Windows on Henry Street
by [Atlantic Monthly Press & Little, Brown, $3.00]
IN her modest and generous foreword, Miss Wald tells us that protracted illness and slow convalescence furnished the leisure for this book and that it could not have been written without the help of the many friends of whom she gives a distinguished list. Special gratitude is expressed to Beulah Amidon of the Survey-Graphic, and to Van Wyck Brooks. Ernest Poole made the happy suggestion for the title. But the reader who knows Miss Wald and Henry Street will be swift to perceive that this is no mere biographical transcript from the lips of an invalid, but an authentic revelation of the author’s personality, informing a considered account of her noble achievement.
The book brings up to date, from 1915, the record of an earlier volume, The House on Henry Street, and is indirectly a complete refutation of the statement occasionally heard of late, from both conservatives and radicals, that social settlements are a spent force. No one can read of the part this House has played and is playing in political, industrial, and social crises in New York, and internationally in peace and public health, and not pay tribute to the power for righteousness actively functioning in our midst. It is not too much to say that in years to come the records of the integrity and statesmanship of our great; social settlements, and of the men and women who founded them, will be among the proudest pages of America’s history.
Looking out of the windows on Henry Street, one sees, not the city streets only, whose chaotic fascination James Daugherty’s drawings interpret so well, but Russia; the League of Nations; all America; and everywhere the Public Health Nurse, that central achievement for which the House stands. Looking into those windows, one sees the woman who has been the indwelling spirit from the beginning. Her fairness and her fearlessness, her wisdom and her compassion and her sense of humor, her statesmanship and her genuine and innate democracy, are in all that she has to say of the child and the law, education and the arts, nursing and health, and the bold chapter on prohibition. And across the pages stream the friends for whom she lives; those loyal, self-respecting neighbors, Jew and Gentile, black and white; those derelicts and down-and-outs who are so lovable as seen through her clear-sighted eyes; those children who have made good, to the glory of Henry Street, and their mothers; those residents and co-workers who have followed her lead and held up her hands; those givers whose faith in her has made the Henry Street House possible even through the lean years. It is a great story told without flamboyance or self-assertion, and it will take its place with the volumes on Hull House and Toynbee Hall and other testimony to the practical social idealism which plays so important a part in modern civilization.
FLORENCE CONVERSE