In this article, Oenone Kubie investigates how childrens’ play was perceived in North American cities during the ‘Progressive Era’. Kubie’s article investigates changing approaches to the treatment of ‘play’ in the city and the rise of the ‘playground’ as city infrastructure. Decisions and approaches from this era continue to shape cities, and the place for children, to the present day. All photos sourced from the United States Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division available at: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/.

Age shapes the way we interact with our cities. Children’s access to public spaces is limited and largely controlled by adults. The state intervenes in children’s use of the city, criminalising children’s uses of the streets and trying to direct children into supervised, child-centred spaces. Much of this age-segregation emerged in the so-called Progressive Era (1890-1918) in northern cities of the United States, particularly Chicago. Informed by turn-of-the-century science, which saw children as malleable and easily corrupted by the urban environment, reformers set about to change the spaces of childhood. Using new regulations such as child labour laws and new institutions, most notably playgrounds, these child-savers sought to transform delinquent urban children into upright citizens. In doing so, reformers changed the shape of America’s cities.

In the 1890s, children dominated the streets of the city. While adult work and leisure mainly took place indoors, children worked, played, and got into trouble in the city’s outdoor spaces. Few institutions or regulations existed in the 1890s to control children’s use of the streets. Only a handful of dedicated playgrounds existed in urban America in the 1890s. Street labour, like play, was also unrestricted and even laws that prohibited adult street labour such as anti-peddling laws made exceptions for children. Although schooling was ostensibly compulsory, terms were short, days often half-shifts, and truancy laws entirely ineffective. Pushed onto the streets by cramped indoor environments and pulled out by excitement, children filled outdoor urban spaces.

All these children on the streets concerned middle-class American adults. Contrasting images of working-class, immigrant youth left unsupervised on the streets with children of their own class, who led increasingly sheltered lives, middle-class urbanites feared for the future of the country. The burgeoning reform class, led by Chicagoans such as Jane Addams, feared so-called “swarms” of children on the streets would fall into vice and the “murky fire of crime.”[1] Boys would supposedly become criminals, pimps, and vagrants, while girls would fall into lives of prostitution; all would grow up unfit for the responsibility of republican citizenship. Worse still, even those sympathetic to the immigrant communities, like Jane Addams, felt the immigrant family could not cope with the pressures of modern urban life resulting in the breakdown of social order in the cities.

To tackle these urban problems, reformers turned to the new science of child-development for solutions.

The city environment corrupted children so, reformers believed, if they could change the environment of childhood, they could save the urban child. Progressive-Era science supported this view.

A new theory of child-development known as recapitulation theory had recently emerged. Proponents of this theory, such as G. Stanley Hall, argued that children passed through (or recapitulated) all the stages of the evolution of the race before they achieved adulthood.[2] This recapitulation was physical, with scholars often pointing to the “gill-slits” visible in human embryos, but also mental and moral. In the recapitulation theory, white boys must relive the so-called “primitive” stages of the race before they could enter the more civilised state of white manhood. According to Hall and his colleagues’ understanding of delinquent behaviour, childish impulses, which were perfectly safe in the countryside, led boys in the city down dangerous paths to crime and dependency. Advocates of this new evolutionary idea of child development idealised almost all of white boys’ misbehaviour as recapitulation of the race’s past and described even serious violent behaviour such as stoning or knifing as normal childish impulses in unsupervised environments.[3]

Although recapitulation theory had room for the sons of European immigrants, girls and children of colour remained outside the narrative of idealised misbehaviour. As nineteenth century American culture linked femininity to dependence and submission, girls who misbehaved seemed unnatural and abnormal, especially when that misbehaviour took place in the city. Due to the supposed inability of boys and girls of colour to advance through the stages of recapitulation, white Americans basing reform on the recapitulation theory sought to repress the misbehaviour or so-called childhood savagery of children of colour rather than encourage it. Thus, just as white children were encouraged to embrace their inner savage and hold mock powwows and “to play Indian”, Progressive reformers confined Native American children to “civilizing” boarding schools, forbidding the use of native languages and names, and forcibly removing children from their families.[4]

In contrast to the treatment of children of colour, when it came to white boys, Progressive-Era science pathologised the city and not the child, laying the framework for urban reform. Reformers set about trying to move so-called swarms of white immigrant children off the streets and into supervised, child-centred spaces where delinquency would once again become mischief. Starting in the 1890s, in just twenty years child-savers created an array of institutions and regulations that controlled and undermined children’s use of street space. Firstly, reformers created juvenile courts and dramatically expanded definition of delinquency to included much of children’s street activities including loitering, absenting oneself from home without the knowledge of a parent or guardian, being out late at night, and trespassing on private land. New delinquency and dependency laws, alongside city ordinances and host of other regulations also outlawed children’s work on the streets and reformers created a system of probation officers and truancy officers to enforce new laws. These changes limited lawful ways children could use the city streets and essentially criminalised much of children’s use of the city even as reformers insisted white immigrant children were not inherently criminal.

Although reformers introduced new laws and regulations to limit children’s street-use, reformers did not seek to completely tame the troublesome child. Growing concerns over masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century limited reforms that could be seen as “molly-coddling”.[5] To completely crush the misbehaving instinct, many middle-class Americans believed, would be just as dangerous as allowing the instinct to carry on unsupervised.[6] Drawing on recapitulation theory, reformers believed the key to anti-delinquency among working-class, European immigrant children was providing these children with supervised, orderly places where the misbehaving instinct could safely play out. 

Central to reformers’ attempts to save but not tame working-class white children meant the development of the world’s first municipal playground system in Chicago and a plethora organised recreation clubs. Preventative not reactionary, manly not molly-coddling, playgrounds and organised recreation soon became the centrepiece of the anti-delinquency movement. By 1915, the city of Chicago ran sixty-six recreation centres in addition to the numerous schoolyards and private playgrounds in the city. President Teddy Roosevelt heralded it as “one of the most notable civic achievements of any American city.”[7] From Chicago, the idea spread around the country. By 1921, almost 200 cities employed a total of over eleven thousand men and women as year-round playground workers.[8]

But celebrations of the successes of the playground movement could not last long. If creating new institutions had been difficult, running them proved harder. In creating child-saving institutions, Progressive Era reformers had conceptualised white immigrant children as passive, completely molded by the corrupting environment of the city streets. However, children were never the passive objects of reform. Children’s ability to disrupt the official plans had repercussions for the everyday practice and shape of child-saving institutions.

Children disrupted new play spaces, using them in unintended and often undesirable ways. Playground organisers lamented that children brought their street activities into play spaces: loitering, gambling, planning thefts, fighting, and even having sex in parks and playgrounds. In confronting with disorderly and disruptive boys and girls, adults had few recourses to which to turn. When adults discovered children had, and often put to use, the power to damage and disrupt institutional spaces, adults frequently resorted to throwing out the very children they had deemed most in need of wholesome recreation. Moreover, in excluding children, adults usually didn’t succeed in regaining control. Barring certain children could lead to escalating conflict. Faced with children vandalising property, destroying club rooms, and having sex in park bushes, exasperated reformers often turned to the state for help.

But the state, too, struggled to control urban childhood. Children probably found evasion of probation and truant officers laughably easy. Most delinquent children interviewed about their experience of being released on probation by the Juvenile Court of Chicago reported it had no effect on them,[9] some could not even remember what it meant. In one case a probation officer visited the home of a delinquent boy twelve times, and never once saw him. The situation was similar for truant officers, who struggled with huge caseloads in the early twentieth century.

Even those children most directly involved with the justice system, those sentenced to the reformatory institutions, proved able to evade adult control. On the streets, escapees evaded police, probation and truant officers easily, especially when parents refused to co-operate with the authorities. Escape was a huge problem for reform institutions. A study of reform schools in and near Chicago in the early twentieth century found two-fifths of detainees left in what was euphemistically called ‘informal departure’; another study found the proportion almost one half. Escape caused such an issue for reformatories that it was considered among the most serious offences and, as such, carried the heaviest punishments including beatings, being hung by the wrists, being shackled, wearing heavy iron studded shoes, being placed in a tub of ice water, and being caged. Even as Progressive ideals ostensibly moved prisons and other reform institutions further from the punishment of the body to the treatment of the individual’s soul, in practice, reformatory officials often resorted to physical punishments for the treatment of runaways. It was directly a result of the confrontation with real children that the new juvenile institutions of the early twentieth-century differed so wildly in practice from their conception in theory.

Despite the range of new institutions and regulations and the increasingly coercive methods of the state to control children in the early twentieth century, children’s street cultures continued.

By the 1930s, however, the concept of the dangerous but ultimately salvageable swarm which had shaped Progressive Era responses to the problems of children and the city was gradually replaced by the far more pessimistic idea of individual deviant personalities.

Faith in the ability to transform children through transforming the city collapsed. Frederic Thrasher, a sociologist who had been one of the most prominent advocates for organised recreation as the cure for delinquency had completed a long-term study of a boys’ club in New York in the early 30’s. A tone of despair seeped through his reports. “If anything definite may be concluded,” Thrasher wrote, “it is that delinquency rates prior to boys club membership periods seem to be less than during membership; while the rates for periods subsequent to boys club membership are, on the whole, increased, rather than decreased.” Juvenile Courts also faced increasing pessimism. In 1936, leading child-saver Grace Abbott asked rhetorically whether the Juvenile Court of Chicago had proved a success or a failure and concluded pessimistically that “the findings of all the recent studies made [about the court] have been very discouraging to those who hoped the juvenile court would, if not prevent, at least greatly reduce, delinquency.” Delinquency experts increasingly turned to psychiatry to explain and treat criminal behaviour; the psychiatrist supplanted the playground as the key to anti-delinquency.

As reformers advocated individualised treatment of delinquent personalities, on the streets, changing priorities of policing increasingly and aggressively targeted children of colour. In addition, suburbanisation was changing the demographics of the inner city. Increasingly, white families were choosing to move out to the suburbs, a choice unavailable to most African-Americans of all classes due to racial discrimination in housing and mortgage lending.[10] European immigration also declined, and old white immigrant communities were gradually seeing more African-American migrants and Mexican-American immigrants move in. As inner-city youth became more and more synonymous with minority youth, the urban child seemed increasingly outside the realm of “saving” and middle-class white Americans responded to black youth’s corner culture with intense policing and urban flight, not playgrounds and child-saving. The pessimistic view of adults’ ability to save children on the streets laid the foundation for the increasingly racialised and violent attempts to control poor urban children in the later twentieth century.

Progressive Era child-saving condemned other ways of life as ignorant and inadequate, but believed that children of European immigrants could be full and equal American citizens. Even at its most progressive, child-saving could never solve the multiple problems of urban childhood in the long Progressive Era. While child savers acknowledged that poverty and inequality in urban America lay behind juvenile delinquency, their proposed solutions of playgrounds and juvenile courts did little to address these larger structural problems.

The legacy of the Progressive Era lives on in the broad range of institutions and regulations reformers created to try to change the environment of urban childhood and stop delinquency. With playgrounds, recreation clubs, anti-child labour laws, compulsory schooling, and juvenile justice, the legacy of the child-saving movement still affects children and urban life both in America and around the world to this day.  

Most importantly, Progressive reformers criminalised and delegitimised much of children’s traditional use of the streets, ensuring that age became a crucial component of urban discipline.

However, the top-down approaches of middle-class child-savers failed to address juvenile delinquency or the problems posed by children’s street use. Rooted in a fundamentally flawed child-development science, Progressive Era child-saving, particularly anti-delinquency, had been rife with contradictions. The Progressives’ attempts to solve delinquency had criminalised much of working-class, immigrant children’s behaviour. On the other hand, Progressives had refused to accept that juvenile delinquents, especially white boys, were inherently bad, irredeemable. Laying the blame at the door of modern, industrial, urban society, child-savers adopted a pragmatic, optimistic approach to delinquency that was at once admirable, naïve, and founded on racism.

When encounters with real children transformed institutions and regulations in unexpected ways, the result was increasingly coercive methods and policing. While child savers acknowledged that poverty and inequality in urban America lay behind juvenile delinquency, their proposed solutions of playgrounds and juvenile courts did little to address these larger structural problems. Without the participation of children and the broader community in the creation of urban spaces, top-down approaches to addressing the problems of urban childhood failed and will continue to fail.

Oenone Kubie is a research and teaching fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford where she completed her doctoral research in 2018. Her research focusses on the history of urban childhood in the Progressive Era United States. She is particularly interested in ideas of work and play and held the Visiting Research Fellowship 2019 at the Texas Tech Humanities Center during the Center's year dedicated to the study of play.

[1] Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (New York, 1909). Clopper, E. N., Child Labor in City Streets, (New York, 1913); See also Lovejoy, Owen, ‘Child Labor and The Night Messenger Service’, The Survey, 24 (1910); Chicago Vice Commission, The Social Evil in Chicago: A Study of Existing Conditions (Chicago, 1911).

[2] Hall, G. Stanley, Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology,

Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, vol. i, ii, (New York, 1904).

[3] George E. Johnson, ‘Why Teach a Child to Play?’ (1909), 104 CHy 34, Russell Sage Foundation Microfiche, Rockefeller Archive Center; Edgar J., ‘ Some Criminal Tendencies of Boyhood: A Study in Adolescence,’ Pedagogical Seminary 8 (March 1901), 65-91.

[4] Armitage, Kevin C., "The Child Is Born a Naturalist": Nature Study, Woodcraft Indians, and the

Theory of Recapitulation’, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 6:1 (Jan., 2007), 43-70; Adams,

David Wallace, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-

1928 (Lawrence, 1995).

[5] For example see Adams, Myron E., ‘Children in American Street Trades’, Child Labor: The Addresses at the First Annual Meeting of the National Child Labor Committee, Held in New York City, Feb 14-16, 1905 (New York, 1905), pp. 23-44

[6] For example Woods Hutchinson, ‘Can the Child Survive Civilization?’, Proceedings of the Second Annual Playground Congress (1908), 104 Chy 11, , Russell Sage Foundation Microfiche, Rockefeller Archive Center. 

[7] Graham Taylor, ‘Recreation Developments in Chicago’, Annals of the American Academy of

Political and Social Science 35:2 (1910), 88-105.

[8] ‘The Playground’ (Mar., 1922), s.3, subseries 4, b.17, fol.182, Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center.

[9] See the Life Histories Collection, Institute of Juvenile Research, Chicago History Museum, particularly the life histories of Joe N., b.50, fol. 55 (9-4), and Laddie P., b.51, fol.58. See also Earl D. Myers, “Juvenile Delinquents” Part 1, Illinois Association for Criminal Justice c.1929, Ernest Burgess Papers, Special Collections and Research Center, University of Chicago Library, b.10, fol.1.

[10] For an introduction to this topic see Rothstein, Richard, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated American (New York, 2017).