Broken Homes Part 7

I, of course, telephoned Clara of your starting off and yesterday she came to the office and we had a long talk. She is only sorry that you did not see the baby and says she will be only too glad to have special pictures taken of the children to send you. This was after I suggested that she let me take a snapshot of them to send you.

Be sure and write to your father and aunt often. And please remember my last instructions, which were to let me know fully about yourself. When you write, tell me all about the camp life; how they arrange the living; how long hours you have to work; what they give you for recreation, etc. Pick out for your friends men who can help you, not hinder you, in your good determinations, and hope there will be at least one man there in whom you can trust and to whom you can go for advice.

I will let you know about the children all the time. Clara says Nellie [the small daughter] was expecting to see you again. Don't worry, she will never forget you.

With all good wishes, Sincerely yours, DISTRICT SECRETARY.

_My dear Mr. Andrews:_

I received your long letter this morning and was very glad to hear all the details of camp life. It is too bad that your surroundings are not more comfortable, but I am sure you can stick it out for awhile. If you can raise yourself to be foreman, will you then have to live in the same uncomfortable quarters? Although I don't know the details, I should think it would be well if you did sign up for the six months. It is too bad that your throat is still hoa.r.s.e.

Thank you for letting me see your father's letter. I am enclosing it. I hope you are keeping in touch with him.

You asked especially about Clara and whether she asked for you. Of course she did, and she wants me to say if there is anything you want to say to her you can send the letter here and she will write you. She thinks that your ambition and determination to make good is fine, and she will try and help you in every way. She has not been in this week and I have been very busy, but I shall make it my business to see her early next week, and if she has not had the pictures of the children taken, I will get that attended to myself.

So far as I can see there is absolutely nothing for you to worry about from this end of the line. Clara is at last, I think, as fully self-convinced as I am that you are making a splendid effort, and she is perfectly willing to be fair in waiting until you have a chance to get turned around financially and in making first payment for the children.

Next week I am going to send you down a book to read. It is one I have enjoyed myself, and perhaps some evenings when you are not too tired you will get a chance to glance over it. It is small and you can put it in your pocket. Be very sure I have not forgotten the very satisfactory talks we had and the splendid way you have grimly started out to make good. If you can help the Government do their work, even down there, give it a good try out. Never mind the different nationalities you have to mix with. You have already knocked around the world so much that you can just consider this another opportunity of getting to know a great variety of people.

You might even learn to talk Italian and Greek! There is no experience in life we have to go through but can be a source of great education to us. You are sure to win out and get the respect of everybody, your fellow-workmen as well as your superior officers, if you continuously day in and day out simply refuse to get discouraged and keep up your work and do as you are told. Stick by.

With all good wishes, Sincerely yours, DISTRICT SECRETARY.

But when all is said and done, there are no unbreakable rules about treatment. A form of treatment is sometimes to do nothing at all.

Charles Morgan, a middle-aged machinist with a wife, a comfortable home, and seven children (the two eldest grown), picked up his tools and disappeared, after a quarrel over his wife's extravagance. He had been earning $50 a week in a shop where he had worked for eighteen years and he would not endure having his wages garnisheed for debt.

An experienced case worker to whom furious Mrs. Morgan made her complaint, decided, after studying Mr. Morgan's record, that he ought not to be prosecuted, and refused to be party to it. As he was a man of domestic habits, search was made in a nearby city where he had relatives. He was easily traced. Mr. Morgan was both proud and reticent, so the case worker made no attempt to approach him, but told the woman she must devise some way to get him back, preferably to write him and say she was sorry. This she refused to do and on her own responsibility adopted the clumsy device of wiring him that a favorite child was sick. This brought him "on the run," and, being back, he stayed. _The case worker has never seen Mr. M._, nor has his wife been encouraged to come any more to the office, although reports have been received from time to time through the son and daughter that things at home continue to go well.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] See p. 179 regarding equity powers of the courts.

[34] Ma.s.sachusetts social workers succeeded in 1917 in securing the pa.s.sage of a law which permits the ordinary non-support law to be invoked in case of the man's failure to pay the amount ordered after a legal separation.

[35] See p. 13 sq.

[36] Colcord, J.C.: Article on "Desertion and Non-support." _Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science_, May, 1918, p. 95.

[37] Philadelphia Munic.i.p.al Court, Report for 1916, p. 64.

[38] See p. 133.

[39] Miss Richmond, writing in 1895, says: "We would rather have a hundred visitors, patient, intelligent and resourceful, to deal with the married vagabonds of our city, than the best law ever framed, if, in order to get such a law, we must lose the visitors."

VIII

THE HOME-STAYING NON-SUPPORTER

Many of the case workers consulted in gathering material for this book urged that a discussion of the treatment of the non-supporter who had not deserted be included in its pages. In so far as non-support is a pre-desertion symptom and the non-supporter a potential deserter, much that has been said applies also to him. But are the two groups co-terminous, or do they only partially overlap?

The law makes little difference in its treatment of the two, the fact of failure to support being the chief ground of its interest.[40] Indeed, in Ma.s.sachusetts, the law under which deserters are extradited for abandonment is habitually spoken of as the "non-support law."

No study of which the results are available has been made to learn what difference, if any, exists between the non-supporter who leaves home and the one who does not. Miss Breed, in making the point that the true a.n.a.logy of the deserted family is with the non-supported family and not with the widow and her children, says: "The deserting husband is at home the non-supporting husband."[41]

A case reader of experience writes: "When I look back over the many records I have read and studied, it seems to me that it is very difficult to draw a line between desertion and non-support cases, either in the kind of problem they present, or in the treatment of them. Do we know enough about non-supporters who later become deserters; and isn't it possible that every non-support case, certainly every beginning non-support case, is a potential desertion case?"

There is no doubt that the two groups grade imperceptibly into each other; but of the twenty or more case workers who were consulted in the preparation of this material, nearly all felt that the out-and-out deserter, if he can be got hold of, is more promising material to work with than the man who sits about the home and lets others maintain it.

They all recognize a common middle ground where the two groups merge into each other; but they see decided differences in the two "wings" so to speak, outside of this common ground.

Seen through their eyes, the non-supporter has less courage, initiative and aggressiveness than the deserter. "He is less deliberately cruel--for at least he 'sticks around.'" He has not the roving disposition, but is apt to be intemperate and industrially inefficient as compared with the deserter. Often the married vagabond, as he has been called, is a "home-loving man who simply s.h.i.+rks responsibility and dislikes effort." He may "sometimes feel parental responsibility even though he does not support," and he is likely to have less physical and mental stamina than the deserter. That phrase in which the psychiatrists take refuge, "const.i.tutional inferiority," is more likely to describe the stay-at-home than the wanderer. However, one social worker (non-medical) says "a mental twist more often enters into the problem of the deserter than into that of the non-supporter, from my experience."

The head of a large probation department writes: "Many of the deserters with whom we have dealt were non-supporters before coming to our attention. Among the men convicted of abandonment, however, is a group which is above the average in intelligence--skilled workers or men in professional occupations."

If this concurrence of observation is sound the reason for the social worker's preference for the deserter as material with which to work is not far to seek. With the deserter as described, the problem is chiefly to alter his point of view; with the non-supporter it is, in addition, to stiffen his will and to increase his capacity--a far more complicated task.

"The deserter is likely to have less justification than the non-supporter," says an observer of long experience. Studies which have been made of the relative capacity of the wives of deserters and of non-supporters seem to agree that the latter have the weaker characters and are less competent and successful workers. A comment made upon one such study points out the impossibility of sound conclusions, if both chronic and incipient cases are included in the two groups. The progressive demoralization in the family of the "intermittent husband"

makes such a study of little value unless this distinction is taken into account.

The influence of ill-kept homes in the manufacture of non-supporting husbands has been widely recognized.

A drunkard's daughter, who had never known a decent home, married a young man who soon began to drink too. Luckily, the young couple were brought in touch with a volunteer visitor who, on finding that the wife possessed only two kitchen utensils, a teakettle and a "frypan," and actually did not know the names of any others, undertook to give her lessons in home management. She proved teachable, and her husband stopped drinking and braced up. Some years later the visitor was able to report a well established home, although the family refused to move out of the poor neighborhood in which they lived because the husband had been elected councilman for that district.

If the inefficient wife contributes her share to this form of family breakdown so also does the overefficient one. Many a non-supporter got his first impulse in that direction when his wife became a wage-earner in some domestic crisis. "There's only one rule for women who want to have decent homes for their children and themselves," advised a wise neighbor. "If your husband comes home crying, and says he can't find any work, sit down on the other side of the fire and cry until he _does_."[42]

One case worker comments on the relation that often exists between an inefficient husband and an unusually competent wife, made up of a motherly toleration on her side and a tacit acceptance on his that he is not expected to be the provider. "Sort of a landlady's husband" was the apt description of one such man, the speaker having in mind the "silent partner" who does odd jobs around his wife's furnished-room house. The lovable old rascal portrayed by Frank Bacon in his play "Lightnin'" is typical of this kind of husband.

There is no ground for outside interference in such an arrangement as long as both are satisfied and the family as a unit is self-supporting.

It is often a serious problem to the case worker, however, to know how to treat such a family if the breadwinner-wife becomes incapacitated.

Such was the case when Mrs. Laflin fell ill with tuberculosis. Her relatives described her husband as "that little nonent.i.ty of a man." He had no bad habits and was pathetically eager to work, but though only a little over fifty he was prematurely aged and incapable. The solution had finally to be inst.i.tutional care for the entire family, Mrs. Laflin in a hospital for incurables, Mr. Laflin in a home for the aged, and their two young daughters, through the interest of a former employer, in a good convent school. "Uncomplicated" non-support, as in the case of Mr. Laflin, is, however, rare in the experience of the social worker.

Out of a group of 51 non-supporters selected at random from the records of the Buffalo Charity Organization Society in 1917, 46 showed some serious moral fault other than non-support. Alcoholism is probably the commonest of these complications; and, as has been pointed out in the previous chapter, is probably a primary cause as well. It will be a matter of great interest to social workers whether the "non-support rate" is reduced after July 1, 1919. Grounds for hope that it may be are found in the fact that some remarkable results have been obtained by moving alcoholic non-supporters and their families from "wet" into "dry"

territory.

Another vice that has a direct relation to non-support (much more direct than to desertion) is gambling. The gambler carries no signs of his vice upon his person as does the inebriate, and it is therefore hard to detect. It undoubtedly does not appear in social case records as frequently as it should. Case workers should have it in mind as a possible explanation, whenever there is a marked discrepancy between what a non-supporter earns and what he contributes to the home.

With the non-supporters rather than with the deserters should be put the group of men whose wives tire of supporting them and either put them out or leave them. These men are often not only morally, but mentally and physically, so handicapped that there is nothing to be gained by constantly pursuing and arresting them, although some wives extract the sweets of revenge from doing just this. Few courts of domestic relations are without some wives as regular patrons who pursue their husbands not for gain but for sport. For the most part, however, the wives of such men are philosophical. "I only wash for meself now," said one of them.

These men, and the unreclaimed deserters, doubtless make up a large part of the floating population of homeless men in our large cities. How large a part it is impossible to say, for they are likely to give a.s.sumed names and deny the possession of families. Mrs. Solenberger[43]

has noted, however, that if they are asked, not "Are you married?" but a less direct question such as "Where is your wife now?" a story of unfortunate married life will often be elicited. Until we have some better method of inter-city registration of homeless men, many of these who otherwise might be identified and in suitable cases brought back, will continue to slip through our fingers.

With non-support in an incipient stage,[44] it is sometimes possible to deal so suddenly and effectively that the man is shocked into a better realization of his responsibilities.