Part 7

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

════════╤════════╤═════════════════╤═════════════════╤═════════════════ Family │ No. of │ Breakfast │ Lunch │ Supper │ School │ │ │ │Children│ │ │ ────────┼────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┼───────────────── 1 │ 2 │Bread and tea │None. │Bread and tea. │ │ only. │ │ 2 │ 1 │None. │Soup from │Coffee and bread. │ │ │ charity. │ 3 │ 1 │Coffee and rolls │Coffee and bread.│Tea and bread. │ │ (no butter or │ │ │ │ jam). │ │ 4 │ 3 │Bread and tea │None. │Bread and tea │ │ only. │ │ only. 5 │ 2 │None. │Soup with the │Piece of bread. │ │ │ soup-meat. │ 6 │ 1 │Bread and jam │None. │Tea and bread │ │ with coffee. │ │ with jam. ════════╧════════╧═════════════════╧═════════════════╧═════════════════

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

VIII

The physical effects of such underfeeding cannot be easily overestimated. No fact has been more thoroughly established than the physical superiority of the children of the well-to-do classes over their less fortunate fellows. In Moscow, N.V. Zark, a famous Russian authority, found that at all ages the boys attending the Real schools and the Classical Gymnasium are superior in height and weight to peasant boys.[54] In Leipzic, children paying 18 marks school fees are superior in height and weight to those paying only 9, and gymnasium boys are superior to those of the lower Real and Burger schools.[55] Studies in Stockholm and Turin show the same general results, the poorer children being invariably shorter, lighter, and smaller of chest. The British Anthropometric Committee found that English boys at ten in the Industrial Schools were 3.31 inches shorter and 10.64 pounds lighter than children of the well-to-do classes, while at fourteen years the differences in height and weight were 6.65 inches and 21.85 pounds, respectively.[56] Dr. Charles W. Roberts gives some striking results of the examination of 19,846 English boys and men.[57] Of these, 5915 belong to the non-laboring classes of the English population, namely, public school boys, naval and military cadets, medical and university students. The remaining 13,931 belong to the artisan class. The difference in height, weight, and chest girth, from thirteen to sixteen years of age, is as follows:—

AVERAGE HEIGHT IN INCHES

═══════════════════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤═══════════ Age │ 13 │ 14 │ 15 │ 16 ───────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────── Non-laboring class │ 58.79│ 61.11│ 63.47│ 66.40 Artisan class │ 55.93│ 57.76│ 60.58│ 62.93 ───────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────── Difference │ 2.66│ 3.35│ 2.89│ 3.47 ═══════════════════════╧═══════════╧═══════════╧═══════════╧═══════════

AVERAGE WEIGHT IN POUNDS

═══════════════════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤═══════════ Age │ 13 │ 14 │ 15 │ 16 ───────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────── Non-laboring class │ 88.60│ 99.21│ 110.42│ 128.34 Artisan class │ 78.27│ 84.61│ 96.79│ 108.70 ───────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────── Difference │ 10.33│ 14.60│ 13.63│ 19.64 ═══════════════════════╧═══════════╧═══════════╧═══════════╧═══════════

AVERAGE CHEST GIRTH IN INCHES

═══════════════════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤═══════════╤═══════════ Age │ 13 │ 14 │ 15 │ 16 ───────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────── Non-laboring class │ 28.41│ 29.65│ 30.72│ 33.08 Artisan class │ 25.24│ 26.28│ 27.51│ 28.97 ───────────────────────┼───────────┼───────────┼───────────┼─────────── Difference │ 3.17│ 3.37│ 3.21│ 4.11 ═══════════════════════╧═══════════╧═══════════╧═══════════╧═══════════

It will be seen, therefore, that the children of the non-laboring class at thirteen years of age exceed those of the artisan class in height almost three inches, in weight almost ten and a half pounds, and in chest girth almost three and a quarter inches. And these figures by no means represent fully the contrast in physique which exists between the very poorest and well-to-do children. The difference between the children of the best-paid artisans and the poorest-paid of the same class is nearly as great. Mr. Rowntree found that in York, England, the boys of the poorest section of the working-class were on an average three and one-half inches shorter than the boys of the better-paid section of the working-class. As regards weight Mr. Rowntree found the difference to be eleven pounds in favor of the child of the best-paid artisan.[58]

Dr. W.W. Keen quotes the figures of Roberts with approval as applying almost equally to this country,[59] and all the studies yet made by American investigators seem to justify that opinion. There exists a somewhat voluminous, but scattered, American literature tending to the same general conclusions as the European. The classic studies of Dr. Bowditch,[60] in Boston, and Dr. Porter,[61] in St. Louis, showed very distinctly that the children of the poorer classes in those cities were decidedly behind those of the well-to-do classes in both height and weight. The more recent investigations of Dr. Hrdlicka[62] fully bear out the results of these earlier studies.

The Report on Physical Training (Scotland) calls attention once more to the fact that children in the pauper, reformatory, and industrial schools are superior in physique to the children in the ordinary elementary schools. Says the report: “The contrast between the condition of such children as are seen in the poor day schools and the children of parents who have altogether failed in their duty is both marked and painful.”[63] Commenting upon which an English Socialist writer says: “The obvious deduction is that if you are doing your duty ... and your children are brought up in the way they should go, they will not be half as well off as if they were truants or thieves. Therefore, ... the best thing you can do for them ... is to turn your children into little criminals.”[64] Without accepting these cynical deductions, the fact remains that in a great many instances those children who, by reason of the criminality of their parents or their complete failure to provide for their offspring, find their way into such institutions, are far better off, physically, than their fellows in the ordinary schools whose parents are careful and industrious. But for the taint of institutional life, and the crushing out of individuality which almost invariably accompanies it, they would be far better equipped for the battle of life.

The real significance of this physical superiority is not so obvious as the writer quoted appears to assume. The fact is that these children are generally below the average even of their own class when they are admitted to these institutions. Their superior physique shows the regeneration which proper food and hygienic conditions produce in the worst cases.

IX