from Daily Worker (November 30, 1939)

“New York Kids Haunt Bars; Poet Describes Their Plight”

Maxwell Bodenheim

Youngsters of Tender Years Forced by Poverty to Roam Streets in Search of Pennies, Prey of Racketeers

Every night in New York City, a horrible situation can be encountered. Children, ages ranging from six to twelve, trot into bars and liquor grills and try to sell tabloid papers. At a time when they should be studying or safely in bed, these tots are forced to walk into atmospheres where vulgarities and obscenities are frequently spouted.

Improper advances are sometimes made to them and a servile spirit is engendered. The quarters and half-dollars occasionally thrown by drunken men and women can not begin to compensate them for the hardening, coarsening and prostration inflicted on their childhood.

They come from Home Relief families or flats where a nickel looms larger than a dollar. The parents attempt to shield them but sometimes send them out in desperation, and in other cases the mothers or fathers work at night and do not know that their children have slipped down the street.

ON THE STREETS

These tots can also be noticed on sidewalk corners at night, piping their wares in the midst of bustle and danger. The tabloids know of this condition, with its miserable and brutalizing effects, but they have made little effort to erase it, and in truth, they could never completely succeed because the evil springs from capitalism’s fundamental twins–poverty and unemployment.

Again, boys of 16 and girls from 17 to 20 make rounds of saloons and restaurants every night and sell trays of doctored gardenias and roses, flowers that wilt shortly after they are purchased. These youngsters, sent by florists or small racketeers, never receive more than 3 per cent of the “take,” and they must become experts in cajolery, trade wisecracks with the prospective customers or sit and drink with them. Ideas of “getting by,” of slickness and surrender are stamped into them, and only the strongest characters survive this beginning influence.

Another gruesome sight is that of tots, all under ten, selling paper market-bags and jostled by pushcart crowds, or trudging around with boxes of shoddy ties and socks, with a whine already creeping into their hearts. Others carry punch-boards, a nickel a chance, with the winners gaining only cheap watches or celluloid toilet articles.

In addition, at week-ends and after school hours, lads still in the first eight grades tramp about the public squares and shine shoes, cracking knuckles and rubbing paste into little hands and often meeting, afterwards, to gamble with a soiled deck of cards, a stolen pair of dice.

TABLOID EFFRONTERY

Other children can be seen in New York City slums, running after passersby and begging for coins, and many of our frightful sex-murders have been aided by the fact that these children are desperate for candy, for little sweets and recreations.

Harold Gray, in his “Daily News” comic strip, “Maw Green,” had the effrontery to assert that parents are responsible for the ruination of their boys and girls by allowing them to run loose on the streets.

Overworked, harassed fathers and mothers have this falsehood thrown into their faces by a man who was boycotted, not so long ago, because he pictured a billionaire as a spotless altruist and drew his workers in the shape of wild-haired “stupid rabble.” Gray is an artist who certainly serves his masters faithfully, though in crude fashion.

Some of our liberal papers pretend to despise Communism and the Soviet Union, but they could travel to any metropolis in that country and look in vain for one duplicate of the aforementioned abuses. They are continually raising a huge, windy palaver about freedom of speech, freedom of expression and opportunity, but how do these boons materialize in concrete physical and educative terms for the youth of our nation?

Returning to one of the previously cited items, it is certainly ironical to see the children of the poor tramping into saloons in the dark hours to sell the very sheets which so often spit venoms and smooth distortions at workers organizing and striking for union conditions!