The state intervenes in children’s use of the city, criminalising children’s uses of the streets [...]. 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 [...], [t]hese child-savers sought to transform delinquent urban children into upright citizens. In doing so, reformers changed the shape of America’s cities. [...] Only a handful of dedicated playgrounds existed in urban America in the 1890s. [...] 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 [...].
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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. [...] Advocates [...] idealised almost all of white boys’ misbehaviour as recapitulation of the race’s past [...]. Although recapitulation theory had room for the sons of European immigrants, [...] children of colour remained outside the narrative of idealised misbehaviour. [...] [W]hite Americans [...] 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 [...].
Growing concerns over masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century limited reforms that could be seen as “molly-coddling”. To completely crush the misbehaving instinct, many middle-class Americans believed, would be just as dangerous [...]. Drawing on recapitulation theory, reformers believed the key to anti-delinquency among [...] European [...] 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 [...] children meant the development of the world’s first municipal playground system in Chicago [...]. By 1915, the city of Chicago ran sixty-six recreation centres [...]. President Teddy Roosevelt heralded it as “one of the most notable civic achievements of any American city.” 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. [...]
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But the state, too, struggled to control urban childhood. [..] [T]ruant officers [...] struggled with huge caseloads in the early twentieth century. [...] On the streets, escapees evaded police, probation and truant officers [...]. 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’ [...]. 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. [...] [T]he new juvenile institutions of the early twentieth-century differed so wildly in practice from their conception in theory. [...]
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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. [...] 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 [...].
Delinquency experts increasingly turned to psychiatry to explain and treat criminal behaviour; the psychiatrist supplanted the playground as the key to anti-delinquency.
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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 [...]. 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 [...] laid the foundation for the increasingly racialised and violent attempts to control poor urban children in the later twentieth century. [...]
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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. [...] When encounters with real children transformed institutions and regulations in unexpected ways, the result was increasingly coercive methods and policing.
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All text above by: Oenone Kubie. “Child’s Play: How Progressive Era Science Shaped America’s Playgrounds.” Oxford Urbanists. 15 September 2019. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]
