Boys being boys in 1910. Spirit of Adventure.
The motion picture show was blamed by some from the very beginning, of being a bad influence on young people, especially boys. Here Jane Addams in the 1909 book The Spirit of Youth and City Streets writes about the boys of the era and what they are dragged into court for doing. (Addams was a prominent social reformer in the 19th ward of Chicago. Montreal had its problems, but Chicago was always held up in our press as the city with the worst problems and the best innovative social programs.) In the context of my book Flo in the City, this goes to explain why Marion is denied the fifth form (fifth grade). That grade would be filled with such rowdy young males, so they preferred to give it to a male teacher, however inexperienced. Marion quit teaching in part because of this. “It makes me sick,” she wrote.
Here’s the excerpt:
We shall have to remember that many boys in the years immediately following school find no restraint either in tradition or character.
They drop learning as a childish thing and look upon school as a tiresome task that is finished. They demand pleasure as the right of one who earns his own living. They have developed no capacity for recreation demanding mental effort or even muscular skill, and are obliged to seek only that depending upon sight, sound and taste. Many of them begin to pay board to their mothers, and make the best bargain they can, that more money may be left to spend in the evening. They even bait the excitement of “losing a job,” and often provoke a foreman if only to see “how much he will stand.” They are constitutionally unable to enjoy anything continuously and follow their vagrant wills unhindered. Unfortunately the city lends itself to this distraction.
At the best, it is difficult to know what to select and what to eliminate as objects of attention among its thronged streets, its glittering shops, its gaudy advertisements of shows and amusements.
It is perhaps to the credit of many city boys that the very first puerile spirit of adventure looking abroad in the world for material upon which to exercise itself, seems to center about the railroad. The impulse is not unlike that which excites the coast-dwelling lad to dream of The beauty and mystery of the ships And the magic of the sea.”
I cite here a dozen charges upon which boys were brought into the Juvenile Courtof Chicago, all of which might be designated as deeds of adventure. A surprising umber, as the reader will observe, are connected with railroads. They are taken from the court records and repeat the actual words used by police officers,irate neighbors, or discouraged parents, when the boys were brought before the judge. (1) Building fires along the railroad tracks; (2) flagging trains; (3)throwing stones at moving train windows; (4) shooting at the actors in the Olympic Theatre with sling shots; (5) breaking signal lights on the railroad; (6) stealing linseed oil barrels from the railroad to make a fire; (7) taking waste from an axle box and burning it upon the railroad tracks; (8) turning a switch and running a street car off the track; (9) staying away from home to sleep in barns; (10) setting fire to a barn in order to see the fire engines come up the street; (11) knocking down signs; (12) cutting Western Union cable. Another dozen charges also taken from actual court records might be added as illustrating the spirit of adventure, for although stealing is involved in all of them, the deeds were doubtless inspired much more by the adventurous impulse than by a desire for the loot itself:
(1) Stealing thirteen pigeons from a barn; (2) stealing a bathing suit; (3)stealing a tent; (4) stealing ten dollars from mother with which to buy a revolver; (5)stealing a horse blanket to use at night when it was cold sleeping on the wharf; (6) breaking a seal on a freight car to steal “grain for chickens”; (7) stealing apples from a freight car; (8) stealing a candy peddler’s wagon “to be full up just for once”; (9) stealing a hand car; (10) stealing a bicycle to take a ride; (11) stealing a horse and buggy and driving twenty-five miles into the country; (12) stealing a stray horse on the prairie and trying to sell it for twenty dollars.
Of another dozen it might be claimed that they were also due to this same adventurous spirit, although the first six were classed as disorderly conduct:(1) Calling a neighbor a “scab”; (2) breaking down a fence; (3) flipping cars; (4) picking up coal from railroad tracks; (5) carrying a concealed “dagger,” and stabbing a playmate with it; (6) throwing stones at a railroad employee. The next three were called vagrancy: (1) Loafing on the docks; (2) “sleeping out” nights; (3) getting “wandering spells.” One, designated petty larceny, was cutting telephone wires under the sidewalk and selling them; another, called burglary, was taking locks off from basement doors; and the last one bore the dignified title of resisting an officer” because the boy, who was riding on the fender of a street car, refused to move when an officer ordered him off.
Of course one easily recalls other cases in which the manifestations were negative. I remember an exasperated and frightened mother who took a boy of fourteen into court upon the charge of incorrigibility. She accused him of “shooting caps,” “smoking cigarettes,” “keeping bad company,” “being idle.” The mother regrets it now, however, for she thinks that taking a boy into court only gives him a bad name, and that “the police are down on a boy who has once been in court, and that that makes it harder for him.” She hardly recognizes her once troublesome charge in the steady young man of nineteen who brings home all his wages and is the pride and stay of her old age.
I recall another boy who worked his way to New York and back again to Chicago before he was quite fourteen years old, skilfully escaping the truant officers as well as the police and special railroad detectives. He told his story with great pride, but always modestly admitted that he could never have done it if his father had not been a locomotive engineer so that he had played around railroad tracks and “was onto them ever since he was a small kid.”
There are many of these adventurous boys who exhibit a curious incapacity for
any effort which requires sustained energy. They show an absolute lack of interest in the accomplishment of what they undertake, so marked that if challenged in the midst of their activity, they will be quite unable to tell you the end they have in view. Then there are those tramp boys who are the despair of every one who tries to deal with them.
