The First Lady of Radio by Stephen Drury Smith Page B

and brought up on the Lower East Side in New York. Mrs. Harris knows firsthand just what living in a tenement means. She’s brought up her family there. And in recent years she has added to her family duties the job of being an active member of the League of Mothers Clubs. Now she is president of that organization of tenement mothers, all of whom are determined to achieve better homes for their families. When I was living more in New York and doing social-service work there, I knew well indeed the districts which Mrs. Harris knows. Many is the time I have visited people there. And this evening we are going to tell you something about living in slums. We hope you will see why we are working so hard to make life in them better. I remember, Mrs. Harris, it was just about a year ago that you came to the White House with a petition for the president.
    IH: Yes, Mrs. Roosevelt. A committee of three members from the League of Mothers Clubs went to Washington to bring a very unique document to the president. It was a book of pictures that our mothers had taken in New York for the president to look at. It showed you the conditions of how the people live, the hallways, the public toilets, the sinks, and some of the people. You could see in the women’s faces what they are enduring in those houses.
    ER: The president spoke of that document. It was an extremely forceful way of presenting your case.
    I shall never forget my first visit, as a young girl, to a tenement. I was going to see a woman who had worked for my mother. She had married, had five or six children, and was very ill. I climbed to the third floor. The hallways were dark, the stairs rickety, and the building so badly built that every sound from all the apartments could be heard clearly throughout the house. There was a drunken brawl in one apartment, I remember, and I was terrified. Finally, I got to the right door and at my knock a child opened a kitchen door. Inside, in a tiny hot room off the kitchen, was that mother lying in her bed almost wasted away to skin and bones. She told me that her sixteen-year-old boy had some work through the church and that was all the income the entire family of seven had. And I know of many other similar cases. In your life and work, Mrs. Harris, what have you found family life in a tenement means?
    IH: It means misery to the entire family. You know, when the children go to school they are taught everything that’s fine in life. And once a child starts to realize the good from the bad, and then has to go home to the bad, that child is ashamed of her own home and her surroundings.
    ER: I know that, for I have heard the same thing from many others. But in the evenings, for instance, what do you do?
    IH: There isn’t anything at all to do. In the wintertime we all live in one room. There’s no central heating and you have to heat up the house by making a coal stove. There isn’t any privacy at all. If you want to takea bath in privacy, either you don’t take it or you put the children out in the hall. If you are sick, you cannot be by yourself or keep warm and comfortable. The only toilets are the public ones in the halls and you catch more cold in going to one of them. My first child died because of those conditions. It got pneumonia and I had to take it outside and it caught cold on top of it. That’s true.
    ER: You have other children though, don’t you, Mrs. Harris?
    IH: Yes, two. My boy is twenty-one going on twenty-two. And my girl is nineteen.
    ER: What do the young people do in these homes?
    IH: They’re only in it as little as they have to be, that’s all. They try to go away where they can get a little comfort, something nice. Most of the boys go to the poolrooms. And some of the girls go places where they shouldn’t go.
    ER: I remember one of the most pathetic stories I ever heard was told by a man who came down to Washington. He had lived in an inside tenement, and one day, when he was