7.3 shows the proportions of Seniors who participated in any activity next those who also 46Carolyn Jefferson documents the policies of racial segregation practiced in Cleveland Public Schools in her dissertation, “An Historical Analysis of the Relationship between the Great Migration and the administrative policies and practices of racial isolation in the Cleveland Public Schools, 1920-1940,” (Ed. diss., Cleveland State University, 1991). 47 On the marketability of a high school diploma during the era see Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Decline of Non-Competing Groups: Changes in the Premium to Education 1890-1940,” (NBER Working Paper No. 5202, 1995); Claudia Goldin, “How American Graduated from High School, 1910-1960,” (NBER Working Paper No. 4767). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 304 TABLE 7.2 Curriculum Tracking by Race at East Technical for 1927 and 1939 curriculum track Unknown White African-American Asian unknown 0 5 7 -7 % 1 - 1.7 */. 0 manual or domestic 0 80 - 9.6 % 21 - 36.8 % 0 skilled manual 2 335 - 40.6 % 20 - 35 % 0 professional 6 353 - 423 •/• 15-263% 1 •These figures are drawn from Senior classes of 1927 and 1939 at East Technical High School. The Cramer’s V association was .158 at a p-value of .000 and the Pearson Chi-Squared p-value was .0000. had leadership roles by race, school, and year. These figures suggest very tentatively that as their overall numbers increased an African-Americans’ chances to participate and lead may have improved, but remained a long way from fair.4* If one weights extra-curricular student leadership titles by status, racial subordination appears to have been even harsher. For the 1,252 Seniors in the sample who graduated from classes that included African-Americans, but did not produce a majority o f them through segregation, a leadership rating was assigned by giving one point for each time the student was an organization President, publication Editor-in-Chief, team Captain, band or play Director, or group Manager, 'A a point went for being an officer or assistant editor; and 1/4 a point went for membership on the large student councils or executive boards. The results are staggering; white students’ mean leadership rating was .2231 or five fold higher than the .0461 scored by African-Americans and the mean 48 By the late 1930s Central was a segregated school and this makes simple comparisons of the 31.7 percentage leadership in 1945 to the earlier years inappropriate. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 305 difference was statistically significant to the .01 level.49 Even the students who did not provide a photograph for their Senior yearbook, as a group, were able to hold TABLE 7.3 Extra-Curricular Participation and Leadership by Race, School, and Year | race - school - year % leading # of students % participating unkn - Central - 1904 131 40.5 % 3.1 % white - Central -1904 83 98.8 % 51.8% unkn - E.Tech -1914 23 17.4% 13.0 % white - E.Tech -1914 134 44.8 % 20.1 % 1 0% 0% 185 61.1% 27% 18 333 % 11.1 % unkn - E. Tech -1927 8 50% 25% white - E. Tech -1927 339 92.3 % 57.5 % 29 55.2 % 20.7 % Asian - E. Tech -1927 1 0% 0% white - E. Tech -1939 486 82.5 % 23% 28 85.7 % 10.7 % 1 100% 100% 249 95.6 % 31.7 % Afr-Am. - E.Tech - 1914 | white - Central - 1922 1Afr. Am - Central - 1922 Afr. Am - E. Tech - 1927 AfivAm - E. Tech -1939 white - Central -1945 AfnAm - Central - 1945 leadership roles more often than African-American students. Another way to measure 49Since we are most interested in comparing the opportunities afforded AfricanAmerican students when they were minorities of integrated schools, 1904, when there were none present, and 1945, when the school was racially segregated, were excluded in the leadership ratings. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 306 the size of the racial discrimination in leadership opportunities is to observe that in the five graduating classes with both sexes, although girls were clearly subordinate to boys in heterosocial organizations (boys were Presidents and Vice-Presidents, while girls were Secretaries and Treasurers), the boys’ mean rating was only about a third higher than the giris (.28 to .21).50 This is not intended to suggest that the extra-curricular courses taken by the two schools were determined completely by racism and the vocational guidance movement. They are made only to suggest that these interrelated factors framed many of the choices that were made by both school authorities and students. There were also important commonalities between the schools, particularly in terms of the continued emphasis on spectator sports. Following the example set by East Technical’s Weekly Scarab, by 1921 Central’s “Belfry Owl” editorial and news section devoured its mother, The Central Monthly, and a student newspaper called The Belfry Owl was bom. However, literary publication reemerged at Central under the guidance of an English teacher. As part o f a unit on short story composition each pupil was required to write at least one piece that was accepted by the class. Many students wrote more than one story and these were submitted to an editorial board o f students and then to the teacher for the final choice of which stories to have printed. 50As Table 7.3 suggests, mean leadership ratings fluctuated considerably between years based on apparently arbitrary changes in class size relative to the numbers of available leadership roles, but analysis of variance and multiple classification analysis confirmed that the racial mean differences were significant (the adjusted means by race were even larger) after factoring for year and sex. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 307 In a “Special Bulletin” dated June 12, 1925 Central’s Principal approvingly reported to the faculty the success of the collection, Class Classics. He told them in the spirit of ‘practical’ education that “teaching of English seems often a futile task, in as much as there is nothing tangible in the way of result.” But, this special teacher’s methods had created a “cherished dream” in the students’ hearts and their “ambition flowed again in the seemingly wild desire that it be printed and bound.” In contrast to East Technical, Central’s students produced no less than seventeen printed and bound collections o f poetry, short stories, and essays between 1925 and 1938.51 When they did so they constructed and revealed the texture and ambiguities of their identities as sexually liberated, peer-centered, consumer youths. Student writers repeatedly defined themselves as sexually engrossed. The Central Clarion ran a gossip column, “We Got You Covered,” in 1944 that told little secrets that kept the students appraised of the dating scene. Once the columnists intercepted a love poem between two students and reported that its verse was so indiscrete that they could only report one stanza that pledged starvation, risking the elements, and homicide for access to the “love of Nellie Crane”. Sexuality was beyond a youth’s control, according to countless poems such as the two below from Central’s 1942 yearbook. I’m all done with dames They cheat and they lie They prey on us males 51 The bulletin was found lose leaf among the literature collections of the school. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 308 To the day we die, They tease and torment us And drive us to sin... Hey! Look at the blonde That just came in. A shy little maiden from Loa Got caught in the coils of a Boa: The snake squeezed and squeezed And the maid not displeased Cried, “Go on and do it Sorooa!”52 Sexual freedom was one part of a larger peer-centered cult of youth that was constructed by student writers in contrast to family and economic obligation.53 For 52Carrie Cherry and Sylvester Neal, “We Got You Covered” The Central Clarion v. 5, no. 1 (1944): 3. For writings that equated peer-centered youth with sexual liberation see Langston Hughes, “My Loves” written in 1920, printed in A Little Book o f Central Verse (1928): 8. Jacob Bailin, “Crowded Street Cars” Class Classics (1925): 25 for his description of flappers. George Silver, “Up the Social Ladder” The Parnassian (1926): 11-13 on becoming a bachelor. Samuel A Kutnick, “Bill” The Parnassian (1926): 25-27 on war heroism and philandering young men who call each other “big bozo” and “big stifl”; Leo DePaul wrote about the difficulty concentrating on studies during youths’ hot “madly yearning, All my soul within me burning. Longing, thinking things no student ever tbot before” in “Life’s Problems” Secunda Hora Weimerensis (1926): no pagation; Milton Wallenstein, “The Maid of the Pyramids,” A Little Book o f Central Verse ( 1928): 43 for a poem describing the ivory flesh of blue-eyed maidens dancing fiercely for men’s pleasure, but as they become undressed they vanish like the mist of this boys erotic dreams; Hazel L. Mosby, “Longing” The Parnassian (1928): 23; Helen A. Johnson, “Apple Pie,” A First Harvest: A Book o f Verse (1932): no pagation; Mildred Williams, “Omnia Vinct Amor” The Parnassian (1932): 15-17 about two girls’ manipulating a prized boyfriend; Jessie Bell, “Lament” A little Book o f Central Verse (1932): no pagation; Melvin McKinney, “La Marquisa” A little Book o f Central Verse (1932): no pagation; George Parton, “Savage Rhythm” A little Book of Central Verse (1932): no pagation; Charles Epstein, “Fear” A little Book o f Central Verse (1932): no pagation; Jessie Bell, “On Being Reproached for Inconstancy” The Parnassian (nd. 1933-35?): 14 a poem excusing infidelity; Charles Epstein “Transient Love” Central Sonnets (1935): no pagation; Jane Garland, “Portrait of a Boy Friend” Central Sonnets (1935): no pagation; Ethel Davis, “Abigail’s First Love” The Parnassian (1938): 13-15; Eugene Barnes, “Lover’s Lane” The Parnassian (1938): 17; A number of the poems under “Now That Makes Sense” Central High School, June 1942 (1942): no pagation. 53Other student writings that advanced a peer-centered youth: Langston Hughes, “Old Youth” written in 1920, printed in A Little o f Book o f Central Verse (1928): 7, a poem about the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 309 example, a 1926 short story by Samuel A. Kutnick entitled “As Usual” constructed peer-centered youth life around the mundane tasks of getting to school on time. The course of the morning was punctuated by half sentences yelled and muttered between the rooms of the home where a worried mother keeps after her careless son. The mother futilely attempted to wake her high school boy at 6:30 AM., but he had been out drinking “dizzy punch” at a party the previous night. A half hour later his mother butters his toast, heats his coffee, and yells to him that she has put two scoops o f sugar in it just as he likes. Mother badgers the boy about lost items, his hair, and his teeth, but he offers no response. As she passes the bathroom she sees he has let the sink overflow and mutters, “I pity the woman who has more than Before she finished the sentence, the boy yells for his coffee and she directs him to the dining room. He adds more sugar because he ignored her earlier and it is now too sweet. She offers more, but he says it is too late. He has lost his hat and mother notices he is sitting on crime of a youth defined by work, obligation, and knowledge; Anna Simon, “My Picture Friend” The Parnassian (1926) 14-15, on female friendship; Ben Goldman, “Happiness” and “Artists All” The Parnassian (1926): 15, 25, for the definition of joy in youth; Emma Olexo, “Tethered” and “Neglected” A Little Book o f Central Verse (1928): 22-23, and also Finley Nix, “Trailing Clouds” A little Book o f Central Verse (1932): no pagation, all on the incompatibility between the city and youth. See Harry Sebransky, “Similitude” A Little Book o f Central Verse (1928): 24, on the purity of youth; Jack Cassler, “Paper Rags” A Little Book o f Central Verse (1928): 36, on the opportunity given to poor children by schooling. On fashion and consumption see: Therese B. Obstgarten, “The Miracle” Secunda Hora Weimerensis (1926): no pagation; Elberta Baldwin, “Shoes” Secunda Hora Weimerensis (1926): no pagation; Bernice Goetz, “A Call After Youth” Preludes to Poetry (1928): no pagation; Charles Epstein, “Come Away” A little Book of Central Verse (1932): no pagation; Ernestine Carter, “At the Brink” A little Book o f Central Verse (1932): no pagation an approving poem on escaping through drink; Lillian Franc, “Change” Central Sonnets (1935); no pagation. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 310 it. He puts it on and she notices a stain. He explains that one “of those crazy girls tipped over a glass an' —oh, I'll tell you all about it when I come home.” The high school boy was a busy bachelor saddled with a nosy maid servant for a mother.54 The following 1926 yearbook joke similarly played upon the cult of youth. Census Taker: “Have you any brothers?” Little Boy: “One” CT: “Does he live here?” L.B.: “No, He Goes to Central” C.T.: “Any Sisters?” L.B.: “One” C.T.: “Does she work?” L.B.: “Naw she don’t do nothin’ either.”55 Abe Kutnick more fully developed the image of youth liberation in a 1930 short story entitled “Revolte.” Kutnick’s narrator claimed youth was in a word “ultra-modern.” They were “born to revolt,” harbored a “hot, fierce spirit,” and carried “hipflasks, girls, mad parties, that lasted from early night to last dawn, and madder auto rides.” His father on the contrary “came of the old stock, taciturn, respected, a quite, determined man of firm beliefs and stem dogmatics that had characterized and dictated his entire life.” In the next paragraph Kutnick says paternal father-son relations are 54 Samuel A. Kutnick, “As Usual” The Parnassian (1926): 8-9. For another example of the peer-centered narrative of getting to school late see Luther Hangen, “Just Any Morning” Class Classics (1925): 19. The Marshall High School student who kept the Girls’ Graduate Journal had several notes from friends under the beading “My Chums” much like the following; “Dear Ruth, It’s friendship makes the world go round. It’s friendship makes us smile. I know because its friends like you make living worth the while.” “The Girl Graduate’s Journal” arranged by Janet Madison and EJ McDonald (Chicago: Reilly and Lee Co., n.d.), John Marshall Alumni Association Archives. 55Secunda Hora Weimerensis, June 1926 (1926): no pagation. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 311 “worn-out, trite, filial love, commanded by tradition and necessity,” but not “sincere” like the peer relation of “warm comradeship of two fellows who knew and respected and thoroughly understood each other.” He even says that friendship-style father-son relations are sacredly lead by “something divine which we feel, and sense, and vaguely understand, and at the same time, do not understand.” The sacralization of peer relations and romantic love was required a rejection of paternalism. The son, not committed to his father, grew apart from him in his youth. They fought and shattered their relationship.56 The only story that directly critiqued peer-centered youthful disrespect for elders was written by Fannie Drummond. Drummond’s 1936 “I believe in Signs” told a parable about an elderly former-slave. One day she mutters “Sho’ sign o’ death,” and one o f her grandchildren who speaks proper urban, Midwestern, white English and can not quite understand her says, “What’s that, Granny.” Granny says, “You heah that dawg howl? Well that’s a sho’ sign o’ death.” The youths mock her until the prediction comes true at the death of her disrespectful granddaughter who dies in a car accident while eloping with a boy.57 56Abe Kutnick, “Revolte” The Parnassian (1930): 6-8. Even the Latin club projected the modern consumer-driven cult of youth onto ancient Rome when they informed the readers of their 1928 magazine that Cicero’s “young son Marcus was a perfect scamp at the University of Athens —cut his classes whenever he wanted to, ran up outrageous bills and had the reputation of being a very hard drinker .."Edward Jordan, Sylvia Newman, and Isacc Factor “Do You Know” Acta Olympica( 1928): 28-30. 57 Fannie Drummond, “I believe in Signs” The Parnassian (1936): 11-12. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 312 Many other student’s stories like “I’ll be waitin’ for you, kid,” by Melvin McKinny in 1932 constructed youthful confidence through nicknames and slang ridden dialogue between two young women named “Babs” and “Patsy”. Patsy was a young, starving actress who was trying to make it on Broadway; Babs was her independently wealthy best friend. Patsy’s failures on the stage drove her to a state of suicidal depression and so she walked into a moving car. As it turns out the driver that hit her was a successful director and he rushed to the hospital with Patsy. Amazingly he happened to be old friends with Babs. Patsy recovered and was greeted by Babs and the director. Her career was saved and she had a reason to live. There was more at work in McKinny’s story than a glib version of an American success story. First, not only was the story about young women, rather than young men, but one could change the feminine names to masculine one’s without altering more than a pronoun. Babs and Patsy were fully androgenous. Second, Patsy’s ruin was prevented not through her own pluck, or family networks, but because of friendships, hers to Babs and Babs’ to the director.58 Student writings about friendship could be as trite as Esther Tinman’s “My Doll” where she defined ideal loyalty in a friend who, “sat upon her judgment seat;” Stately and serene, And never did she disagree, When I thought Peg was mean.59 58Melvin McKinny, “I’ll be waitin’ for you, kid” The Parnassian (1932): 20-23. 59Esther Tinman, “My Doll” A Little Book o f Central Verse (1932): no pagation. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 313 Or they could be thoughtful such as Isabelle Bidgood’s 1926 "Forward” in her English class yearbook where she claimed that the high school and youths were modem religious “shrine[s].” When students grew old and faded, the yearbook would allow them to “live things over in dreams.”60 The difficulties of youth liberation were not usually addressed by student writers, until they began to dig deeper into their identities through direct treatments of religion, gender, or race. Samuel Kutnick’s short story “The Bigot” and Mary Stoltz’s poem “Metamorphosis” assaulted on religion as an unliberated harborer o f hate and ignorance. Other treatments were less severe. In a poem called “My People,” Aldino Di Paolo wondered how a cosmopolitan world would provide a sense of community. He found an answer in sharing individual relations. Who are my people? I went into a temple where The congregation kneeling worshiped my God. Were they my people? Where are they? Who are my people? I went to the land where I was bom. Men spoke my language, but I was a stranger there. I cried, “My people, who are my people?” And sorrow was dense in my barren heart. One rainy night I met an Old man Who spoke a language I do not understand, Whose God I do not know. He offered me the shelter Of his worn out umbrella, My eyes meet his - and then ~ I knew —6l 60Isabelle Bidgood, “Forward” Secunda Hora Weimerensis. June 1926 (1926): no pagation. 61 Aldino Di Paolo, “My People” ^ Little Book o f Central Verse (1932): no pagation. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 314 Other students defended the religious beliefs even as they acknowledged challenges to them. In “Prayer” Faythe McIntyre told students that the Depression had shaken her faith in the “holy, scared, deep, sincere prayer” that she had learned from her Grandmother. But, in the same collection, McIntyre reaffirmed her Christian belief in a poem that attacked materialism. Esther Katcher’s “A Busy Day” praised religious continuity, but acknowledged the opposition between modern youth and religious continuity when she wrote of the “beautiful brisk autumn day which would suggest hikes in the woods, or some active outdoor sport, to the younger generation, but to these devoted upholders of pious Jewish homes it suggested the important task of selecting a fowl for Shabbos.”62 Central’s English teachers encouraged students to write about ‘natural’ topics. The students cooperated and produced dozens and dozens of descriptive pieces about trees, flowers, fish, water, weather, birds, and bugs. According to a student named Alice Kenamore the reflection upon natural beauty would allow students to escape the dirt and aggression o f the city. But she found the assignment impossible because, A monstrous smoking stack above me towers. So I must sign a song of city life, Of honking horn and traffic jam and roar, Of dress parade and sound of band and fife, And luncheon trips to five and ten cent store. Hooray! Hooray! My sonnet now is done 62 Samuel Kutnick, “The Bigot” The Parnassian (1929): 5-10 and Mary Stoltz, “Metamorphosis” Central Sonnets (1935): no pagation; Faythe McIntyre, “Prayer” and “Transiency” The Parnassian (1936): 15,24. Esther Katcher, “A Busy Day” The Parnassian (1929): 14. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 315 After getting started, I found it rather fun.63 Kenamore was the only student who voiced opposition to the idea that reflection upon and the study of nature could help city people achieve a more harmonious existence. In fact several students sought transcendent meanings in terms of natural beauty as an alternative to the religions of their parents. Herman Abromson addressed generational discontinuity and declining religious faith directly in two poems, “My Grandfather” and “My Prayer”. The first poem is set at the Sabbath candle lighting and after his Grandfather sings: Time passes by And the candles are flickering out As life ebbs away reluctantly So do the candles Flare up and down Casting a gloomy shadow about the room. My grandfather’s head falls on his breast, He is sleeping. His loud snores frighten me And I crawl into a comer, Tuck myself against the wall And also fall asleep. The candles die out And darkness fills the room. The falling of religious darkness did not prompt Abromson to learn his Grandfather’s song, because, as expressed in the second poem, he found another light and a new god in enlightened music, a beautiful flower, and the setting sun. I took my prayer-book When the sun had just begun to set 63Alice B . Kenamore, “Enigma” Central Sonnets (1935): no pagation. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 316 To say my evening prayer. I looked toward the heavens and the intense beauty gripped by soul I looked to the earth and saw the little flower nodding its head. In the distance, I heard the playing of Beethoven's music. I threw the prayer-book away, I had prayed.6* Cecilia Graff rejected “a Sunday of prayers and a Monday of lies.” Faith, she claimed, must be grounded in “Dame Nature’s humble nooks” not “found in gaudy books.” Not what was said long, long ago, By feeble men who could not know, But a thought that's modem to the core, Sown in your mind, and pondered o’er.65 When Graff abandoned tradition for nature, her language gendered the two and located natural authenticity in the feminine. Locating nature in one’s own gender was a common tropological device. Other high school girls constructed femininity in nurturing reproductive terms and in opposition to a commodified masculine production.66 Variah Cobbs’ essay “People,” claimed that some people, implying men, failed to “realize their smallness” when they are “fighting for the life of supremacy in the world, fighting for the downfall of their foes, the realization of their aspirations, 64 Herman Abromson, “My Grandfather” and “My Prayer” Preludes to Poetry (1928): no pagation. 65Cecilia S. Graff “Faith” Preludes to Poetry (a collection from the Stevenson Room Poetry Group of Cleveland’s Public Library) 1928. I believe this was published by Central’s print shop. Graff was 18 years old. 13. 66For another example see Rose Holnapy, “His Birthday” The Parnassian (1932) 11- Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 317 and the completion of their happiness on earth.” Fortunately, the “mothers of the universe” lived above petty differences and the war for gold. Cobbs tells a story about a social worker who saw through the “rough burlesque cover” of the washer woman and the “cold exterior of rich ladies” to find their beauty. This woman led three African-American children out of their filthy home and gently cleaned them up. She looked into the “little ugly-red faced” babies of a “little, fat, dumpy, woman, who was overworked and who had bome too many children in her home” and saw “children of the universe” and a “future citizen of the world.” Social distinctions of the modem city would fall away if only middle-class matemalism reigned.67 The male counterpart to the “mother of the universe” strategy was expressed in several Hemingwayesque boys’ stories about mastering natural threats or battling domestication. David Polish’s “A Matter of Imagination” is a good example. In this story one man entertained a friend and the friends’ sons by telling them tales of his great bravery during the war. “I had no fear,” he claimed amid a story about capturing German soldiers, “fear is merely a matter of the imagination and only cowards are fearful.” Yet, suddenly Hendricks became “ashen pale” when his wife entered the story and demanded he return home. “Mr H., fairly shaken, followed his wife home meekly.” The masculinist critique did not advance the helping professions as a solution of modernity, but much to the contrary, it lamented the waning of homosocial 67Variah Cobbs, “People” The Parnassian (1926): 12-13. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 318 settings. Some students also constructed a romantic vision o f the noble savage through their stories. This was the case in the 1913 “When June Calls” by Techite Glenn F. Luckey, about a young man’s return to a wooded lake area where there “was the hut in which I had played I was Daniel Boone. These rude broken sticks were reminders of the most happy time in my life” because he had, “slipped away from civilization.”6* Social feminism and vigorous masculinity were the most common ways students gendered a critique of modernity, but writing practices provided opportunities for other voices to speak. Bella Cohen went so far as to cast a young woman as a social darwinistic savage in his story “The Forest Maiden.” As an inverted maternal character, Cohen’s heroine was a skilled hunter who was appalled upon her first visit to the city to find that “the weak did not perish, but lived on, a curse to the strong and to themselves.” Contrary to the predominant themes of peer-centered sexual delights, Rodino Mastandrea used his essay “Modem Culture” to rail against the reduction in civility and the immorality of “companionate marriage.” Lena Klein, unlike Variah Cobbs, was not taken with the notion that femininity could fix the world. In “The ® Here are other examples: George Silver, “Teddy’s Pride,” Class Classics (1925): 2932; Charles Judd, “I Walked” Secunda Hora Weimerensis (1926): no pagation; Ben Goldman, “Bravery” The Parnassian (1926): 20-22; Samuel A. Kutnick, “Bill” The Parnassian (1926): 25-27; James Turner, “Hooky” The Parnassian (1928): 16-17; James Liotta, “The Caged Lion” The Parnassian (1929): 15; Hyman Gelfand, “Misunderstood” The Parnassian (1930): 26-28. David Polish, “A Matter of Imagination” Class Classics (1925): 23-24; Glenn F. Luckey, “When June Calls,” The June Bug (1913): 138-140; also see Lawrence Arnett, “The Runaway” The Parnassian (1932): 26. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 319 Market” she saw, Old women and children in tatters Hunt through the garbage cans to find Something they might use to eat — Too poor to purchase even decent food. Then there are sly little boys, Eagerly watching their chance to take A few apples or potatoes From beneath the very nose Of a much annoyed vender.69 Even in the face of this systemic racism that set them apart (see Tables 7.2 and 7.3), the themes of African-American students’ writings shared a great deal with those of white students. When he was attending Central in 1920, Langston Hughes wrote the poem “Old Youth” and clearly articulated the opposition between middle-class youth ideals, “city knowledge,” and “work.” Old Youth I heard a child’s voice, Strong, clear, and full of youth, But I looked into his face And the face was old, — Not old with age, But old with city knowledge, Old with work And the dust and grime Of the factories 0 little child's voice, 69Bella Cohen, “The Forest Maiden” The Parnassian (1928): 8-12; Rodino Mastandrea, “Modem Culture” The Parnassian (1930): 24-25; Lena Klein, “The Market”/! Little Book o f Central Verse (1928): 21. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 320 0 face like a flowerless spring!70 Years later Hughes remembered his first poem was written in the eighth grade when he was elected Class Poet. Hughes said he was the first African-American boy in this school ever to be elected to anything, but this was not because his classmates recognized some special ability within him. As he recalled it, none of the students wanted to be the Class Poet or even understood what qualities made for a good poet. So, the teachers explained that a poet must have “rhythm.” This prompted a white boy to rise and point to Hughes. The class agreed in unanimous belief that all AfricanAmericans could sing and rhyme and keep a beat. Hughes did not disappoint his teachers or classmates and delivered a roundly applauded poem for eighth grade commencement. This first success set him on a determined course over his father’s wishes to become a writer.71 Hughes called the idea that African-Americans had rhythm a “conventional white belief,” but this does not mean it failed to penetrate how he and other African70Langston Hughes, “Old Youth,” Little Book o f Central Verse (1928): 7. The poem was written in 1920, when he was a student at Central; only after he had considerable literary success was it published as part of an effort to maintain interest in poetry at the school. Other works by Hughes (with the exception of a single love poem) do not appear in the records at Central today. It is impossible to know if he was prohibited from contributing because he was black, or if his later fame prompted someone to lift his work from the school’s archives as rumor has it today at the school. We do know that he faced prohibitive racism at Columbia University when he tried to join that school’s newspaper. He probably was able to find peers and mentors at Karamu House in Cleveland, if not at the mostly white Central High School, to develop his thoughts about race around which he produced his best known work. 71 Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes Reads, (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishing, 1980), Originally broadcast by the BBC in 1962, unabridged and digitally remastered by Harper Audio, a division of HarperCollins. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 321 Americans thought about themselves. For example, black authenticity was a matter of soul for Centralite James Turner. He wrote a story about a rich white girl who had a conscious raising experience when she heard her families’ African-American washer woman sing a melancholy song while boiling their clothes. She decided to visit the woman's sick daughter with gifts of flowers and a doll. During her visit the wealth and race mattered not because both girls love dolls and sweet smells. As the white girl left the African-American ghetto she saw in a window, the figure of a boy. He was playing and swayed to the rhythm of his music. He played Strauss's immortal “Blue Danube.” He played it with the depth of feeling known only to the accomplished artist —the virtuoso. He knew the great master better than some of those who moved in society’s most exclusive circles. She thought of Thelma [her rich white friend]. Thelma did not know. She had never tried to find out. Louella [the white visitor] instinctively understood that here [in the ghetto] was life, the zest of living —the colorful existence.72 As had their white counterparts through different tropological means, a number of African-American students shared the need to locate natural authenticity within themselves. Some did so in racially specific ways by stereotyping black dialogue. This cultural work could be used to build a positive images of African-Americans, but as with the construction o f gender identity, race was a tricky business. Eugene Barnes’ narrator in “Dinner Bell” was a virtuous black farmer “Plowing’ all de live long day,” 72James Turner, “Who Gives Himself’ The Parnassian (1929): 22-27. It was not always possible to establish positively the race of the writers, but in many cases, just as it was reasonable to assume from the content of “My Grandfather” and the author’s name, “Herman Abromson”, that it was written by a Jewish boy, it was also reasonable to assume that Mildred Coleman, who wrote “What Price of Color?,” was African-American. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 322 but Velvilee Harden’s Mississippi sharecroppers were “poor suffering patients” and “inmates of Muddy Creek.” Their only joy was “Pay day! day of wild carousing, mad sprees, with plenty o f rye and com whiskey, molasses and com pone. Like first graders on a holiday from a sour school ma’am, they threw away the earnings they had sweated for...” Characterizing sharecroppers as children blamed them for the system of Southern racial domination. The link between youth and sexuality could also present double-edged meanings for African-American students. James Turner labeled his youthful urges the “call of the jungle” and George Parton, whose race was unclear, wrote about a “savage rhythm,” Figures creeping, swaying leaping in a fierce barbaric way. Naked bodies gleaming, gleaming as the dancers leap and sway. Jessie Bell, whose other writing suggest that she was African-American, also related youths’ sexual awakening to African objects. “Something wild and strange in the air, Calling to me, turning my blood to fire; Something cool as the deep reaches of the jungle, As hot as the jungle sun, Something maddening, monotonous, Like the beat of tom-toms.” Connecting sexual liberation to African objects could obviously feed into the racist construction of Africans as beasts.73 73 Eugene Bames, “Dinner Bell,” The Parnassian (1938): 12; Velvielee Harden, “Sing You Sinners!” The Parnassian (1936): 21-23; James Turner, “The Drums Call,” The Parnassian (1929): 33; Jessie Bell, “Lament” A Little Book o f Central Verse (1932): no pagation; George Parton, “Savage Rhythm,” A Little Book of Central Verse (1932): no pagation Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 323 The survival of literary groups did not mean African-American students’ would easily learn to handle or master the leviathan of racism in America. But, the writing they produced gave testimony to the abilities of literary societies to arm students against the larger racist society. For example, James Tate thanked a teacher, who was also African-American, for leading the Question Mark club that had “instilled race pride in many, and awakened sensibilities against the many social wrongs we are familiar with in this world today.” The club gave Tate the courage and ability to share “Black” with other students. I am black! And so I swim and swim and swim, Often carelessly with the tide, Often against its waves I swim and swim and swim. We must be kindred, the sea and I For in its constant roar and motion I lose my cares and woes, and on its waves, triumphantly-1 ride, As I swim and swim and swim, I seem to forget for a time that I am black; That I am denied that which I desire most; That there is a surging in my breast for that which only love can bring, The comradeship of others, Those who can love me for what I am and forget that I am black. They ask me why I swim where no one else would dare, Yet I know that even in these shark-infested waters I am safe, For not even they would touch black meat! The ravenous barracudas shun me —so even by them Am I unmolested. Yet --1do not brood long -For I drown my sorrow in the roaring and the rushing of the sea, As I swim and swim and swim I am black!74 Tate’s nature was not found in an African-American soul. Instead he used the image 74 James Tate, “Black” The Parnassian (1936): 14. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 324 o f the sea as a way to find his ‘real’ self. Large bodies of water flow without easy distinctions between one piece of water and the next. Swimming in it allowed him to “forget” that in society his distinction was black. “Race Pride” for him was knowing that race was a social phenomenon, and that he had within his “breast” the same human desires as everyone else. A central liberal tenet insists that underneath our surface differences there is a universal man in all of us. Tate and other African-American students who learned this tenet created stories and poems affirming the hope for a colorless integrated society. But, when they did this, they sometimes defined what that ‘universal man’ underneath us all would look like and in so doing made latent political choices. For example, “What Price Color?” by Mildred Coleman was about “passing” as a “high-bred AngloSaxon,” in order to have a chance for success as a professional in America. A “honeycolored” young engineer who was a Yale honor graduate could not keep a job because as soon as they met his darker wife they recognized his race. His wife tried to console him, but he bitterly remarked, “I suppose I've just got too much ambition, I suppose I ought to be satisfied with any old job; pullman porter, janitor, red-cap, boot-black, chef, anything.” His mother had scrubbed, washed, and ironed to give him the education but “What o f it?” he questioned. So, his wife thought of a scheme to surrender her own respectability so they could succeed. He would apply for a job in California and lie about his race, pass as white, and his wife would pose as his maid. Thus, he could fulfill his desire to “lavish upon” on his wife “all that money can buy” Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 325 and repay his mother for her sacrifices. The plan worked, and he became a successful engineer, but “many an evening had he sat at his table with some client or his boss while he choked with silent shame and rage -- rage at the forces which had driven him to this! Lil [his wife] should have graced his table, his car, himself and his household.” He was sure that he would one day be found out, and when the owner of the firm talked o f making him a partner he had to tell him that he was a “negro.” The boss responded that it was of no matter, “I always knew you were colored —I’m colored myself.” When the man asked why the boss never said so, he asked in return, “what do you want me to do - wear a sign on my back? I don’t see you with one on yours. Come now, let's get back to business.”75 Coleman had learned to hope for a colorblind society because it would give more African-Americans access to the material success, the companionate marriage, and the consumer driven domesticity where women put “grace” into men’s social lives that so many whites of the professional classes enjoyed. Was not this what we all naturally wanted underneath social restrictions? As with religion and gender, so too with race, the hegemony of liberalism within literary societies was not seamless. Other students were less sanguine that race could be negotiated by expressive individualists forgetting they were black by swimming in waves or by utilitarian individualists getting “back to business.” Vashni Thaddeus Davis’ 1935 poem “Protest” asked, 75 Mildred Coleman, “What Price Color,” The Parnassian (1930): 29-31. Reproduced with permission of the copyright ow ner Further reproduction prohibited w ithout permission. 326 What evil hand was it that struck you down, Disgraced with treachery your once fair name, Forgot the right of a free man’s law to shame A race -- inflaming hearts against your brown? Should one endure incessant pain and grief To gain respect for naught but fortitude? The future holds for us but prospects rude Unless we find in faith renewed belief. But what price color here? There is one God In spite of lyncher’s noose and gory necks, In spite of wrongs upon down-trodden wrecks Who do not need the scomer’s haughty rod, Or lash of whip that leaves imprints and decks The heart in bitterness and courage checks. Davis’ reasoning that America held “prospects rude” for African-Americans unless they found in religious community a “renewed” will to change society beyond individual “fortitude” was more clear-headed than most of students could muster.76 However, “Protest,” or “What Price Color?” or “Black” were not products of talented students’ individual insights, because they were created out of extra-curricular groups that emersed students in prolonged intellectual exchanges about race in America. Conclusion This chapter has delved into the ways extra-curricular activities helped school authorities discipline students to modem organizational techniques, and paradoxically encouraged them to behave, think, and speak about themselves as peer-centered, 76 Vashni Thaddeus Davis, “Protest” Central Sonnets (1935): no pagation. Other poems and stories that protested racism are Jessie Bell, “Color,” A Little Book o f Central Verse (1932): no pagation; Lawyer Miller, “They Too” Central Sonnets (1935): no pagation; James K. Anthony, “Slave Ship” The Parnassian (1936): 16-17; Richard Jamison, “The Class Poem” Central High School, January 1945 (1945): 26. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout permission. 327 sexually liberated consumers. Between the world wars, as working-class Jews, Catholics, and African-Americans entered these schools in large numbers, like those middle-class ones before them, the students used extra-curricular activities to search for authentic or ‘real’ experiences which both industrial discipline and their liberation from the adult world had denied them. This search for vigorous experience can be seen in the intense pouring out of emotion for high school sports and its twisted association with enthusiasm for the world wars. Even those students who participated in activities most removed from spectator events, the student writers o f the literary and debating societies, constructed a sense of authenticity through naturalism. Whether it was through the lonely emotion of mass spectator experiences or romantic naturalism, high school extra-curricula often reinforced the growing irrelevance of kinship and religious, ethnic, or racial traditions. Yet, student writings also suggest that activities devoted to language, the arts, rhetoric, and knowledge were fundamentally different from spectator events because they gave students greater latitude with which to speak. By so doing, these clubs turned the expressive individualism of youth culture, the therapeutic aspects of self-realization that existed within it, toward more socially critical directions. This was particularly pointed when students writers dealt with the issues of gender, religion, and race in the 1920s and 1930s. High school extra-curricular activities simultaneously possessed the most domineering and the most liberating aspects of coming of age in a modem mass society. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CONCLUSION On January 13, 1998 Georgia Governor Zell Miller told the General Assembly of his state, “enrichment works.” He held up a compact disk while Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” serenaded the legislative hall, proclaimed research proved that classical music enhanced the development “brain connections,” and suggested that it could help prevent social troubles by fostering a smarter citizenry. It would take only 5105,000 a year to send every new mother in Georgia home from the hospital with a collection of the best music for babies assembled by Yoel Levi, the music director o f the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. The proposal took a little over a minute of Miller’s hour-long budget address, but it drew immediate and mostly positive national attention. ABC’s “World News Tonight” called Miller a “Governor who gets it.” Supportive reports were aired on “Good Morning America,” during PBS’s “News Hour,” and by the BBC. Two Florida state law makers quickly followed by introducing bills for similar proposals in their state. As one of few detractors, Rush Limbaugh wanted to hold the line against public funding for families, and said if parents thought their kids should hear classical music, “they can go buy the tape themselves.” Fiscal reservations were soon put aside because Miller’s idea was so popular that donations from corporations and promises of free services from music makers poured into his office. Within the week, he announced that enough monies had been raised to start the project without 328 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 329 tax dollars.1 USA Today accurately reported that the proposal’s goal was “immunizing children against ignorance.” Who could oppose this? Ohio’s largest paper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer gave an unmitigated endorsement and asked “Why didn’t someone think of this before?” They claimed that studies had confirmed that classical music improved “creativity and intelligence.” “As toddlers listen to Mozart symphonies, piano concertos and chamber music, they absorb elements of structure, learn discipline, increase their memory, expand their emotional worlds and discover what beauty means.” If we all listened to classical music it would not only help the babies “mental and spiritual health but [it would also improve] baby boomer and Generation X sensibilities.”2 The Boston Globe interviewed an educator named Dan Rostan who was more cautious. Rostan warned us not to think music was a “magic formula to make kids smarter but to focus on how the magic of music can make them better people.” He emphasized performing over listening to music and said, “it gives human beings a chance to be themselves in a way they otherwise never could be... 1Charmagne Helton, “98 Georgia Legislature; Beethoven 1st week’s top bill; Odes, yea: Plan to give new moms classical music is session’s early splash,” The Atlanta Journal and Constitution 18 January 1998,7F. Glenn O’Neal, “Beethoven for babies on Ga. minds,” USA Today 5 February 1998,4D. Kevin Sack, “Lullabies by Brahms and Others,” The New York Times 18 January 1998, Sunday, Late Edition - Final, section 4, 2. David Nitkin, “Can Baby Benefit From Beethoven? A Miami Legislator Thinks So. He Wants Classical Music in StateFunded Child-Care Centers,” The Orlando Sentinel 8 March 1998, Bl. 2“Sowing Classical in Red Dirt; Georgia Cultivating Love of Mozart Among Kids,” The Plain Dealer 25 January 1998, 71. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 330 What matters [even for two year olds] is that it’s an act of self-expression.”3 Although there were some who doubted that giving CD’s would do enough, the public discourse that followed Miller’s proposal appears to have been virtually bereft o f anyone willing to challenge his unspoken, radically individualist premise: poverty, crime, and other problems are created by underdeveloped, maladjusted, unacculturated, ignorant individuals. Nor did a second unarticulated assumption come under significant examination: the great diversity of “popular” music, which is presently playing in the households of newborns, is art for dummies.4 Professionals and other experts do not generally speak about such matters these terms. This is not merely because they are reluctant to say what would be unpopular. When educators like Rostan tell us about the power of the high arts and humanities, it is inspirational both for them and for many others. Who would not want to become what they otherwise never could be? Zell Miller himself comes from the hills o f northern Georgia and grew up on Bluegrass music. He had not even heard of classical music 3O’Neal, “Beethoven for babies on Ga. minds.” 4William Raspberry wrote a very funny column in The Washington Post based on a purported conversation between him and a Dr. Laura Gnozitahl (knows-it-all). The good doctor explains that rap music is the cause of youth troubles and that today’s adults are smarter because cartoons in the good old days were produced with classical music in the background. Raspberry’s piece was one of only two articles I could find (among 14) where there was a less than positive response to the proposal. See William Raspberry, “Babies and Brahms,” The Washington Post 23 January 1998, A27. Jack Kisling, “Will Georgians get Smarter?” The Denver Post 15 February 1998, second edition, F-02. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 331 until he went away to college, but there he began to “appreciate” it.5 Miller’s cultural journey is familiar to his successful contemporaries, and so his proposal resonated with them. Those exemplary Americans who continue to address social and public concerns, like Zell Miller, have been so shaped by the radical individualism of their own course to adulthood, that it is difficult for them to articulate ideas outside of it. This dissertation does not offer any easy ways out; that is it offers neither expert solutions to social problems, nor a way around the therapeutic ethos that drives us to search for magic bullets to them. It does make a helpful suggestion, however, that social problems cannot be solved through technical means. Since society is essentially a morally and politically constructed system, insight into it comes only through seeking understand the moral and political life worlds we inhabit. This project was designed to help us understand the construction of a common element of modem American society. It began with an analysis o f federal household budget surveys and employer wage surveys around the turn o f the century. The data suggested that a sharp decline in children’s economic contributions to their households was associated with a surge in the strength and reliability of father’s wages relative to all other household members. The greater attainability of a family-wage by fathers was widely shared across region, nativity, race, and industry. Youths were relieved from economic responsibilities in the household, but not just because they could be. The s “Georgia Governor’s Plan To Give Classical Music Recordings To Newborns Strikes Responsive Chord,” The Buffalo News 23 January 1998, 15A. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 332 meanings of growing up working-class were being transformed into terms that called for greater care to their future, the potential to become more than their parents had been. In Dan Rostan’s words, the dream is to be more than we would otherwise be. This exploration into the new policies that encouraged the new youth dependency began with a study of work accident claims made by youths in Ohio courts between 1889 and 1930. Youths, their kin, and lawyers demanded compensation for injuries by proclaiming that they were incompetent for the performance o f work in factories and mills. Ohio courts slowly dismantled the applicability of the concept of “due care” for workers under 18 years of age. As a consequence, the liabilities taken on by employers of youths rose, and there emerged an unmanageable differential between the risks of hiring youths over adults. This provided employers with strong rational economic incentives to avoid hiring youths, but the courts also provided settings where adults and youths alike learned a key rule of the evolving male breadwinner ideal —wage earning in the “primary” industries and manufacturing sectors of the economy was inappropriate for minors. These parts of the economy were precisely the places where men were organizing the most effective unions, seeking the protections of state regulation, and fighting for better hours, wages, and conditions —the social policy backbone of maintaining male wage superiority. By the time liability for injuries to youths at work were included under workmen’s compensation in 1925, employment patterns had been transformed. Social personnel were now in place to monitor and discipline violators of compulsory education, high Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 333 schools were the hubs for the movements of youth culture, and youth labors had been redefined as appropriate for “casual” sectors of the economy. The labeling o f some jobs as “casual” has less to with transcendent qualities of particular productive processes, than with historically negotiated relations of production. For example, newsboys organized a number o f sporadic labor actions early in the century, but the relations of newspaper circulation remained favorable to the owners. This is not to say the boys were unorganized, because newspaper owners and social workers organized the boys into newsboys’ associations, clubs, and camps. Chapter Four traced the rise of newsboys’ recreational and citizenship clubs through texts written by those who operated newsboys clubs and those who hoped to remove the boys from street labor altogether. Beginning in the 1890s, John Gunckel tried to build a sense o f masculine vigor within the boys through their street life because he thought it could save the city from the corruptions o f overcivilization. According to Gunckel the boys could be taught to be virtuous little merchants. As his work was culminating in the National Newsboys’ Association, the National Child Labor Association (NCLC) launched a campaign to eliminate child labor in the city streets. Led by Edward Clopper, the reformers of the NCLC claimed that the boys should not be on the streets, but should be protected within nurturing homes and educated in schools. In Clopper’s vision, the city could not be saved by Gunckel’s program, and boys certainly could not be the foot soldiers of a moral crusade. In Clopper’s words “real purpose o f the street” was to serve the technical purposes of “communication” Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 334 and “commerce,” not for sociability or building community. As newsboys’ associations spread, GunckeFs moral paternalism faded and recreational treatment programs emerged. Recreational clubs provided common ground where newspaper owners would be insured that their use of the boys would go undisturbed, yet the services of social workers, psychologists, physicians, and other professionals would be employed. As exemplified by Harry Burroughs’ nostalgic newsboys’ retreat to the Maine countryside, the recreational clubs offered a therapeutic approach to the boys’ troubles. At Agassiz Village they practiced handy crafts, went on small expeditions, and joined faux pioneering communities or Indian tribes to build their self-esteem through a playful haven from a heartless world. The brief stories that we have of Burroughs’ boys articulating their troubles in terms of class-based poverty, or racial or religious oppression, suggests that their complaints were translated by the dominant therapeutic language into matters of individual enrichment, education, or personality adjustment. The ideological origins of newsboys clubs were related to a general transformation of social work from charity to therapy. In chapters Five and Six, case notes and theses based on client-interviews in Cleveland, Ohio were used to delve deeper into the rise of therapeutic social work. The poverty relief notes o f the 1890s suggested that friendly visits were brief, rarely repeated exchanges. By the 1930s social workers had created the organizational technology to establish long-term relationships with their clients, and they also spoke in a new therapeutic language. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 335 Friendly visitors rarely gave child rearing advice because a child’s lot was cast with his or her own kind and the definition of poverty was intertwined with ethnic, religious, and class identities. Visitors and parents alike seemed to have shared a familycentered notion of childhood that encouraged a boy to “go in his father’s place.” Unlike the mercenary aid offered by visitors, professional social workers provided individualized assessments of a poor person’s mental and physical health. Thus, childhood and youth, as the quintessential period of healthy or pathological development, became the primary way to help the poor. Client interviews from the 1930s suggest that the distinctions made between parental poverty and the potential of youth worked to heighten anxieties about failed male breadwinning, to reinforce the growing irrelevance of cultural heritage, and to support a cult of youth centered on peers and consumerism. Social workers designed programs of enrichment, adjustment, and education to save poor youths from their parents’ legacies of failure. None of these programs was more intensive than foster care. Foster care taught poor children that fathers who failed to earn a family-wage or mothers who lack proper control of themselves and their households would be punished, divorced from their children, and discouraged from reestablishing parental bonds with them. Utilitarian or economic versions of individualism that helped constitute matemalism framed how case workers exercised foster care treatment. Wage placement and vocational guidance were used to move girls into domestic service and to keep boys employed on farms if they failed to secure Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 336 private employment. The opportunities provided African-American foster youths were extremely limited. Foster case workers implemented treatment programs in an attempt to insure that their clients would become single wage-eamers and create the types of households that their parents had failed to sustain. The Johnson’s and Sorrento’s children often submitted to their case workers’ demands, but they also contested their treatment. They subtly shaped the meanings of individual success into less narrowly economic and more expressive forms and opposed racial subordination by using the resources of kinship, seeking the relations of labor that they preferred, engaging in sexual relationships, creating families on their own terms, rejecting outright the authority of professionals, forming intimate bonds with foster parents, and attending high schools. They were generally less compelled than case workers by ideals of selfcontrol and middle-class respectability. Youths were willing to forego job security, if it meant they had to partake in especially undesirable work relations. They were more concerned sustaining intimate relations with family and friends, and fashioning a meaningful present life more than insuring their own employment stability. High schools were one of the best ways for foster youths to avoid wageplacements or to nullify the implementation o f the vocational counselors’ often dire predictions about their occupational potential. For most foster youths schooling was probably more than a way to resist professionals, or simply a means to a good job, because high school student life also provided the seductive elements of the cult o f youth. Chapter Seven reconstructed student life and the rise of extra-curricular Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 337 activities between 1900 and 1945 at Cleveland’s East Technical High School, from which Carter Johnson graduated in 1939, and Central High School. High school newspapers, literary magazines, and yearbooks allowed a rare glimpse into the ways extra-curricular activities helped school authorities discipline students to industrial order, while simultaneously encouraging them to become peer-centered, sexually liberated consumers. High school activities tended to reinforce the growing irrelevance of religious and ethnic traditions in favor of the liberal ideal of the universal nature o f ‘man.’ The degree to which this undermined hatred and prejudice should be applauded, but it should be noted that curriculum tracking and extra-curricular leadership opportunities at these schools followed gender and racial hierarchies. Moreover, the more comprehensive high school life became, the more the cult of youth grew, the more disengaged students became from kinship and community life. The origins of extra-curricular activities lay in a search for ‘real’ or authentic experiences which, ironically, institutions like high schools (through spectator sports, mass discipline, and the encouragement of youth separateness) had denied students. Antimodem sentiments framed students’ fascination with spectator sports and they were frightfully put to use by authorities to rally support for the quintessential experiences of modem alienation —the World Wars. Antimodem sentiments were so embedded in the cultural fabric o f high school student life that the youths who participated in the activities that were the most opposed to mass discipline and spectator anonymity, the student writers of the literary and debating societies, often Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 338 constructed a sense of themselves through a romantic naturalism that was alas another form o f the antimodem search for authenticity. Yet, student writings also suggested that activities devoted to language, the arts, rhetoric, and knowledge were fundamentally different from spectator events because they gave students greater latitude with which to speak. By so doing, these clubs turned the expressive individualism of youth culture, the therapeutic aspects of self-realization that existed within it, toward more socially critical directions. This was particularly pointed when students writers dealt with the issues of gender, religion, and race in the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, high schools manifested the most captivating and the most liberating, the most horrifying and the most inspiring elements of life in a modem mass society. Labor, welfare, and education policies spurred on the increased economic dependence of working-class youths upon their parents, while they paradoxically taught youths lessons of liberation from their parents’ cultural heritage. Case law, reformer tracts, local studies from the era, notes from social workers, and writings from working-class youths themselves, have shown some of the ways social service providers, working-class youths, and their families fashioned modem generational relations and youth life. The power of helping professionals to influence growing up working-class grew enormously over this period, but it was never total or monolithic. Working-class youth helped shape an expressive individualism that challenged both filial obligation and self-control, and altered the meanings of maturity, family obligations, and individualism in our century. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. APPENDIX A An Essay on the Data for Chapter Two The Collection of the Household Budget Data The household budget survey data utilized in chapter two were made available by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). The data set referred to in the text as the 1890 survey, "Cost of Living of Industrial Workers in the United States and Europe, 1889-1890" (ICPSR 7711) and the data set referred to as the 1918 survey, "Cost o f Living in the United States, 1917-1919" (ICPSR 8299) were originally collected by the United States Department of Labor and the Bureau of Labor Statistics respectively. Neither the collector o f the original data nor the consortium bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretation presented here. The 1890 survey was embarked upon in order to estimate the cost of living and production in cotton and woollen textiles, glass, pig iron, bar iron, steel, bituminous coal, coke, and iron ore. One hundred and two variables including household demographic characteristics, expenditures, and sources of income are provided for 8,544 families in 24 U.S. States and five European Countries. The information was to serve comparative purposes for debates over the highly protective McKinley Tariff of 1890. It is not clear where interviews were held, but it is quite likely that the survey was not random in the technical sense. Random sampling, which was rarely implemented prior to the 1930s, is an important assumption in tests of significance and 339 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 340 allows researchers to apply their conclusion about the sample to a particular group of people. Although the lack o f strict random sampling procedures is unfortunate with this and other historical data prior to the 1930s, it appears that those interviewed came from a fair cross-section of industrial workers. Michael Haines tested for representativeness of the sample by comparing the distribution of family characteristics with the 1890 U.S. Census aggregates. He concluded that the sample and the census were “roughly similar.” For further discussion see John Modell, “Patterns of Consumption, Acculturation, and Family Income Strategies in Late-NineteenthCentury America,” in Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A Vinovskis eds. Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 206-240; Michael R. Haines, “Industrial Work and The Family Life Cycle, 1889-1890,” Research in Economic History, 4 (1979): 289-356. The 1918 survey was used to calculate weights for use in the consumer price index. It covered 12,817 families in ninety-nine U.S. cities in forty-two states. The instructions imply that surveyors were to visit the homes of the families and that they should approach the mother for information. The survey was much more extensive than the 1890 data set, including 2,224 variables providing demographic, earning, and expenditure variables for each individual in the households. Making the Household Data Sets Comparable There are some significant differences in the populations sampled in each survey. The 1890 data was from wage earners in heavy industries, extraction, textiles, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 341 and glass. The 1918 survey was intended to cover the entire spectrum of occupations and industries. Obviously these surveys would not be comparable without selecting cases by industry and occupational title. So, I sorted out the occupational titles and industries in the 1918 data that were incongruent with those surveyed in 1890. There were two variables that governed the selection procedure: industry and occupational title. First, I eliminated all cases but those with comparable father’s industries which included: blank, invalid, textiles, manufacturing, metals, mining, glass, and resource extraction. Second, I selected occupational titles in the skilled and unskilled trades, as well as low skilled office workers. I included foremen and overseers, but excluded yard masters, supervisors, managers, and superintendents. Assistants were treated as if they were the full version o f the occupational title. In all 1,096 (8.6%) separate occupational titles in 1918 were deemed not comparable to 1890. The following were deemed not comparable: accountant, advertising agent, all agents except ticket agents, architect, army recruiter, artist, auditor, bookkeeper, buyer, captain of fire, captain of police, cemetery caretaker, chemist, chief of police, cinematographer, civil engineer, claim investigator, claims adjuster, collector, county tax assessor, court reporter, dentist, dept, master of quartermaster corp., dept, head, deputy Marshall, deputy treasurer, detective, draftsman, druggist, drummer, editor, electrical engineer, embalmer, estimator, grain exchange supervisor of weights, head general man, high school teacher, horn player, insurance agent, law clerk, librarian, magistrate, managers, mechanical engineer, museum attendant, museum caretaker, musician, optician, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 342 pharmacist, photographer, pilot, police inspector, post master, registrar of deeds, road supervisor, rr yard master, salesman, saleswoman, school training supervisor, secretary, ship captain, solicitor, stenographer, superintendents, surveyor, tree surgeon, undertaker, university professor. In all only about 35% or 4,505 households in the 1918 survey were deemed comparable by both father’s occupation and industry to those surveyed in 1890. The European families were excluded from the 1890 data for comparative purposes. Whereas the 1890 survey had included single-parent families and those without children, the 1918 survey was narrowed to two-parent families with children. Thus, no children families were selected out of the 1890 survey to make the surveys comparable by that quality. The 187 families without a father and the handful of families without a mother reported were left in the 1890 data set. Thus, the two data sets have been culled to be roughly comparable and for analysis include 5,896 households in the 1890 survey and 4,505 households in the 1918 survey. To make dollar amounts reported in the surveys comparable, I used the consumer price index (CPI) given in U.S. Dept, of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics o f the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, part 1 (Washington, D C., 1975), E135-173, 211. Historical Statistics used 1967 as the base year, CPI = 100. If CPI for 1967 equals 100, they calculated the CPI for 1890 to be equal to 27 and the CPI for 1918 to be equal to 45.1. This another way to say that consumer goods were priced at 167 percent in 1918 (45.1/27) of what they had been in 1890. In Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 343 1918 one would have needed 167 dollars to purchase the same goods that were sold for 100 dollars in 1890. The worth of a 1918 dollar in 1890 terms can be calculated by (100/167) or 60 percent. In general, the following expression converts the CPI for any new year x and makes year b the new base year. (CPIx / CPIb) * 100 = CPInx Where CPInx is the new CPI for the year x, and the year b is new base = 100 Once the new base is created for the year one wants to hold constant dollars, the general expression for the real income index is as follows: CPI(base) / CPI (x) = Real Income Index for year x W here the base is the year for constant dollars and x year is the converted year For all the years used in chapter one, shown in Table A.1 below, I converted the income figures into constant 1890 dollars according to the following chart by multiplying the reported income figures for a given year by that year’s real income index. There were a number of differences in the surveys’ questionnaires that required transformation in the data. Most of these were mundane in nature and are documented in code books in the possession of the author. One transformation worth noting here allowed the creation o f a variable I have called “adjusted mothers’ income” (see page 43-44). In both surveys there were variables for non-wage cash sources of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 344 TABLE A.1 Real Income Indices Calculated for Chapter Two year cpi base 1967 = 100 cpi base 1890 = 100 real income index base 1890 = 1 1878 29 107.41 .93 1890 27 100 1 1891 27 100 1 1900 25 92.59 1.08 1914 30.1 111.48 .90 1918 45.1 167.04 .60 1923 51.1 189.26 .53 income. The surveys did not ask ‘who’ in these families did the labor that brought these non-wage sources of income into the household. Because other scholars have showed that women were the likely laborers for these jobs, I summed these sources with the mothers’ reported income in an attempt to get a more accurate figure for the cash mothers brought into the household. In the 1890 survey adjusted mothers’ income was a summation of variables labeled “wife’s wage,” “other income,” and “boarder income.” In the 1918 survey the adjusted mothers’ income was a summation of the variables labeled “wife’s earnings,” “boarders,” “fuel picking,” “gardening/chickens”, “other income.” There are other potential differences in the surveys which can not be compensated. It is not clear whether African-Americans are represented in the 1890 survey because no variable coded race. It is also unclear how many households of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 345 foreign-born fathers are in the 1918 data because this question was left blank in the vast majority o f cases. The instructions to the interviewers in 1918 tell them not to interview non-English speakers or persons on charity. There are also no boarders included in the later survey, although there are many lodgers. This introduced a systematic bias against families who provided meals to outsiders for pay. However, the historical distortion introduced by the boarder-lodger sampling variation between the surveys is less serious than it might have been because historians have documented a general shift first away from boarders and then away from lodgers over these years among the working-classes during these years. See Nancy Folbre, “Women's Informal Market Work in Massachusetts, 1875 - 1920" Social Science History 17 (Spring 1993): 135-160; and Mark Peel, “On the margins. Lodgers and Boarders in Boston, 1860-1900.” Journal o f American History 72 (1986): 813-34. Below Tables A.2 and A.3 show the dollar amounts rounded to the nearest dollar that shown in the graphs titled Tables 2.1, 2.2, 2.3. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 346 TABLE A.2 (Figures Graphed Tables 2.2 and 2.3) Sources of Household Income by Member Status Across Father’s Age Groups from Household Budget Surveys 1890 and 1918 FATHER'S INCOME FATHER'S AGE GROUP CHILDREN’S INCOME 1918 1890 1890 •ADJUSTED MOTHER'S INCOME 1918 1890 MOTHER'S INCOME 1918 1890 1918 UNDER 30 S 515 S779 $1 $2 $43 S 18 S 15 $8 30 TO 39 S 579 $823 $2 9 $ 10 $44 $25 S 14 $ 11 40 TO 49 SS1S S785 $198 $122 $5 9 $30 $ 10 $ 14 50 TO 59 S 445 $682 $301 $255 $ 112 $35 $9 $19 60 AND OVER $27 6 $541 $294 $263 $131 $45 $6 $20 * Adjusted Mother’s income combines the mother’s reported earnings with earnings from labor for which she was likely to be responsible including earnings from boarders, chickens, gardens, and fuel picking. Mother’s reported income without this adjustment appears in column 4 of this chart. TABLE A.3 (Figures Graphed in Table. 2.1) Real Mean Annual Wages in 1890 dollars by Sex and Age in Ohio’s Mining, Metals, Glass, Textiles and Manufacturing Industries Selected by Skill Levels to Sex&A ge Group 1878 Ohio Labor Survey 1890-91 Composite of Ohio Surveys N S $482 352,156 $531 185,974 $693 280.594 $826 50,946 $228 59,929 $259 24.204 $362 40.140 $438 $ 179 1,451 $211 6,065 $ 181 2,715 $301 3,310 $413 X X 227 $ 177 X X 2,042 $235 1,933 $325 29 $ 147 8.856 $155 X X X X X X N 17.492 $379 333,907 801 $ 192 Boys 1,899 Girls Boys & Girls 1923 Ohio Labor Survey S s Women 1914 Ohio Labor Survey N N Men 1900 Ohio Returns U.S. Census s S N *In 1878 boys < 16 and girls < 16. In 1890-91 boys and girls < 16 in Ohio Bureau o f Labor Surveys and 10-16 in U.S. Census. In 1900 boys and girls 10-16. In 1914 and 1918 boys and girls < 18. In the 1878 Ohio wage survey boys were defined as under 16 years old and girls as under 1S years old. In order to separate the composite figures above note that the 1891 Ohio labor survey reported for all industries m en's (n = 60,111) annual mean wages were S 499, women’s (n * 5,599) annual mean wages were S 248, boys’ (n = 2,860) were S 197, and girls’ (n = 479) were S 163. See text below for explanation of methods for Tables 2.1 and A.3 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 347 The Ohio Employer Wage Surveys and the U.S. Census: Tables 2.1 and A.3 show the mean annual wages paid in industries and occupations comparable to those selected in the Household Budget Surveys. Because these figures were obtained by either the grouped mid-point method discussed below, or as aggregate means reported by sex, age, industry, and occupation, tests of statistical significance are not possible. They were tabulated by using the Ohio Department of Labor Annual Reports for the years 1878, 1891, 1914, and 1923 and the published volumes of the United States Census for the years 1890 and 1900. The years of 1878, 1891, 1914, and 1923 were chosen because they were the only years that provided occupational and industry variables along with data on the numbers of weeks or days worked to translate daily or weekly wage data into annual figures by industry, occupation, sex, and age. See Ohio. Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Labor Statistics, Annual Report o f the Bureau o f Labor Statistics, To the General Assembly o f Ohio, 1877-1945. Both the wage surveys and the Census figures on wages (which are also employer surveys) are biased toward large employers. Note that the age definition of boys and girls changed over these years. In the 1914 and 1923 data, boys and girls were define as those under 18 years of age, while they were workers between 10 and 16 years in the Census and under 15 or 16 in the Ohio wage surveys from 1878 and 1891. This significant shift in age categories caused a biased toward underestimating the decline (relative to adults) in wages by boys and girls over the survey years. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 348 The wage surveys and census data asset lays in the size of the samples from which the mean wages are calculated. This first year the survey respondents included 1024 firms employing 22, 650 persons and each subsequent year included more persons in the Ohio Labor Surveys. The data from the remaining years is drawn from hundreds of thousands o f wage-eamers. Difficulties in comparability between the data sets were their main weakness. For example, in the 1891 reports did not separate women’s wages by industry and occupation, and so it was impossible to select women’s wage data by industry and occupation comparable to the other years’ wage data. Rather than abandon the 1891 Ohio labor survey data altogether, I consulted the U.S. census published volumes for wage data by sex, age, industry, and state. I averaged the mean values for men, women, boys, and girls from the 1891 Ohio wage survey and the 1890 Ohio census wage survey for each o f the appropriate industries (manufacturing, metals, textiles, glass, and mining). It should be noted that for men, boys, and girls the mean annual income data from the Ohio labor survey in 1891 was quite close to the U.S. census in 1890. For all industries surveyed in the two data sets men’s annual wages were $523 in the 1890 data and $499 in the 1891 data, women’s annual wages were $243 in the 1890 data and $248 in the 1891 data, while in 1891 boys’ and girls’ annual wages were $197 and $163 respectively, and reported together in the 1890 data they were $156. These similarities in the mean income values speaks favorably for this admittedly rough method of compiling the data from different sources. Finally, combining different surveys allows one to bolster comparisons of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 349 mean income by age, sex, and industry, but comparisons in the enumeration of employees through this method would be improper. The “N” values for 1890-91 column in the chart are totals from overlapping surveys which cannot be compared to the enumeration of workers (“N”) other years, or serve for determining proportions by sex and age within the 1890-91 compiled category. The problems with the U.S. Census’ category “gainfully employed” or the other enumerations of workers in the U.S. Census by each household do not apply to either data sets used here. The Census’ wage data was gathered from inquires of large employers about numbers of employees and wages by sex and age. These were the same methods used by the Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics when compiling their wage survey. One other notable data transformation was required of the Ohio wage surveys. The 1878 and 1891 data on wages were given for each job title and industry by sex and age in mean figures for the given number of workers. In the 1914 and 1923 wage surveys the numbers o f workers by age and sex were reported in five or ten dollar intervals. As a substitute for the mean, a midpoint value was taken as the value for the numbers of workers in the wage category. For the lowest category the true midpoint was adjusted, because there is a lower limit of wages that is substantially above zero. This lower limit was calculated by the relation lowerlimitX = 25(rangeX), where rangeX equals the size of the lowest category. The midpoint was then taken from the new lower limit. For the highest category the midpoint was set by the relation upperlimitX = 5(range o f the second to highest category). These procedures allowed Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 350 the conversion of categorical data into continuous values. Table A. 4, shown in the following pages provides proportions of workers employed and real wages by industry, sex, and age in Ohio as reported by the Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1878, 1891, 1914, and 1923. This data does not allow one to conduct analytic tests for statistical significance or strengths of association. Table A4 is valuable for demonstrating that the changes in the proportions of workers and their wages by sex and age shown in Tables 2.1 and 3.1 were widely shared across a variety of heavy industries and manufactures. The enumeration o f workers in the Table A4 should not be read as a census of the numbers of men, women, and children working in a given industry in Ohio during these years, but it should be read for relative differences by sex, age, and time. Even in this sense, it should be noted that the 1891 Ohio labor survey did not report the enumeration and wages of women workers by industry. This skews the ratios between men, boys, and girls employed by industry in this year. The most conservative way to deal with this shortcoming is to disregard the 1891 data when comparing it to the other years. This was why I omitted the 1891 survey data from table 3.1. However in Table A 4 ,1 have reported the figures reported in 1891 for the readers observation. This table demonstrates more convincingly than Tables 2.1 and 3.1 the widespread nature of the rise in the superiority of men’s wages over women’s and children’s and a declining workforce participation by minors across many industries. In every industry except paper and paper boxes, there was a decline in the participation of minors over the period even Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 351 though the definition of who was a minor increase from 16 to 18 years o f age. This data also suggests that the largest decline in youth participation in factories and mills preceded 1914. TABLE A.4 Numbers of Employees & Mean Annual wages in Constant 1890 dollars by Sex and Age in 26 Ohio Industries, 1878-1923 As Reported by Large Employers to the Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics. Converted to annual earnings in constant 1890 dollars. N % S = Numbers of employees by sex and age in the industry surveyed = Percentage of employees by sex and age in the industry surveyed = Mean annual wages by sex and age in the industry surveyed y ear and sexage Boots Sc Shoes N Clothing Chemlcafc % S N % S N % S 1878 - men 260 65% S537 171 8 8% $465 25 63% $318 1878 • women 128 32% $210 10 5% $268 15 36% $ 195 1878-boys <16 15 3% $135 0 0% ox 1878-jdris <15 0 0% m 13 7% S 162 0 0% na 987 65% $483 X X X 101 44% $758 X X X X X X X X X 1891 -boys<16 417 27% $ 180 X X X 32 13% $ 123 1891 -girls<16 126 8% $ 182 X X X 99 43 % $110 1914 - men 9,159 55% $622 34,792 89% $718 5.859 32% $787 1914 - women 5,875 36% $387 3.536 9% $357 12,018 65% $398 1914-boys <18 791 5% $281 396 1% $383 103 < 1% $256 1914 - giris <18 721 4% $233 242 1% $279 540 3% $251 1923-m en 7,686 53% $ 747 69,778 87% $873 6,562 27% $904 1923 - women 6.186 42% $456 7,987 10% $470 16,131 67% $510 1923 - boys <18 401 3% $377 2,016 3% $507 792 3% $4 6 0 1923 - Ki r i s <18 333 2% $296 243 < 1% $317 751 3% $3 6 7 1891 -m en 1891 - women boys Sc girls TABLE A.4 CONTINUED NEXT PAGE... Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 352 . . . TABLE A.4 CONTINUES y e a r and sexage C onstrnctfoadc C onstruction SappUes Cooperage Electrical & Gas Supplies N % $375 925 89% $332 0 0% na 0% na 0 0% na 0 0% na 2% $202 111 11 % $111 70 88% $252 0% na 0 0% na 10 12% $ 156 2394 97% $584 903 94% $502 X X X 1891 - women X X X X X X X X X 1891 -boys<16 70 3% $217 59 6% $261 X X X 1891 -girls<16 0 0% na 0 0% na X X X 87,891 97% $713 1.962 91 % $588 4,207 54% S651 1.733 2% $363 120 6% $292 3,240 42% S 360 1914-boys <18 681 < 1% $298 68 3% $293 110 1% $320 1914-girls <18 43 < 1% $262 0 0% na 203 3% $285 160.204 98% $875 1,708 89% $637 2,409 45% $844 2.400 1% $417 162 8% $360 2,713 50% $459 1923 - boys <18 837 < 1% $379 61 3% $443 111 2% $384 1923 -girls <18 109 < 1% $286 0 0% na 170 3% S 397 1878 -men 1878 - women 1878 - boys <16 1878-girls <15 1891 -men 1914 -men 1914 - women 1923 -men 1923 - women N % 1.554 98% 0 38 °J S N $ % $ TABLE A.4 CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE... Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 353 . . . TABLE A.4 CONTINUES | Year and sexage Food StaA N Glass Faraitarc % S N 138 66% S 513 273 89% 1878 • women 39 19% S 163 0 0% 1878-boys <16 31 15% S 184 1878-girls <15 0 0% na 32 11% 289 71 % $507 530 1891 - women X X X 1891 -boys<16 48 12% 1891 -giris<16 71 N % $439 294 67% $371 X 18 4% $87 126 29% $95 $ 127 0 0% na 75% $442 0 0% na X X X X X X $247 175 25% $220 220 86% $201 17% $ 193 3 <1% $ 101 36 14% $172 17,953 71 % $626 10,039 94% $587 11,329 89% S 725 6,709 26% $306 339 3% $298 974 8% $298 1914-boys <18 275 1% $259 275 3% $304 320 3% $331 1914-girls <18 399 2% $244 24 <1% $230 50 <1 % $251 30,284 74% $743 8,212 93% $690 9,825 83% $745 9,725 24% $373 390 4% $399 1,806 15% $396 1923-boys <18 493 1% $354 197 2% $403 183 2% $382 J j 9 2 3 - girls <18 399 <1 % $268 30 <1% $323 53 <1% S 311 1878 - men 1891 -men 1914-men 1914-women 1923 - men 1923 - women % $ Boys A Girts $ TABLE A.4 CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE . . . 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Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 354 TABLE A 4 CONTINUES . . . y ear and seiage Iron & Steel Manufacturing Iron & Steel Furnaces and Mills Jewelry N % S 511 5.342 92% S 494 171 86% S 588 0% na 0 0% na 21 11 % $ 259 175 8% $ 172 460 8% S 284 8 4% S 149 0 0% na 0 0% na 0 0% na 12,156 96% S 576 30 11 % S 432 X X X 1891 - women X X X X X X X X X 1891 -boys<16 458 4% S 179 225 89% S 284 X X X 1891 -girls<16 8 <1 % S 273 0 0% na X X X 105,675 96 % S 683 68,454 99% S 758 224 78% $ 824 1914- women 2,859 3% S 356 410 <1% S356 21 7% S 385 1914 - boys <18 U 15 1% S 306 231 <1 % $ 334 33 11 % S 205 1914 - girls <18 69 <1 % $ 255 3 <1 % $ 309 9 3% S 240 156,232 95% S 790 107,132 99 S 904 728 74% $760 1923-women 7,030 4% S 430 969 <1 % S430 223 23% $338 1923-boys <18 1,168 <1 % S 427 140 <1% S 421 30 3% $280 1923-girls <18 214 <1 % S 334 32 <1 % S 618 0 0% X N % S 2.060 92% 0 1878-boys <16 1878-girls <15 1878 - men 1878 - women 1891 -men 1914 - men 1923 - men N $ % S TABLE A.4 CONTINUED ON THE NEXT PAGE . . . Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 355 TABLE A.4 CONTINUES y t» r and w n fe Laimdry % N Liqoor St Beverages Leather N $ % N $ % | $ 1878 • men X X X 360 98% $458 161 100% $642 1878 • women X X X 0 0% na 0 0% na 1878-boys <16 X X X 6 2% $169 0 0% na 1878- ^ t s <15 X X X 0 0% na 0 0% na 1891 -men 57 8 0% $ 577 294 100% $484 1,204 97% $609 1891 -women X X X X X X X X X 1891 -boys<16 13 18% S 148 0 0% na 35 3% $270 1891 -girls<16 1 1% S 103 0 0% na 0 0% na 1914-m en 2,244 3 2% S687 3,139 85% $630 6,288 98% $777 1914 - women 4,716 6 7% S328 448 12% $376 68 1% $320 1914-boys <18 21 <1% S 266 68 2% $273 62 1% $327 1914-girls <18 58 <1% S223 47 1% $249 1 <1 % $485 1923-m en 3,461 37% $760 2.684 84% $714 2.842 95% $775 1923 - women 5,631 60% $377 445 14% $461 76 3% $352 1923-boys <18 272 3% $339 35 1% $416 67 2% $351 1923 - girls <18 0 0% na 38 I% $340 1 <1 % $454j TABLE A.4 CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE ... 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Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 356 TABLE A.4 CONTINUES year and sexage Lumber, Planing & Saar Mflb, A Wooden Boxes N ------------------------------Metals Production ( not Iron o r steel) Manufacturing (general) N % S 490 92% S 422 633 68% $356 94 100% $419 0 0% na 210 23% $259 0 0% na 1878-boys <16 46 8% S 140 0 0% na 1878 - girls <15 0 0% na 88 9% $ 137 0 0% na 555 94% $497 156 27% $330 0 0% na 1891 - women X X X X X X X X X 1891 -boys<16 35 6% $ 167 359 62% $214 3 100% $ 187 1891 -girls<16 0 0% na 63 11 % $ 171 0 0% na 15,514 90% $599 16,762 82% $629 3,285 86% $699 1.221 7% $338 3,155 15% $343 452 12% $335 1914-boys <18 362 2% $286 425 2% $320 55 1% $270 1914-girls <18 85 <1 % $213 166 <1% $244 36 <1% $260 17,255 90% $693 35,831 77% $763 14,441 92% $758 1,432 7% $392 8,871 19% $436 1,059 7% $429 1923 - boys <18 360 2% $446 1,158 2% $426 190 1% $362 1923 - girls <18 183 <1% $289 597 I% $345 29 <1 % $293 1878-men 1878-women 1891 -men 1914-men 1914-women 1923 - men 1923 - women N % $ Boys & Girls % $ TABLE A.4 CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE . .. 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Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 357 TABLE A.4 CONTINUES year and ■exage Mining St Quarries Paper St Paper Box Pottery N % s 7,341 89% S 266 1,125 57% $ 391 670 69% $519 0 0% na 713 36% S 181 121 13% $ 186 1878 -boys<16 893 11% S 141 119 6% $170 174 18% $ 137 1878 - girls <15 0 0% na 0 0% na 0 0% na 20622* 97% X 0 0% na 163 87% $537 X X X X X X X X X 1891 -Sx>ys<16 568* 3% $ 163* 41 6 4% $169 20 11% $274 1891 -girls<16 0 0% na 23 36% S 129 5 3% $234 7,172 99% S 585 7,867 6 7% S634 13393 82% $637 0 0% na 3,598 3 0% $319 2,654 16% $396 1914-boys <18 46 1% S 302 73 <1% $249 164 1% $370 1914-girls <18 0 0% na 280 2% $208 118 <1 % $290 1923 - men X X X 12434 6 7% $747 19,109 78% $794 1923 - women X X X 5.009 27% $395 4305 20% $457 1923 - boys <18 X X X 1,038 6% $251 233 <1 % $464 1923-girls <18 X X X 191 1% $287 141 <1 % $328 1878 - men 1878 - women 1891 • men 1891 - women 1914-men 1914-women X _j % S N % S •Data undermining and quarries from 1891 is from the 1892 annual report by the Ohio Bureau of Labor Statistics. The mean wages of boys’ mining under 1891 is from 3 youth minors in the 1891 annual report TABLE A.4 CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE . . . Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 358 TABLE A.4 CONTINUES . year and w up Printing St Binding % N Textiles S N % 3 5% Tobacco A C igars S 1878 -men X X X 388 1878 • women X X X Women A Children 1878 -boys <16 X X X 723 1878 -girls <15 X X X 2,324 87% $589 0 0% 1891 -women X X X X 1891 -boys<16 340 12% $124 1891^prb< 16 11 <1% 11.648 1914 - women N $ 98 75% $456 0 0% na 29 22 % $ 169 4 3% $ 181 na 897 93% $436 X X X X X 1 100% $128 44 5% $ 179 $177 0 0% na 21 2% $155 71 % $772 5,039 31 % $587 4,478 31 % $556 3,573 22% $338 10,074 62 % $359 9,497 65% $339 1914-boys <18 1,092 7% $205 168 1% $266 149 1% $293 1914-girls <18 162 <1 % $246 961 6% $233 495 3% $254 14,619 76% $913 9,363 37 % $657 3,967 25% $563 4,253 22% $442 15,008 59 % $435 11290 72% $419 1923-boys <18 155 <1% $368 458 2% S 406 121 <1 % $345 1923 -girls <18 280 1% $375 525 2% $318 357 2% $340 1891 -men 1914 - men 1923-men 1923 -women 65% $432 % $ 186 TABLE A 4 CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE .. . Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 359 TABLE A.4 CONTINUES . year and K I> |( Vehieal Manufacturing N % Wood turning. beiKUng.dc carving N S 5 % 1,704 92 H $475 230 92 H $361 0 OH na 0 OH na 1878-boys <16 159 8H $202 21 8H $ 131 1878-girls<l5 0 OH na 0 OH na 1891 -men 0 OH na 3.245 100 H $502 1891 - women X X X X X X 1891 -boys<16 191 99 H $206 0 OH na 1891 -girls<16 2 1H $156 0 OH na 47,263 96 H $692 894 82 % $546 1.538 3H $406 157 14 H $287 1914-boys <18 281 < IH $316 28 3H $363 1914-girls <18 17 <1 H $275 12 1H $246 73,981 95 H $835 1.061 94 H $589 3.757 5H $487 48 4H $302 1923-boys <18 338 <1 H $437 13 1H $202 1923-girls <18 149 <1 H $335 1 <1 % S 195 1878 -men 1878 - women 1914-men 1914 - women 1923 -men 1923-women Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. APPENDIX B An Essay on the Sources for Chapter Five There are 32 casebooks numbering 3,644 cases that have been preserved from Cleveland’s Bethel Associated Charities (BAC). See Family Service Association Records. MS 3820, boxes 8, 9, and 10. Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio. They are from the years 1893 to 1898 and thus coincide nicely with the depression of the 1890s. I sampled every seventh case (14.2 %) with children of at least 10 years of age in every casebook —carrying over the remaining count to the next book. The database includes variables such as “ward”, “religion”, “occupation,” and “who reported” that were reported on the case sheet, but I also endeavored to record variables that are a matter of my reading of visitors’ “backside” notes such as “clients’ request,” “cause o f poverty” according to the visitor, or “prescription for children’s life-course needs.” Even though the data was complied with attention to the relationships between visitors and families, and the position of youths in the households, I did not believe that quantitative methods would fully exploit the source. Thus, I randomly pulled five casebooks, read each case with notes concerning youth life, and recorded the entire note and corresponding family information. The sources of chapter five would be stronger if case records for families on relief from the 1930s had been available for comparison to the Bethel Associated Charities casebooks of the 1890s. Such records have not been found and probably do not exist. It was my good fortune to discover that the School of Applied School of 360 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 361 Social Sciences of Western Reserve University had produced a series of theses, most of which are in storage at Case Western Reserve University Archives, beginning in the 1920s which analyzed case records and recorded client interviews at length. These researchers often meticulously documented a small number o f cases giving extended descriptions of each case as part of a group project with other students interested in similar issues. The descriptive content of these studies, and the care students took to distinguish between their own voices from those of case workers and clients has allow me to reconstruct client responses to interview questions. Two of the studies were especially pertinent to the questions raised in chapter five. See Alexander Horwitz, “The Client Speaks. A study o f the reactions of 15 clients of the division of relief, city of Cleveland, to the policies and practices of that agency” (M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School o f Applied Social Sciences, 1940); Josef L. Tamovitz, “The Client Speaks. A study of the reactions of fourteen clients of the division of relief, city of Cleveland, to the policies and practices of that agency” (M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1940); Kathryn S. Weitzel, “The Client Speaks. A study of the reactions of fourteen clients of the division of relief, city of Cleveland, to the policies and practices of that agency” (M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1940); Roberta Vance, ‘“ The Record is Closed’: The Theory and Practice of Closing as Revealed in a Project of the Cases Closed in the Associated Charities During a Two Month Period” (M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 362 Applied Social Sciences, 1935). “The Client Speaks” provided the most relevant data for comparison with the BAC case records. This study was carried out by eight students who interviewed 117 clients o f the city’s Division of Relief in 1939. I was able to locate three o f the theses that contained analysis and descriptions from 43 families. The purpose o f “The Client Speaks” was to solicit opinions regarding the problems faced by poor families both in terms o f poverty itself and relief policies. The families were asked questions directed toward budgeting issues, intra-family relationships, the meaning of work, and plans for the future. Each interviewer grouped the 14 or 15 families the he or she interviewed into positive, mixed, and negative groups in their orientation toward the Division o f Relief. For each group the thesis would begin with a description of the families and the tenor of the interviews. The narratives roughly followed the questionnaire used in the interviews which was also printed in an appendix. Although the interviewers did not attempt to tally responses (perhaps because the questions were not of the multiple choice or “yes or no” variety) they made an effort to report points of consensus and dissent. They took special care to highlight issues that multiple persons had raised in response to broad questions. The selection criteria for “The Client Speaks,” were more restrictive than the ones I used in the BAC casebooks. The interviewers selected families of two parents and three children, without boarders, roomers, and kin living in the home because they were concerned about, “too many variables for evaluation.” (Pg. 5-7) The two parent, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 363 three child family of five made up about 12 % of the families on the Division’s relief. They also selected families that had not received public relief before August of 1933 when federal guidelines instituted many of the policies under question. And they had to have appeared on the roles by October 15, 1939. Cases where the family could not speak the same language as the interviewer were also dropped as were any with extreme “mental or emotional disturbance” that made the interview difficult to conduct. After meeting these criteria, cases were selected randomly with surnames beginning with A through N due to a problem with the availability o f the master indexing list at the county relief agency. The interviews averaged about two hours in length and tried to include all family members. For “The Record is Closed,” Roberta Vance selected 65 cases closed by the Associated Charities in November and December of 1934. She asked why was the case opened, what treatment was prescribed, how did the client family react to treatment, and why was the case closed. She read the case notes and interviewed case workers. Vance, like many of her peers, provided a wealth o f detail from the case notes. She does a better job than the students of “The Client Speaks,” in reporting frequencies of given characteristics. Are the Data Comparable? Three different selection methods are at work in the evidence for Chapter Five. The simplest way to see if data sets are comparable in cases where random sampling has been violated is to compare the samples’ profiles to the populations from which Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 364 they are drawn. Variations in the characteristics of the samples are methodologically problematic only if they originate from the rules of selection rather than the populations themselves and have some relationship to the questions being posed. Differences or similarities in the frequencies of the three samples do not demonstrate a bias or a lack of bias. Some differences may be due to the historical changes that we are trying to comprehend. For example, variations in residential or marital patterns between the 1890 households and 1930 households might be part of changes in the domestic relations of poor families over the era. Unfortunately there is no source from which to obtain profiles of the populations from which these data are drawn. A second way to see if the data are comparable is to look for similarities in the frequencies o f variables known to be important such as race, ethnicity, religion, nativity, household structure, occupation, home ownership etc. I have done just this and the results suggest that the comparison is appropriate. The BAC sample reported 143 Catholic, 108 Protestant, 1 Jewish households (in 17 cases this data was missing). The theses did not tally the religious backgrounds o f the samples, but Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish families were noted (the later being represented more fairly in the theses than in the BAC casebooks). Jewish families were helped by charities kept separate during both depressions, thus one would expect them to be under represented in the BAC data and “The Record is Closed.” Table B. 1 shows that eighteen different ethnic/racial groups were present in the BAC data. It was not completely clear from the BAC casebooks, but it seems Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 365 likely that most of those who gave European ethnic designation were families with at least one foreign bom parent. If this is the case then 83 % of the BAC cases were from immigrant families. Leslie Hough has shown that between 1870 and 1900 the TABLE B.1 Ethnicity/Race of Households from 1890s BAC Sample # of cases % of cases German 74 27.5V. Austrian 2 0.7% Irish 65 24.2V, Swedbh 2 0.7% White (native) 38 14.1V. Dutch 1 0.4% Polish 30 11.2V, Danish 1 0.4% English 17 6.3V. Hungarian 1 0.4% Bohemian 9 33% Italian 1 0.4% African-Amer. 7 2.6% Russian 1 0.4% Slavic 4 1.5% Welsh 1 0.4% Scottish 4 1.5% missing data 8 3.0% French 3 1.1% ethnicity/race ethnkity/race if of cases % of cases percentage of Clevelanders who were first or second generation immigrants climbed to about three-fourths of the total population. See Leslie Hough, The Turbulent Spirt: Cleveland, Ohio, and it Workers, 1877-1899 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991) 36. World War I marked the end of massive European immigration. Immigration restrictions such as the Literacy Act of 1917 and the National Origins Act of 1924 permanently stemmed the tide. The percentage of foreign bom Clevelanders fell substantially (229,000 foreign whites in 1930). Simultaneously large numbers of African-American migrated from the South into the city. By 1930 nearly 72,000 or Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 366 eight percent of Cleveland’s population was made up of African-Americans. Thus, it is probably appropriate that the figures shown in Table B.2 for the nativity and race of the 43 families interviewed in 1939-40 contained a higher proportion of African Americans and fewer foreign bom whites than did the BAC sample from the 1890s. Ethnicity was not reported systematically in the theses. The interviewers noted “Slavs”, Italians, Germans, Poles, Czechs, and whites of “American stock.” TABLE B.2 Race and Nativity of Fathers in 43 “The Client Speaks” Family-Interviews Race-Nativity # of Cases % of Sample N ative White 20 47% Foreign White 19 44% 4 9% African-American Table B. 1 and B.2 show that native whites, European immigrants, and AfricanAmericans are properly represented in the case records and interview samples. In “The Client Speaks” selected families with a nuclear residential structure — and only ones with two parents and three children. They did so, “not because it is representative of the average American family or o f the relief family of 5,” but because they wanted reactions from both fathers and mothers and children old enough to have and express opinions about such matters as relief policy and the experience o f poverty. I also selected families with older children to focus on questions of youth. The average household size among the BAC sample was 5.56 persons; obviously the mean Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 367 was 5 for the interviewed families. The BAC households ranged from 2 to 11 members and 20% of them included 5 or more dependents. Thus, many o f the BAC households were larger and many were smaller. “The Client Speaks” also excluded more complex households such as those with kin and boarders. My BAC sample did not uncover any families with non-kin members reported, but ten cases reported TABLE B.3 Relationship of Dependents to Household Heads in the 1890s BAC Sample Relationship to Heads # o f cases percentage son 463 51.5*/. daughter 423 47.1V, mother (mother-in-law) 5 0.5% grandson 3 03% granddaughter 1 0.1% father (father-in-law) 1 0.1% sister 1 0.1% son-in-law 1 0.1% reported non-nuclear kin. However, Table B.3 demonstrates clearly that there were very few dependents who were not children of the household heads noted. No uncles, aunts, or cousins were reported. Only five households in the BAC data sublet a room. Although household structure data was not reported in the “Record is Closed,” its cases were not selected on this basis. Most of the BAC families were headed by married couples. Tables B.4 and B.5 allows one to compare the marital status of the 1890s and the 1934 data and reveals no large differences. Finally, the comparison of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 368 TABLE B.4 M arital Status of 269 Families in 1890s BAC Sample Marital Status # of cases percentage unmarried/single 2 0.7% married 198 73.6% widow 39 14.5% widower 4 1.5% separated 5 1.9% divorced 1 0.4% deserted 18 6.7% 2 0.7% missing data TABLE B.5 M arital Status of 65 Cases that Roberta Vance Sampled From the AC in 1934 Marital Status Vance’s 65 case Sample # o f cases Married % o f sample AC - 1934 •/. in AC 40 61.5% 59.8% Single Men 2 3.1% 0.3% Single Women 2 3.1% 1% Separated Men 1 3.1% 2.0% Separated Women 4 6.1% 8.5% Widows 6 9.3% 5.9% Widowers 6 9.3% 5.1% Deserted Women 1 1.5% 4.4% Orphans 2 3.1% .7% Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 369 the families occupational characteristics between the BAC data and “The Client Speaks” reveals remarkable similarity. In both the BAC sample and the interviewed families about six out of ten fathers were unskilled laborers. If there is a small bias TABLE B.6 Father’s Occupation Among 202 Families with Fathers in 1890s BAC Sample Father’s Occupation unskilled laborer 4 of Cases percentage 124 61.1% 11 5.4 % carpenter 8 4% painter 5 2.5% plasterer 4 2% machinist 3 1.5% molder 3 1.5% engineer 3 1.5% express man, driver 3 1.5% cook 2 1% boilermaker 2 1% street car / RR worker 2 1% mason 2 1% 13 6.5% steel worker missing data • Other occupations listed only once: shoe-makcr, cigar-maker, candy peddler, slate roofer, blacksmith's shop worker, harness maker, dock worker, agent, tanner, store keeper, gas co. worker, carriage builder, tailor, ship caulker, bookkeeper, watchmaker, and sailor. toward more skilled or professional occupations among the fathers it favors the 1890s. Only in the earlier sample do we find small business “store keepers” or the high skills o f “watch maker” or the low professionals o f “bookkeeper” and “agents.” By selecting older families (three children in the interviews and children over nine in the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 370 BAC), it is possible that the father’s occupational statuses were higher than they were in the populations. If so the bias was shared between the samples. TABLE B.7 Father’s Occupational Statues Among 43 Families of “The Client Speaks” Father’s Occupational Status # of cases percentage unskilled laborers 26 60.5% semi-skilled and skilled laborers 17 39.5% 0 0% professionals Charting the occupational statues of fathers implicitly assumes it was an especially important factor in the class identity of the entire family. This is probably a sound assumption, but the occupational statues of mothers should not be ignored. This especially true for the sixty-seven households in the 1890 data where that were without fathers. As table B.8 shows, mothers who reported occupations were mostly engaged in unskilled labor such as washing and day work much like the fathers. Thirty-three (or about half) of the mothers without husbands present reported occupational titles; only 21 of 198 (or about one in ten) o f the women with husbands reported occupational titles. Of the thirty-three single mothers who reported occupations, most were washers (17), day workers (8), or garment workers (5). On the whole, mothers had a shorter list of job titles and lower occupational statuses. The lack of single-parent in “Client Speaks” is probably the most serious discrepancy between the data sets. On other points their was close comparability. In twenty-four of twenty-nine (83 %) households were it was noted by the 1939-40 interviewer, the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 371 TABLE B.8 Mother’s Occupation Among 265 Families with Mothers in BAC Sample Mother’s Occupation s o f Cases percentage washing 29 11% day worker 13 5% sewing 7 2.6% dressmaker 2 0.7% 222 84% missing data •Other occupations listed only once: scrubbing, store keeper, restaurant cook, music teacher, peddler. family was in debt. Only two owned their homes; most lived in 3, 4, or 5 room apartments. These are financial and living characteristics shared by the BAC households. Of cases with the data, 158 of 183 (86 %) BAC households reported debt. Thirty-six families (13.6%) rented or owned a house; most lived in two (17%), three (25%), and four (17%) room apartments. Thirty-two of the forty-three (74.4%) families in “The Client Speaks,” reported a member with poor health. A large portion (41.6%) were noted with poor health in BAC sample. Although there were differences in the selection criteria, the samples used in chapter five appear quite similar and comparing them was justified. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY PRIMARY SOURCES *Due to the large number of short pieces used in this study, the bibliographic entries for primary sources do not include every court opinion, piece of legislation, article, essay, poem, or story cited in the footnotes. Instead, I have provided entries for larger works and for entire collections, bulletins, journals, and yearbooks that often included several hundred short pieces of writing used in the project. Shorter works that were cited in the text which were not included in frequently used periodicals and collections were given separate bibliographic entries. ** Abbreviations for Archives and Local Libraries CCA - Cuyahoga County Archives CMC - Central Middle School Media Center CPL - Cleveland Public Library ETMC - East Techical High School Media Center ICPSR - Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research JAAA - Jane Addams High School Alumni Association Archives JHMC - John Hay High School Media Center JMAA - John Marshall High School Alumni Association Archives UA - University Archives, Case Western Reserve University WRHS - Western Reserve Historical Society American Academy for Political and Social Science. Annals o f the American Academy fo r Political and Social Science. Philadelphia, PA: A.L. Hummel for the American Academy for Political and Social Science, 1890-present. Bauman, Josephine S. “Children Yesterday, Adults Today? A descriptive study of 70 cases active with Aid to Dependent Children, Cleveland Ohio, in which there are children 16 to 18 years old living in the hom e,. . .” M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1947. Located at MSASS library, Case Western Reserve University, MSSA B. Brace, Charles Loring. The Dangerous Classes o f New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them. New York, NY: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, Publishers, 1872. 372 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 373 Burroughs, Harry E. Boys in M en's Shoes: A World o f Working Children. New York: The MacMillian, 1944. Central High School. A Little Book o f Central Verse. Cleveland, OH: Central High School, 1928, 1932. Located at CMC. Central High School. Acta Olympica. Cleveland, OH: Central High School, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1932, 1937. Located at CMC. Central High School. Central High School Monthly Mid-Year Book, Commencement Number, January, 1917. Cleveland, OH. Central High School, 1917. Located at CMC. Central High School. Central Sonnets. Cleveland, OH: Central High School, 1935. Located at CMC. Central High School. Class Classics: Being a Collection o f Compositions Written and Edited by a Group o f IOA Pupils and Hand-set, Printed, and Made into a Book by the 8B Printing Classes. Cleveland, OH: Central High School, 1925. Located at CMC. Central High School. Preludes to Poetry. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Public Library, 1928. Located at CMC. Central High School. Secunda Hora Weimerensis, June 1926. Cleveland, OH: Central High School, 1926. Located at CMC. Central High School. The Annual: Diamond - Jubilee, 1846-1921. Cleveland, OH: Central High School, 1921. Located at CMC. Central High School. The Central Clarion. Cleveland, OH: Central High School, 1940-1947. Located at CMC. Central High School. The Central High School Annual. Cleveland, OH: Central High School, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1913, 1914, 1922, 1942-1945. Titles varied. Located at CMC. Central High School. The Central High School Monthly. Cleveland, OH: Central High School, 1899-1910. Located at CMC. Central High School. The Central High School Monthly, Commencement Number. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 374 Cleveland, OH: Central High School, 1915, 1916, 1917, 1918. Located at CMC. Central High School. The Parnassian: Issued and Edited Amrually by the Parnassian Club and Hand-Set and Printed by the 8B Printing Classes. Cleveland, OH: Central High School, 1926, 1928-30, 1932, 1933-36, 1938. Located at CMC. Clopper, Edward N. Child Labor in the City Streets. New York, NY: MacMillan Company, 1912. East Technical High School. The June Bug: The Annual o f the Technical High School Cleveland Ohio. Cleveland, OH: East Technical High School, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1916, 1918, 1922, 1939. Titles varied. Located at ETMC. East Technical High School. The Scarab. Cleveland, OH: East Technical High School, 1909-1912. Located at ETMC. East Technical High School. Weekly Scarab. Cleveland, OH: East Technical High School, 1917-1945. Title varied. Located ETMC. Family Files. Records of the Cuyahoga County Welfare Bureau, 1919-1970. No manuscript number. Located at CCA. Family Service Association Records. MS 3920, box 8-11. Located at WRHS. Green, Howard Whipple. Supplement to Population Characteristics by Census Tracts Cleveland, Ohio. Cleveland, OH: The Plain Dealer Publishing Company, 1933. Gunckel, John E. Boyville: A History o f Fifteen Years ’ Work Among Newsboys. Toledo, OH: The Toledo Newsboys’ Association, 1905. Horwitz, Alexander. “The Client Speaks: A study of the reactions of 15 clients of the Division o f Relief, city of Cleveland, to the policies and practices of that agency.” M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1940. Located at UA, SASS Theses, box 5. Howe, Frederic C. Confessions o f a Reformer. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925. Jane Addams High School. The Purpose and Progress o f Jane Addams Vocational Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 375 High School For Girls, Seveteenth Year, 1924-1941. Cleveland, OH: Jane Addams High School, 1941. Jane Addams High School. Trade Winds. Cleveland, OH. Jane Addams Vocational High School, 1944-45. John Marshall High School. The Interpreter. Cleveland, OH: John Marshall High School, 1925, 1930-45. Located at JAA Johnson, Helen A. A First Harvest: A Book o f Verse. Cleveland, OH: Central High School, 1932. Located at CMC. Longwood High School. Longwood Transcript. Cleveland, OH. Longwood High School, 1924. Located at JHMC. Lowell, Josephine Shaw. Public R elief and Private Charity. New York, NY: Anno Press & New York Times, reprinted, 1971, c. 1884. Miller, Frieda S. “Industrial Home Work in the United States.” International Labour Review 43 (January-June 1941): 1-50. National Child Labor Committee. The American Child. New York, NY: National Child Labor Committee, 1919-1967. National Child Labor Committee. The Child Labor Bulletin. New York, NY: National Child Labor Committee, 1912-1919. Ohio. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Annual Report o f the Bureau o f Labor Statistics to the General Assembly o f Ohio. 1877-1881, 1885-1909, 1911-13 located at CPL. See also: Ohio. Dept, o f Industrial Relations. Annual Reports. Ohio. Dept, of Industrial Relations, Divison of Labor Statistics. Reports o f the Industrial Commission o f Ohio, Department o f Investigation and Statistics. 1913-1945 located at CPL. Ohio. Laws o f Ohio. 1803-1997 Ohio. Ohio Appellate Reports. Norwalk, OH: S.R. Laning, 1914-1964. Ohio. Ohio Circuit Court Reports (New Series). Cincinnati, OH: Ohio Law Reporter Co., 1903-1914. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 376 Ohio. Ohio Circuit Court Reports. Norwalk, OH: Laninig Printing Co., 1887-1923. Ohio. Ohio Decisions. Norwalk, OH: American Pub., 1912-1923. Ohio. Ohio Law Reporter. Cincinnati, OH: Ohio Law Reporter Co., 1904-1935. Ohio. Ohio State Reports. Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clark, 1873-1982. Ohio. Page's Ohio General Code Annotated, containing all laws o f a general and permanent nature in force at date o f publication with notes o f decisions construing the statutes, edited by William H. Page. Cincinnati, OH: W.H. Anderson Co., 1937. Ohio. The Ohio Law Abstract. Cleveland, Norwalk, OH: The Law Abstract Publishing Co., 1922-1964. Ohio. The Ohio N isi Prius Reports. Cincinnati, OH: Ohio Law Reporter Co, 18921935. Otis, Lillian L. “Unemployment and its treatment in non-resident families. A study of fifty non-resident white...” M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1932. Located at UA, SASS Theses, box 7. Paley, Milton W. “We Can’t Work: A study of ten Cleveland families whose male heads have been classified. . .” M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1942. Located at U A SASS Theses, box 7. Springer, Ethel M. Canal Boat Children on the Chesapeake and Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York Canals. Shepherdstown, WVa: The American Canal and Transportation Center, 1921 c. reprinted, 1977. Tamovitz, Josef. “The Client Speaks: A study of the reactions o f fourteen clients o f the Division o f Relief, city of Cleveland, to the policies and practices of that agency.” M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1940. Located at UA SASS Theses, box 9. The Girl Graduate's Journal. Arranged by Janet Madison and EJ McDonald. Chicago: The Reilly & Lee Co., undated. Located in the JMAA U.S. Court of Appeals. Federal Court Reporter. Washington, 1790-1997. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 377 U.S. Dept, of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics o f the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, part I. Washington, 1975. U.S. Dept, of the Interior, Census Office. The Eleventh Census o f the United States. Washington, 1890. U.S. Dept, of the Interior, Census Office. Twelfth Census o f the United States, Taken in the Year 1900. Washington, 1900. U.S. Dept, of Labor. “Cost of Living of Industrial Workers in the United States and Europe, 1889-1890.” Computer database file 7711, 3rd ICPSR ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1986. U.S. Dept, of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Cost of Living in the United States, 1917-1919.” Computer database file 8299, 5th ICPSR ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1986. U.S. Dept, of Labor, Women’s Bureau. Potential Earning Power o f Southern Mountaineer Handicraft. Bulletin no. 128. Washington, 1935. U.S. Supreme Court. US. Supreme Court Reports. Washington, 1790-1997. Untitled Scrapbook of Central High School Memoribilia. In a large yellow envelope located at CMC. Vance, Roberta. “‘The Record is Closed’: The Theory and Practice of Closing as Revealed in a Project Study o f the Cases Closed in the Associated Charities During a Two Months Period.” M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1935. Located at UA, SASS Theses, box 9. Weitzel, Kathryn S. “The Client Speaks: A study of the reactions of fourteen clients of the Division of Relief, city of Cleveland, to the policies and practices o f that agency.” M.S. Thesis, Western Reserve University, School of Applied Social Sciences, 1940. Located at UA, SASS Theses, box 9. WhitBread, “What’s and Leg to a Newsboy?” The Christian Century, 6 January 1937, 13-14. 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