—————
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday September 14, 1911
“The Blighting of the Babies” -from John Spargo’s Bitter Cry of the Children
From The Progressive Woman of September 1911:
THE BLIGHTING OF THE BABIES
—————(From “the Bitter Cry of the Children” by John Spargo)
Poverty and Death are grim companions. Wherever there is much poverty the death-rate is high and rises higher with every rise of the tide of want and misery. In London, Bethnal Green’s death-rate is nearly double that of Belgravia; in Paris, the poverty stricken district of Ménilmontant has a death -rate twice as high as that of the Elysée; in Chicago, the death-rate varies from about twelve per thousand in the wards where the well-to-do reside to thirty-seven per thousand in the tenement wards .
The ill developed bodies of the poor, underfed and overburdened with toil, have not the powers of resistance to disease possessed by the bodies of the more fortunate. As fire rages most fiercely and with greatest devastation among the ill-built, crowded tenements, so do the fierce flames of disease consume most readily the ill-built, fragile bodies which the tenements shelter. As we ascend the social scale the span of life lengthens and the death-rate gradually diminishes, the death-rate of the poorest class of workers being three and a half times as great as that of the well-to-do. It is estimated that among 10,000,000 persons of the latter class the annual deaths do not number more than 100,000, among the best paid of the working class the number is not less than 150,000, while among the poorest workers the number is at least 350,000.
This difference in the death-rates of the various social classes is even more strongly marked in the case of infants. Mortality in the first year of life differs enormously according to the circumstances of the parents and the amount of intelligent care bestowed upon the infants. In Boston’s “Back Bay” district the death-rate at all ages last year was 13.45 per thousand as compared with 18.45 in the Thirteenth Ward, which is a typical working class district, and of the total number of deaths the percentage under one year was 9.44 in the former as against 25.21 in the latter. Wolf , in his classic studies based upon the vital statistics of Erfurt for a period of twenty years, found that for every 1,000 children born in working-class families 505 died in the first year; among the middle classes 173, and among the higher classes only 89. Of every 1,000 illegitimate children registered-almost entirely of the poorer classes-352 died before the end of the first year.
Dr. Charles R. Drysdale, Senior Physician of the Metropolitan Free Hospital, London, declared some years ago that the death-rate of infants among the rich was not more than 8 per cent, while among the very poor it was often as high as 40 per cent.
Dr. Playfair says that 18 per cent of the children of the upper classes, 36 per cent of the tradesman class, and 55 per cent of those of the working-class die under the age of five years.
And yet the experts say that the baby of the tenement is born physically equal to the baby of the mansion. For countless years men have sung of the Democracy of Death, but it is only recently that science has brought us the more inspiring message of the Democracy of Birth. It is not only in the tomb that we are equal, where there is neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, but also in the womb of our mothers. At birth class distinctions are unknown. For long the hope-crushing thought of prenatal hunger, the thought that the mother’s hunger was shared by the unborn child, and that poverty began its blighting work on the child even before its birth, held us in its thrall. The thought that past generations have innocently conspired against the well-being of the child of to-day, and that this generation in its turn conspires against the child of the future, is surcharged with the pessimism which mocks every ideal and stifles every hope born in the soul. Nothing more horrible ever cast its shadow over the hearts of those who would labor for the world’s redemption from poverty than this spectre of prenatal privation and inherited debility.
But science comes to dispel the gloom and bid us hope. Over and over again it was stated before the Interdepartmental Committee by the leading obstetrical authorities of the English medical profession that the proportion of children born healthy and strong is not greater among the rich than among the poor. The differences appear after birth. Wise, patient Mother Nature provides with each succeeding generation opportunity to overcome the evils of ages of ignorance and wrong, with each generation the world starts afresh and unhampered, physically, at least, by the dead past.
“The world’s great age begins anew,
The golden years return.”And herein lies the greatest hope of the race; we are not handicapped from the start; we can begin with the child of to-day to make certain a brighter and nobler to-morrow as though there had never been a yesterday of woe and wrong.
—————
[Photograph and emphasis added.]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SOURCES
Quote EVD Childhood ed, Socialist Woman p12, Sept 1908
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=OvM4AQAAMAAJ&pg=GBS.RA6-PA12
The Progressive Woman
(Chicago, Illinois)
-Sept 1911
https://books.google.com/books?id=DI1EAQAAIAAJ
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=DI1EAQAAIAAJ&pg=GBS.RA1-PA16
IMAGE
Lung Block Children, Bitter Cry Spargo bf p5, 1906, ed of 1915
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=jRtShCzm4ygC&pg=GBS.PA4-IA2
See also:
John Spargo (1876-1966)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Spargo
https://spartacus-educational.com/USAspargo.htm
The Bitter Cry of the Children by John Spargo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bitter_Cry_of_Children
-Excerpt re Breaker Boys
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5571/
Note: Chicago Tribune of Dec 9, 1905, states book will be published in early January (1906)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/350254256
Bitter Cry of the Children
by John Spargo
Macmillan, 1909
https://archive.org/details/bittercryofchild00sparuoft
-with Intro by Robert Hunter
https://archive.org/details/bittercryofchild00sparuoft/page/n11/mode/2up
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We Will Sing One Song – Six Feet in the Pine
Lyrics by Joe Hill
We will sing one song of the children in the mills,
They’re taken from playgrounds and schools,
In tender years made to go the pace that kills.
In the sweatshops, ‘mong the looms and the spools.