Shirley Buchanan

History 579 - Week 2 PRECIS

Children of the City: At Work and At Play. By David Nasaw. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

David Nasaw's Children of the City: At Work and At Play explores the role of the city and urban space in the growth, development, and socialization of America's youth in the early twentieth century. Focusing on the period from 1900-1920, Nasaw finds that the "city" served as a powerful teacher to the working class and immigrant children of a burgeoning modern America. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States had entered into a more advanced industrial and technological age. For adults, this often meant painful adjustments, but the children of the city had known no other existence than an urban life. As Nasaw states, "The city was, after all, the only world they knew; it was the place they called home." (Preface) Born into the working class, children became the conduit between the immigrant neighborhoods and the middle and upper class citizens who populated the downtown areas. While their parents often remained isolated in the ethnic neighborhoods, the children ventured outside of traditional parameters and into an urban world where they were fully Americanized; they were molded by the values, pace, and priorities of the street. Coming of age during a period before the strict enforcement of child labor laws and compulsory schooling, the children lived in the "zone of the in-betweens,"[1] in a world, as Nasaw quotes Johan Huizinga, where they were "'apart-together' in an exceptional situation." (165) To support his analysis, Nasaw examines the setting and constructs of the city, the labor of city children, the fruits of that labor as manifested in consumption patterns, and the subsequent socialization and response of children, parents, and authority figures in the urban community. Nasaw uses a multitude of resources, relying most heavily on primary accounts from newspapers, journals, sociological studies, U.S. federal documents, and literary descriptions. He scrutinizes the accounts of the period from both journalists and reformers as well as the autobiographical reflections of children who graduated from street to screen. His attention to details and his description of the particulars of urban life in the early twentieth century paints a picture for twenty-first century readers that helps them imagine the enormity of the social transformation that city life wrought. Nasaw effectively shows that the budding cites of the early twentieth century provided the setting in which America's youth would find a new freedom and faith: freedom in their autonomy from familial and old world traditions and faith in the American Dream as they embraced the melting pot ideology of American capitalist and consumer society.

THE SETTING - (The City They Called Home, At Play in the City)

In order to portray the profound impact of the city on America's youth, Nasaw begins his analysis by describing the new urban environment at the turn of the century: "The early twentieth-century city," he writes, "was among the wonders of the New World." (1) The advent of electricity and advances in mobility made the emerging cities of America nothing short of magical. As Nasaw observes,

Electric light made night into day. Subways, streetcars, and the elevated sped commuters through the streets. Steel-girded skyscrapers and granite railroad stations expressed its solidity and its power. Lobster palaces, vaudeville palaces, movie palaces, and department store palaces of consumption recreated in the present the mythic splendors of the past. (1)

For a nation where the majority of the populace still lived in rural areas, the city was more than an external setting or simply a location for commerce; the city was a living, breathing entity filled with all the promise and luxury that America could offer. For the new urban dwellers, the city was growing in the same measure as the children who would eventually both master and exploit what it had to offer. While at the start of the century only 39.6 percent of the population lived in urban areas, by 1920, more than half of the American population (51.2 percent) occupied urban space[2]. Thus, the city embodied an American metamorphosis, as society moved from a rural / producer orientation to an industrialized and urbanized consumer culture.

The process of this rapid change, however, was not without its challenges or catalysts. While downtown was characterized by the shining lights of "progress", the areas surrounding the city were distinguished by their absence of promise. Just beyond the central business districts lay the working class and immigrant neighborhoods which were characterized by the "grayish squalor of slums." (16) Using photographs as a "primary source material as interesting and informative in their own right as the narrative accounts of life on the street," (Preface), Nasaw illustrates the contradictions to be found in the early twentieth century city. He notes that the "city was suffused with contrasts...Poverty and plenty lived sided by side, in the same city, on the same block in the same tenement flat." (16) However, It was precisely this poverty and lack of space that would serve as a channel for change and the indoctrination of a new generation of urban dwellers. As the population grew and urban areas became overcrowded, the children of the early twentieth century ultimately spilled out into the streets. "The children played on the streets because there was nowhere else for them," Nasaw notes . (17) Having grown up in the city and unaware of any other alternative, children were not deterred in this world where space was a commodity. Instead, children "converted public space into their community playground, pushing aside the ordinary adult world..." (21) While reformers of the period lobbied for playgrounds and dedicated recreational space for America's youth, the children of the city were already becoming more familiar with "the ordinary adult world" of the city and actively inhabiting it. Even as urban schools were given the task "to prepare them [children] for the future: to educate, socialize and Americanize them, catechize them in the duties of citizenship...to take the children from the streets and the streets from the children," (26) Nasaw explains that the children of the early twentieth century city were learning lessons on their own. Exposed and unsupervised on the streets, city children were getting a direct lesson in the rules, regulations, and rewards of modern American capitalism. They recognized, as quoted from Harpo Marx, that "'School simply didn't teach you how to be poor and live from day to day.'"(26)

LABORERS - (Child Labor and Laborers, The Littlest Hustlers, The Newsies,

Junkers, Scavengers, and Petty Thieves, and The "Little Mothers")

The children of the emerging cities exploited any and all opportunities that were of benefit to them. While Nasaw focuses specifically on children of working class parents, he is quick to point out that these children were both "immigrant and native-born, of Jewish, Italian, Polish, German, Irish, or native-born American parents." (39) They were uniquely united across ethnic, religious and at times, even racial lines. Nasaw observes that "what distinguished them from their more prosperous middle-class contemporaries -- was the size, shape, and reach of their families' income." (39) Furthermore, these city children were distinguished from their 19th century predecessors in that they were not required to enter a life of full-time labor at the earliest possible age. Of the many factors that contributed to this change, Nasaw notes that increased mechanization and technology, increased Eastern European immigration, amplified laws against child labor, and the move towards compulsory schooling all contributed to a diminished child labor market. Furthermore, Nasaw observes that "children and their parents were also responsible for the changes. As it was perceived that the more schooling students received, the better their chances for landing preferred white-collar jobs, families who could afford to kept their children in school and out of full-time work as long as possible." (46) Still for many children, there was an opportunity to garnish an income from the streets after school, which would both serve to enhance familial revenue and more importantly, their individual discretionary income. Some assisted storekeepers in local shops, but many more learned to be "the littlest hustlers" (48), becoming direct salesman on the streets. Selling items such as chocolates, gum, and crackers to the passersby -- white-collar workers on their way to and from work -- proved to be a profitable and limitless opportunity. As mini distribution centers, Nasaw astutely points out that the children of the early twentieth century cities learned the market mentality of American capitalism first hand: "They learned how to sell and, just as important, that it was the salesman's job to pitch and the customer's to resist. All was fair in the marketplace. Whether buyer or seller, you had to look out for yourself. No one else was going to watch out for you." (52) This competitive and individualistic outlook would not only shape the youth of the cities, but would prove to shape the attitudes of the twentieth century as the children at the turn of the century matured into the social, economic, political, and cultural leaders of modern America.

Nasaw illustrates the importance and power of the burgeoning media and marketing in the early twentieth century by focusing on the role of "the newsies" and the army of children that hawked newspapers in the afternoon hours. He notes, "The new metropolis had spawned the new newspaper," (63) and with it the use of children as the cheap source of its proliferation. A seemingly endless labor pool, the children were not wage earners, but rather incentivized with each paper they sold. Newspaper companies took advantage of this conduit of circulation by encouraging competition and rewarding their stock of newsboys. "The newsies," however, as Nasaw points out, "were no exotic breed of city child. The historical record suggests that selling papers on the streets was a common children's occupation." (68) What was uncommon, though, was the manner in which this generation of children took ownership of the process, turning it into a finely tuned source of both work and play. As they were limited in the time in which they could sell papers, Nasaw describes how the children of the city exploited that space where "Their 'playgrounds' would necessarily have to be located near their workplaces." (72) Newsies learned to time their recreation around their work requirements and found time for games on the street as well as time to indulge themselves in the abundance of the city, spending some of their earnings on the endless offerings of candy, dime novels, and even cigarettes. However, more remarkably, Nasaw notes that these young entrepreneurs quickly learned to manage their individual business in order to come home with a profit:

The newsies had to figure out what their probable sales would be --and buy just that amount of papers. To arrive at an accurate figure, they had to sift and sort a number of diverse factors: the time of day the papers were ready for distribution, the weather, the day of the week, the season of the year, the number of papers sold the day before, the number and importance of the sports scores, and most crucially, the size and content of the headlines. (76)

In essence, the newsies had to balance all of the variables of the management of a business and in doing so, they quickly adapted the first business rule of capitalist America: "They had learned to worship the bottom line...If war, catastrophe, and tragedy sold the most, then they would gladly parade them through the streets." (80) For the child laborers of the city, the ultimate Americanization hit early, hard, and fast.

While the newsies were probably the most visible and aural children of the early twentieth century city, still others took advantage of the abundance of the city to generate extra income for themselves and their families in after school pursuits in and out of their neighborhoods. Living in a country obsessed with private property, the young Americans of the early twentieth century found opportunity in turning "waste into wealth". (90) In the chapter "Junkers, Scavengers, and Petty Thieves" Nasaw notes that "Junking was a neighborhood business -- and a big one." As most city dumps were located in close proximity to working class enclaves, children of this period learned they could easily generate quick cash by scavenging and selling the castoffs of the middle and upper class families who shared their urban space. As children, picking through the discards was both a game and an adventure and as Nasaw observes, the lines between private and public ownership were open to interpretation: "Material found unused on public or quasi-public space belonged to whoever had the foresight to collect and make use of it. 'Use,' not 'title,' conferred rights of ownership."(93) While reformers lamented the pitiful vision of children picking through trash, working class families of the early century could not afford to stand on honor if conditions meant their children would go hungry. While children learned that a spoiled tomato would not be missed from a pushcart vendor, Nasaw notes that the children of the city were considered "petty thieves" only "because they were allowed to be--indeed, even were encouraged by the adults around them...as long as there was so much 'stuff' to rescue, so many junkmen to buy it for cash...to have done anything else would have defied common sense and violated the logic of the streets."(100) Whereas this kind of entrepreneurship made use of the external abundance of the city, families also sought to make the best use of their children's time at home as well, in particular the labor of girls. Nasaw acknowledges that "The streets bred tough, self-reliant, self-confident young adults. Their lessons were appropriately learned by boys who would grow up to join the world of work and wages. Working-class girls were destined for different futures." (104) Girls were expected to assist parents in the home both as "little mothers", babysitters for their younger siblings and as housekeepers, caring for boarders a family may have taken in to generate extra income. But young girls were also exposed to work and life in the city as they ran errands for their mothers and watched over the play of their siblings in the streets. Additionally, girls in particular were expected to assist with piecework labor that their mothers may have contracted. Just as the young newsies managed their individual work, young girls in the city juggled many responsibilities after school as caretakers, laborers and as intermediary between their homes and the urban environment. Although fewer girls than boys worked on the city streets, they were equally exposed to the promise of the wealth of the city and the American dream in the early twentieth century as "the job of picking up raw materials and delivering finished goods often fell to the girls." (111) While Nasaw analyzes that "in comparison to their brothers, [girls] remained isolated from the life of the city, they were able to construct their own community," (114), it is clear that it was precisely this urban community of women that would bear witness and participate in both the suffrage movement and the vote by the end of the period (1920).

CONSUMERS - (All That Money Could Buy, The Battle for Spending Money)

Nasaw opens the chapter, "All That Money Could Buy" stating "The children who worked downtown crossed the invisible bridge that separated and linked the two parts of the city." (115) In fact, the working class children of the twentieth century city crossed more than that: they traversed across the boundaries of ethnicity and class in their participation in the city. As Nasaw so eloquently affirms, "With eyes and ears wide open, the newsies, peddlers, and shineboys observed first-hand how life was lived by the other half...The more they saw, the more difficult it was to return to their home blocks and take up again their childish games." (115) The children of the city were both embraced and embracing a socialization which would more fully Americanize them than any organized institution. Reformers who advocated stronger compulsory school laws and organized recreation for children after school failed to see what the businessmen of the city had already recognized; they had failed to see that even part-time child laborers had turned into full-time American consumers, a right to be proclaimed and exercised as fully incorporated citizens. Children found that they could integrate their work with play by taking advantage of the amusements and treats the city had to offer. In particular, Nasaw focuses on the emergence of arcades and nickelodeons as a source of both entertainment and assimilation. "The early theatres and nickelodeons", he notes, "catered to an almost exclusively working-class audience." (121) Whereas live theatre was too expensive for most working class folks, the early "flickers" and moving picture theatres presented short stories that could be viewed for the small change earned by the street children. These early films also validated the life of the city's working class, dramatizing the characters and quandaries of urban existence. In his copious use of entertainment autobiographies, Nasaw further illustrates that these early movies influenced a generation of actors as they incorporated their street performances as "little merchants" into a lifetime pursuit as entertainers.

Film, as a visual media, also served to introduce the working class to the extravagance that could be had in pursuing the American Dream. Movies inside the theatre and the urban environment outside illustrated that "The cities were socially stratified -- with an escape clause." (135) With the things that money could buy, the working class could emulate the middle and upper classes; spending on the right things could in fact, buy the illusion of status. For the young girls of the city, purchasing expensive clothes, hat, and shoes would present to the urban world the image of respectability; it would purchase a ticket to upward mobility. Utilizing oral histories and testimonies of the times, Nasaw captures perfectly the true price of this consumption as he explains "One working girl reportedly spent a whole week's wages 'on a willow plume. We starved fer that hat,' her mother said, ' just plain starved fer it, so we did.'"(135)

Thus, the children of the city expressed their independence and autonomy in their consumption patterns which ultimately brought conflict within most working class and immigrant households. As widely reported by sociological studies of the period, both children and parents admitted to the knowledge that although children were expected to turn over their earnings for the welfare of the whole family, most children kept back some of their pay for their own discretionary spending. With their own resources in hand, children of the early twentieth century found that they were empowered to break away from the traditions and old world values of their parents. While their 19th century predecessors had been bound both by cultural and geographical limitations, the prospering young of the urban century were more fully realizing that money could buy independence. "Money," Nasaw observes, "erased the distinctions between childhood and adulthood and, in so doing, tore apart the hierarchical basis upon which the family rested." (131) As the children worked, played, and integrated the city and American consumer patterns into their lives, so too, did the city develop around their present and future wants and needs, catering to an emerging generation of Americanized consumers.

SOCIALIZED AMERICANS - (The Children and the Child-Savers, Working Together, Unions and Strikes)

As children defined and shaped their urban space and experience, reformers continued to attempt to refine and control the socialization of America's youth. From the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, there was a growing movement in America to establish child labor laws which would address and limit the egregious working conditions of children in mines, mills, and factories. However, with the proliferation of urban populations and children in the street, reformers turned their focus to the youth of the cities. To their credit, Nasaw notes, "Together, the child labor activists, settlement-house workers, juvenile justice authorities, and the legions of professionals and well-meaning amateurs who supported their campaign accomplished a great deal." (144-145) Through extensive legislation, reformers were able to secure both compulsory school and child labor laws and developed methods of enforcement which would allow ordinary citizens to regulate the growing urban expanses. In particular, Nasaw focuses on the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (the "Gerry Society") in New York City, which sought to prevent children from peddling on the streets or working as performers in vaudeville shows. Reformist attempts to limit child labor in the city, however, conversely consolidated and validated the largest source of child labor - the newsies. Where the powerful news agencies would not be denied their labor force, licensing systems were developed to provide badges for legitimate newsboys. With the mammoth numbers of newsies on the street, it was impossible for authorities to fully monitor the system, but as Nasaw points out, in many cities, the children developed a means to regulate themselves. With the development of the Boston Newsboys' Republic in 1908, a model was born whereby the newsies demonstrated just how thoroughly they had been Americanized. As the "official governing body for all city newsies, eleven to fourteen years of age" Nasaw discovered that the "Boston newsies took their republic seriously." (152) They incorporated the best of the American capitalist democracy they had come to know on the streets, and limited both age and working hours as a means to diminish competition in the streets and implemented a "newsboys' court" which illustrated the inclusivity of the organization. Quoting Lyman Beecher Stowe, Nasaw notes upon Stowe's visit to the newsboys' court he observed the mixed ethnicity of the judges - "one a Polish Jew...and the other a Negro." Although the city streets were not an institutionalized form of socialization, the education received by the city's children seemed to teach them both the ideals and realities of American society. As Nasaw sums up, "Without the children's cooperation, the street trader laws were unenforceable-- and the children knew it." (157) At a time when reformers and legislators united to further structure the education of America's youth, the children of the city responded with a manifestly sophisticated socialization earned in the streets.

Acutely tuned in to the pace and priorities of the street, working class children demonstrated that they could integrate, manage, and manipulate the urban crossroads they inhabited. Nasaw argues, in fact, that the children of the early twentieth century created a sub-culture all their own: "The street traders carried with them from their home blocks the inchoate sense of unity that had suffused their play communities. Just as in their play communities they had experienced what Huizinga referred to as the feeling of being 'apart-together' in an exceptional situation', so downtown were they united by their shared isolation from the adult inhabitants of [downtown]...by age, class, and need." (165) This unity and autonomy would serve them well in the capitalist urban jungle. To further edify this point, Nasaw focuses on the unions and strikes of the newsboys of the early twentieth century. The first of these, the 1899 strike by the New York City newsies had a significant enough economic impact on publishers to force them to amend their "contract" with the newsboys. More importantly, the process of the strike itself revealed that the city newsies were quickly acculturating the world of urban work and their rights as American laborers. Nasaw confirms, "In unionizing and striking to protect their rights and their profits, the children were behaving precisely as they believed American workers should when treated unjustly. Unions and strikes were part of the urban environment. It was the rare working-class boy or girl who did not have a father, brother, sister, or relative who was a union member or sympathizer." (181) In later strikes, (Boston 1901, Minneapolis and Seattle 1916-1918, and New York City again in 1918), the newsboys had managed to attract and maintain a connection with the AFL and garnered support from fellow adult union groups but as Nasaw notes, "victory in the union halls did not compensate for defeat in the streets."(185) Still, the very notion, that children could organize and communicate effectively across ethnic, cultural, and geographical distance within the city was testimony to the power of the community they had fashioned as the city shaped them.

END OF AN ERA

Nasaw ends his study in 1920, as a full generation of street children had come of age and the conditions in the country and world had changed. Once again, industrial and technological advances had eliminated the need for child labor. The automobile and the telephone changed the way goods and services were delivered and by 1920, more than half of the U.S. population resided in cities, prompting the development of permanent vendors on the busy streets. Additionally, the children who inhabited the urban spaces of the early twentieth century were the same adolescents and adults who would serve in World War I. These city children returned from the Great War as worldly adults and perhaps more than ever, were ready to leave the customs and traditions of the old world behind in order to continue shaping their new American world. In the Epilogue to the book, Nasaw reflects that this was the first generation to be truly "native to the city--with no memory, no longing, no historic commitment to another land, another way of life." (195) Perhaps because of his reliance on the media sources of the time and autobiographies of the many entertainers who grew up in the period, Nasaw also identifies a critical connection between the children of the city and their unique legacy. As no generation before or since, Nasaw indicates that these children inherited from their street experiences a belief in the promise of America and this was expressed throughout the twentieth century through the many performers who would be the first to experience worldwide fame with the marketing of Hollywood. Their unquestioning faith in America as the "'last, best hope of mankind, the country where the fate of the common man is of the utmost importance'" (202) ultimately influenced American culture throughout the twentieth century. The portrayals this generation of city children brought from street to screen celebrated that "They, the common men, triumph--and with them, America and capitalism." (202)

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[1] Gabriel, Peter. From the lyrics for "Lay Your Hands on Me", Security, Geffen Records, 1982. Lyrics available from www.lyricsfreak.com; Internet. Accessed 26 August 2009.

[2] U.S. Census Bureau. Table 1. Urban and Rural Population 1900-1990. Released Oct. 1995. Available from www.census.gov/population/censusdata/urpop0090.txt; Internet. Accessed 25 August 2009.