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Edmund Lawall must have felt cursed. He’d brought his family to New York in the late 1800s to carry on his father’s business as a pharmacist, but fate⁠⁠—or perhaps the city itself⁠⁠—seemed determined to drive him back out again. Lawall’s health had been in decline since their arrival, and his wife’s kidney disease had worsened, despite all of the tinctures and patent medicines available to his turn-of-the-century expertise. Not long after that, his business partner had been revealed as a crook, sending Lawall scrambling into bankruptcy court to convince the judge that his pharmacy had nothing to do with shady real estate dealings. Then, in the midst of the bankruptcy proceedings, an anonymous woman had staggered into Lawall’s drug store, collapsed on the floor, and died of unknown causes. Likely no one could have saved her, but it wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the pharmaceutical services available at the corner of Eighth Street and Avenue C.

None of that compared, however, to the morning of 27 June 1906, when a disheveled man in a medical coat burst through the narrow glass doors of the pharmacy, begging for protection. He was immediately followed by a young man with a revolver, and an angry crowd screaming in Yiddish. Lawall didn’t speak the language, but there was no mistaking the young man’s intent as he strode purposely forward and raised his gun to the doctor’s head.

It was a grim, but recognizable tableau: the young man’s stance and grip were confident, clearly marking him as a budding gangster. The behavior of the crowd, on the other hand, made no sense at all. Innocent bystanders tended to run away from gang violence, yet the pushcart vendors and housewives surrounding the apparent holdup were not frightened, or even appealing for mercy. They were shouting, quite insistently, for the doctor’s execution. And everything seemed to indicate they were going to get what they wanted.

In the weeks that followed, blame would be pointed in nearly every direction⁠⁠—because at that moment, unbeknownst to Lawall, similar scenes were playing out all over the neighborhood, with other doctors, teachers, reporters, and even utility workers being assaulted by hordes of people howling at them in Yiddish. By the time it was over, the incident would be measured as one of the largest riots ever in New York City, and the confrontation at Lawall’s Pharmacy would be mentioned only in passing, if at all. Another name, however, would be repeated over and over again: Adeline E. Simpson, the principal of Public School No. 110.

For the toughest school in the city, P.S. 110’s architecture was surprisingly beautiful. Its five stories of white stone crowded the narrow sidewalk and ascended sharply upward, cutting through the street-level grime like a shaft of light. Where gargoyles would have traditionally stood, the roofline instead featured dozens of intricately carved owls⁠⁠—an homage to Florence Nightingale, who was famously fond of her pet owl, Athena, and who was technically the school’s namesake even if no one ever called it by anything but its number. Like the rest of the Lower East Side, the building’s pristine craftsmanship would soon be draped in a thick layer of grey soot, but in 1906, just three years after opening, it still stood as a proud testament to the Board of Education’s mission to prepare every child in New York City for a bright future, regardless of their background.

It didn’t take much, however, to recognize the façade for what it was. Behind the school’s decorative archways and wide, glass-paned windows sat roughly 2,400 children, all of whom lived within a one-block radius of the intersection at Broome and Cannon Streets. Any further, and they would have attended P.S. 92 instead, at Broome and Ridge, or P.S. 34 at Broome and Sheriff. “Some blocks seem to have a school on each of the four sides,” wrote a reporter for The Sun, and it wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Over at Hester and Essex, there were two schools immediately adjacent to one another, containing a total of more than 5,000 children under the age of 14, and Lawall’s Pharmacy itself was located between a pair of schools just 800 feet apart.

All told, there were about 565,000 registered school children in Manhattan in 1906, which, taking into account their adult relatives and the significant number of underaged dropouts, added up to as much as a quarter of a million people per square mile in some areas. (For comparison, in 2025, there were approximately 70,000 people per square mile living in Manhattan, though weekday commuters could push the density as high as 170,000.) Each September, school officials held their breath as they waited to find out how many young immigrants had arrived over the summer⁠⁠—and how badly their expansion estimates had been off. No one wanted a repeat of 1901, when they’d still had to turn away thousands of students for the year despite opening 11 new school buildings, filling some classes with as many as 60 children, and relegating hundreds in each campus to only a half-day of education each.

Those who did secure a desk had no complaints about the crowding, as their homes were usually worse. Tenement apartments averaged just 325 square feet, and often contained up to a dozen people and zero plumbing. During the summer months, charitable water wagons would trundle the neighborhood offering simple hydration, and when the city installed swimming tanks in the schools for water safety training, those on the Lower East Side quickly repurposed them as bathtubs for students who had no other opportunity.

This was the world in which principal Adeline E. Simpson strove to make a difference in the lives of her students at Public School No. 110. She was a stout woman, with short, tightly curled hair and a thin mouth that seemed to frown and smile simultaneously⁠⁠—your best friend or your worst enemy, the choice was yours. Simpson was a school principal to her core, and she loved her job so much she did it twice: after working all day at P.S. 110, she would walk a mile and a half to the opposite side of the district and serve as the principal of the night school for adult women until 9:30 each night. A second job also offset the fact that state law capped her salary at $2,500, compared to $3,500 for male principals.

Unlike the pharmacist Edmund Lawall, who existed at the frayed edges of the Lower East Side and perhaps had the luxury of feeling surprised by a gangster in his store, Simpson could look out her window and see one any time she liked. Directly across the street from P.S. 110 was a bird shop owned by the infamous “Monk” Eastman, which maintained a steady cash flow despite never selling a single bird. His relationship with violence was frighteningly casual: at one point, Eastman had begun shooting at the school for no reason other than target practice. As glass shattered and children screamed, Simpson marched across the street and lectured him the way only a school principal could. If Eastman didn’t care about dead children in general, she noted, he might at least care that his own children were inside the building. The lumpy, scarred gangster considered her for a moment, smoking weapon still in hand, then said, “You’re a good sport for not calling the cops.” He never troubled her again.

Yet Simpson was more than just a formidable authority. She cared deeply about her students and believed that every child had potential, an idea which was frankly laughable to many of her contemporaries. They’d tried to warn her, when she took the job, that P.S. 110 wasn’t just a bad school in a worse neighborhood. It had, over the years, been informally designated as a clearinghouse for what were known at the time as “backward” children; that is, children who suffered from cognitive, physical, or behavioral delays that left them unsuited to traditional education⁠⁠—and thus presumably destined for a life of crime and degeneracy. Of course, every school on the Lower East Side had struggling children on its roster, but at P.S. 110, there were at least 150 children in so-called “defectives classes,” who were three or more grades below what their ages would have indicated.

It only made her want the job more. Once she got there, in fact, Simpson actively encouraged her school’s status as the de facto junk bin, welcoming difficult students with open arms when no one else would. One such boy was Benjamin Apicello, who had been gathering firewood in the streets when he mistakenly picked up a “nice brown stick” that turned out to be a construction worker’s lost dynamite. The subsequent explosion in their kitchen had left Benjamin fully blind, and for five years his mother had been unable to find any school that would take him. When he finally enrolled at P.S. 110 at the age of 14, however, he wasn’t even the only blind student on campus⁠⁠—and in less than two years, Benjamin had caught up on his studies, graduated with honors, and was on his way to high school with the intention of becoming a lawyer.

But while Simpson’s individual victories could be impressive, her overall success rate remained sadly relative. Only around a third of her students made it to eighth-grade graduation, and of those, approximately 98 percent were girls. The gender gap was due, at least in part, to the parents: it was all too easy to give up on educating boys when menial labor seemed inevitable anyway. Officially, school was compulsory until age 14, but in reality, the “work certificate” program greased the wheels for would-be dropouts to exit the educational system. One boy who successfully applied for a work certificate at the Rochester Health Bureau was barely over 4 feet tall and weighed just 69 pounds. The evaluator admitted to being skeptical of his age⁠⁠—proven only by a handwritten baptismal record⁠⁠—but noted that his diminutive size could be explained by malnutrition. After all, he didn’t exactly look young. “Impressed upon his forehead were four distinct wrinkles, and at the corners of his small, red lidded eyes, crows’ feet were beginning to show.”

Unfortunately, while anyone could recognize that poverty led to illness, far fewer at the time were aware that illness can also lead to poverty. Proper nutrition and medical treatment were generally considered a benefit of success, rather than a necessity for achieving it, and many disadvantaged workers, including parents, saw no point in treating small maladies. One doctor at the time recalled a woman who, when alerted to her son’s mouthful of rotting cavities, replied sourly, “He don’t work with his teeth.” Another ignored her son’s ear infections until the boy was nearly deaf, yet remained unable to see the connection between his physical health and his failing grades. Instead, she blamed the school, and began threatening to withdraw him entirely and “put him on a paper-stand to do real work.”

Simpson, of course, did see the connection. Every single child in her defectives classes, she noted, suffered from one or more medical problems⁠⁠—and on the rare occasion that a parent did seek treatment, the child usually saw such improvement that they were promoted out of special education altogether. She was not completely alone in her observations: as far back as 1897, the New York Department of Health had employed a team of School Medical Inspectors to check for contagious outbreaks, and in 1901, they had expanded the program to include certified physicians who would screen the children for more general ailments. If any were discovered, a letter would be sent home to the parents encouraging them to visit a doctor, or else obtain free services at Mount Sinai Hospital if the family was unable to pay. But the letters were usually in English, and the few parents who could read them had oppressive work schedules that left no time for a 13-mile round trip to a hospital⁠⁠—especially when that facility offered none of the traditionally trusted remedies of their home countries. The cultural divide was so significant that many parents in the Lower East Side preferred to pay a neighborhood royfe (a fellow Russian-Jewish immigrant with some medical experience, but no formal training) rather than accept free treatment from the German-Jewish doctors of Mount Sinai, who were already Americanized by a generation or more. In the parents’ defense, the care was often comparable⁠⁠—penicillin was still more than 30 years away, and the effectiveness of handwashing in a medical setting would continue to be debated for another 60. But while the royfe was cheap, he wasn’t free, and this combined with all the other roadblocks to care meant that a significant number of immigrant children simply lived with their illnesses.

Simpson, however, didn’t believe in giving up. If the parents couldn’t take their children to the doctor, then she would bring the doctor to the children. The Educational Board was already paying for medical exams, she argued, so why not pay for the prescriptions and procedures, too? The money would be easily recouped in preventative savings, since by some estimates a single repeated school year could cost taxpayers as much as $86 per student, while medical treatment might require as little as 50 cents.

The Chief Inspector for the Schools, Dr. John J. Cronin, was in favor of the idea. But if such an experiment were undertaken, he said, it would need to be dramatically effective, in order to serve as a model for other schools to do the same. Cronin understood the politics of city funding, and he knew that a piecemeal operation⁠⁠—bringing in one optometrist for a few pairs of glasses, then one dentist for a handful of cavities, and so on⁠⁠—would not provide the strong evidence he needed to convince the Board of Education. They had to choose one affliction that would bring about the most improvement for the most children in a single visit.

The answer, they decided, was swollen adenoids. According to medical understanding at the time, adenoids were “fungal growths” in the sinuses, just above and behind the uvula, which could cause a host of serious symptoms, including blocked airways, interrupted sleep, and even hearing loss. In reality, adenoids are a part of the lymphatic system that can become inflamed for several reasons, and surgically removing them remains a key treatment today just as it was in 1906. More to the point, this was the kind of advanced procedure that Lower East Side parents were less likely to commit to, yet which doctors knew from experience could bring about immediate improvement in a child who was previously too lethargic to concentrate. It was also a stunningly common problem, afflicting more than half of the students in Simpson’s severely delayed classrooms.

While Cronin handled the medical arrangements, Simpson coordinated with the parents. Students were identified, permission slips were sent home, and while some came back with only a crude letter X on the signature line, all came back signed. On 21 June, just a week before classes were let out for the summer, Dr. Emil Meyer of Mount Sinai Hospital arrived at P.S. 110, along with eight nurses and eight physicians from the corps of medical inspectors. They paired off around chairs in an empty classroom, and as each child entered, Dr. Meyer swabbed their throat with an anesthetic which, given standard practice at the time, was almost certainly cocaine. The eight doctors worked so rapidly that each nurse barely had time to wipe the blood from her patient’s lips before the next one arrived, and in the end, they completed 83 operations in just 88 minutes. Then, for being such good sports, the children had an ice cream party.

It was, Simpson and Cronin agreed, an unqualified success. With a little healing, and three months of summer air flowing freely through their noses, one could only imagine how different these classrooms would look come September.

Six days later, however, all Gehenna broke loose.

It started with just one man, a “strange” figure who raced through the tenements on the morning of 27 June, knocking on doors and telling parents that they must hurry to P.S. 110 and rescue their children. It’s unclear whether he gave an exact reason, but according to Simpson, at least 25 parents later reported that they had been visited, and the narrative quickly became that school officials were slitting children’s throats.

To Jewish immigrants in 1906, this was not a far-fetched accusation⁠⁠—most had come to America to escape persecution, and the ongoing pogroms in Russia had been particularly brutal. In these parents’ experience, local authorities did sometimes decide to murder every Jew in the city, and they often started with the children. Some reports would later claim that the adenoid surgeries had directly sparked the rumor, as children returned home “drooling mouthfuls of blood” and “barely able to speak” to parents who had never understood what they were signing off on. But that theory didn’t realistically fit the timeline, as a full six days had already passed without complaint. Instead, Simpson said, she was quite sure that the instigator was a disgruntled royfe who had learned about the operations, and did not appreciate having his business cut into by school officials. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d caused trouble, Simpson said⁠⁠—four years earlier, a group of parents had rushed to Gouverneur Hospital on the rumor that a field trip for eye exams was actually meant to blind them, and back then, “these low-class doctors openly complained to me that their practice was being interfered with by the city authorities.”

But while the Gouverneur Hospital incident had been relatively small, something this time was different. Perhaps the constant newspaper coverage of Jewish deaths in Kishinev and Bialystok was weighing on the parents’ minds. Perhaps the early summer heat had put them on edge. Perhaps many were skeptical, but decided that it was easy enough to go and confirm the truth when the school was only a few hundred feet away. Or perhaps, as some suggested, the spark was not a man knocking on doors, but a scathing editorial about the adenoid surgeries in a Yiddish-language newspaper⁠⁠—though this pre-riot editorial, if it existed, has not been subsequently found. Regardless of the initial cause, by 10:45 that morning, tens of thousands of concerned parents had swarmed not just P.S. 110, but every single school on the Lower East Side.

Like the spread of a virus, most parents could point to another individual who had brought them into the fold. One of the earliest, according to The Sun, was “a hatless young Jewess with hair flying in the wind and the look of a mother tigress,” who reportedly ran across Broome Street toward P.S. 110 screaming, “The Christs are cutting my baby’s throat!” Others heard a different woman telling the crowd outside P.S. 110 that “they’ve killed four now and buried them in the cellar of the school.” A pushcart vendor five blocks away on Ludlow Street said that his sister-in-law had repeated the story to him, so he’d gone to his daughter’s school, P.S. 137, just “to see.” A plumber who had been working on Norfolk Street saw a handful of upset women outside P.S. 75, and initially approached to help calm them, but soon found himself smashing a length of lead pipe against the school doors and screaming, “Murderers!”

Each escalation brought more in kind. One mother entered P.S. 34 and assaulted a teacher who tried to prevent her from “dragging her six-year-old daughter down three flights of stairs by the hair.” Others who had been locked out of their children’s schools began throwing rocks, vegetables, and anything else they could get their hands on. Leon King, a tailor on Stanton Street, fought off four police officers “as though they had been straws,” then “leaped a high railing and attacked a door with his finger-nails, feet, teeth and head.” According to the principal of P.S. 4, “One man tore his hair out. When I say this I am not speaking figuratively. He put both hands to his head, and when he held his hands out there was a bunch of hair in each one. For the moment he was raving mad.”

The police response was swift, but inadequate. According to The Evening World (whose staff writer subscribed to the Yiddish editorial theory,) a handful of officers were already inside P.S. 4 on Rivington Street before the crowds gathered, preemptively escorting the anxious medical inspectors on their typical rounds. Many of these physicians were Jewish, and if The Evening World is to be believed, they fully anticipated what would happen on the streets after reading such an inflammatory news item around their own breakfast tables. On the other hand, this same article features numerous verifiable errors, and a flair for dramatic narrative that was unfortunately average for newspapers at the time. Several medical inspectors were indeed on duty that morning⁠⁠—including one especially unlucky doctor who happened to be leaving P.S. 36, at Ninth Street and Avenue C, just half a block away from an otherwise unremarkable pharmacy⁠⁠—but none of them mentioned any pre-emptive action from the police. According to most sources, law enforcement was as blindsided as anyone.

Nonetheless, they put forth an admirable effort. Most of the Lower East Side was covered by the Thirteenth Precinct under Captain Patrick Byrne, whose 97-year-old station house was described in the 1905 Annual Report for the Police Department as “old, unsanitary and badly adapted for police purposes.” Within minutes of the first call, every officer and reserve patrol in Byrne’s command was responding to one of the four schools within a one-block radius of the station house, with no hope of reaching any further. Yet when Byrne called for backup from Captain Cooney, of the Union Market station, and Captain Murtha on Eldridge Street, he was informed that both were engaged with nearly a dozen schools of their own. If anything, they were worse off: Captain Cooney had been violently assaulted by several women outside P.S. 188, and the only person left to rescue him had been the station’s doorman.

Meanwhile, Captain Murtha was engaged in a life-saving rescue of his own in front of Public School 20.

“Fools, to send your children to American schools!” a man had scolded the crowd from his perch on the playground fence. “They butcher your babies right and left. I can give you the names of many children that have been killed and buried in the school cellars. I can give you the addresses of⁠⁠—”

“Shut up,” yelled Detective Landers in Yiddish, “and come down out of there.”

“This is a free country,” retorted 24-year-old David Stern, “and it is my right under the Constitution to⁠⁠—”

“Constitution, hell!” said Landers, and grabbed Stern’s legs. Instantly, the crowd set upon him, pummeling Landers’ face and tearing off his clothes. For a moment it seemed as if his fellow officers would not be able to pull him free, but Landers was inspired by the realization that many in the crowd did not even know what they were protesting.

“This is a thief⁠⁠—out of the way!” he shouted, and the crowd relaxed long enough for him to escape with his rabble-rouser in tow.

By 11:00 am, horse-mounted reserves had galloped in from every precinct in lower Manhattan. Mounted officers were considered as effective as ten men on foot, but even by that math, the total responding force for the roughly 50,000 rioters was less than 300 police. At P.S. 137, across the street from the Essex Market courthouse, there were no police available at all, and the court magistrate was forced to suspend proceedings so that bailiffs could go outside and attempt to quell the rioting parents. One of these parents was a jeweler named Otto Gottlieb, who had taken up a spot on the courthouse steps and was still shouting “They’re cutting their heads off!” as a court official wrestled him to the ground. Magistrate Breen fined him a dollar on the spot without trial. The District Attorney, meanwhile, tried to shoulder his way through the crowd toward the front of the school, where a woman had somehow acquired a ladder and was attempting to break through a second-story window.

By now, most schools had locked their doors against the commotion, and the anger of the mob turned toward any target it could find. A telephone lineman was brutally beaten after his tools were mistaken for surgical instruments, and a pair of reporters claimed that their eyeglasses branded them as potential doctors, resulting in a violent fusillade of fruit from vendors’ carts and exhortations to “Kill the cutthroats!”

But the worst accessory of all was a white doctor’s coat, which one unfortunate man was still wearing when he found himself inside Lawall’s Pharmacy with his hands in the air, surrounded by a screaming crowd who had paused their assault only because a young man with a revolver seemed poised to take care of the problem.

If Lawall had phoned the police, he would no doubt have received the same non-answer as every other call that morning. But by a miraculous stroke of luck, a single patrolman named Burke saw a crowd descending upon the pharmacy on the heels of a fleeing doctor. Burke forced his way in behind them, raising his own gun and demanding the teenage gangster’s surrender. To the relief of only a few, he complied. The boy would later be identified as Max Scott of 643 East Thirteenth Street, and he would be sentenced to a fine without jail time.

Many others, however, were not yet safe, including the teachers inside the besieged schools. Some opened their doors, hoping that the parents would see their children were unharmed, and leave quietly. It didn’t work. “If a woman didn’t happen to find her child at once,” said principal Lizzie E. Rector of P.S. 4, “she set up a wail as if she had stumbled across its body.” Others went outside and attempted to address the crowd. “Your children are all right,” insisted principal Annie Boyne of P.S. 22. “I am a mother myself and will look out for your babies.” Rioters flung rocks at her in response. The district superintendent of schools, Julia Richman, took a firmer stance. When one well-dressed man tried to persuade her to sneak him past the locked doors, she told him that he should be ashamed of his foolishness. “I’m a Jewess myself, and I am sorry I have to talk this way to a man that speaks English as well as you do. You can see your child when school is dismissed.” He pushed past her, undeterred.

One by one, the principals realized that the safest⁠⁠—and realistically only⁠⁠—option was to cancel school for the day. But the subsequent flood of children into the streets only swelled the crowds and confusion. Some could not find their parents, while others had no interest in doing so, and a rush of several thousand children began loudly parading down Pitt Street, determined to enjoy their unexpected vacation. This, in turn, caused any parents still unaware of the commotion to hurry out of their tenements and join the fray.

One of the last schools to dismiss was P.S. 137, across from the courthouse, where the children had grown as dangerously panicked as the crowd outside. To open the doors between them now would surely result in someone getting trampled. Fortunately, several officers of the court had successfully made their way to the front of the school, and in a coordinated effort, they managed to force the line of parents back to the opposite side of Essex Street. On cue, principal Kate M. Stephens rang the gong signifying a fire drill, and in the brief pause that followed, a young teacher named Julia Hamburger began loudly singing the school song.

“Three cheers for the red, white and blue! Three cheers for the red, white and blue! Oh, the Army and Navy forever⁠⁠—Three cheers for the red, white and blue!”

Stunned into relative complacency, the children began to fall into their standard routine, lining up behind her and singing along as she clapped out the beat with shaking hands. The scene was so unexpectedly bizarre that it worked: the crowd outside hesitated as the doors to the school were thrown open and the children marched out in formation, their clear voices evidence of their uncut throats.

“It looked like pictures of the Crucifixion,” said Hamburger, who continued to solemnly guide them through the melee until each child had been recognized and snatched from the line with wails of relief. Once she was safely across the street, she sat down on the steps of the courthouse and wept.

Principal Simpson, for her part, claimed that there was no riot at her school⁠⁠—or at least, that it was over as soon as it began. One of her first actions as principal had been to replace the old disciplinary system with a policy of student self-government, in which the children collectively determined their own “charter” through elected representatives, and rule-breakers were fully prosecuted and defended by classmates before an adolescent judge. It had taken several years for the cultural shift to take hold, but eventually the program became so successful that the children would even remonstrate with each other outside of school, such as when one student heard a classmate speaking rudely to his mother, and took the time to knock on his door and ask if that was “what you were taught in Public School 110.” On the day of the riot, Simpson said, the halls were being monitored by student leaders, as usual, so when the frantic parents arrived they were immediately calmed by the sight of self-assured children, who then escorted them to the appropriate classrooms without a fuss. She later told an interviewer that her school had not even needed to be dismissed, and most sources agree.

In the end, despite 50,000 rioters and countless acts of assault (not to mention 83 adenoidectomies of dubious consent), the fallout from the day’s violence included just three arrests, and zero deaths. By mid-afternoon, tempers had largely subsided, and while some schools chose to cancel that day’s graduation ceremonies, others managed to peacefully hold them in the evening. District superintendent Julia Richman made a personal appearance at P.S. 75 to chastise the parents.

“The idea of believing that children were being killed and buried in cellars!” she marveled incredulously. The audience laughed, but she wasn’t having it. “Why didn’t you laugh this morning?” she demanded. “These rooms should be emptied of your children for a few months, and your silly mothers sent here for a term or two instead.”

It was an unfair generalization⁠⁠—the school Richman was standing in still bore the marks of a father’s lead plumbing pipe on the door⁠⁠—but in lieu of outright antisemitism, many tacitly agreed that it was safe to blame the women. “Crazed Women Storm Schools on East Side” read the headline for the Times Union the next day; “Women Rush to Schools” declared The Brooklyn Citizen. “Now that the region has reduced excitement to a science,” wrote a reporter for The Sun, “the woman-made panic is the best thing the East Side does.”

Other papers, however, were not so dismissive. “A refugee generation can never quite overcome such alarm,” wrote The Buffalo Enquirer, “nor completely trust the faith of a new land.” A few even directly condemned Simpson’s experiment. “To go into a schoolhouse and remove adenoids wholesale,” said a reporter for The Standard Union, “is as absurd as it would be to go down the line pulling teeth, or performing the Lorenz operation for congenital hip disease.”

Two anonymous teachers, meanwhile, wrote to the editor of the New-York Tribune declaring that the real blame fell on journalists, whose “highly sensational accounts” of the riot had directly caused a smaller riot among Italian immigrant parents just one day later. (This, too, had been sensationalized by the same paper, only with swapped stereotypes: “Three schools… were mobbed by purple skirted, red ‘kerchiefed women. The janitor of one building was slightly stabbed by a stiletto in the hands of an infuriated mother, and several children were found to be characteristically armed with knives to repel the anticipated assaults of health doctors.”)

But despite the violence, indignation, and verbal sparring that continued well into the new year, Simpson regretted nothing. The students whose adenoids had been removed did, in fact, return in the fall showing major cognitive improvement, and both she and Chief Inspector Cronin assured the Board of Education that the riot had been an inevitable side effect of an otherwise incredibly successful operation. If anything, said Cronin, they should be happy that the bandage had been fully ripped off, because “after you have one good [riot], there are no more.”

This statement was demonstrably untrue, but many state officials nonetheless began to recognize the financial value in treating the ailments of the poor. Funding for the medical inspection program was significantly increased, on the condition that the money would go toward hiring more inspectors, rather than medical procedures. “We made that blunder once,” agreed Superintendent Richman, “and we will not do it again.”

By June of 1907, just one year after the riots, the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital had to make a public plea for more charitable funding, as “adenoid and tonsil operations performed in the hospital have greatly increased in number… and though it increases the expenses of the hospital, it is more than justified by the results.”

Simpson never again received the same level of publicity as she did in the summer of 1906, but she continued to be praised in the papers every few years for various innovations, including teaching her eighth-graders how to sew their own graduation gowns in aspiration of high school, adding Latin to the curriculum at her night school for women, and overseeing one of the first racially integrated middle schools in the city. Her ongoing implementation of student self-government received several glowing profiles as well as a nod in a college textbook, and in 1933, she testified before the United States Senate on her experience in treating causes, rather than symptoms. “Medicine is progressively solving its problems by prevention of disease, instead of through cure,” she said. “[Degeneracy] requires most expert surgery for the eradication of its poisonous seeds.”

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