Juvenile Delinquency

How can we face our Juvenile Delinquents with a steady eye,
We who so blindly passed them by?
How can we condemn their parents and their spirit,
When we forced their pride to die?
With Patience we must labor to undo,
In Charity we must Faith instill anew!
(1940s)

This statement was scratched in pencil on a small USO note, probably in the early 1940s. It shows mom’s compassionate liberal social point of view, which sees juvenile problems as the result of a systemic failure of the adult establishment to heed the early warning signs in childhood. It calls for an attitude of patience and charity, versus judgment and punishment, for the rehabilitation of youth who’ve gone astray. Mom maintained and espoused this attitude throughout her life.