Fighting for Life Page 2

  After the veto, some experts continued to pursue the vision of comprehensive child care services. During the 1970s, David Olds, now a professor of pediatric psychiatry at the University of Colorado, was working in a Baltimore day-care center for preschoolers. Many of the children came from homes wracked by poverty, drug abuse, domestic violence, and other problems. Realizing that there was only so much the center could do to help them, he eventually went on to create the Nurse Family Partnership, a home-visiting program in which trained nurses taught poor mothers how to provide a safe, secure, stimulating environment for their children, and helped them envision a better future for themselves. Twenty years later, Olds found that the children of mothers who received the visits were not only healthier but were also less likely to have been abused or neglected and more likely to finish school, get jobs, and stay out of jail than a similar group of children whose mothers had not received the visits. Economists now estimate that every dollar invested in high quality home-visiting, day-care, and preschool programs results in $7 in savings on welfare payments, health-care costs, substance abuse treatment, and incarceration, plus higher tax revenues due to better-paying jobs.[6]

  In the early 1930s, Baker toured Soviet Russia. Unlike the United States even now, the Soviets already had a comprehensive system of day-care centers and preschools. Maternal and child health care were free and pregnant women were given paid leave from their jobs. Baker was well aware of the purges, labor camps, deliberate mass starvation, and other horrors of the Soviet system, but the national dedication to the care of the young impressed her. Still, as she toured these programs, she noticed something odd. None of the children ever seemed to fight or cry, and she never saw children laughing, except on propaganda posters. “They just sat and looked at you like so many little Buddhas,” she writes. Play activities were rigidly organized and even potty behavior seemed to be governed by Soviet methods of synchronized regulation.

  Since its inception, the Soviet Union had been preparing for another world war, and Baker suspected there was a connection between this and the child-development programs. “You could not talk to any Intourist guide for ten minutes without hearing something about the Red Army and the impending war,” she wrote, “and, from sickening experience, I knew it was no accident that, in 1934, the two groups of Russians who looked really well fed were the soldiers and the children.”

  In some respects, contemporary America is not all that different. It turns out there is one group of Americans that receives high-quality government-subsidized child-care services, including day care, preschool, home-visiting programs, and health care: the U.S. military. Unlike the Soviet version, these comprehensive programs aren’t designed to create obedient little soldiers. Instead, they use a play-oriented approach to help bring out children’s individual cognitive and social capabilities. This may help explain why military children score higher on reading and mathematics tests than public school children, and why the black/white achievement gap is much lower in military families than it is in the general population.[7] Since the military child-care program was created in 1989, the government has repeatedly declined requests to fund an in-depth evaluation, perhaps because if the effects were known, all Americans would demand these programs for their children too.

  Baker appears to have destroyed all her personal papers, so little is known about her life except what’s in this memoir. After retiring from the Bureau of Child Hygiene, she lived in Princeton, New Jersey, with the novelist and Hollywood scriptwriter I.A.R. (Ida) Wylie, who was the author of more than a dozen romantic melodramas, including Torch Song with Joan Crawford and Keeper of the Flame with Spencer Tracy. The witty, detached, sometimes hilarious but always morally decent tone of Fighting for Life resembles Wylie’s own memoir, My Life with George. Although the books tell totally different stories, some phrases, including “fighting for life,” appear in both, and it’s likely that Wylie ministered to Baker’s prose. Their roommate was Louise Pearce, a Rockefeller University scientist who helped invent the cure for sleeping sickness and then traveled alone to the Belgian Congo in 1922 to test it. Around Princeton they were referred to as “the girls,” but otherwise, gossip appears to have been restrained. They must have been wonderful to know. Read the first page of Fighting for Life, and you’ll see.

  —HELEN EPSTEIN

  1. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

  2. Samuel Preston and Michael Haines, Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 1991), chapter 6.

  3. Karen Weintraub, “Structural Brain Changes Found in Romanian Orphanage Children,” CommonHealth, July 23, 2012, available at http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2012/07/brain-changes-orphanage; R. A. Spitz, “Hospitalism: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 1 (1945): 53–74; and Wayne Dennis, Children of the Crèche (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1973).

  4. The Raising of America: Early Childhood and the Future of Our Nation (California Newsreel, 2013).

  5. Edward Zigler, The Hidden History of Head Start (Oxford University Press, 2010).

  6. James J. Heckman and Dimitriy V. Masterov, “The Productivity Argument for Investing in Young Children,” Working Paper 5, Invest in Kids Working Group (Committee for Economic Development, October 2004).

  7. Michael Winerip, “Military Children Stay a Step Ahead of Public School Students,” The New York Times, December 12, 2011, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/12/education/military-children-outdo-public-school-students-on-naep-tests.html?pagewanted=all.

  FIGHTING FOR LIFE

  To

  DR. ANNIE STURGES DANIEL who started me on my way

  and

  DR. JACOB SOBEL

  whose whole-hearted cooperation

  made the goal attainable

  CHAPTER I

  MY IMPULSE TO TRY TO DO THINGS ABOUT hopeless situations appears to have cropped out first when I was about six years old, and it should be pointed out that the method I used was characteristically direct. I was all dressed up for some great occasion—a beautiful white lacy dress with a blue sash and light blue silk stockings and light blue kid shoes—and inordinately vain about it. While waiting for Mother to come down, I wandered out in front of the house to sit on the horse block and admire myself and hope that someone would come along and see me in all my glory.

  Presently a spectator did arrive—a little colored girl about my size but thin and peaked and hungry looking, wearing only a ragged old dress the color of ashes. I have never seen such dumb envy in any human being’s face before or since. Child that I was, I could not stand it; it struck me right over the heart. I could not bear the idea that I had so much and she had so little. So I got down off the horse block and took off every stitch I had on, right down to the blue shoes that were the joy of my infantile heart and gave everything, underwear and all, to the little black girl. I watched her as she scampered away, absolutely choked with bliss. Then I walked back into the house, completely naked, wondering why I had done it and how to explain my inexplicable conduct. Oddly enough both Father and Mother seemed to understand pretty well what had gone on in my mind. They were fine people, my father and mother.

  I know that women of my generation who struck out on their own are supposed to have become rebellious because they felt cramped and suppressed and unhappy as children in an alien environment. It is a convenient formula and no doubt perfectly applicable in many cases. But it does not fit mine. I was reared in a thoroughly conventional tradition and took to it happily. I understood that after I left school I would go to Vassar, and then, I supposed, I would get married and raise a family and that would be that. Until events of the sort that are notoriously beyond one’s control forced me to take bewildered thought for the morrow, I had no more purpose in life than a million other American girls being brought up just as I was in the e
ighties and nineties.

  It would have taken a pretty demanding, not to say peevish, kind of child to fail to adjust to the family environment in which I was reared. We were reasonably well to do as wealth went in Poughkeepsie, so I had none of that precocious sense of responsibility which children often derive from straitened family incomes. Father was one of the most eminent lawyers in town; so eminent that, when I was making a speech in Poughkeepsie several years ago, I received a large basket of flowers with a card: “From the members of the Dutchess County Bar to the daughter of O. D. M. Baker.” That was about thirty years after his death and it went straight to the heart of a daughter one of whose earliest resolves was to make it up to Father for having been born a girl. There is no particular point in emphasizing that ambition or its cause. Father was not one of those childish people who take disappointment out on children. But I did happen to arrive in the world as the third daughter in a row and I heard family legends about Father’s remarks when the nurse congratulated him on Daughter Number Three. Father always knew his own mind. He had known his own mind ever since he was a boy, when he ran away from a stepmother he disliked and educated himself into becoming a proverbially brilliant lawyer. The education was his first brilliant piece of work. He was one of those rare examples of self-educated people who really are educated.

  He did things thoroughly. His professional education was sound and adequate. When he bought shoes, made to order in New York City, he ordered them seven pairs at a time, all exactly alike, and wore each pair only one day a week which, of course, was the best possible way to get maximum mileage out of each pair. When he went in for amateur carpentry for relaxation from the strain of business, he filled the attic with five times as many elaborate tools as the ordinary cabinetmaker uses, and became a first-class craftsman. He had been devoted to fishing all of his life. When he died, his fishing equipment included thirty-nine split bamboo rods, not to mention all kinds of odd tackle, and nearly thirteen thousand artificial flies all arranged around in cases in his library. By the time I could stand alone I was being taught to cast a line and every summer we spent a month or two at the Balsam Lake Club in the Catskill Mountains where we all fished in the Beaverkill Creek or in the quiet mountain lake which was part of the club’s property. There were odd times of fishing in the Dutchess County lakes and streams and I can still drop a fly in an eddy with a subtlety that bodes ill for trout in the vicinity.

  A sober, quiet man who never uttered an unnecessary word. His mother, who died when he was quite young, must have had romantic ambitions for him, because she named him: Orlando Daniel Mosher Baker. When he ran away from home, he came to Poughkeepsie from his nearby birthplace in Hyde Park, and was presently studying law in the office of the Honorable Homer A. Nelson. One day Mr. Nelson asked his young clerk to dinner to meet a young Vassar girl named Jenny Brown whose father, worried by the idea of having a daughter away from home at a new-fangled college, had asked his friend, Mr. Nelson, to look out for her. The bright young clerk and the pretty college girl liked each other on sight and the inevitable happened.

  There were some fine and strange names in my family background, on my mother’s side. My grandmother Brown was born in Boston. She was Arvilla Danforth, a direct descendant of the Samuel Danforth who was one of the committee to vote the money which made possible the founding of Harvard College. There was a curious trend in that branch of the Danforth family for they named their four daughters Arvilla, Permilla, Lucilla and Marilla. I knew only my grandmother, a fine woman of the old school, and my great-aunt Marilla who married Dr. Bleeker L. Hovey of Rochester, New York, and went with him as a nurse throughout the war between the states. As plain Jenny Brown, my mother inherited nothing of this richness of nomenclature; but she had a touch of the pioneer in her, a natural result of the same spirit which led her father, Merritt H. Brown who was born in Bennington, Vermont, to take his bride from Boston and trek out to the little settlement in Dansville, New York. There he and his wife brought up their family of seven children. My mother, who was the next to the youngest child, started out in the same spirit when she went to Poughkeepsie and, on the first day of the opening of Vassar College, enrolled herself as a student there. By pure chance, or perhaps by alphabetical arrangement, she appears on the record as the first, or one of the first, students to enter Matthew Vassar’s new college for women. Fifty years after her enrollment, she was a guest of honor at the College’s celebration of its half-century of progress and saw herself, in the college play, Milestones, as “Jenny Brown” portrayed in old-fashioned costume entering the college and talking to Matthew Vassar.

  Our Poughkeepsie house was a fine sample of a kind of architecture which has left an ineffaceable mark on Hudson River towns: three stories, gray slate mansard roof, veranda across the front, patch of front lawn and a stretch of back lawn running through to the next street, decorated with trees and a children’s play house. All it lacked to be perfect was a set of lightning rods. Evidently Father was one of the few citizens of Poughkeepsie sufficiently strong minded to resist the blandishments of the ever-present lightning-rod salesman. My father and mother went to live in this house when they were first married and we four children were all born there. My oldest sister, Arvilla, died in infancy; my next older sister, Mary, lived until about twelve years ago; my brother, Robert Nelson Millerd Baker, died when he was thirteen; and now I am the only one left of that vigorous and very happy family.

  There was plenty of room in our house and we made the most of it. Only on rare occasions were we without guests. It seemed to me that there were always people coming or going or staying. Innumerable friends made it a stopping place. There were my numerous cousins from Amherst College who always came for the holidays and many of the students from the thriving Riverside Military School in town which had a great reputation as an educational institution in those days and drew boys from all over the United States. There were always relays of Vassar students who would come for the week ends and bring with them any girls who they thought looked homesick. Dr. Kendrick, who was then the President of Vassar, used to call it “The Vassar Annex,” but it was more than that. I belonged to a hospitable family.

  There was little to Vassar College at that time but the old main building, a gymnasium and the astronomical observatory which naturally followed from the fact that Maria Mitchell, the great woman astronomer, was a member of the faculty. It was strict, too, much stricter than the present-day girls’ boarding school. The girls were not allowed even to come into Poughkeepsie without a teacher as an escort, though that seemed to be waived when they came to see us. We knew all about it and were as much at home with the personnel of the institution as if they had been our cousins. Commencement time, Founders Day, and “Phil” would mean as much company and jollification as Christmas and always rated with circus day in my juvenile calendar.

  It took something big to be a great occasion too, for people lived gaily in that era. I do not know what charts of the business cycle have to say about it, but as I look back, it seems to me to have been an ample, affluent time. I think the gay nineties deserved their name; certainly the earlier part of that decade was a joyous time and even before that we were gay enough; even the children were.

  There was always something going on, some simple, cheerful, comradely occasion among people who all knew and liked each other. We took full advantage of being on the Hudson River and one of my major accolades of that time was when the Poughkeepsie paper said that I pulled “one of the best oars among the girls in town.” There were the clam bakes which were held a few miles up the river, the kind of clam bakes that are rare today. Starting with a stone-lined pit in the ground which in preparation was heated to a white heat, the ashes were cleaned away and then successive layers of bluefish, chicken, green corn and dozens of clams were covered over to bake into a delectable meal fit for the gods. There were picnics and boating parties in plenty and, when the first college boat race of the big Poughkeepsie rowing regatta was instituted,
we knew everyone connected with the management and I saw this first race from the judges’ launch, which has spoiled me ever since for anything so distantly dull as an observation train along the bank of the river. In the winter our life became even more exciting with ice-skating and ice-boating on the frozen Hudson. It is an easy cliché to say that the seasons have changed, but our winters then were long and cold and the river was solidly frozen over for weeks.

  Skating kept you warm in your own right, but you came back from an icy cruise at lightning speed on an ice-boat almost as frozen as the Hudson. Ice-yachting was rare sport when one could lie out at full length in the tiny cockpit and fly along, often on one runner, racing with the crack trains along the bank and often making a speed of sixty miles an hour. But you wanted it to be cold, knife-blade cold in the moonlight with a big fire glowing on the bank to come back to just when you thought your face and feet would never be able to thaw out again. There was bob-sledding on the long hills in town when ten or twelve of us would pile ourselves on the long sled and start off on what seemed to us a perilous trip. We always found some friendly horses and driver who would pull us up the hill again to repeat the performance. Sometimes in the evening and effectively chaperoned, a dozen or fifteen youngsters would pile into a long, four-horse sled, packed with straw, and drive out into the country to a special farmhouse where huge bowls of oyster stew would be waiting when the sled’s runners creaked in the yard. On the way home we sang like frogs in the spring, sang “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” and “Seeing Nellie Home” and “Clementine” and “After the Ball Is Over” and that song about a bicycle built for two.