1.     “Uplifting the ‘Dangerous Classes’”

2.     A Not-So-Divine Comedy, Part 17

3.     Announcements

4.     Fun Facts about New Mexico

5.     The Flashback Quarterback:  Can We Peel the Paint Now?

6.     Be Aware and Share:  Worth Bookmarking on Your Computer

 7.     About Montebello E-News and “My Montebello”

“Uplifting the ‘Dangerous Classes’”  

“Uplifting the ‘Dangerous Classes,’” by Howard Husock, winter, 2008,
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_urb-brace.html  .  An excerpt:

Homelessness, contrary to those who date its inception to the Reagan administration, is nothing new in New York. In June 1872, between 20,000 and 30,000 homeless and vagrant children haunted the city, sleeping not on their grandmothers’ couches—as homelessness is sometimes defined, as a legal matter, today—but actually on the streets. ...

…Charles Loring Brace …  “The vast immigration of poor foreign peasants and laborers [and] the neglect of the marriage-tie and consequent breaking up of family life, with a certain independence allowed to youth . . . for these and other causes, there has come to be in the United States . . . a growth of a poor, vagrant and criminal class of children, scarcely ever known before in the civilized world.” ...

Brace’s greatest accomplishment in New York was a privately financed system of shelters and schools that helped tens of thousands of homeless kids a year—at a time when the city’s population was under 1 million. His life is a reminder that the assimilation of poor immigrants and the uplift of the American poor in the late nineteenth century were not inevitable but rather the results of concerted action by committed people. He deserves to be better remembered—both for what he did and how he did it. ...  

Brace … encouraged “self-help.” He was, as Joel Schwartz observes in Fighting Poverty with Virtue, a moral reformer—a man who sought to mold boys into moral adults, people who, as they encountered novel situations, would naturally make the right choices because they held the right values. “The principal value of our Enterprise , we believe, as distinguished from similar efforts, is that our whole influence is moral and in no respect coercive,” Brace wrote. “Those who have much to do with alms-giving and plans of human improvement soon see how superficial and comparatively useless all assistance or organization is which does not touch habits of life and the inner forces which form character.” ...  

The contrast with organizations that help “at-risk” children today is striking. Typically, they promote a utilitarian worldview—“Don’t do something because it will hurt you”—as opposed to the core idea of right versus wrong. There is, for example, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or Dare, which hopes to scare younger kids from using drugs by bringing police officers to elementary school classrooms nationwide. ...

If you answer the multiple-choice questions below and e-mail to lessonanswers@mymontebello.com with “Lesson answers” in the subject field, you will be credited toward a “certificate of recognition in community affairs” to be awarded in 2007 by a local nonprofit organization. 

1. What is the history of homelessness and children in the United States?

(a) Our problem began with the liberalization of the law on marriage.

(b) There was a very large number of homeless children in New York City one hundred thirty-five years ago.  

2. Who was Charles Loring Brace?

(a) He tried to build the character of homeless children, so that they would make moral decisions.

(b) He was an American version of the old man who led the boy bandits in Oliver Twist.  

3. What is the author of this article attempting to convey?

(a) That Brace’s philosophy is no longer applicable because times have changed.

(b) That Brace’s philosophy contrasts with that of modern programs to help at-risk children.

  No one can earn a million dollars honestly.
William Jennings Bryan, 1860 – 1925,
an American lawyer, statesman, and politician, three times the Democratic Party nominee for President of the United States.

The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success. It is not intelligent. It is not beautiful. It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it doesn't deliver the goods.
-----  
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest [sic] of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
John Maynard Keynes, 1883 – 1946,
a British economist whose ideas, called Keynesian economics, had a major impact on modern economic and political theory, as well as on many governments’ fiscal policies.  

Santa Fe is the highest capital city in the United States at seven thousand feet above sea level.  

The province that was once Spanish New Mexico included all of present day New Mexico, most of Colorado and Arizona, and slices of Utah, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.  The original American territory of New Mexico that Congress created in 1850 included all of New Mexico and Arizona plus parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah. The boundaries of present day New Mexico were drawn by Congress in 1863, but New Mexico did not become a state until 1912.  

Each October, Albuquerque hosts the world’s largest international hot air balloon fiesta.  

The world’s first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945, on the White Sands Testing Range near Alamogordo.  North of the impact point a small placard marks the area known as Trinity Site.  The bomb was designed and manufactured in Los Alamos.  

Grants was at one time known as the “carrot capital of the country” until the process of cellophane wrapping began and California took over title. More recently Grants has been known as the “uranium capital of the world,” producing the bulk of the nation’s uranium supply during the post-World War II and Cold War era.  [Read the two following facts and then answer the question:  what helped New Mexico become the carrot capital?]

Lakes and rivers make up only .002% of the state’s total surface area. The lowest water-to-land ratio of all fifty states. Most of New Mexico’s lakes are man-made reservoirs. A dam on the Rio Grande formed the Elephant Butte Reservoir, the state’s largest lake.  

The Rio Grande is New Mexico’s longest river and runs the entire length of New Mexico.  

The Palace of Governors in Santa Fe, built in 1610, is one of the oldest public buildings in America.  [If the walls could tell stories.]  

To a certain degree, New Mexico’s Indian reservations function as states within a state, where tribal law may supersede state law.  

New Mexico’s state constitution officially states that New Mexico is a bilingual state, and one out of three families in New Mexico speaks Spanish at home.  [Why do we bristle over bilingualism and New Mexico has it in its constitution?]  

Since New Mexico’s climate is so dry, three-fourths of the roads are left unpaved.  The roads don’t wash away. 

During the height of the so-called lawless era of the late 1800s, when Lew Wallace served as territorial governor, he wrote the popular historical novel Ben-Hur. First published in 1880, it was made into a movie in 1959, starring Charleton Heston.  [Something about the distance from the big cities which helped him write the book?]

Tens of thousands of bats live in the Carlsbad Caverns. The largest chamber of Carlsbad Caverns is more than ten football fields long and about twenty-two stories high.  

Taos Pueblo is located two miles north of the city of Taos.  It is one of the oldest continuously occupied communities in the United States.  People still live in some of its nine hundred year-old buildings.  

New Mexico’s capital city, Santa Fe, is the ending point of the eight hundred-mile Santa Fe Trail.  

New Mexico was named by sixteenth-century Spanish explorers who hoped to find gold and wealth equal to Mexico’s Aztec treasures.  

On the same desert grounds where today’s space-age missiles are tested, ten-thousand-year-old arrowheads have been found. New Mexican history has ranged from arrows to atoms and has embraced Indian, Spanish and Anglo cultures. …  [Would you like to travel back in time to see—but not experience—the life ten thousand years ago?]