Education: Sixty Dirty Republikins

Mrs. Dorothy G. Mills Howard, a 37-year-old widow, is a junior high-school teacher in East Orange, N. J. She spent seven years in what many an educator would consider a shocking waste of time: sitting in school yards and on curbstones listening to the impromptu songs of rope-skipping kids. Last week, having also collected songs from assistant eavesdroppers from coast to coast, Mrs. Howard was ready to publish her collection. Folk Jingles of American Children.* It is not for squeamish readers. Sample:

Teddy on the railroad

Picking up stones;

Along came an engine

And broke Teddy's bones.

Oh, said Terry, That's no fair.

Oh, said the engineer,

I don't care.

Mrs. Howard found that the songs of U. S. tots, often accompanied by ritualistic fingerpointing, spitting, face-making and nose-thumbing, were savage but cheerful in spirit, had "a Rabelaisian flavor." Sample:

Mary's mad and I am glad

And I know what will please her,

A bottle of wine to make her shine

And a sweet little boy to squeeze her.

Children love inelegant taunts:

Marguerite

Go wash your feet

The Board of Health

Is 'cross the street.

Old man Kelly had a pimple on his belly

His wife cut it off to make a bowl of jelly.

I see London

I see France

I see Betty's under pants.

Still popular is a ditty of the 1904 Presidential election:

Sixty needles and sixty pins

And sixty dirty Republikins.

Sixty rats and sixty cats

And sixty dirty Democrats.

More up-to-date:

Roosevelt in the White House

Talking to the ladies.

Landon in the back yard

Washing nigger babies.

Among other contemporaries of whom U. S. children sing are Macy's and Marshall Field's department stores, Mickey Mouse, Ivory Soap, Tootsie Rolls. Sample:

All the girls that wear high heels

Work down town at Marshall Field's.

Some songs have an old English origin. One of the oldest is based on Edmund Spenser's line (in the Faerie Queene):

Roses red and violets blew. This song has many variations, e.g.:

Roses are red, violets are blue

Vinegar stinks and so do you.

Mrs. Howard concludes that all this "unconscious literature" is "an integral part of child life," as inevitable and necessary as the smoking-room stories with which politicians and even professors give "meaning and significance to otherwise unwieldy subjects." She suggests that parents and teachers recognize the educational value of children's folk literature, that writers for children use it as a model. Says she, sagely: "[Children's] humor involves a laugh at the simpleton. But perhaps children love the simpleton better than the wise man."