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WorkJane Addams

The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets

A defence of the boys and girls brought before Chicago's Juvenile Court: they wanted adventure, and the city sold it to them as vice.

by Jane Addams104 passages held

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First published
(aged 49)
Original language
English

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Overview

Fifteen thousand people under the age of twenty were arrested and brought into court in Chicago in a single year, and Jane Addams, writing in 1909, had read what they were charged with. From the records of the city's Juvenile Court she copies a dozen charges against boys: building fires beside the railway tracks, flagging down trains, turning a switch to run a streetcar off its rails, setting fire to a barn to see the fire engines come. The court had opened in 1899, the first juvenile court in the United States; the reformers around Hull-House had helped to bring it about and had provided its first probation officers. Addams argues that these offences do not show bad character. The desire for adventure, play and romance is strongest in the young, and the Greek city and the medieval city provided for it with games, pageants and festivals. The industrial city wants young people for their labour, organises their work and leaves their play to anyone who can make money from it. What they are sold is the dance hall where five cents buys five minutes on the floor, the five-cent theatre with its stories of revenge, the saloon, and in her own neighbourhood cocaine, which a one-armed man sold to boys on the street. The middle-aged, she writes, answer all this with restrictions. Her reply is that only recreation can drive out vice, and that the city itself owes it: parks and playgrounds, public music and theatre, and schools that show children the meaning of the factory work most of them will do. She draws her cases from twenty years at Hull-House. At midnight in a public dance hall a young man new to Chicago asks her to introduce him to a girl, because he knows no other place to meet one. Macmillan published the book late in 1909. The philosopher William James read it that December and wrote to her that it was hard not to cry at some pages; he expected it to have great influence, and he signed the letter as her pupil in sociology. Addams called it her favourite among her own books.

Key concepts

What does Addams mean by the spirit of youth?

The surge of energy, play and longing for adventure, romance and justice that comes with being young. Addams treats it as a public good and not a nuisance: the young keep reaffirming the charm of existence for everyone else. She pictures it as a wistful, over-confident creature walking the city streets and calling out that with it all things are possible, while the city neither sees nor understands it.

What is commercialised pleasure in The Spirit of Youth?

Amusement sold for profit to the young because nobody else provides any. Addams's point is that the modern city organises young people's work and leaves their play to business. So the dance hall, the saloon and the cheap theatre do the job that festivals and games did in older cities, and they sell excitement in order to empty pockets. She calls it vice disguised as pleasure.

What is the 'quest for adventure'?

Her name for the impulse behind most offences that bring boys into court. Addams reads the charges, such as flagging trains or sleeping in barns, as attempts at danger and daring by boys who have no lawful outlet for either. The loot hardly matters to them. The lesson she draws is that the impulse cannot be suppressed and has to be given something worthy to do, as games and sport once did.

What is the 'house of dreams'?

The theatre, as young city dwellers experience it. Addams borrows the phrase to say that for boys and girls from crowded streets and factories the cheap show is more real than their own lives, and often the only art they meet. Because their working moral code is formed by what they see there, she holds that a city cannot be indifferent to what is put on its stages.

What does Addams mean by 'the informing mind'?

A worker's understanding of what the work is for. Addams uses the phrase for an education that tells a child in a factory where the material comes from, how the product is made and how its design belongs to the history of art. Her example is a girl in a sewing factory. With that knowledge, she argues, the same task is lifted from drudgery into conscious activity.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Adventure the city sells back as vice

What is a boy after when he sets a barn alight to see the fire engines come? Addams reads the court's charge sheets as a record of the hunger for adventure, which the city has left to anyone who can sell it something.

From the Juvenile Court records she copies the charges: fires built beside the railway, trains flagged down, a streetcar switched off its track. The loot, she argues, was never the point. A Greek city built its stadium as it built its market and a medieval one had tourneys and pageants, while the industrial city organises young people's work and hands their play to commerce. So they get the dance hall at five cents for five minutes, the saloon, and cocaine from a one-armed dealer. The middle-aged answer with restrictions. Her counter is that recreation is stronger than vice, and that the city itself owes the young parks, games and music.

  • youth
  • adventure
  • juvenile justice
  • public recreation
  • play
  • urban life
  • drug addiction
  • social responsibility
  • sexuality
  • love

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The five-cent theatre as a house of dreams

Why will boys steal to get into a cheap theatre? Addams takes the craving seriously, as a hunger for a world larger than the street, and blames the city for feeding it tales of revenge.

'A play unlike life' is what young people ask of the theatre, and for many it is the only art they will meet. Chicago's five-cent houses showed them a boy of seven who hunts down his father's killers and thanks God at the grave, or two brothers who rob and kill a Chinese laundryman and are blessed for it at home. Such pictures, she warns, become the working moral code of thousands. Closing the theatres is not her answer. A starved child sent out to find food takes what excites, and the cure is better fare: public music and drama, and the ball game that fuses a crowd of strangers.

  • theater
  • imagination
  • art
  • popular culture
  • moral education
  • creativity

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Factory work that gives youth nothing to love

How long can a fourteen-year-old stand a day that is one small motion at a machine? Addams argues that the revolt which follows is self-preservation, and that only a schooling which explains the work can make it bearable.

In whole neighbourhoods every child enters a factory at fourteen. The work demands fussy movements and offers no reason for them, and Addams reads the constant quitting as a sound instinct. A Swedish boy threw up nine jobs before he found one climbing telephone poles and became his family's steady support. A Russian girl who pasted labels on bottles stole her father's savings for a spree and was sent to reform school. On the Puritan farm, at least, the young could express themselves in their work. Her remedy is an education that shows a child the material, the process and the finished product, which the book calls the informing mind.

  • labor
  • industrial labor
  • industrialization
  • working conditions
  • alienation
  • education
  • craft

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Within this work

passages held
104
distinct concepts
198
by passages held, corpus-wide
#494

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “urban life” and “youth”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
urban lifeyouth13
adventureyouth10
educationyouth10
laboryouth9
industrializationlabor8
educationlabor7
public recreationyouth7
industrializationyouth6
public recreationurban life5
educationindustrialization4
imaginationyouth4
adventureurban life3
educationimagination3
imaginationurban life3
adventureimagination2
educationurban life2
industrializationpublic recreation2
adventureeducation1
adventurepublic recreation1
imaginationpublic recreation1
industrializationurban life1
laborpublic recreation1
laborurban life1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1902 Democracy and Social Ethics

    Her first book, published eight years before the memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House. Her later books on youth, prostitution and peace stand on its claim that people must be asked about their own good.

     EN
  2. 1907 Newer Ideals of Peace

    Finished seven years before the war of 1914, this is the hopeful one among her books on peace. Peace and Bread in Time of War returns to its question after that war.

     EN
  3. 1909 The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets you are here EN
  4. 1912 A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil

    Five magazine articles from McClure's, built on the case files of Chicago's Juvenile Protective Association. The book came out two years after her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House.

     EN
  5. 1916 The Long Road of Woman's Memory

    The counterpart to The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets: that book listened to the young of the neighbourhood, this one to its old women. Its fifth chapter comes from her journey through wartime Europe in 1915.

     EN
  6. 1922 Peace and Bread in Time of War

    Part memoir and part argument, covering 1914 to 1921. It returns to the question of Newer Ideals of Peace fifteen years on, after the war that book had not expected.

     EN
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