Introduction

This plan was developed for a standard eleventh-grade U.S. history class at Bryant High School in New York City, a comprehensive urban high school with a multiethnic student body. Through the use of a short novel and primary and secondary sources, we had students analyze point of view, roleplay a talk show starring both literary and historical guests, and write an essay. They also carried out a long-term research project that had both written and oral components.

Time Frame

The lessons focusing directly on Maggie and the Progressive Era take five days, while the final research period requires at least five class sessions spread out over a longer period of time.

Objectives

Background

Set in the 1890s, Maggie portrays the lives of poor Irish immigrants in the Bowery, a New York City neighborhood. A short, seventy-page novella, it is a gripping story for adolescents. Maggie Johnson, a teenager, works in a sweat shop, and lives at home with her coarse brother, Jimmie, and her violent, alcoholic mother. Maggie naively trusts her first boyfriend, Pete, and escapes her home by moving in with him. When he leaves her in a few days, Maggie’s mother will not allow her “fallen” daughter to return home. Crane’s descriptions of saloons, beer halls, gender and class relations, tenements, and work life are vivid and unrelenting, for he provides no chance for his characters to escape their origins. This feature becomes important to the discussion of their relationship—and those of their “real life” counterparts—to the larger social and political forces that surround them.

Procedure

I. Reading Assignment:
Students read Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1895) and respond to questions from a reading guide, such as:

1. How does the characters’ environment influence their development?
2. Why was Maggie attracted to Pete? Why didn’t their relationship work out?
3. Why did Maggie’s family (Jimmie and her mother) reject her when she tried to return home? Why did her life turn out this way?
4. Why did Stephen Crane write Maggie?

II. Examining Primary and Secondary Sources for Point of View (3 lessons)

1. We review students’ reading of the book for general comprehension and discuss ambiguities (how did Maggie die?), but we focus mainly on how Crane expects his readers to respond to the characters and their lives. For example, did Maggie have real choices or was she forced into prostitution? After the class discussion, students choose a specific scene, event, social issue (alcoholism, gender inequality, housing, low wages), or setting (saloon, amusement hall, tenement) that moved or intrigued them and explain why they responded strongly. The students focus on the descriptive language Crane uses in order to discover what words provoked their reaction. Those who choose an event describe it from different characters’ viewpoints, emphasizing the distinction between facts and perspectives.
2. Students then receive a packet containing excerpts from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Jane Addam’s Forty Years at Hull House (1910), and Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (1905). Working in groups, they read each excerpt and look for passages giving different perspectives on their chosen social issue, event, or scene from Maggie. They compare their findings with the textbook’s presentation of these authors (Who Built America, vol. 2).
   This exercise challenges students to understand the middle-class assumptions behind the courses Jane Addams taught in her settlement house, along with the parasitic nature of Tammany’s ministrations and the reasons the working class supported its candidates over government reformers. The students share the factual information they obtain, and then reach tentative conclusions about how Sinclair, Addams, and Plunkitt each viewed the urban scene, what they defined as problems, who they blamed, and the kind of solutions they supported.
3. Next, using a selection from How the Other Half Lives (1890), by Jacob Riis, students learn to distinguish between the facts he records and the conclusions he draws from them. Students readily see that statements about a tenement courtyard’s lack of light or abundance of children are quite different in nature and verifiability from phrases about the tenants’ “joyless homes” and “lives of wearisome toil.” Once students agree that Riis interprets his facts and reaches debatable conclusions, they look for evidence of his point of view and biases. Students quickly discover that Riis was repelled by the poor (“a scum of forty thousand human wrecks”) and that he characterized Jews, Italians, and African Americans in racist terms. He was a reformer who despised the wretchedness of the poor and called for slum clearance and schools for assimilation, but he also believed the poor came from inferior races and followed their “instincts” in succumbing to alcoholism or gang murders.
4. All of the sources the students have used so far were written by members of the middle and upper classes, including Crane’s Maggie, which expresses some of the same biases as Riis’s work. Now the students listen to the voices of the workers themselves, from sources such as letters to the editor of the Yiddish Socialist newspaper The Daily Forward, and from a rich collection of oral histories of working-class men and women, originally published by the reform paper The Independent in 1906 and reprinted as The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves (1990). Both of these sources were mediated by professional writers, but they usefully reflect the voices and life experiences of a wide variety of working-class men and women of the period. Students focus on how these sources present life in the workplace and in the larger society and then compare these views with those of the other assigned writers.
   

III. “People Who Feel Their Problems Are Beyond Solving”: A Talk Show Roleplay Exercise (2 periods)

1. The teachers host the talk show, while students (after preparing in small groups) play characters from Maggie, historical figures, and audience members. The moderator appears first and introduces the literary guests one at a time, followed by the historical guests. The guests from Maggie prepare a written statement describing the problems they are facing and why they seem insoluble. They also explain their actions and place (or share) blame. The historical guests prepare solutions to the problems. What could a settlement house do for Maggie? What if her family had been part of the Tammany family? How do labor conditions shape Maggie’s choices? The audience members write two questions for every guest on the panel; each member covers a different topic and has to use specific quotations as the basis for his or her questions. As audience members focus on Maggie’s misfortunes, the historical characters help refocus discussion on the underlying causes of her problems.

IV. Writing Assignment and Final Research Project

1. Students take the scene, event, issue, or setting they have worked on, explain how Crane presents it, and describe their reactions to it. Next, they examine their topic from the perspective of one of the reformers or politicians they have read and conjecture how that person would describe the same scene, event, issue, or setting. Students can rewrite a portion of the novella and change it to reflect that person’s perspective. They come to understand that while Maggie accurately describes many real lives, other perspectives and other choices were available.
2. Our students’ reaction to Maggie was so intense, their identification with the characters and their problems so charged after the talk show, that we used it to structure our approach to twentieth-century domestic policy. Using the same social problem they explored in Maggie, they formed groups to investigate the problem, its evolution, and attempted solutions from 1890 to 1990. Over the course of a month, we gave them research time and opportunities to meet during class, led discussions of the readings in their history text, and lectured on the Great Depression, the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and the Great Society.

Assessment

Over the course of this project, students used journals (kept at home and in class) to answer reading questions and write short paragraphs about the viewpoints they encountered in primary sources. Instructors graded the journal for completeness and overall quality. We also collected and graded the questions and statements used for the talk show, with credit added for participation during the actual exercise. Students received the individual writing assignment in the first class and turned in one draft for credit, as well as receiving a grade on the final paper. For the final research project, they received a group grade on the oral presentation and an individual grade on their section of the written report.

After turning in the completed research projects, students wrote a formal letter evaluating themselves, describing what they learned from the project and how they would approach such a project in the future. While a few students got lost in projects and some presentations were weak, many performed at levels we had not previously seen. Some interviewed their principal and veteran teachers about public school education in the present and the past. Although we compromised our coverage of twentieth-century domestic politics, our class achieved a pass rate on the standardized New York State Regents’ U.S. History Exam that was 10 percent higher than other classes in the school.

The students’ identification with characters in Maggie provided a spark that made social issues real for them and motivated many of them to undertake serious investigations. Getting to choose the topics they wanted to explore also helped, while their high level of interest aided them in remembering the period better. An important factor in their success on the Regents’ exam, we believe, was our emphasis on differing perspectives, since critical readings of passages are often more central to standardized tests than mere recall. In fact, our students may have been better off than those whose classes covered every period in a more traditional manner.

Suggested Resources

Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan, 1938 [1910], 200-75, “Performing Neighborhood Services,” “Assisting Families in Need,” “Entertaining Immigrants,” and “Forming Social Clubs.”

American Social History Project. Who Built America. Vol. 2. New York: Pantheon, 1992, 159-215.

Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. New York: Norton, 1979. The Norton critical edition contains maps and primary sources, including selections by Jacob Riis.

Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl. New York: American Social History Productions, 1993. Video recording. Purchasing Department, American Social History Productions, 99 Hudson Street, Third floor, New York, NY 10013; (212) 966-4248, ext. 201; $75.00.

Holt, Hamilton, ed. The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Metzker, Isaac, ed. A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to The Jewish Daily Forward. New York: Ballantine Books, 1971.

Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives. Boston: Bedford Books, 1996 [1890], Ch. XV, “The Problem of the Children.”

Riordan, William, ed. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall. Boston: Bedford Books, 1994 [1905], 25-28. “To Hold Your District, Study Human Nature and Act Accordin’.”

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: New American Library, 1960 [1906], 32-34; 82-83.

On the Lower East Side: <http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk.www/ctich/eastside/contents.html)> is a web site containing information on Maggie, part of a larger site about the Lower East Side in the nineteenth century.

David Gerwin is an Assistant Professor of Secondary Education at Queens College/CUNY. He is an oral historian who studies twentieth-century U.S. urban history and social studies teacher education.