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RoM THE 1930s THRoUGH THE 1950s, a group of fictional young toughs known as “the Dead End Kids” captivated audiences on Broadway and in the movies. Sidney Kingsley’s melodramatic play, Dead End, which opened in New York in 1935, graphically depicted the lives and longings of a group of boys who swam in a polluted river , cooked food over outdoor fires, smoked cigarettes, gambled, swore, fought, carried weapons, and became entangled in the criminal underworld on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Kingsley’s bad boys found even greater fame in a series of popular movies that toned down their antisocial behavior and diluted the playwright’s message that life in urban slums was destroying the innocence of children and depriving young men of the fundamental American right to pursue a bright and happy future.1 For more than a century before the opening of Dead End, citizens in American cities had tried to address the problem of unsupervised youngsters on dangerous streets. In the early 1800s, churches and charitable organizations opened orphanages to shelter children who had no parents or whose parents failed to properly care for them. Throughout the nineteenth century, orphanages and other institutions used the indenture system, which involved placing children in the homes of families who would often act as employers demanding that the children work to earn their keep. By midcentury, philanthropic organizations such as the New York Children’s Aid Society tried to place children in foster homes, without an indenture obligating them to work, in the hope that they Introduction There’s a blaze of fire crackling out of an old iron ash-can in the center of the street. The boys hover over it, roasting potatoes skewered on long sticks. Their impish faces gleam red one minute and are wiped by shadows the next as they lean over the flames. —sidney Kingsley, Dead End F 1 2 THE DEAD END KIDS oF ST. LoUIS would be treated as part of the family. By the early twentieth century, Progressive Era reformers demanded governmental supervision of child placements to make the system more effective and humane. Each generation criticized and tried to improve upon the previous generation’s handling of the problem, but in the mid-twentieth century the problem remained.2 During the early decades of the twentieth century, the problem even intensified. Boys and young men, looking for work or moving from job to job, swelled the populations of Skid Row neighborhoods in many American cities, including St. Louis. During the era of Prohibition in the 1920s, organized criminal gangs vying for control of the alcohol market turned the streets into shooting galleries. During the Great Depression, uncounted numbers of adolescents joined the ranks of frustrated and angry job seekers, wandering from city to city. With America’s entry into World War II, legions of young men went off to fight in Europe or the Pacific, and many of them came home disabled or traumatized. The GI Bill of Rights (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944) eventually helped millions of young men go to college and pursue the American dream in the suburbs. While the world changed around them, many urban boys struggled to reach adulthood in increasingly violent and desolate streets.3 The problem of endangered youth is difficult to define. Unlike race or ethnicity, boyhood is a temporary social category. No one remains a boy for a lifetime, and boys pass through a series of stages that have been labeled as infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Children and adolescents develop gradually from infants, who are completely dependent upon adult caregivers, to adults, who are able to take care of themselves. The beginning of adolescence is generally defined as the onset of puberty, somewhere between the ages of twelve and fourteen, but the end of adolescence is not easy to pinpoint. In general, within American society, the age of full adulthood is defined as falling somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. For the purposes of this book, a boy will be defined as a young male under the age of twenty-one. A homeless boy will be defined as a male who has not reached adulthood and who lacks necessary shelter and supervision by responsible adults.4 There are plenty of homeless boys in popular fiction. Gavroche, the Paris gamin, challenges French authorities and stands with the revolutionaries on the barricades in Victor Hugo’s monumental novel Les Miserables. Charles Dickens’s iconic waif Oliver Twist miraculously preserves...

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