Brace Charles Loring
The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them
CHAPTER XII
THE BEST PREVENTIVE OF VICE AMONG CHILDREN
INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS
As a simple, practical measure to save from vice the girls of the honest poor, nothing has ever been equal to the Industrial School.
Along with our effort for homeless boys, I early attempted to found a comprehensive organization of Schools for the needy and ragged little girls of the city.
Though our Free Schools are open to all, experience has taught that vast numbers of children are so ill-clothed and destitute that they are ashamed to attend these excellent places of instruction; or their mothers are obliged to employ them during parts of the day; or they are begging, or engaged in street occupations, and will not attend, or, if they do, attend very irregularly. Very many are playing about the docks or idling in the streets.
Twenty years ago, nothing seemed to check this evil. Captain Matsell, in the celebrated report I have alluded to, estimated the number of vagrant children as 10,000, and subsequently in later years, the estimate was as high as 30,000. The commitments for vagrancy were enormous, reaching in one year (1857), for females alone, 3,449; in 1859, 5,778; and in 1860, 5,880. In these we have not the exact number of children, but it was certainly very large.
What was needed to check crime and vagrancy among young girls was some
School of Industry and Morals, adapted for the class.
Many were ashamed to go to the Public Schools; they were too irregular for their rules. They needed some help in the way of food and clothing, much direct moral instruction and training in industry; while their mothers required to be stimulated by earnest appeals to their consciences to induce them to school them at all. Agents must be sent around to gather the children, and to persuade the parents to educate their offspring. It was manifest that the Public Schools were not adapted to meet all these wants, and indeed the mingling of any eleemosynary features in our public educational establishments would have been injudicious. As our infant Society had no funds, my effort was to found something at first by outside help, with the hope subsequently of obtaining a permanent support for the new enterprises, and bringing them under the supervision of the parent Society.
The agencies which we sought to found were the INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS, which
I shall now attempt to describe.
Each one of these humble charities has a history of its own – a history known only to the poor – of sacrifice, patience, and labor.
Some of the most gifted women of New York, of high position and fortune, as well as others of remarkable character and education, have poured forth without stint their services of love in connection with these ministrations of charity.
THE WILSON SCHOOL
The School to which allusion has already been made on page 83, as growing out of the Boys' Meeting in Sixth Street, and afterwards in Avenue D, was the first of these Schools, and owes its origin especially to a lady of great executive power, Mrs. Wilson, wife of the Rev. Dr. Wilson. It has always been an exceedingly successful and efficient School. It was formed in February, 1853, the writer assisting in its organization, and was carried on outside of the Society whose history I am sketching.
THE ROOKERIES OF THE FOURTH WARD – A REMEDY
In visiting from lane to lane and house to house in our poorest quarters, I soon came to know one district which seemed hopelessly given over to vice and misery – the region radiating out from or near to Franklin Square, especially such streets as Cherry, Water, Dover, Roosevelt, and the neighboring lanes. Here were huge barracks – one said to contain some 1,500 persons – underground cellars, crowded with people, and old rickety houses always having "a double" on the rear lot, so as more effectually to shut out light and air. Here were as many liquor-shops as houses, and those worst dens of vice, the "Dance-Saloons," where prostitution was in its most brazen form, and the unfortunate sailors were continually robbed or murdered. Nowhere in the city were so many murders committed, or was every species of crime so rife. Never, however, in this villainous quarter, did I experience the slightest annoyance in my visits, nor did any one of the ladies who subsequently ransacked every den and hole where a child could shelter itself. My own attention was early arrested by the number of wild ragged little girls who were flitting about through these lanes; some with basket and poker gathering rags, some apparently seeking chances of stealing, and others doing errands for the dance-saloons and brothels, or hanging about their doors. The police were constantly arresting them as "vagrants," when the mothers would beg them off from the good-natured Justices, and promise to train them better in future. They were evidently fast training, however, for the most abandoned life. It seemed me if I could only get the refinement, education, and Christian enthusiasm of the better classes fairly to work here among these children, these terrible evils might be corrected at least for the next generation.
I accordingly went about from house to house among ladies whom I had known, and, representing the condition of the Ward, induced them to attend a meeting of ladies to be held at the house of a prominent physician, whose wife had kindly offered her rooms.
For some months I had attempted to prepare the public mind for these labors by incessant writing for the daily papers, by lectures and by sermons in various pulpits. Experience soon showed that the most effective mode of making real the condition of the poorest class, was by relating incidents from real life which continually presented themselves.
The rich and fortunate had hardly conceived the histories of poverty, suffering, and loneliness which were constantly passing around them.
The hope and effort of the writer was to connect the two extremes of society in sympathy, and carry the forces of one class down to lift up the other. For this two things were necessary – one to show the duty which Christ especially teaches of sacrifice to the poor for His sake, and the value which He attaches to each human soul; and the other to free the whole, as much as possible, from any sectarian or dogmatic character. Nothing but "the enthusiasm of humanity" inspired by Christ could lead the comfortable and the fastidious to such disagreeable scenes and hard labors as would meet them here. It was necessary to feel that many comforts most be foregone, and much leisure given up, for this important work. Very unpleasant sights were to be met with, coarse people to be encountered, and rude children managed; the stern facts of filth, vice, and crime to be dealt with.
It was not to be a mere holiday-work, or a sudden gush of sentiment; but, to be of use, it must be patiently continued, week by week, and month by month, and year by year, with some faint resemblance to that patience and love which we believed a Higher One had exercised towards us. But, with this inspiration, as carefully as possible, all dogmatic limitation must be avoided. All sects were invited to take a share in the work, and, as the efforts were necessarily directed to the most palpable and terrible evils, the means used by all would be essentially the same. Even those of no defined religious belief were gladly welcomed if they were ready to do the offices of humanity. The fact that ninety-nine hundredths of these poor people were Roman Catholics compelled us also to confine ourselves to the most simple and fundamental instructions, and to avoid, in any way, arousing religious bigotry.
In the meeting, gathered at the house of Dr. P., were prominent ladies from all the leading sects.
An address was delivered by the writer, and then a constitution presented, of the simplest nature, and an association organized and officers appointed by the ladies present. This was the foundation of the
"FOURTH WARD INDUSTRIAL SCHOOL."
In the meanwhile, we went forth through the slums of the ward, and let it be widely known that a School to teach work, and where food was given daily, and clothes were bestowed to the well-behaved, was just forming.
Our room was in the basement of a church in Roosevelt Street. Hither gathered, on a morning in December, 1853, our ladies and a flock of the most ill-clad and wildest little street-girls that could be collected anywhere in New York. They flew over the benches, they swore and fought with one another, they bandied vile language, and could hardly be tamed down sufficiently to allow the school to be opened.
Few had shoes, all were bonnetless, their dresses were torn, ragged, and dirty; their hair tangled, and faces long unwashed; they had, many of them, a singularly wild and intense expression of eye and feature, as of half-tamed creatures, with passions aroused beyond their years.
The dress and ornaments of the ladies seemed to excite their admiration greatly. It was observed that they soon hid or softened their own worst peculiarities. They evidently could not at first understand the motive which led so many of a far higher and better class to come to help them. The two regular and salaried teachers took the discipline in hand gently and firmly. The ladies soon had their little classes, each gathered quietly about the one instructing. As a general thing, the ladies took upon themselves the industrial branches – sewing, knitting, crocheting, and the like; this gave them also excellent opportunities for moral instruction, and winning the sympathy of the children.
As these ladies, many of them of remarkable character and culture, began to show the fruits of a high civilization to these poor little barbarians, the thought seemed to strike them – though hardly capable of being expressed – that here was a goodness and piety they had never known or conceived. This offspring of poverty and crime veiled their vices and bad habits before these angels. They felt a new impulse – to be worthy of their noble friends. The idea of unselfish Love dawned on their souls; they softened and became respectful. So it continued; each day the wild little beggars became more disciplined and controlled; they began to like study and industry; they were more anxious to be clean and neatly dressed; they checked their tongues, and, in some degree, their tempers; they showed affection and gratitude to their teachers; their minds awakened; most of all, their moral faculties. The truths of Religion or of morals, especially when dramatized in stories and incidents, reached them.
And no words can adequately picture the amount of loving service and patient sacrifice which was poured out by these ladies in this effort among the poor of the Fourth Ward. They never spared themselves or their means. Some came down every day to help in the school; some twice in the week; they were there in all weathers, and never wearied. Three of the number offered up their lives in these labors of humanity, and died in harness.
A most gifted intellectual family, the S – s, supplied some of our most devoted workers; the wife, since deceased, of one of our leading merchants and public men, himself a man much loved for his generosity, occupied the place of one of the Directresses; the wife of a prominent physician was our Treasurer. A young lady of fortune, since dead, Miss G., took the hardest labors upon herself. The wife of a gentleman since Governor and United States Senator, was in especial charge of the house, and dreaded no labor of humanity, however disagreeable. Two others, sisters, who represented one of our most honored historical families, but whose characters needed no help of genealogy to make them esteemed by all, threw themselves into the work with characteristic earnestness. Another of that family, which has furnished the pioneer of all reform-work among the youthful criminals, and in criminal law, and which in the early days of our history so often led public affairs, visited from house to house among the miserable poor of the ward, and twice found herself face to face with small-pox in its most virulent form.
The effects of this particular School upon the morals of the juvenile population of the Fourth Ward were precisely what they have always been in similar schools. These little girls, who might be said to be almost the inmates of the brothels, and who grew up in an atmosphere of crime and degradation, scarcely ever, when mature, joined the ranks of their sisters and neighbors. Though living in the same houses with the gay dance-saloons, they avoided them as they would pestilential places. Trained to industry and familiar with the modest and refined appearance of pure women in the schools, they had no desire for the society of these bold girls, or to earn their living in this idle and shameful manner. They felt the disgrace of the abandoned life around them, and were soon above it. Though almost invariably the children of drunkards, they did not inherit the appetites of their mothers, or if they did, their new training substituted higher and stronger desires. They were seldom known to have the habit of drinking as they grew up. Situations were continually found for them in the country, or they secured places for themselves as servants in respectable families; and, becoming each day more used to better circumstances and more neatly dressed, they had little desire to visit their own wretched homes and remain in their families. Now and then there would be a fall from virtue among them, but the cases were very few indeed. As they grew up they married young mechanics or farmers, and were soon far above the class from which they sprang. Such were the fruits in general of the patient, self-denying labors of these ladies in the Fourth Ward School.
One most self-sacrificing and heroic man, a physician, Dr. Robert Ray, devoted his education and something of his fortune to these benevolent efforts, and died while in the harness. Singularly enough, I never knew, in twenty years' experience, an instance of one of these volunteer teachers contracting any contagious disease in these labors, though repeatedly they have entered tenement rooms where virulent typhoid or small-pox cases were being tended. They made it a rule generally to bathe and change their clothing after their work.
For a more exact account of the results of the Fourth-Ward labors, it is difficult to obtain precise statistics. But when we know from the Prison Reports that soon after the opening of this school there were imprisoned 3,449 female vagrants of all ages, and that last year (1870), when the little girls who then attended such schools would have matured, there were only 671; or when we observe that the Prison in that neighborhood inclosed 3,172 female vagrants in 1861 and only 339 in 1871, we may be assured that the sacrifices made in that Ward have not been without their natural fruit.
Extracts from our Journal:
A VISIT IN THE FOURTH WARD
"We Started out a wintry afternoon to see some of our scholars in the Industrial School of the Fourth Ward. A number of ragged little girls, disdaining to enter, were clustered about the door of the School. As they caught a glimpse of some one coming out, the cry of 'Lie low! lie low!' passed among them, and they were off, capering about in the snow-storm like so many little witches.
"We passed up Oak Street and Cherry. Here is the entrance, a narrow doorway on the side. Wind through this dark passage and you are at the door of a little back room; it is the home of a German rag-picker who has a child in the school. A filthy, close room, with a dark bedroom; there is one window, and a small stove, and two or three chairs. The girl is neat and healthy-looking. 'I pick rags, sir,' says the mother, 'and I can't send her to Public School. I am away all day, and she would have to be in the streets, and it's very hard to live this winter. It's been a great help to send her to that school.' I told her we wanted none who could go to Public School, but if it was so with her she might continue to send. A miserable hole for a home, and yet the child looked neatly.
"Here, beyond, is an old house. We climb the shaking stairs, up to the attic – a bare front room with one roof-window. The only furniture a bed and stove and a broken chair. Very chill and bare, but the floor is well swept. A little humpbacked child is reading away very busily by the light of the scuttle window, and another is cleaning up the floor. The mother is an Irish woman. 'Shure! an' its nivir none of the schools I could sind 'em to. I had no clo'es or shoes for 'em and, it's the truth, I am jist living, an' no more. Could ye help us? We told her we meant to help her by helping her children, and asked about the little deformed one. 'Och! she is sich a swate won! She always larned very quick since her accidint, and I used to think, maybe she wont live, and God will take her away – she was so steady and good. Yes, I am thankful to those ladies for what they are teaching her. She never had no chance before. God bless ye, gintlemen!'
"We climbed again one of these rookeries. It is a back garret. A dark-eyed, passionate-looking woman is sitting over the little stove, and one of our little scholars is standing by – one of the prettiest and brightest children in the school. One of those faces you see in the West of Ireland, perhaps with some Spanish blood in them; a little oval face, with soft brown complexion, quick, dark eyes and harsh, black hair. The mother looked like a woman who had seen much of the worst of life. 'No, sir, I never did send 'em to school. I know it, they ought to learn, but I couldn't. I try to shame him sometimes – it's my husband, sir – but he drinks, and then bates me. Look at that bruise!' and she pointed to her cheek; 'and I tell him to see what's comin' to his children. There's Peggy, goes sellin' fruit every night to those cellars in Water Street, and they're hells, sir. She's learnin' all sorts of bad words there, and don't get back till eleven or twelve o'clock.' She spoke of a sister of the little girl, about thirteen years old, and the picture of that sweet, dark-eyed little thing, getting her education, unconsciously, every night in those vile cellars of dancing prostitutes, came up to my mind. I asked why she sent her there, and spoke of the dangers. 'I must, sir; he makes nothing for me, and if it wasn't for this school, and the help there, and her earning of a shilling or two shilling in them places, I should starve. Oh, I wish they was out of this city! Yes, it's the truth, I would rather have them dead than on the street, but I can't help it.' I told her of some good families in the country, where we could place the children. 'Would they git schoolin', sir?' 'Certainly, that is the first condition. We always look especially to that.' The little dark eyes sparkled, and she 'should like to take care of a baby so!' The sister now came in, and we talked with her. 'Oh! no, she didn't like to go to those places; but they only buy there at nights' – and she seemed equally glad to get a place. So it was arranged that they were to come up to the office next day, and then get a home in the country. The little girl now wrapped her thin shawl about her head, and ran along before us, through the storm, to some of the other children. The harder it snowed, the more the little eyes sparkled and the prettier she looked.
"Another home of poverty – dark, damp, and chill. The mother an Englishwoman; her child had gone to the school barefooted. This girl was engaged in the same business – selling fruit at night in the brothels. 'I know it, sir,' she said; 'she ought to have as good a chance as other people's children. But I'm so poor! I haven't paid a month's rent, and I was sick three weeks.'
"'Yes, you're right. I know the city, sir; and I would rather have her in her grave than brought down to those cellars. But what can I do, sir?'
"We arrange, again, to find a situation in the country, if she wishes – and engage her, at least, to keep the child at school.
"Our little sprite flies along again through the snow, and shows us another home of one of our scholars – a prostitute's cellar. The elder sister of the child is there, and meets us pleasantly, though with a shame-faced look. 'Yes, she shall go to school every day, sir. We never sent her before, nowheres; but she's learnin' very fast there now.'
"We tell her the general objects of the school, and of the good, kind home which can be found for her sister in the country. She seems glad and her face, which must have been pretty once, lights up, perhaps, at the thought for her sister, of what she shall never more have – a pure home. Two or three sailors, sitting at their bottles, say, 'Yes, that's it! git the little gal out of this! it ain't no place for her.'
"They are all respectful, and seem to understand what we are doing.
"The little guide has gone back, and we go now to another address – a back cellar in Oak Street – damp, dark, so that one at mid-day could hardly see to read; filthy, chilly, yet with six or eight people living there. Every one has a cold; and the oldest daughter, a nice girl of fourteen, is losing her eyes in the foul atmosphere. The old story: 'No work, no friends, rent to pay, and nothing to do.' The parents squalid, idle, intemperate, and shiftless. There they live, just picking up enough to keep life warm in them; groaning, and begging, and seeking work. There they live, breeding each day pestilence and disease, scattering abroad over the city seeds of fearful sickness – raising a brood of vagrants and harlots – retorting on society its neglect by cursing the bodies and souls of thousands whom they never knew, and who never saw them.
"Yet it is cheering – it cheered me even in that squalid hole – that the children are so much superior to their parents. It needs time for vice and beggary and filth to degrade childhood. God has given every fresh human soul something which rises above its surroundings, and which even want and vice do not wear away. For the old poor, for the sensual who have steeped themselves in crime, for the drunkard, the thief, the prostitute who have run a long course, let those heroically work who will. Yet, noble as is the effort, one's experience of human nature is obliged to confess, the fruits will be very few. The old heart of man is a hard thing to change. In any comprehensive view, the only hopeful reform through society must begin with childhood, basing itself on a change of circumstances and on religious influences."
The average expense of a school of this nature, with one hundred scholars and two salaried teachers, where a cheap meal is supplied, and garments and shoes are earned by the scholars, we reckon usually at $1,500, or at $15 per head annually for each scholar.