The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Those Good Old Days Along time ago—back in the 1880s—my brother and I were given some intimations of the better things of life by reading a weekly journal called...
...Yankee authors were played up, and one usually found them taking quiet and refined pleasure in the superiority of their part of the country...
...But what fascinates me most about this series of stories and articles reaching from 1827 to 1927 is the light they throw upon our own much-discussed subject of juvenile delinquency...
...The young people who read the Companion were expected, of course, to be models of behavior...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Those Good Old Days Along time ago—back in the 1880s—my brother and I were given some intimations of the better things of life by reading a weekly journal called the Youth's Companion...
...This appeared in the era of Andrew Jackson...
...The burning of Mr...
...Johnny was able to assemble a gang which beat up the police...
...For the past ten days, my leisure time has been devoted to reading a book called Youth's Companion...
...The boy whose history is given below was arrested by a New York police officer for some misdemeanor...
...What they have saved from oblivion fills 1,140 pages...
...This high-class publication was sent out from Boston and carried by train, canal-boat, stage-coach and pony express to the farthest and wildest points of the frontier...
...There were stories of the West and stories of the East, stories of adventure and little essays on morals...
...Every printed word seemed wonderful...
...This vessel, so necessary for the protection and preservation of rugs and floors, was obviously regarded as a symbol of the bad habits of the lower classes...
...Writing to a Massachusetts Sunday-school class, she exclaims: "Think of the privileges you enjoy...
...There are articles and sharply slanted stories against war, slavery, tobacco and, especially, the demon rum...
...But in the early days, let us say from 1827 to about the time of the Civil War, the young men of the lower classes were the object of grave concern—even as they are today...
...What else can you expect in such a changing and unsettled time...
...A traveler relating her experiences in passing through Pennsylvania acknowledges that the streets of Philadelphia were surprisingly clean but goes on to relate that the young people of Pennsylvania were growing up in "ignorance and sin...
...Strange people have come in from Europe...
...In those days, there were no movies, no television, no radio, very little travel...
...How carefully we would cut the wrapper to avoid tearing any of the pictures or paragraphs of reading matter...
...Four former editors of the paper have selected for republication what they consider the most representative stories, poems, essays and illustrations published during this exciting century...
...The second young scamp whose deeds have been recorded for the edification of succeeding generations was a New Yorker, and we owe the account of his escapades to a story in the highly respectable New York Post which was reprinted in the Companion of February 24, 1859: "Here is a specimen of the kind of boys that are not infrequently found in the low streets of such cities as New York and Boston...
...On June 28, 1849, the Companion published a short editorial entitled "Juvenile Incendiaries...
...In prison he was so actively vicious that the officers were glad to get rid of him...
...Bemis's barn in Watertown," begins this piece of adult wisdom, "which has been found to have been purposely set on fire by boys, and the detection of a boy in the act of attempting to set fire to Park Street Church in Boston, has led me to think that if boys were better instructed in the consequences of such conduct they would not dare to commit such wickedness and expose themselves to imprisonment or death...
...As a chapter in American history, it is priceless...
...He was called Little Johnny, and although he had just commenced his course of crime his history even thus far is a fearful one...
...Most of them owe their wickedness in part to drunken, swearing, desperate parents, and to young companions who are old in vice and crime...
...It dealt, of course, with what was going on in and about the highly cultured city of Boston...
...There has been a backwash from the ill-regulated frontier...
...What people said about young rascals like this was much like what similar people are saying about similar good-for-nothings today: There has been a loosening of old rules...
...I vividly recall what a fresh element it brought into our life on the farm out in Ohio when some neighbor who had come past the Post Office at the "center" threw the tightly wrapped little parcel over our front gate...
...Snuff-taking is also referred to in derogatory terms, and every now and then there is a crack at the spittoon...
...During the early years, at least up to the Civil War, the Companion paid a good deal of attention to sundry reforms...
...This paper for young people started publication on April 16, 1827, during the regime of John Quincy Adams, and sent out its last number just a century later while New England's Calvin Coolidge was sitting quietly in the White House...
...The account which follows fully justifies this ominous introduction...
...The Youth's Companion was always very much of a New England product...
Vol. 41 • January 1958 • No. 1
