5 Things a 1925 Brooklyn Kid’s Dream Job Reveals

Picture a hot June day in 1925 Brooklyn. Streetcars rattle past tenements, boys in knickers hang off the back of trucks, and a newspaper man with a camera stops a knot of kids on the sidewalk.

He is the “Inquiring Photographer,” a feature common in big-city papers. His question is simple: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The answers, printed under grainy photos the next day, sound innocent. Doctor. Fireman. Teacher. Maybe aviator, if a kid has been reading about Charles Lindbergh’s mail flights.

But those answers were not just cute quotes. What a Brooklyn child in 1925 said about their future sat at the crossroads of immigration, industrial work, women’s rights, and the coming consumer age. When kids in 1925 Brooklyn said what they wanted to be, they were really telling you what they thought was possible.

Here are five things that simple sidewalk question reveals about America in 1925, and why it mattered for the century that followed.

1. Dream jobs were already shaped by class and immigration

On paper, the question “What do you want to be?” sounds wide open. In 1925 Brooklyn, it was anything but. A child’s answer usually echoed the limits of their parents’ lives, their neighborhood, and their family’s passport stamp.

Brooklyn in the 1920s was packed with first- and second-generation immigrants: Italians in Bensonhurst, Jews in Brownsville and Williamsburg, Irish and Germans in Bay Ridge and Greenpoint. Many parents worked in low-paid jobs, from garment factories to longshore work on the docks. Their children read about presidents and explorers, but they watched fathers come home from the pier and mothers take in piecework sewing.

So when a kid told the Inquiring Photographer, “I want to be a lawyer,” that answer carried weight. Law, medicine, engineering and teaching were the classic “up and out” professions for immigrant families. The sons of Eastern European Jews in Brownsville, for example, would go on to dominate New York’s public high schools in the 1930s and 1940s and feed into the city’s law and medical schools. A boy like future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had been a poor immigrant kid on the Lower East Side a generation earlier, was already a model of what education could do.

On the other hand, a child might say “I want to work in an office” or “I want to be a mechanic.” Those were not small dreams. In a tenement where the father pushed a pushcart or worked irregular shifts, a steady clerical job or skilled trade meant security, shorter hours, and less physical danger.

Class showed up in what kids did not say. Very few children of dockworkers or factory hands would have answered “I want to be an artist” or “I want to be a writer.” That kind of creative ambition tended to come from families with a bit of cushion, or at least from kids who had already been singled out by a teacher as “college material.”

A concrete example of this path is Fiorello La Guardia. He was older than the 1925 kids, but his story was familiar. Born to Italian immigrant parents, he grew up poor, worked in low-level consular jobs, studied law at night, and became a lawyer and then mayor of New York City in 1934. Thousands of Brooklyn kids in 1925 were dreaming some version of that same climb.

Those sidewalk answers mattered because they show how tightly class and immigration framed a child’s imagination. The American Dream was real enough to name, but it usually came wrapped in very specific job titles.

2. Girls’ answers ran into the hard wall of 1920s gender roles

When a Brooklyn girl in 1925 told the Inquiring Photographer what she wanted to be, she was answering a different question than the boys. She was really being asked: Will you work at all, and if so, until when?

Women had just won the right to vote in 1920. Flappers were dancing in Manhattan nightclubs. Magazine covers showed young women driving cars and playing tennis. On the surface, the 1920s looked like a new era for girls.

Underneath, expectations were stubborn. Middle-class girls were still steered toward “respectable” female jobs: teacher, nurse, secretary, telephone operator. Working-class girls often left school by 14 or 15 and went into factories, shops, or domestic service. Marriage was assumed. Paid work was often framed as a temporary stage before becoming a wife and mother.

So a Brooklyn girl who said “I want to be a teacher” was not just parroting a cliché. Teaching was one of the few professions where women could have authority, a steady salary, and some social respect. In New York City, women already made up the bulk of public school teachers by the 1920s. A girl might have had a real model in front of her: a strict but educated woman at the blackboard who had her own income.

Some girls did aim higher, and the decade produced examples they might have read about. In 1925, Dr. Sara Josephine Baker, a New York City physician, was famous for her work in public health and saving infants in poor neighborhoods. Amelia Earhart had not yet made her solo Atlantic flight, but women pilots like Bessie Coleman were already in the news. A Brooklyn girl who said “doctor” or “flyer” was pushing against the grain.

Yet even ambitious girls ran into real barriers. Medical schools and law schools admitted very few women. Employers openly fired women when they married. Newspapers themselves often treated girls’ answers as cute or sentimental, while boys’ answers were framed as serious ambition.

Those 1925 answers from Brooklyn girls mattered because they reveal a generation standing at a hinge point. The jobs they could name were still narrow, but some were already imagining careers their mothers had been barred from.

3. Race and segregation quietly narrowed Black children’s dreams

Most surviving “Inquiring Photographer” features from 1920s New York show white faces. That silence tells its own story. Black children in Brooklyn and nearby Harlem were answering the same question in their own heads, but the newspaper rarely printed their words.

In 1925, the Great Migration was reshaping northern cities. Black families were moving from the Jim Crow South to New York, Chicago, Detroit and beyond. Brooklyn’s Black population was smaller than Harlem’s but growing, especially in areas like Bedford-Stuyvesant. Parents worked as porters, domestics, laborers, and in a few cases as teachers or small business owners.

A Black boy in Brooklyn who said “I want to be a lawyer” or “I want to be a doctor” was facing a steeper climb than his white classmate. Northern schools were not legally segregated like Southern ones, but discrimination was real. Black students were tracked into vocational courses. Professional schools and employers often shut them out.

Yet there were visible Black role models in New York by 1925. In Harlem, physician Louis T. Wright worked at Harlem Hospital and fought for better care for Black patients. The NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, regularly profiled Black professionals. Kids could read about Charles Hamilton Houston studying law, or about Black teachers and principals in segregated Southern schools who were community leaders.

Closer to Brooklyn, the Black press gave its own version of the “inquiring photographer” question. Papers like the New York Amsterdam News ran stories about young Black graduates and their ambitions. Those articles show a pattern: many Black youths named teaching, ministry, and small business ownership as realistic goals, with a smaller number daring to say law or medicine.

The gap between what Black children wanted and what they could get would fuel activism. The very fact that a Black child’s dream job was blocked by race, not talent, became part of the argument for civil rights. When Thurgood Marshall argued Brown v. Board of Education in the 1950s, he was fighting for those kids whose answers had been quietly dismissed.

So the missing voices in a 1925 Brooklyn photo spread matter. They remind us that the question “What do you want to be?” was never race-neutral, and that some children’s ambitions were filtered out before they even reached the printed page.

4. New technology and mass media were already rewriting kids’ dreams

If you had asked a Brooklyn child in 1885 about their future, you would have heard a lot of farmers, shopkeepers, and tradesmen. By 1925, the list had changed. Technology and mass media were putting new jobs in kids’ heads.

The 1920s were the first decade when radio, movies, and mass-circulation magazines reached millions of homes. Brooklyn kids could sit in dark theaters and watch silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin or Clara Bow. They could hear radio announcers calling baseball games or read about pilots in pulp magazines.

So when a boy answered “I want to be a movie actor” or “I want to be a baseball player,” he was tapping into a new kind of dream: celebrity. Babe Ruth was smashing home run records for the New York Yankees. The Brooklyn Robins (soon to be the Dodgers) played at Ebbets Field, drawing local kids who might fantasize about taking the field themselves.

Aviation was another magnet. In 1925, Charles Lindbergh was still a mail pilot, but stories of World War I aces and barnstorming flyers filled the press. A child who said “I want to be an aviator” was reaching for the newest, most glamorous technology of the age. Within two years, Lindbergh’s 1927 solo Atlantic flight would trigger a wave of aviation obsession among American youth.

Even more modest answers showed the pull of new tech. A kid might say “I want to work with radios” or “I want to be an engineer.” The word “engineer” itself was expanding. It no longer meant just railroad engineer at the throttle of a steam locomotive. It now included electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, and radio technicians.

One concrete example of this shift is Philo Farnsworth, a farm boy in Utah who, as a teenager in the 1920s, dreamed of transmitting pictures electronically and went on to help invent television. He was not a Brooklyn kid, but he was part of the same generation whose imaginations were being wired to machines.

Those 1925 sidewalk answers show how quickly new technology can change what children think is possible. Within a single generation, the dream job list had moved from local, familiar roles to national and even global fantasies.

5. The question itself marked a turning point in how we see childhood

There is one more thing hiding in that Inquiring Photographer’s question. The very idea of stopping a child on the street to ask about their future was relatively new.

In the 19th century, many children did not get to imagine a future job at all. They were already working. In 1900, roughly 1 in 5 American children between 10 and 15 was employed, often in factories, mines, or farms. Childhood was short and harsh, especially for the poor.

By 1925, that was changing. Progressive reformers like Florence Kelley and organizations like the National Child Labor Committee had pushed for child labor laws. New York State had passed restrictions that kept most under-14s out of factories and required school attendance. The idea that children should be in classrooms, not mills, was taking hold.

So when a Brooklyn photographer asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he was participating in a new cultural script. Childhood was being reimagined as a protected stage of life where you prepared for the future instead of just surviving the present.

Schools fed this shift. New York City’s public schools were expanding high school access in the 1920s. Guidance counseling was in its infancy, but teachers were already sorting kids into academic and vocational tracks. The question “What do you want to be?” was starting to appear in classrooms and advice columns, not just on the sidewalk.

Psychologists like G. Stanley Hall had begun to argue that adolescence was a distinct phase, with its own needs and possibilities. That idea filtered into popular magazines and parenting advice. Asking a 10- or 12-year-old about their future career became a way of treating them as a person with an inner life, not just a small worker.

We can see the long-term impact in how normal the question feels today. Every modern child hears it dozens of times. That 1925 Brooklyn feature is an early snapshot of this shift, catching the moment when children’s dreams became a subject of public curiosity.

The question mattered because it marked a cultural turn. Americans were starting to see children not just as dependents, but as future workers and citizens whose hopes were worth printing.

So what do those Brooklyn kids’ answers leave us with a century later?

They remind us that dream jobs are never just personal. In 1925, a child’s answer carried the weight of their parents’ wages, their gender, their race, the latest technology, and a changing idea of what childhood was for.

Some of those kids would have their dreams crushed by the Great Depression just four years later. Others would ride the postwar boom into the very professions they named on the sidewalk. A few might have become the teachers, doctors, or engineers who, in turn, asked the next generation the same question.

When we look back at that Inquiring Photographer in Brooklyn, stopping kids on a summer day in 1925, we are not just seeing cute answers. We are catching the early outlines of the modern world of work, and of the hopes that still shape it.