Children and Youth During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

James Marten, Paula S Fass, James Marten

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781479849819
• eBook ISBN: 9781479856558
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the decades after the Civil War, urbanization, industrialization, and immigration marked the start of the Gilded Age, a period of rapid economic growth but also social upheaval. Reformers responded to the social and economic chaos with a “search for order,” as famously described by historian Robert Wiebe. Most reformers agreed that one of the nation’s top priorities should be its children and youth, who, they believed, suffered more from the disorder plaguing the rapidly growing nation than any other group.

Children and Youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era explores both nineteenth century conditions that led Progressives to their search for order and some of the solutions applied to children and youth in the context of that search. Edited by renowned scholar of children’s history James Marten, the collection of eleven essays offers case studies relevant to educational reform, child labor laws, underage marriage, and recreation for children, among others. Including important primary documents produced by children themselves, the essays in this volume foreground the role that youth played in exerting agency over their own lives and in contesting the policies that sought to protect and control them.

PART I

Shaping the Future

Institutions and the Law

The Children’s Bureau made history when it was founded in 1912. The United States became the first national government in the world to create an agency dedicated to the welfare of children, and its founding director (or “Chief,” as she was called) was Julia Lathrop, the first woman to head a U.S. agency. The legislation establishing the bureau ordered it to “investigate and report . . . upon all matters pertaining to the welfare of children and child life among all classes of our people . . . especially . . . the questions of infant mortality, the birth-rate, orphanages, juvenile courts, desertion, dangerous occupations, accidents and diseases of children, employment, legislation affecting children in the several states and territories.”¹

Lathrop and her successors focused on research and advocacy, particularly on the issues of infant and child mortality and child labor. They commissioned and distributed their findings, held conferences, and published books and pamphlets on infant care, recreational needs of children, and good posture, among other things. The bureau also sponsored annual Baby Weeks, during which local organizers would hold fairs and workshops on feeding and clothing infants and children, safe and educational toys would be distributed, and proud mothers would enter their children in healthy baby contests.

“The Health of the Child Is the Power of the Nation.” (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Collection)

“The health of the child is the power of the nation” promoted not only child health but also the bureau’s contributions to the war effort during the First World War. The idealized, healthy, happy, productive children featured in the poster could contribute now to the present and the future welfare of the United States. The poster epitomized the optimism expressed by Ellen Key when she declared that the twentieth century would be the “Century of the Child,” as well as the commitment to justice for all Americans, even the youngest, reflected in Florence Kelley’s assertion that everyone deserved a “Right to Childhood.”

None of the essays in this section addresses the Children’s Bureau directly, yet each shows how nonprofit organizations (as we would call them), corporations, the government, and even writers for young adults attempted to mold the values and promote the well-being—variously defined—of young people in ways that Lathrop and her colleagues at the bureau would have understood.

NOTE

1. Quoted in Dorothy E. Bradbury, Four Decades of Action for Children: A Short History of the Children’s Bureau (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1956), 3. The bureau is now a part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

1

Playing Progressively?

Race, Reform, and Playful Pedagogies in the Origins of Philadelphia’s Starr Garden Recreation Park, 1857–1904

DEBORAH VALENTINE

In the summer of 1904, leaders of a small philanthropic organization called the Starr Centre Association announced that they had opened “the first real playground in Philadelphia.” Spanning an entire city block in an otherwise densely populated region, it was equipped with “a varied sort of apparatus, consisting of parallel bars, flying rings, travelling rings, trapeze, striking bag, hand-ball court, basket-ball ground, quoit space, sand piles, swings, seesaws and several small games.” African American children and a variety of “white” immigrants were present and welcomed at “Starr Garden Playground.”¹

Children across Philadelphia had played regularly in outdoor spaces prior to the establishment of this playground, including some with swings or other play equipment installed. The city could even boast of a six-acre state-of-the-art Children’s Playground, located in sprawling Fairmount Park. According to definitions of the nascent American playground movement, however, these were not “real” playgrounds because they lacked trained leaders who would facilitate children’s play activities to ensure that play became a vehicle for the children’s moral and social transformation, as well as for their pleasure and physical health. Although play movement leaders certainly did not mind providing children with the pleasure of play, it was play’s potentially transformative powers that provided the movement’s driving force.²

African American children were regular participants at Starr Garden Park and Playground prior to 1913, when it came under municipal control. (Courtesy Starr Centre Association of Philadelphia)

This chapter tells the story of the complex origins of the American Playground Movement using Philadelphia’s Starr Garden as a case study, exploring, in particular, the inclusion and exclusion of African Americans in the processes and organizations that led to the creation of Philadelphia’s first model playground. The chapter describes the efforts of the playground’s namesake, Theodore Starr (white), to support kindergarten advocate Anna Hallowell (white) and African American pastor Reverend Henry Phillips in their child-saving efforts by establishing Starr Garden Park, the seed of the future Starr Garden Playground. It then shows how Starr built on the efforts of a mid-nineteenth-century businessman, George Stuart (white), and his Colored Mission Sabbath School. Finally, the chapter follows the stubborn commitment of Susan Wharton (white) to African American children and families in the neighborhood through her work as a founder of the Starr Centre Association and its predecessors, the St. Mary Street Library and the Philadelphia College Settlement, the latter of which was primarily responsible for Starr Garden Park’s expansion, but whose leaders were more interested in working with European immigrants than black young people. These key players in the development of Starr Garden both as a space and as a program were in turn influenced in varying degrees by their interactions with African American children whose participation in, or avoidance of, these programs and organizations helped to shape the playground as well.

Hidden Actors in the American Play Movement

The dominant, national strand of the play movement was institutionalized in 1906 in the form of the Playgrounds Association of America (PAA). In the first decades of the twentieth century, PAA leaders were key actors in a very successful campaign to make the provision of play and recreation for American citizens of all ages a public responsibility. Leaders of the PAA kept extensive records and published a monthly journal and multiple books. These sources have provided historians with a rich record of dominant trends, goals, and actors in the mainstream play movement. It is a necessarily limited view, however, one in which the men who controlled the PAA were the dominant actors and adolescent boys and recent immigrants were the primary targets of their efforts. African Americans are virtually invisible in these sources, leading Jeffrey Pilz to conclude that they were excluded until World War I, when a “colored branch” of the PAA was established.³

By contrast, historians who focused primarily on locally produced documents have found traces of African Americans and other non-dominant actors that challenge conventionally held notions of play movement history. This scholarship demonstrates that working-class adults played an active role advocating for space for play as they defined it, highlights the importance of women’s leadership in the movement’s origins, and includes some perspectives and actions of the children who used, or avoided, reform-focused play spaces. However, although several of these studies briefly mention African American presence, none provides any significant detail regarding black participation. Similarly, studies that examine the reform efforts of black women during the Progressive Era demonstrate that African American playground advocacy was common, but provide minimal detail and virtually no mention of the experiences of black children.⁴

This chapter demonstrates that African American children and adults were present and contributed to the development of Starr Garden Playground and that their initial inclusion was intentional. Thus, it indicates that their broad exclusion (explicit and implicit) under the auspices of the College Settlement in the 1890s and in national and regional play movement efforts after 1906 was not accidental.

To see how the story begins, we must travel back to 1882, twenty-two years prior to the opening of Starr Garden Playground in 1904, when a white philanthropist named Theodore Starr spearheaded the transformation of a small, awkwardly shaped plot used as a trash heap into a playground/park complete with swings, an area for playing ball, a fountain, and a garden space. Starr Garden Park, as it was initially called, would be progressively expanded to create the playground described in the opening paragraph.⁵

The Creation of Starr Garden Park/Playground: African American Influences

Starr Garden in its original form was an inverted L-shaped space bound on one very narrow end by an unpaved back alley known as St. Mary Street. The inner two sides of the lot bordered the right side and back of a church property that also opened onto St. Mary Street. Only two blocks long, it ran parallel to Lombard from Sixth Street to Eighth Street, leaving one block in Philadelphia’s Fifth Ward and one in the Seventh. The block that housed Starr Park was located within the Fifth at the center of a block crowded with tenement buildings and backing up to a soap factory. Newspapers referred to the neighborhood that would house Starr Garden as “the slums.”⁶

The original Starr Garden was a small, oddly shaped plot of land centrally located in a crowded, interracial tenement neighborhood. (George W. and Walter S. Bromley, Atlas of the City of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Bromley, 1885. Plate H. Courtesy Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

In 1882, the Fifth Ward was literally Old Philadelphia. The entire ward had been within the boundaries of the city in 1770 during a time when Philadelphia had been primarily a walking city with middle-class, elite, and working-class residents traveling by foot to work, shops, places of worship, and social gatherings in and around the central business district. Often referred to as the “city of homes” due to the lack of large tenement buildings, which were common in larger cities like New York and Chicago, Philadelphia’s poor were simply better hidden than they were in many big cities. Back-alley streets were created by Philadelphia’s somewhat unique method of housing the poor, in comparison to that of other northern industrial cities. Because Philadelphia’s residential lots were originally designed with long back yards intended to preserve green space in the city, housing for poor people developed behind the nice large houses that were situated on the front of the lots. Often two houses were built behind the original house, leaving the poorest residents living in dark, poorly ventilated back alleys like St. Mary Street, usually with shared outhouses and surface drainage, which led to very high rates of disease.⁷

Despite these challenges, however, St. Mary Street also had some significant strengths due to the neighborhood’s historical importance to African American life in Philadelphia. Since 1787 the neighborhood had been home to a landmark black-led organization, Mother Bethel African Methodist Church. The presence of a variety of other churches and black-owned businesses ensured that the neighborhood retained a level of significance to the social, political, economic, and intellectual life of black Philadelphia. Despite the fact that more financially successful black families were beginning to move west of Twelfth Street as new waves of European immigrants added to the diversity, poverty, and tension of an already-struggling interracial community, children who lived in and around St. Mary Street in the 1880s would have had regular opportunities to encounter, at least from a distance, some of the city’s and the nation’s most well-known black leaders. Among these leaders was the esteemed pastor Rev. Henry Phillips, who encouraged Starr to invest in the region.⁸

Phillips and Starr met through their shared membership in the Episcopal Church. In the late nineteenth century Philadelphia was home to two black Episcopal congregations of significant size. Starr, though white and not a member, was elected to the governing body (the vestry) of one of them, the Church of the Crucifixion. Established in 1847, the church was located several blocks southwest of St. Mary Street on Ninth Street, just above Bainbridge.⁹

According to historian Roger Lane, it was Phillips who managed to encourage his racially mixed vestry, led by Theodore Starr, “to get involved in the local [black] community in a number of unprecedented ways.” Starr participated directly in establishing the church’s first charitable organization, the Progressive Workingmen’s Club, a social club for black men. Founded in 1878 with Henry Phillips as its president and Starr as treasurer, the club was Starr’s first attempt to directly address the needs of black Philadelphians. Because Starr died young, leaving no written record regarding his interest in the concerns of the African American community, further detail regarding his actions and goals is accessible primarily from the perspective of Phillips.¹⁰

In 1887 Rev. Phillips gave a memorial speech at the unveiling of a stai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Shaping the Future: Institutions and the Law
• Part II. Managing Change: Children, Youth, and Families
• Documents: Thinking with Their Heads
• Questions for Consideration
• References
• About the Contributors
• Index