You ought to be out raising hell.
This is the fighting age.
Put on your fighting clothes.
-Mother Jones
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday November 10, 1908
Chicago, Illinois – 5,000 Children Go to School Hungry
From The Socialist Woman of November 1908:
American School Children Starving
Chicago Tribune of October 5, 1908
When we are talking of the number of men who are tramping the country looking for work—hungry, broken-spirited, abject creatures, who once thought themselves men, as good as any of their kind—let us not forget the women, and the little children of these men.
Last winter in Chicago after the first flurry of the panic, I had occasion to visit a number of the “homes” of those who had been thrown out of work. In every case the men were out, hunting feverishly for the chance to make even a little money by any kind of hard labor. And in every case my heart ached and my soul grew sick when I thought of the future of the women and children of those families.
“It is awful when the children cry for food, and we cant give it to them,” said one woman who had never before known what it was to be down and out. Another mother, about thirty, and strong and handsome, had to sit by and watch her seven-year-old daughter burning with fever, and without the care of a doctor because she had lost her job in a department store, and there was no money even to buy food. She had applied for work at all the large stores again and again. She had tried everywhere—and was told that they might need her during the holidays. But the holidays were weeks away. Already she had moved into a questionable quarter because rent was cheap. And unless that mother got work within two weeks, there was but one resource left her, if she would save herself and her child from death through starvation. And that was the sale of her body.
It was for a charitable institution I was working—and I knew that those institutions were crowded to their utmost with destitute cases.
Such, indeed, was the condition of the poor in Chicago last winter, that the superintendent of compulsory education, W. Lester Bodine, took up the case of hungry school children, followed his investigations for six months, and finally ascertained that there are 5,000 starving children, and 10,000 that are underfed, in the schools of the city.
Excerpts from Mr. Bodine’s report give the following facts:
Five thousand children who attend the schools of Chicago are habitually hungry. Ten thousand other children do not have sufficient food. There are fifteen thousand underfed children in Chicago now who do not have three square meals a day. Many mothers are working for a pittance, sewing pants for the cheap-clothing trade. Some work for 50 cents a day and only three days a week. Many of those are widows with four or five children. The city is filled with deserted wives whose lives are abject slavery to home, children and industrialism.
This is but part of the report. The whole thing is so clear, and, coming as it does from a city official, one would imagine that the whole machinery of Chicago would be set going at once to feed these children.
But not so. The rulers of the present system don’t do things in that way. If they did there would have been no starving children to begin with. The system that makes children starve, will naturally let them keep on starving. And they are doing it in Chicago. They are pulling out all the red tape at their disposal-and there is an awful lot of it—and are using it to offset the work of feeding the children. One authority says that the city has no legal right to feed the little folks, while one Kingsley, of the Chicago Relief and Aid society says that “the charity organizations are strapped, and funds will have to be found elsewhere if the need is as great as reported.” And the capitalist papers are saving that the report has been exaggerated-that the needs are not so urgent as the Superintendent of Compulsory education claims they are.
And meanwhile the children, innocent, and ignorant of the contentions, go on starving.
If Illinois had a few Socialists in its legislature, it is likely that the matter of feeding the school children would soon be settled. The Socialists would force such a settlement, and force it in favor of the children. They have done this thing in foreign countries, even though they have always been in the minority in the legislatures. The Socialists in the English parliament are forcing the matter of feeding hungry school children, upon the law makers. In Italy they have already had laws passed whereby children are fed at the schools. In Norwegian, German, French and Belgian cities midday meals are provided for those children who care to partake of them. If they can pay a small amount, it is accepted. If not, they are provided without pay. In all these cities where the Socialists are strongest, the children are best provided for.
And this feeding of the children by the city has proven a success. The children are healthier, stronger, and more alert mentally, than are those of our industrial cities, where, like Chicago and New York, so many thousands must go to school day after day, week after week, month after month—with never enough to eat.
Tho Socialist legislator gets down to the immediate needs of the people. His work is for the man at his labor, the woman in the home, and the child in the school. His business is to protect these. His business is to look to the future welfare of the unborn babe; of the woman who is to be the mother of children; of the male child, who is to be the father of sons.
The dignity of the capitalist legislator lies outside of these things, and away from them. But the honor of the Socialist legislator is wrapped up in them, and is inseparable from them. When he gets away from them he is no longer a Socialist and is turned out of that organization, among old party politicians where he belongs.
Under Socialism there would be no starving children.
[Newsclip added.]
Caroline A. Lowe Speaks to Teachers:
A Teacher’s Plea to Teachers
CAROLINE A. LOWE,
Vice’President of the Teachers’ Association, Kansas City, Mo.
With a heart full of love, I greet you my teacher companions. Throughout our life we have journeyed together. Your joys have been my joys, my sorrows have been your sorrows. Together we have tarried, on vacation times, in scenes of marvelous beauty, in great white palaces set among luxuriant gardens, surrounded by lakes alive with light and song. Here and there we caught glimpses of handsome men and women and beautiful children, beings whose existence seemed in complete harmony with the joy of life. And together we have crossed the chasm, have hastened through dark, noisome streets, between gaunt, prison-like houses, haunted by millions of haggard-faced men, emaciated women, and lifeless babes. We have seen these flock to the machines and bring forth untold abundance. We have seen them carry this abundance into the beautiful gardens and pile it mountain-high—for themselves, retaining not enough with which to maintain life; merely enough with which to escape death.
Our hearts have ached for those people of the great cities, of the noisome streets, as we have watched them in our vacation times, when we have gone out to gather fresh material to take back to our school rooms. We have wondered that a loving father permitted this great chasm to so divide his children. That millions were kept in bondage chained to an animal existence in order that a few might become masters and luxuriate in abundance so great that they, too, were enslaved, that they, too, lost the true joy of living.
As we stood upon the bridge that spanned the chasm, many passed us. And we, teachers with our eyes open, looked and saw men and women of all professions—editors, ministers, teachers, lawyers doctors. With our minds alert, we learned that they were but messengers, carrying sermons, editorials, textbooks, court decisions and prescriptions, dictated by the masters, sanctified by our signature and delivered by us to the bondsmen, who, because of their ignorance, looked reverently to us for truth and justice.
As dealers in the futures of humanity—as teachers of men and women to be, our souls have sickened at the sight. All humanity enslaved. The masters enslaved to their desire for power, and their fear of the slave; the bondsmen enslaved to their grinding tasks, and to their fear of the master, and we, the intermediaries, enslaved too, realizing our dependence for the necessities of life upon those who employ us-upon our masters.
How long, we have cried, How long, O Lord, has poor humanity suffered thus-and is there no hope for the future?
And then some of us, teachers—a few of us, have turned to history. Not to our school histories, for they, alas, fail to tell the whole story. But to the works of scientists on the shelves of our great libraries, and we have found—oh, refreshing discovery!—that social systems have not always been slave systems. That in the remotest period, so dim that scarcely could it be outlined, the human race stood erect, men and women gazing into each others’ eyes fearlessly, none enslaved, none masters—all brothers. Throughout this long period of communism no child was conceived in slavery, in fear and reverence for a master man.
This discovery, of the one-time freedom of man from his kind, brought un told joy to us. Surely, if the race once tasted of freedom it would never be content until it again possessed freedom in all its fulness. We continued our search. What caused man to lose this great boon? How came he to pass from communism to slavery, from slavery to feudalism, and on into the present wage-system we call capitalism?
Unnoticed by man, its great unseen forces silently changing all of his institutions—his customs, his governments, his religions—the tool with which man worked, shaped the destiny of the human race. Because the forked stick of communal times became tipped with metal, its productive power increased and a surplus was produced. The strongest man desired this surplus. He enslaved his weaker brother that he might obtain it—and slavery followed communism. The metal-tipped plow improved, the slaves began to organize, they broke the bands of slavery—and feudalism appeared. The hand tool gave way to the weaving machine. The print ing press brought light to the ignorant serfs, gunpowder aided in their struggle for emancipation—and feudalism passed into history, with wage-slavery taking its place.
What then? ls the wage-system the final aim of all the centuries of evolution? May we not pass on to other stages? Do we not already see a light pouring forth from the great machine of production giving glimpses of the future? Do we not hear it crying to us, “Come unto me all ye workers! You who have produced me in common, shall now own me in common! You who use me socially shall own me socially, and never again will I hear from you, ‘I was naked and ye clothed me not. I was an hungered and ye fed me not.'”
You of the school room, you who train the minds of little children-who form the intelligence of the future-do you not see that the competitive system called capitalism is already dying? That it is dead?
Millions of men, homeless, wandering the streets for a chance to work—are they not testimony of its inability to longer serve the human race? Millions of women engaged in labor, making home life and care of children impossible, millions of babies torn from the joys of childhood, thrust into factories, mines and sweatshops, converted into tiny human wrecks—are they not testimony that this system is dead, that it cannot longer serve humanity?
Profit! Profit! Profit! demands this capitalist system. It is a system of profit by profits and for profits, rather than a system of, by and for the people. The new order, the higher order, will be a system for humanity—for men, women and children. It will be a system wherein the people own the machines, and receive the benefit from them.
School teachers, as you stand before the youths in your classes, as you teach history and politics and science to your pupils, be sure that you teach them the truth! If you are intelligent you know the truth. If you are not intelligent, you are cheating those dependent upon you. You have no right in the school room.
Through the power of machine production we will pass out of capitalism into Socialism. The machine is already socially used. It is waiting for our fuller claim. Let us answer its cry, and inaugurate the new day of the Co-operative Commonwealth—the Brotherhood of Man.
———-
[Photograph from cover of Socialist Woman.]
Miss Caroline A. Lowe:
CAROLINE A. LOWE
Ideas possess men and women and carry them into walks of life that they little dream of entering when they begin their work in the school of experience. Old ideas and plans may seem so well established, that to follow them is but a matter of course, until some thought, revolutionary, comes our way and suddenly the whole plan of life is changed, and all things become new. Institutions that we thought sacred become profane, and associates that were once congenial disappoint us more and more as the new idea takes hold.
The subject of this article is one of those possessed with the new idea, and has come forth from among the old institutions and friends to add her little or great might as it may happen in bringing about the better day for the down-trodden human race. Caroline A. Lowe, is one of the many women that is waking to the fact that woman’s slavery has its beginning where all slavery begins, that is in the economic world of production and distribution. She has learned that for the race to be free we must study our relationship to the institutions at which, and with which we labor. She has learned that to be politically free, socially free, we must first be economically free, and so this idea has possessed her that the working class must be aroused to see its slavery.
The woman of the race has been subject to the man of the race. She has been the isolated part and her expression has been only as man allowed, or was forced to allow by the rising intelligence of a few brave women who dared to protest against not having any voice or part in the affairs of the world. It has been the habit of man to look upon woman as a commodity, purchasable for a price to be set between the father and the suitor. This mental idea is not dead yet and so woman has to awaken woman to the fact that to get social and political recognition she must arise and strike the blow for her economic emancipation. To do this a few women have learned that only in organization is there strength.
Following the lead of the national convention of the Socialists in Chicago in appointing a woman’s committee of the party, Kansas has placed in the hands of Comrade Lowe the task of organizing the women of Kansas. We feel sure that the work is in the hands of the right person. “By our fruits we are known” and her work so far has been very successful, having organized the women of Ft Scott, Englevale, Ashley, Pittsburg, Girard, Coffeyville, and Sycamore. At each place a personal visit is made to the teachers and an urgent invitation extended them to attend the meetings. The members of the woman’s committee must be dues paying members of the party.
The work is not being rushed, but plans are being carefully laid. Every person who shows any signs of wanting to help is receiving a letter. The state oflice is giving every aid possible and under Comrade Lowe’s directions Kansas bids fair to take the lead in woman’s committee organization work.
There is an impression abroad that to-day we work only for a money compensation; but once a person becomes thoroughly imbued with an idea, this idea causes him or her to drop the best paying work in the world and to go forth to do battle for that which they love. Comrade Lowe had taught school for a number of years, when it began to dawn upon her that the social body was unclean and wretched. She saw the stricken human beings who toil from sun to sun and whose lives are blighted with the curse of poverty, coined into the profits of the present system. Although her entire life had been spent in the school room and she had risen to the position of vice-president in the Teachers’ Association of Kansas City, Mo., she left it all to come into the work of lifting the burden of the workers that is grinding the life out of all society.
To meet Comrade Lowe is to meet earnestness and a soul devoted to a cause that is bound to win because it is right, and for the reason that such as she are enlisted to fight its battles.
