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Thursday March 15, 1906
From The New York Times: "The Children of the Poor," Part I

In its March 3rd edition, the Times published an in-depth review of the newly published book by John Spargo which documents the suffering of the millions of children who are born and reared in poverty within our great American prosperity. Today we present part one of that review, entitled "Children of the Poor." We will concluded with part two in tomorrow's edition of the Hellraisers Journal.

Advertisement from The New York Times of February 17th:

From The New York Times of March 3, 1906:

CHILDREN OF THE POOR
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A Passionless but Terrible Description of
Their Condition in This Country.*
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It is easy enough to describe a book as epoch-making, but such a description is too apt to be false, unless, like the only safe prophesies, it be made long after the event. But Mr. Spargo's book ought to be epoch-making; it ought to mark the turning of the tide in the treatment of children. It is a plain, unvarnished statement of the manner of life of the children of the poor, and of the results of such living on their health and their morals, and a carefully planned series of remedial suggestions. We can think of no one who, of full age, would not be benefited by reading the book; even the employers who now make the child life of the poor what it is, might, even though but temporarily, be affected by it, and be moved toward better conditions.

Mr. Spargo's book is in five sections, dealing, respectively, with the poor baby, the school child, the working child, remedies, and the transplanting to the country of tenement children. The first of these is entitled "The Blighting of the Babies," a study of the very little children of the poor. The burden and blight of poverty fall most heavily upon the child; "experts say that the baby of the tenement is born physically equal to the baby of the mansion," but, underfed or badly fed, neglected, badly housed and improperly clad, the child of poverty is terribly handicapped at the very start. It has not an even chance to begin life with. The author continues:

To the child as to the adult the principal evils of poverty are material ones-lack of nourishing food, of suitable clothing, and of healthy home surroundings. It is not, however, the occasional hunger, the loss of a few meals, that is of importance; it is the chronic underfeeding day after day, month after month, year after year. Poverty and Death are grim companions. Wherever there is 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 12 per 1,000 in the wards where the well-to-do reside to 37 per 1,000 in the tenement wards.

Rickets are the ordinarily visible results of undernourishment; but they predispose their victims to measles, whooping cough, bronchitis; and if a child weathers the storms of childhood despite rickets, the consequences pursue the adult. Proper feeding is Mr. Spargo's suggested remedy-proper milk. One year at Randall's Island, in this city, 524 babies out of 1,181 died; the next year Pasteurized milk was used, and only 255 babies died! There, says Mr. Spargo, in effect, is the indicated cure-"clean milk," and enough of it.

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On the subject of the care of children, Mr. Spargo says:

These "little mothers" have been much praised and idealized, until we have become prone to forget that their very existence is a great social menace and crime.... Thirty-five years ago Paris was besieged by Germany's vast army. Industry was paralyzed and factories were closed down, with the result that there was the most frightful poverty due to unemployment. But because the mothers were forced to stay at home, and were thus enabled to give their children their personal care instead of trusting them to the "little mothers," the mortality of infants decreased by 40 per cent.

Mr. Spargo's chapter on "The School Child" is practically a continuation of his first chapter; it discusses the subject of starvation among the school children, and declares that "not less than 2,000,000 school children of the United States are the victims of poverty which denies them common necessities, particularly adequate nourishment." Shocking are the facts collected by the author. We expect the babies to die, there is nothing new in learning that, but that the children in the schools are starving in greater of or less degree-that at least 10 per cent, of them in this city go hungry daily and nightly- that is something to startle one. In Norway and in Vercelli, Italy, every school child is fed, whatever the parents means, and in such procedure Mr. Spargo sees the only hope of reducing the tremendous factor of starvation among the poor. Good food makes stronger children, it also helps them to learn, it makes better pupils in every way.

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[Photographs added.]

SOURCE
The New York Times
(New York, New York)
-Mar 3, 1906
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A0DE4D7103EE733A25750C0A...

IMAGES
Bitter Cry of Children, Spargo, NYT, Feb 17, 1906
https://www.newspapers.com/image/20459100/
Bitter Cry, Spargo, Title etc, NYT, Mar 3, 1906
https://www.newspapers.com/image/20582482/
Bitter Cry, Spargo, Death Rates, Feb 1906
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=5qSXMJQG6E4C&printsec=frontcove...
Bitter Cry, Spargo, Little Mother, Feb 1906
https://books.google.com/books/reader?id=5qSXMJQG6E4C&printsec=frontcove...

See also:

John Spargo
http://spartacus-educational.com/USAspargo.htm

The Bitter Cry of the Children
-by John Spargo
Macmillan, 1906
https://books.google.com/books?id=5qSXMJQG6E4C

Robert Hunter
http://spartacus-educational.com/USAhunterR.htm

Poverty by Robert Hunter
https://archive.org/stream/poverty01huntgoog#page/n8/mode/2up

Theodore Roosevelt's Great Prosperity Speech
(One such speech.)
-December 5, 1905
http://genius.com/President-theodore-roosevelt-presidential-speech-1905-...

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