JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2724

It was the provocative and strong cover art was the work of Maurice Becker, 1889-1975, ( who “…was a radical political artist best known for his work in the 1910s and 1920s for such [seminal] publications as The Masses and The Liberator”–Wikipedia) that drew me into this pamphlet. John Collier’s¹ The City Where Crime is Play, a Report by The People’s Institute² is a slim pamphlet with an odd and I thought metaphorical title, though it turns out that this is exactly the subject of the work. Collier collected data from 400 or more collectors who made what sounds like fairly unscientific surveys of children’s games in the Middle West Side of Manhattan on how kids played and the possible connection between that “play” and crime. He evidently finds something there, some sort of correlation that I do not understand and really don’t need to, presently, though the games that he collected where of interest. In general though The People’s Institute and Collier worked for the social welfare, and especially so for immigrants (Collier going on to become the Commissioner of Indian Affairs under FDR), and perhaps this was a simple work to parents on keeping a watchful eye out on the kids so that their play didn’t veer into truancy, or something along those lines.

In some ways the listing of children’s games and gamey-truancy and petty crimes, as well as the quality of the morality of their play puts me in mind of the vast and complex paintings of the Netherlandish Renaissance master Brueghel the elder in depicting the very busy town life and children’s games of 16th c Holland. The 80 or so identified games in the Brueghel are indeed games, and is a more complete identifier of children’s activities in 1560 than the lists that appear in the Collier work.  Sending out hundreds of people to observe or question kids about the games they were playing on the streets of Manhattan in 1914 sounds a bit like a time capsule, and so the connection to Brueghel, who definitely painted a time capsule encyclopedia of the games children played.Collier’s is not nearly as complete, and Brueghel made no connection to crime 

Notes

1. John Collier (May 4, 1884 – May 8, 1968), a sociologist and writer, was an American social reformer and Native American advocate. He served as Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, from 1933 to 1945. He was chiefly responsible for the “Indian New Deal,” especially the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, through which he intended to reverse a long-standing policy of Cultural assimilation of Native Americans.” “From 1907 to 1919, he worked as secretary of the People’s Institute, where he developed programs for immigrant neighborhoods, emphasizing pride in their traditions, sponsoring lectures and pageants, and political awareness…”–Wikipedia

2. “The People’s Institute was founded in 1897 by Charles Sprague Smith to teach the theory and practice of government and social philosophy to workers and recent immigrants in New York City. It sponsored lectures, classes, concerts, and other community activities at Cooper Union and throughout New York City, though principally on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The Institute ceased operations in 1934. The People’s Institute is recognized most often for its contribution as a community educational center for working class adults and immigrants. It sponsored lectures, craft guilds, art and music leagues, a training school for community workers, and adult education classes in history, social science, literature, as well as nutrition and health…The Advisory Council comprised over forty [strong]  individuals including Lyman Abbott, R.R. Bowker, Nicholas Butler Murray, Andrew Carnegie, R.W. Gilder, Samuel Gompers, Jacob A. Riis, Jacob H. Schiff, Anson Phelps Stokes, J.G. Phelps Stokes, Oscar S. Straus, and Lillian D. Wald.”–Historical note on the People’s Institute Archives at the NYPL. 

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post  

There’s was something striking in this representation of Big Money and the Common People that reminded me of other inverted pyramids. The weight of debt image appears on the back cover of what might well be an Outsider approach to reorganizing society, created  by William H. Smyth and surfaced in a number of slim pamphlets in the 1920’s and ’30’s. Smyth is all but forgotten save for the word he coined–“Technocracy”–which itself is not too-well remembered; Technocracy itself was a form of (somehow) democratic form of government ruled by engineers and scientists, and so on, who would somehow relieve us all of the tremendous burden of national debt.  And since this particular pamphlet Technocracy Explained by its Originator William H. Smyth (and then re-titled on the next page as Technocracy by its Originator Reorganization of National Energy Aim of Theory [sic] was printed in 1933 in a particularly bad year of the Great Depression, Smyth might have attracted a number of other-involved citizens who were now paying attention for some sort of anything that might relieve society of its monetary golem. 

In any event, the image on the rear cover was pretty striking, though I can’t find reference to it in the text (even though there is a reference here to this book itself, a piece of advertising in the book that someone has already found and perhaps purchased). It reminds me slightly of something else, a popular renaissance depiction of Dante’s inferno, by Sandro Botticelli:

[Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sandro_Botticelli_-_La_Carte_de_l%27Enfer.jpg]

It is common to see the Inferno structured this way, as is the depiction of debt heaped on the back of ordinary people, another inverted pyramid–now that I said that, I can’t think of another image. That said, I know it has nothing to do with the pyramid on the U.S. one dollar bill, as that didn’t make its first appearance for another two years after the Smyth paper. So there’s that.