A Study of Cases
July 22, 1899
Summary
A Baptist missionary school declares minorities a threat to the community, especially due to their alcohol consumption.
Transcription
These field notes were made by workers in the Baptist missionary training school in a part of Chicago where Poles, Russians, Bohemians and Syrians form a large part of the population. Such large aggregations of foreigners are found in our most populous American cities, and are constantly fed by fresh arrivals from Europe. Educating these centers is like making butter with a stream of fresh cream flowing into the churn, or like sweeping a floor over which a stream of mud is crawling.
I here group the cases and make general statements borne out of facts.
1. Public school teachers find the afternoon sessions marked by an increase of stupidity and tardiness. Investigation proves this is largely due to beer drinking at dinner (i:e., the noon meal) or going to the saloon to get beer for parents.
2. The love of beer is encouraged in children that they may be more willing to go for it.
3. Wherever beer is commonly drunk, tobacco and the cigarette abound, and it is difficult to discriminate in the results of these, and impossible to suppress one and allow the others.
4. Drunkenness among the boys under 16 years of age is so common as to startle the most phlegmatic citizen.
5. Many, indeed most of the cases of dwarfed and stunted growth which we see among the very poor are directly traceable to doses of liquor given in infancy or to “mistakes” made by a drunken physician. One pitiable case comes to mind—that of a young man 21 years old, but as helpless as a babe of three months. Life was not taken, but who will acquit that drunken doctor of the charge of manslaughter? This division of responsibility is a delicate question, and confronts us everywhere. Take this case: a young man came home intoxicated; his mother spoke reproachfully, a quick blow followed. The next day the son “came to himself.” Who killed the mother whose body was robed for the grave? Was it the son who had given himself to the devil yesterday? Were not those who had aided him in this transaction partners in that murder?
6. The Saturday industrial schools have each week, instances of children whose cloaks, hoods, shoes or mittens have gone to the pawnshop, not for break, not for coal or rent, but for liquor. In many, many abodes (I cannot say homes) more is spent each week for beer than for bread, more each month than for clothing.
7. The women in these neighborhoods, as a rule, drink beer as an accepted rule of life. It should be remembered most of them come from countries where beer and wine aren’t classified as intoxicants, and their eyes have never been opened in this country to the relation of beer drinking and drunkenness. Some cases were found where women, despairing in their hopeless poverty, took to heavy drinking as a sort of blameless suicide, while the husband went on with his accustomed daily dram. One case is now a matter of deep anxiety and prayer. A husband whose drunkenness had dragged his family through poverty, homelessness and shame, reformed, but the wife who had struggled and prayed for years to woo him back to sobriety—in an hour of aberration, I am sure—got drunk, and is to-day a confirmed inebriate.
I here group the cases and make general statements borne out of facts.
1. Public school teachers find the afternoon sessions marked by an increase of stupidity and tardiness. Investigation proves this is largely due to beer drinking at dinner (i:e., the noon meal) or going to the saloon to get beer for parents.
2. The love of beer is encouraged in children that they may be more willing to go for it.
3. Wherever beer is commonly drunk, tobacco and the cigarette abound, and it is difficult to discriminate in the results of these, and impossible to suppress one and allow the others.
4. Drunkenness among the boys under 16 years of age is so common as to startle the most phlegmatic citizen.
5. Many, indeed most of the cases of dwarfed and stunted growth which we see among the very poor are directly traceable to doses of liquor given in infancy or to “mistakes” made by a drunken physician. One pitiable case comes to mind—that of a young man 21 years old, but as helpless as a babe of three months. Life was not taken, but who will acquit that drunken doctor of the charge of manslaughter? This division of responsibility is a delicate question, and confronts us everywhere. Take this case: a young man came home intoxicated; his mother spoke reproachfully, a quick blow followed. The next day the son “came to himself.” Who killed the mother whose body was robed for the grave? Was it the son who had given himself to the devil yesterday? Were not those who had aided him in this transaction partners in that murder?
6. The Saturday industrial schools have each week, instances of children whose cloaks, hoods, shoes or mittens have gone to the pawnshop, not for break, not for coal or rent, but for liquor. In many, many abodes (I cannot say homes) more is spent each week for beer than for bread, more each month than for clothing.
7. The women in these neighborhoods, as a rule, drink beer as an accepted rule of life. It should be remembered most of them come from countries where beer and wine aren’t classified as intoxicants, and their eyes have never been opened in this country to the relation of beer drinking and drunkenness. Some cases were found where women, despairing in their hopeless poverty, took to heavy drinking as a sort of blameless suicide, while the husband went on with his accustomed daily dram. One case is now a matter of deep anxiety and prayer. A husband whose drunkenness had dragged his family through poverty, homelessness and shame, reformed, but the wife who had struggled and prayed for years to woo him back to sobriety—in an hour of aberration, I am sure—got drunk, and is to-day a confirmed inebriate.
About this article
Source
Location on Page
Upper Left Quadrant
Topic
Contributed By
Elias Sturim
Citation
“A Study of Cases,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed September 14, 2026, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/1035.