Tag:

poverty

The She-She-She Camps of the Great Depression

The Civilian Conservation Corps gave millions of young men a job and their families a lifeline with money they sent home every month. The much-admired and much-studied CCC also had a much-derided and little-studied little sister: the She-She-She camps.

At the beginning of the Great Depression, women made up 25 percent of the U.S. workforce. But attitudes prevented jobless women from getting anywhere near the government help that men got. Many took to the road, their stories the same: no work, the family on relief and no prospect of marriage.

Civilian Conservation Corps statue in Augusta, Maine.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt knew of their plight. Many had written to her, begging for help. So when her husband launched the Civilian Conservation Corps within a month of becoming president, she had a question. “What about the women?”

The answer to the CCC camps were smaller camps for women largely focused on “education” and “socialization.” While the men built roads and planted trees, the women put on plays. They also learned about antiquing, repaired toys and practiced conversational French. Critics called them She-She-She camps.

But at least they got fed.

Why She-She-She Camps

President Roosevelt won support for his New Deal programs by making poverty and hardship visible to the American people. He sent Farm Services Administration photographers out to take pictures of Dust Bowl families, breadlines and squatters’ camps. But the poor, jobless, city woman was invisible.

Elaine S. Abelson looked for images of poor, jobless, city women. She found one image of a woman selling apples in 1930, but not a single woman in photographs of breadlines and shantytowns.

A bread line in California

Meridel LeSueur tried to tell their story in Women on the Bread Lines. “I am sitting in the city free employment bureau,” she wrote. “It’s the woman’s section. We have been sitting here now for four hours. We sit here every day, waiting for a job. There are no jobs. Most of us have had no breakfast. Some have had scant rations for over a year.”

“A woman will shut herself up in a room until it is taken away from her, and eat a cracker a day and be as quiet as a mouse so there are no social statistics concerning her,” wrote LeSueur.

Young women who lost their jobs often moved in together, sometimes seven to a one-room apartment, according to Agnes V. O’Shea of the New York City Central Registration Bureau for Women.

They then slept in relays, “pooling their clothes to assemble one outfit presentable enough to pass muster with a prospective employer,” wrote O’Shea. They would delay applying for relief as long as possible. Even when homeless, women would eat a cracker and ride the subway all night. Sometimes they came to the registration bureau so physically and mentally exhausted they’d be sent to a hospital, O’Shea wrote.

First of the She-She-She Camps

During his first 100 days in office, President Roosevelt frantically set up an alphabet soup of agencies to try to put America back on its feet. He signed the bill creating the CCCC on April 1, 1933. Then in May he created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, or FERA. It would later morph into the Works Progress Administration, or WPA.

Eleanor Roosevelt prodded her husband for money to “provide healthful employment and useful instruction amid wholesome surroundings for needy young women.” FDR then forwarded her idea to Harry Hopkins, architect of many New Deal programs.

On June 10, 1933 the first She-She-She camp opened at a retreat for New York Life Insurance Company’s employees at Bear Mountain in the Catskills. Labor Secretary Frances Perkins came to the opening of Camp TERA, named for New York’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration.

Eleanor Roosevelt speaking to the She She She campers at Camp TERA

A month later, Eleanor Roosevelt visited Camp TERA. She expected to see 200 young women. She saw 20. By November, Hopkins had done little for the camps or for women. And so the First Lady organized a White House Conference on Women to pressure her husband’s administration for New Deal programs to help women.

“As a group women have been neglected in comparison with others,” the First Lady said. “And throughout this Depression have had the hardest time of all.”

Hopkins admitted the government hadn’t done what it should for unemployed women – “and feels pretty humble about it,” he said.

So Hopkins asked his new education specialist, Hilda Smith, to do something.

Hilda Worthington Smith

Smith knew what destitute working women were up against, having run the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry.

Hilda Worthington Smith

“People were hungry all over the country,” she said. “I know, I went to see some of our students in New York, and they showed what they had for supper. They opened the oven, and they were cooking a little puppy they had picked up on the street.”

With help from the First Lady and her network, Smith promoted the idea of the She-She-She camps. She spoke to a group of FERA field representatives in February 1934, trying to get them to support her project. They warned her of “serious discipline problems if women were brought together to live.” In April, a survey of FERA administrators showed half had no interest in the She-She-She camps and didn’t see a need for them.

And yet there were 45,000 homeless and destitute women and girls in the US in 1933, according to an estimate by sociologist Nels Anderson.

Bad Attitudes

Attitudes about women in the workforce tied Smith’s hands. Women weren’t viewed as permanent workers. People objected to job programs for women because, they believed, they came at the expense of jobs for men – the real breadwinners.

The American Federation of Labor’s executive council, for example, said married women whose husbands have permanent jobs should be discriminated against.

Smith had proposed the She-She-She campers do public works and reforestation alongside the CCC. CCC administrators didn’t like that idea one little bit. They made sure from the start that women didn’t get the same training and job opportunities as the men.

“The creation of jobs appeared to be the solution for the male population alone,” wrote Abelson.

But Smith had the First Lady and her considerable network on her side. Because of the publicity generated by Eleanor Roosevelt’s visits to Camp TERA, wealthy benefactors and local YWCAs offered summer estates, employee retreats, unused campgrounds. Hopkins in the end pledged financial support – limited financial support — for the She She She camps.

Early She-She-She Camps

By the summer of 1934, 28 She-She-She camps were up and running in 26 states and the District of Columbia in abandoned school buildings, summer hotels, country clubs and estates. Girls got $25 a month in salary and $15 from that salary went to the program for room and board.

One of Hilda Smith’s staffers went to visit them. “To see a group of girls assemble on the first night was to receive an immediate and tragic impression of the results of unemployment,” she wrote. “Thin, emaciated girls . . . they were overcome by the sight of a simple supper. Many showed symptoms of long fatigue, exhausted nerves and mental strain.”

The She-She-She camp in Pittsfield, N.H.

Pittsfield, N.H., had the first in New England at Winsunvale Orchards, the estate of Gov. John Winant. Shortly after buying the property in 1930, Constance Winant had announced plans to use it as a YWCA camp.

Winsunvale Orchards had 115 acres, a pond, tennis courts, a bowling alley, recreation hall, flower gardens and a 12-room house with 14 guest rooms. Fifty-four enrollees stayed for four weeks. They came from families receiving some form of relief, between 18 and 25 and in normal physical and mental health.

One photo of the Winsunvale Orchards camps shows the women putting on a play about Robin Hood.

Despite the lack of work opportunities, the She-She-She camp attendees at least got three square meals a day.

“It’s not only that I am getting enough to eat for the first time in three years, but I am beginning to think of myself as a real person again,” one attendee wrote.

Women’s Work

Though the PR for the She-She-She camps claimed the attendees were carefully selected — “outstanding girls with initiative” — the reality was much different. Most county relief agents sent hungry women who needed a roof over their heads.

It was up to the individual states to decide what to do with the She She She camps. As a result, they were a mish-mash of programs. The federal government’s attempts to explain them to the public resulted in confusing boilerplate. They were called “an adventure in human cooperation.” Attendees would “learn to exercise a wholesome influence on their community.” The camps would “stimulate their qualities of cooperation and leadership.” Or they would provide “hobbies and interests.”

Beneath the gobbledygook lay a consistent theme: Stereotypes about women’s work, whether in the home or in the workplace.

She-She-She campers in Manchester, Maine

Domestic Employment

In some camps they had lessons in “domestic employment.” In others they produced Braille materials, hospital dressings and sewed and repaired toys. They also did the cooking in the camps, and helped maintain them.

The president of the Temple University Women’s Club loaned her summer home in Manchester, Maine, to FERA for the camp that opened July 14, 1934. The camp had 99 enrollees, who spent 12 weeks taking courses in shorthand, typing bookkeeping, business English, home economic and handicrafts.

However, the She-She-She camps disappointed some young women because they didn’t lead to jobs. “I attended with the idea that the school, being a government school, would mean a lot in securing a job,” said one. “The school was a good idea but you can’t get a job after you return home.”

Campers in Manchester, Maine, got vocational training in clerical work, but not many actually got jobs.

Hilda Smith estimated later that only one-fifth of the enrollees in 1934 and 1935 found paid work on their return home, many in New Deal relief projects

1935

In 1935, the She-She-She camps were transferred to National Youth Administration (NYA), under the direction of Smith and Dorothea de Schweinitz. It didn’t help. Smith and de Schweinitz hoped for 150 camps and schools for 15,000 young women, but they only reached a third of that goal. In comparison, the CCC had 2,600 camps for 500,000 young men at its peak in 1935.

The program for women had run into trouble.

The She-She-She camps were hobbled by criticisms that they harbored communists and loose women, as well as prejudice against providing relief, jobs and education for women.

The Betsy Williams She-She-She Camp

The Betsy Williams camp in Chepachet, R.I., was supposed to open in 1936, but the $23,000 slated for its operation didn’t arrive until 1937. Sixty-five unemployed young women from the relief rolls in Massachusetts and Rhode Island spent three months at the camp.

Some were waitresses, some stenographers and many were college graduates, according to the Jan. 4, 1937 New York Times. Despite their backgrounds, they were trained in household arts. “They will carry on such work as making hospital supplies, transcribing books into Braille, making and repairing toys and working in the tree nurseries of the Forestry Service,” the newspaper reported.

Women’s work

Once a week they could attend dances in the recreation hall with escorts from the CCC camp six miles away.

Charm in North Haverhill

The She-She-She camp that opened in North Haverhill, N.H., in 1937 undoubtedly provided fodder for critics. The New York Times on March 14, 1937, described the activities at Camp Chipewas. It had a Little Theatre group, a glee club, a French conversation group, a poetry group, a nature group, a hostess group and an antique group. All were aimed at “filling leisure time.”

Under the direction of Mrs. Frances P. Oakes of Landaff, N.H., social science teacher at the camp, the French speakers sat at their own table during meals and only spoke French, reported the newspaper. The camp also offered a “Charm by Choice” course that “will interest those who are concentrating their attention on making the most of their appearance and who are seeking to cultivate habits of speaking and acting which will make them attractive.”

By October 1, 1937, the She-She-She camps were dead.

In 1935 an anonymous woman wrote that her month in a She-She-She camp gave her a new outlook on life.

It seemed like someone did have an interest in whether we lived or starved and was trying to help. I know I had reached my ‘rope’s end’ trying to keep three children and an old mother.

End Notes to She-She-She Camps

With thanks to The Homeless Transient in the Great Depression New York State, 1929-1941 by Joan M. Crouse.

New Deal Resident Camps for Unemployed Women, PennPraxis, University of PennsylvaniaJanuary 22, 2021.

Jane Kahramanidis, The She-She-She Camps of the Great Depression, History Magazine, February/March 2008.

Kornbluh, Joyce L. “The She-She-She Camps: An Experiment in Living and Learning, 1934-1937.” In Sisterhood and Solidarity, edited by Joyce L. Kornbluh and Mary Frederickson, 253–83. Temple University Press, 1984. JSTOR.

Kornbluh, Joyce L., and Lyn Goldfarb. “Labor Education and Women Workers: An Historical Perspective.” In Labor Education for Women Workers, edited by Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, 15–31. Temple University Press, 1981. JSTOR.

“Women Who Have No Men to Work for Them”: Gender and Homelessness in the Great Depression, 1930-1934, by Elaine S. Abelson.

Images: Hilda Worthington Smith By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44139977. Bread line: “The White Angel Bread Line” By Dorothea Lange, San Francisco, California, 1933; Records of the Social Security Administration; Record Group 47; National Archives.

This story updated in 2024.

0 comment 3.4K views

When Poor Apprentice Laborers Were 2 Years Old

In 1754, Boston’s overseer of the poor bound out Joseph Clifton, aged two, as an apprentice to Aaron Clinton, a brickmaker in Medford, Mass. Joseph, probably orphaned or abandoned, had no say in the matter.

For the next 19 years, Joseph couldn’t leave his master’s household without permission. He had to gladly obey all of his orders. In return, Clinton would provide room and board and teach Joseph his trade, along with reading, writing and arithmetic. When Joseph turned 21, Clinton would give him two suits, called freedom suits, one for Sunday and one for work.

Joseph wasn’t alone. Surviving records in Massachusetts show that from 1735 to 1805, Boston’s overseers of the poor bound out about 1400 children as apprentices. Rhode Island’s surviving records show 725 poor children were bound out during the second half of the 18^th century.

Apprenticeship contract for Sarah Scribner.

For some, like Isaiah Thomas, apprenticeship led to a successful career and a place in history. For others apprenticeship meant a lifetime of poverty and toil. And in the case of Nathaniel Sewell, it meant an early death.

Nathaniel Sewell, Smelly Apprentice

In 1643, a London street kid named Nathaniel Sewell arrived in Newbury, Mass., to work as an apprentice for William Franklin. The child had arrived with a batch of poor children sent to Massachusetts, where colonists had a pressing need for laborers.

It had been 24 years since English authorities shipped the first load of 100 homeless children to Virginia, where they labored as apprentices until they turned 21. The experiment succeeded, at least for the masters, and the next year another hundred kids arrived in Virginia.

Nathaniel Sewell, a smelly child, had the scurvy when he landed in Massachusetts. His master treated his young apprentice harshly. Franklin left him in the cold and wet, corrected him mercilessly and hung him in the chimney as punishment. But Sewell would not bend to Franklin’s will, and so Franklin took him to court in Boston.

On the way, Franklin had to tie the sick boy to his horse because he couldn’t sit up. Nathaniel begged for water, but Franklin refused. Hours after they reached Boston, Nathaniel Sewell died. Franklin was charged with killing his servant, found guilty and hanged for the offense.

The Family Apprentice

The Puritans believed servants, apprentices or employees had a duty to obey the master of the household, but the master also had a duty to them. He had to teach them to read Scripture, follow a trade and be a good person. He was also not supposed to kill them.

The practice of apprenticeship didn’t always work out, as in the case of Nathaniel Sewell. But the Puritans believed in the concept as sound. To their minds, an orderly society rested on the family – a family headed by a male. The single life inspired “sin and iniquity,” the Puritans believed.

In the 17^th century, Massachusetts, Plymouth and Connecticut colonies actually passed laws requiring single people to live with a family. If a single person didn’t find an established family, the local authorities would find one for him – or her.

That went for children, too.

Child Labor

From 1692 to the Revolution, Massachusetts took care of hundreds of poor children younger than 10 by binding them out as apprentices to families. (The maritime trades were the one exception to the family apprentice). About three dozen children hadn’t reached the age of five.

Most young girl apprentices spent a lot of time doing this.

In Rhode Island, very young children (who couldn’t be expected to work much) came with a premium paid by the town. Colored children made up 25 percent of all indentures in Rhode Island, where apprenticeships lasted longer.

Overseers of the Poor

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, poor families in Puritan New England could expect a knock on the door. The door would open to admit selectmen or overseers of the poor, who would inspect their home. Then they’d decide whether or not to take a child away from the family as a pauper apprentice.

In the case of craft apprentices, like Paul Revere (silversmithing) or Benjamin Franklin (printing), parents had a say in the terms of the agreement. Not so in the case of poor, abandoned, orphaned or illegitimate children.

Puritan town officials even took children from their homes if they thought the parents immoral. Around 1644, for example, they took two children away from Ruben Guppy of Salem and apprenticed them to another family. Guppy had gone to court many times for stealing fences, lying and accusing his wife of a “wanton dalliance.” He’d also said something blasphemous to Puritan ears. God, he believed, found his nail parings as acceptable as a day of Thanksgiving,

Heartfelt Pleas

But town leaders also seized children from their parents because of their poverty. In Northampton, Mass., town officials in 1680 took two sons and one daughter away from Robert Lyman and his wife. They apprenticed the children to other families despite the parents’ heartfelt pleas to the court to keep their children.

It could have been worse for Mr. and Mrs. Lyman. In 1756, Massachusetts passed a law that ordered selectmen to bind out adults as workers for one year if they couldn’t support their children. Three years later, the colony passed another law allowing an unmarried mother to be indentured for five years if the child went on the dole before the age of five. Those two laws only took effect for a few years, and the Legislature did not reenact them.

Isaiah Thomas, Success Story

For some poor children like Isaiah Thomas, apprenticeship was the best thing that could happen to them.

Success story Isaiah Thomas

Isaiah Thomas’ father abandoned the family, leaving his wife to support five children. Isaiah went to live with a family in the country between the ages of two and six. At seven, he returned to Boston, where authorities drew up an apprenticeship contract on July 7, 1756, to a printer named Zachariah Fowle.

Until he turned 21, Isaiah had to obey Fowle, keep his secrets, leave him only with permission and avoid gambling, taverns, fornication and matrimony. In return, Fowle had to teach him printing, to cipher, read and write, and to give him two freedom suits when he turned 21.

Freedom suits, by the way, had considerable value. In 1761 a freedom suit was worth about five months’ wages. A few poor apprentices also received freedom dues in the form of cash, land or tools.

Isaiah Thomas ran away from Fowle at age 18, but returned to Boston and started an influential newspaper, The Massachusetts Spy. Thomas took up the patriot cause and emerged as the foremost publisher of his age. He was an ally of John Hancock and Sam Adams and friend of Paul Revere.

During the Siege of Boston, Thomas smuggled his printing press out of town and settled in Worcester. There he published the Bible, almanacs and the History of Printing in America. He also formed the American Antiquarian Society.

From Boston to the Boonies

In 18^th-century Boston, children could end up as apprentices far from home and family. Hard economic times had fallen on the town after a series of wars and smallpox epidemics. Impressment of sailors by the British Royal Navy had also scared off shipping.

But settlers spreading out into outlying towns needed plenty of help. They looked to Boston’s poor to get it.

In 1745, Edward Holin was apprenticed in Boston at the age of 18 months to Robert Anderson, a housewright in Chester, N.H.
Five years later, five-year-old Mary Hermon left Boston to apprentice as a household servant to a trader named Joseph Langeret in Lebanon, Conn.
In 1765, seven-year-old Thomas More departed Boston for Pownalborough, Maine, as an apprentice housewright for the next 14 years to James Flagg.

Conversely, Rhode Island’s economy thrived, and the colony’s wharves and workshops needed cheap labor. Perhaps that’s why Rhode Island’s pauper apprentice boys didn’t win their freedom until 24, girls until 21.

Mary Butcher, 7, Apprentice

Few poor boy apprentices came close to Isaiah Thomas’ success. Historian Lawrence Towner found only three apprentices listed as masters of their own trade in 1796 out of 60 boys bound out to tradesmen between 1760 and 1790. They worked as a tailor, a hairdresser and a tobacconist.

The best that could happen to a poor servant girl was marriage to a decent husband. Other than that, she’d spend her life in service or, like Mary Butcher, end up in the poorhouse.

In 1754, Boston authorities bound seven-year-old Mary Butcher as an apprentice servant to Richard Storkney, a yeoman farmer in Stoughton, Mass.

The Idle Servant by Nicholas Maas.

For the next 11 years she had to work for him in exchange for room, board and a rudimentary education.

Storkney, like all masters, had to produce letters testifying to his good character (the Nathaniel Sewall case had apparently proved instructive). Then Mrs. Storkney had to train Mary to spin wool, to keep house and to read. (Girls didn’t need writing or math.) When Mary got her freedom at 18, the Storkneys had to give her two freedom dresses.

Fifty years later she reappeared in the record, poor, single and lame in Canton, Mass. The overseers of the poor wrote, “She is a person whom nature has not been over bountiful in furnishing her mental faculties.” They sent her to the Boston poorhouse, where she presumably died.

End Notes

With thanks to: Markets for Children in Early America: A Political Economy of Pauper Apprenticeship John E. Murray and Ruth Wallis Herndon in The Journal of Economic History, 2002. Graham Millar, The Poor Apprentices of Boston: Indentures of Poor Children Bound Out Apprentice By the ‘Overseers of the Poor of Boston, July 4, 1958. And The Indentures of Boston’s Poor Apprentices: 1734-1805 by Lawrence W. Towner, 1962.

Images: Young Girl at Spinning Wheel By https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/0a/28/c704a981cdb6bf5f30d829506d67.jpgGallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0039573.html Wellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-23): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/th7sdqf4 CC-BY-4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36633776. This story was updated in 2023.

1 comment 2.5K views

The Working Man’s Friend Who Busted the Hartford Newsies Strike

The New York-based newsies strike, immortalized in the Disney film of the same name, succeeded in 1899. The Hartford newsies strike 10 years later did not — and all because of a former newsie.

Hartford Newsies

Hine’s caption: 9:00 P.M. March 4, 1909. Hartford, Conn. Group of newsies still selling although it was bitter cold and blizzardy. Smallest chap was 8 years old. The boys said he has been selling for 3 years. Boy next him (and) has been selling 4 years (called Bologna). Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Early in 1909, social reformer Lewis Hine brought his Graflex camera to Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven to record images of boys and girls on the streets. They worked as newsies, bootblacks and messenger boys.

Social reformers thought children shouldn’t work on the streets, where they learned about gambling, swearing and booze. They went into saloons to sell papers, knowing that drunks made good customers. The kids also worked long hours, sometimes starting out at 5 a.m., and returning home at midnight. They fought over territory, and people sometimes shortchanged the youngest newsboys who didn’t know how to make change.

Others, however, pointed out the children’s families, mostly poor immigrants, needed the pennies they earned to survive. Some young girls, for example, paid for school tuition with their earnings as newsies.

Two newsies about to do business in a saloon. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Herman Kopplemann

Herman Kopplemann had started out as a Hartford newsie in 1888 at the age of eight. He came to Hartford from Russia with his parents when he was two years old. He and his brother eventually formed a partnership to distribute Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers throughout Connecticut. They built it into the largest distributorship in the state.

At 24, Herman Kopplemann ran for city council and won, representing Hartford’s poor East Side. During his five terms in the council he brought improvements to the neighborhood: sewer upgrades, a public bath house and pay hikes for police officers and firefighters.

Toward the children who sold his newspapers, he showed less benevolence.

Hartford Newsies Strike

Hine’s caption: 7 year old twins. Been selling for 1 year. Sell sometimes until 8 P.M., Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

New York papers sold well in Connecticut, especially Joseph Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Heart’s Evening Journal. The two millionaires battled each other for more circulation and bigger profit.

Typically, newspaper publishers bought back unsold newspapers from their distributors. But in 1909, they refused to do it anymore.

In Connecticut, that meant Herman Kopplemann would be the one to stick the newsies with the papers they couldn’t sell.

The newsies went on strike against Pulitzer and Hearst. According to the Shoeleather History Project, on May 1 newsies from all over the city assembled at a hall at the corner of Winthrop and Pleasant Streets. They formed a parade and marched in the rain behind a drum and bugle corps with a banner that urged people to buy only local newspapers. The next day they formed a union, the Hartford Newsboys’ Association, and elected officers.

At first it went well. Drugstores stopped stocking the Pulitzer and Hearst newspapers, people stopped buying them and supporters contributed to the strike fund. On May 17, the newsies marched through the streets again, wearing white hats and union pins and waving flags.

Scabs

Kopplemann, however, had no intention of backing down. He hired strikebreakers from out of town – at their peril, as it turned out, as the newsies beat them up. He spread rumors the strike had failed. And he enlisted his brother to form a rival ‘union.’

Hearst himself helped out. He sent an employee from New York to break the strike. A Hartford clothing store owner caught him buying a large quantity of boys clothing and shoes. Kopplemann had planned on offering the new clothes to the boys as a bribe to end the strike.

By the end of the third week, dissension spread among the strikers, probably instigated by the Kopplemanns and Hearst. Nineteen days after it began, the newsies voted to end the strike.

Some New Dealer

Herman Kopplemann

Herman Kopplemann then won election to the state Legislature. After lying, bullying and hiring scabs to break a children’s strike, he went on to get himself elected to Congress as a Democrat on a pro-labor ticket.

After serving five terms in Congress, he was defeated in 1946 and died 11 years later. Speaker of the House John McCormack memorialized him as a man who always extended a helping hand.

“There are many thousands of persons who are happier today because of Herman Kopplemann and his consideration of and his kindness to others,” McCormack said.

Tony Zazzaro

Paul and Tony Zazzaro. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Among the Hartford newsies photographed by Lewis Hine were Paul and Tony Zazzaro. Hine’s caption read,

8 A.M. A cold and windy day. Small boy, Paul Zozzaro, 9 years old, begins at 7 A.M. daily. Then goes to school. Sells after school until 6 P.M. and later. Older brother, Tony, gets up at 5 every morning and sells before school. Then after school again.

Historian Joe Manning did some sleuthing about Tony and Paul Zazzaro. The boys’ parents had immigrated from Italy. Their father worked as a street sweeper, their mother took care of seven children. When Paul grew up he started a successful restaurant called The Capitol Grille.

Tony became one of Hartford’s political bosses. For many years he delivered the Italian vote and served for a term on the city council. He also owned parking garages and a brewery. He had two aides who became well-known Connecticut political figures: John Bailey and Abraham Ribicoff.

Robert Chiles, in his book, The Revolution of ’28: Al Smith, American Progressivism, and the Coming of the New Deal, wrote the triumvirate that ruled Hartford in 1928 consisted of Thomas J. Spellacy, Tony Zazzaro and Herman Kopplemann.

With thanks to Shoeleather History and Mornings on Maple Street.

0 comment 3.1K views

New England Witchcraft Trials: It Wasn’t Just Salem

Plenty of people in early New England were persecuted for witchcraft, and not just in Salem, Mass.

Witches had troubled the European colonists from the get-go. In 1635, Plymouth Colony made it a crime to “form a solemn compact with the devil by way of witchcraft.” As late as the 19^th century, women were persecuted for cursing butter churns, making animals sick and causing people to die.

“Examination of a witch” by Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1853)

Salem’s witchcraft hysteria was just the most spectacular (and certainly the most memorable) of the witch trials. Two hundred people faced charges, and 20 died at the executioner’s hand. But Hartford had its own mini-witch hysteria, as did many towns scattered throughout New England.

Connecticut Witchcraft Prosecutions

In Connecticut, witch hysteria took hold 45 years before Salem began its mass executions. The colony formally tried 43 people for witchcraft (Massachusetts tried 50.) Most were acquitted or escaped, but nine men and two women were executed as witches between 1647 and 1663. The first, a woman from Windsor named Alse Young, died, as the others would, on the basis of flimsy evidence. She went to the gallows on the site of the Old State House.

The witch hysteria peaked during the “Hartford Witch Panic.” It started in 1662 when a young Hartford girl died after claiming a neighbor, Goodwife Ayres, tormented her. In 1662, Goodwife Ayres and her husband sensibly skipped town.

More accusations followed for the next 50 years in the Connecticut River towns of Hartford, Windsor, Farmington and Wethersfield. Most, however, resulted in acquittals as Connecticut judges came to their senses.

By 1715, the law making witchcraft a capital offense was off the books, and the witchcraft hysteria died down. (Click here for more about the Hartford Witch Panic.)

The Witch No. 1, lithograph, J.E. Baker.

Disturbing Witches

Your chances of getting hauled into court for witchcraft got better if your neighbors didn’t like you. Often the people accused of dealing with the devil were shrewish or grouchy or arrogant. Sometimes they lived on a town’s margins, and took the blame for its misfortunes.

Eunice Cole of Hampton, N.H., was difficult, unlikeable and didn’t have much money. From 1656 to 1680 she went to court three times to face charges. She was in and out of prison for slanderous speech and familiarity with the devil. She did perform one near-magic feat: dying peacefully in her own bed at the age of 90. (Read more about Eunice Cole here.)

Just because a jury found you not guilty of witchcraft didn’t mean your persecution ended. A Boston jury exonerated Mary Webster of Hadley, Mass., but that didn’t stop her neighbors from disturbing her.

The Puritans believed ‘disturbing’ witches – beating or restraining them – prevented them from casting spells. Mary Webster’s neighbors dragged her from the house, hanged her from a tree until she nearly died, than buried her in the snow and left her. She survived, and spent the rest of her life known as ‘Half-Hanged Mary.’

Mary Webster was lucky compared to Susannah Martin of Amesbury, Mass. A neighbor first accused her of witchcraft in 1669. Susannah’s husband sued the neighbor for slander, and ultimately she was cleared of the charges. But the taint of the accusation lingered, and she was charged again during the Salem witchcraft hysteria of 1692. She died on the gallows at the age of 70 with three other accused witches. (Read about Susannah Martin here.)

Court of Oyer and Terminer

In Salem and nearby towns, officials began rounding up suspected witches even before Gov. William Phips ordered the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened.

William Phips

As the storm gathered, Philip English may have been a target because of his wealth. Essex County’s High Sheriff George Corwin had a nasty habit of seizing the property of accused witches and dividing the spoils with his deputies.

Corwin arrested Philip English’s wife Mary on April 18, 1692. Five weeks later, the Court of Oyer and Terminer was formed to investigate the disturbances in Salem. (Read more about it here.) The court quickly turned into a killing machine.

Philip English followed his wife to jail when a neighbor accused him of witchcraft. She said he pinched her and threatened to kill her if she didn’t touch his ‘Devil’s book.’ Philip and Mary English managed to flee to New York until the bloodshed ended.

Two hundred (perhaps a few more) were charged in what historians now believe was a massive case of petty jealousies and score settling. Nineteen died by hanging, one man was crushed to death and five people died in jail.

The Salem bloodlust

But then the Puritan leaders came to their senses and realized the witchcraft trials were a shocking case of government run amok — and an embarrassment. After the 20 alleged witches were executed in Salem, Mass., no one was indicted, convicted or executed for witchcraft in New England. One of the witch trial judges, Samuel Sewall, even apologized for his role in the witch hysteria. (Read about Judge Sewall here.)

Samuel Sewall.

Witchcraft After the Trials

That didn’t mean people stopped believing in witches. Rhoda Dustin was known as the Witch of Weare, N.H., but lived in an era when witchcraft prosecutions had died down. She was born in 1736, and with her husband ran an inn. The townspeople believed she could fly, inflict illness on people and curse butter churns so they wouldn’t make butter. Though they gossiped about her and tried to counteract her curses, she was never tried and died peacefully in Vermont in 1824.

Hannah Cranna, like Susannah Martin and Eunice Cole, was a shrew. But she was born nearly a century after the witch trials ended, in 1783. Hannah married Capt. Joseph Hovey, probably much older than she, and they lived in Monroe, Conn.

Hannah Cranna’s headstone.

No whisperings of witchcraft followed her until her husband died suspiciously. He went out for a walk one night and fell over a cliff in an area he knew well. People thought she’d cast a spell on him.

From then on, Hannah lived in poverty, and used her reputation for witchcraft to extort food and firewood from her neighbors. She never went to trial, though neighbors talked about her.

When she died, her neighbors ignored her wishes and buried her after sundown. When they returned to her house, it had gone up in flames, sealing the legend of Hannah Cranna, witch. (Read more about Hannah Cranna here.)

This story was updated in 2022.

1 comment 10.1K views

The Vermont Eugenics Survey Purifies the Population’s Polluted Protoplasm

The Vermont eugenics survey began with the rural exodus of Vermont farmers and didn’t end until well after Hitler used its ‘philosophy’ to justify his race experiments.

The state’s eugenics supporters thought the westward migration had skimmed the cream from country farms and villages. They believed the people who remained lacked the intelligence and drive of the Yankee Protestants who created Vermont.

Eugenics aims to improve the genetic quality of the human population by promoting more reproduction among ‘biologically fit’ people and less reproduction among ‘degenerates.’

Though eugenicists claimed they based their views on science, the Vermont eugenics survey actually responded to increased immigration from Europe and Canada. It sought to eliminate from the population such traits as harelips, sloppiness, tuberculosis and poor memory. Eugenicists even believed poverty was hereditary.

Original caption reads “Two cretins.” From a book by geneticist Reginald Ruggles Gates.

Inventor Alexander Graham Bell was a proponent. So was birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. Even W.E.B. Du Bois believed in developing the best versions of African Americans in order for his race to succeed.

Vermont was far from the only state to use eugenics to breed a better population. Connecticut started the ball rolling in 1896, with a marriage law that prohibited anyone who was epileptic or feebleminded from marrying. The next year, Michigan started compulsory sterilization, which spread to 32 states. In the end, state governments forcibly sterilized 65,000 people, mostly women.

Henry Farnham Perkins

The Vermont eugenics survey began with Henry Farnham Perkins, a Mayflower descendant who married another Mayflower descendant. Both came from families of distinguished academics.

Perkins was born in 1877 in the wealthy section of Burlington, Vt. He graduated from the University of Vermont in 1898, and in 1903 got a job at the college as associate professor of Zoology. That same year, the American Breeder’s Association was created to study eugenics.

He plodded along for nearly two decades until he learned of a U.S. Army study after World War I ended. The Army had used the study as part of the draft process, and concluded that men from Vermont had an inordinately high rate of ‘defects, such as diabetes, epilepsy, deformities and mental deficiency.

Perkins set about to correct that problem and preserve Vermont’s Yankee Protestant identity through ‘investigation and social reform.’

The Vermont Eugenics Survey

Perkins started off in 1922 by revamping his Zoology curriculum and started teaching courses on heredity and evolution. He taught that social ills had biological links, and that certain groups of people exhibited a general deterioration toward mental illness, criminality and promiscuity.

That inspired the Vermont eugenics survey, which studied rural Vermonters. Perkins hired fieldworkers to hunt degenerate families in the Vermont countryside. They looked for three categories of degeneracy: chorea, or people with Huntington’s disease; pirates, or people who lived on houseboats; and gypsies, people with dark skin.

In reality, they targeted French Canadians, Indians, African-Americans and immigrants.

Perkins revealed his animus toward immigrants in a comment about French Canadians: You cannot believe a thing they tell you…They are a pretty genial folk but many have a pretty low I.Q….the French are a complacent people; it would be impossible to have a French Mussolini for instance. That kind of drive is lacking…

At least, he thought, they were better than the Irish.

Rural Vermont, the target of the Vermont eugenics survey.

Fieldwork

One fieldworker, Harriet Abbot, gathered information on 4,642 people by the end of 1927. Sometimes they disclosed their family histories to her because they thought she was writing a book.

“Unwittingly, her informants opened up their homes and hearts to her, completely unaware of the real purpose of her research,” wrote Kevin Dann and Christie Carter in From Degeneration to Regeneration: The Eugenics Survey of Vermont, 1925-1936.

She and other Vermont eugenics survey fieldworkers identified such traits as illiterate, illegitimate, insane, thief, queer, pauper, immoral, dishonest, rape, syphilis, liar, epileptic, twin, stillborn, dependent, alcoholic, a little odd, wanderer, wild, cruel, one eye and shiftless.

Fieldworkers went to the Rutland Reformatory for Women, a home for the wayward. The fieldworkers believed the institution’s ‘sex delinquents’ were bad women, and got that way through heredity.

Purifying the State’s Polluted Protoplasm

In 1927, Perkins got funding for a bigger survey, called the Vermont Commission on Country Life. Through it, he developed a program that called for Vermonters to ‘wake up’ so that their grandchildren wouldn’t be dragged down by ‘avoidable low-grade Vermonters.’

The commission concluded that Vermont should prevent the marriage and reproduction of its ‘feeble-minded’ citizens.

On the positive side, the VCCL urged Vermonters to keep track and study their families. “It is the patriotic duty of every normal couple to have children in sufficient number to keep up to par ‘the good old Vermont stock,” the commission reported.

It also recommended ways to promote tourism in order to attract economically successful – therefore biologically fit – visitors and summer residents. Vermont implemented many of those ideas, such as banning billboards, licensing cabins, building highways and encouraging summer homes.

Forced Sterilization

Eventually the Vermont eugenics survey took over the VCCL. Then in 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Buck v. Bell that forced sterilization was constitutional. That opened the floodgates for Vermont and other states to pass and enforce their compulsory sterilization laws.

Vermont passed its compulsory sterilization law in 1931, the 25th state to do so. The law targeted ‘idiots,’ ‘imbeciles,’ ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘insane’ persons living in state institutions.

Many state laws targeted the mentally ill, the intellectually disabled, the epileptic, the deaf, the blind and the physically deformed. But at the time, many women deemed ‘feeble-minded’ went to state institutions. In reality, they had had sex or gotten pregnant outside of marriage.

In 1936, a publication of the American Neurological Association reported data on sterilizations in the New England states. Vermont had the lowest disparity between men and women, with 65 women sterilized and 32 men. Connecticut had the worst disparity, sterilizing 372 women, but only 19 men. Maine sterilized 78 women and seven men, while New Hampshire sterilized 170 women and 29 men.

Map showing the Vermont eugenics survey wasn’t the only perpetrator of forced sterilization.

A Bad Name

But eugenics was losing steam in the 1930s. Hitler’s rise to power gave eugenics a bad name, and scientists began to think environment played a large role in human development.

Then in 1942, another U.S. Supreme Court case, Skinner v. Oklahoma, raised legal questions about the practice and discouraged further sterilization. Vermont, however, continued sterilizing its people until 1963. In the end, Vermont sterilized more than 250 people it deemed degenerate — mostly women.

Though Henry Farnham Perkins identified alcoholism as a degenerate trait, he died of liver failure, a bedridden alcoholic, in 1956.

Images: Chester, Vt., By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61935149. Two cretins By https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/63/91/55df9a057497dbe426d95a9fd0bb.jpgGallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0013872.htmlWellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-21): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/v2un3ra7 CC-BY-4.0, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35966587. This story was updated in 2023.

1 comment 3.2K views

When Massachusetts Was a Paradise for Tramps

So many tramps rode the rails into Massachusetts after the Civil War that in 1899 a group of charity administrators published a manual, The Best Methods of Dealing with Tramps and Wayfarers.

Most tramps had no home or job. They wandered from place to place, riding on freight cars, sleeping in barns or station houses and turning up in a city. There they stayed long enough to get money to push on farther – or to get arrested. Some took to the road looking for work, but most avoided labor like the plague.

Connecticut can claim the most famous tramp of all: the Leatherman, who as his name suggests, dressed entirely in handmade leather. Every year from 1857 to 1889 he walked a 360-mile circuit between the Hudson and Connecticut rivers, starting and ending in Danbury.

But the magnet for tramps was Massachusetts.

In 1899, Massachusetts recorded 207,081 cases of vagrancy.

“This is the great State of the country among the tramps,” said an undercover operative in 1895 who traveled with tramps. “They are better treated in Massachusetts than in any other State of the Union.”

Tramps walking along railroad tracks. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Tramps

They had names, or monicas, like Connecticut Slim, Shorty and Boston Blackey. They traveled with timetables and maps, sleeping in railroad boxcars or shanties in good weather, seeking shelter in police stations when the weather turned crimpy. Tramps usually didn’t like to talk about their past, but they could tell tall tales and they swapped information about places to go.

They may have been bums, but they weren’t stupid. Tramps knew the laws of every state they visited, and how to avoid arrest. They knew which farmer’s wife would feed them when they knocked on her back door, and they knew the good ‘chewing’ towns from the bad.

Charles Ralston of the Hoosac Valley News said for six months his wife fed every tramp who came to the door. Three tramps came by their home in the first month, six in the second, 18 in the third and one a day in the sixth. Then they stopped feeding the tramps, and their visits dropped off.

The tramps communicated with a system of markings they’d write with chalk or a jackknife. They marked fences, buildings, trees, pavements — anywhere another tramp might find it. A zigzag, for example, meant a barking dog. A cat meant a kind lady. Three diagonal lines meant danger.

Tramps playing cards in a boxcar. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Philosophical

In 1899, the eminent physician Francis Weld Peabody described the tramp with grudging respect:

He is often an exceptionally acute, observant, somewhat philosophical character. There is something picturesque and even dramatic about a man who in the midst of a world of work can be perfectly free from the trammels of industry, and live — like a professor — by his wits.

The famous detective Allan Pinkerton in 1877 called them ‘persons of great natural gifts, close observers of people and things, keen to secure and retain valuable information, quick to discern motives for human action, splendid conversationalists, and, as a rule, also persons of superior education.’

The Rise of the Tramp

The lifestyle that Roger Miller sang about in his 1964 hit, King of the Road, took hold in the United States after the Civil War. Recession and the railroads gave it a boost.

Pinkerton blamed the war for the hordes of vagabonds roaming the country. “Hundreds upon hundreds became demoralized by the lazy habits of camp-life, and were suddenly turned loose upon society without any regular employment, or desire for any,” he wrote in 1877.

Some Civil War veterans, undoubtedly, took to the vagabond life because of trauma sustained during the conflict.

Railroads, especially slow-moving freight trains, enabled tramps to travel far and wide for nothing. In 1899, Jacob Riis, a social reformer who had tramped himself, attributed, ‘the great increase in facility of cheap travel, by which a man may come from the interior of Russia for less money than it cost our grandfathers to travel to New York.’

The Long Depression of 1873-79 caused the number of tramps to spike. In 1874, Boston reported 98,263 cases of vagrancy, triple the number just two years earlier. (The city’s population was then about 250,000, but tramps could be counted more than once.)

Twenty years later the Panic of 1893 and the four-year depression that followed caused another uptick in vagrancy. Jack London quit his job in disgust in 1893 and took to the road, later writing about it.

Jack London

In 1895, T.T. Pomeroy of the Central Labor Union told the Massachusetts Board to Investigate the Subject of the Unemployed that many men had taken to tramping in the previous year. Of those, many were shoemakers.

“Lots of them …were regarded as skilled laborers,” he said. “Perhaps not the most efficient, but men who were fairly comfortable, pleasant companions, rather easy going and perhaps careless, fair hands in ordinary conditions.”

Dover Deals With Tramps

They may have been entertaining, even pleasant, but the tramps caused problems in Massachusetts cities and towns.

In 1889, the town of Dover put up 972 tramps. A local resident received 25 cents to feed and shelter each tramp, but he was to give them nothing more than crackers and water. Selectmen suspected he gave them more. He also gave them a comfortable room and the daily newspapers, which they could read by a lamp he kept lit.

One night a police officer in nearby Milford found a book belonging to a tramp that had all the names of the Massachusetts cities and towns in them. Some had an x next to them, and some had xx. The policeman asked what it meant. The tramp said x meant a good town, xx meant a damned good town.

Dover had two xx’s. So the town built two brick cells in the town hall cellar and wooden platforms for tramps to sleep on. The next year, Dover only put up 10 tramps.

Paradise

In general, Massachusetts treated tramps better than neighboring states. In the 1890s, Providence crammed 65 tramps in a room 13 feet long. New Hampshire made tramping illegal in 1878 and rigidly enforced the law for several years. It kept the tramps out of the state for a few years, but then they relaxed enforcement and the tramps drifted back.

In Massachusetts, a tramp could get lodging for two nights in most towns, usually in the police station. Five out of six gave tramps food, even if it was just crackers and water. A tramp could easily spend 100 days in Massachusetts without going to jail.

Many stayed in the small towns along the southern border, guests of farmers who fed them, took away their matches and let them sleep in the barn.

Even jail wasn’t so bad in winter. Though tramps stayed away from the Fitchburg and Worcester jails, they liked the Reformatory in Concord. And when a judge discovered some tramps were glad to go to Bridgewater State Prison for three months, he stopped sending them there.

Travel Patterns

Many came from Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island, according to the undercover operative. He categorized three kinds of tramp: town bums, shovel bums and hobos. The town bums started off in Boston and took the Fitchburg Rail Road to the Connecticut River, stopping at good chewing towns along the way. They’d take in Springfield, maybe Pittsfield and North Adams, and then go back down over the Albany railroad to Boston.

Hopping a freight train, 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Shovel bums were men who worked for a few weeks or months, perhaps on sewers and roads. Some drove cattle in Brighton, then rode the cattle trains to the stockyards in Watertown. Many worked in the Washington mill in Lawrence. The shovel bums spent money as quick as they got it.

Some tramps were dangerous thieves, according to the undercover tramp. He called them hoboes. They avoided police stations and taught poor boys to beg and steal. Others, though, described hoboes as migrant workers – a man who lost his job and rode the rails to find work.

Work

Work would cure the tramp, according to reformers, town officers and charity administrators. But the tramp didn’t want to be cured.

The Springfield newspaper printed a rumor that Chicopee had set up a woodyard, where tramps would have to saw wood to earn their keep. The number of tramps visiting Chicopee fell from about 30 a night to about seven. They returned to Chicopee when they learned the woodyard was a hoax.

Grafton tried to make the tramps break stone, but they broke so many sledge hammers the town lost money. Leominster had them break stone in exchange for food, and it kept them out of town.

That wouldn’t have surprised Jacob Riis. He wrote,

I have once been “on the road” myself, and I know that there is an insidious poison in the tramp’s life that saps the energy of the man, until in a very little while he does not care for anything, so long as he can fill his belly and lie and bask in the sun.

This story was updated in 2024.

2 comments 2.9K views

Newer Posts

Older Posts