Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Diane Monico, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
THE SPIRIT OF YOUTH AND
THE CITY STREETS
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
OF CANADA, LIMITED
TORONTO
THE
SPIRIT OF YOUTH
AND THE CITY STREETS
_By_
JANE ADDAMS
HULL HOUSE, CHICAGO
_Author of Democracy and Social Ethics
Newer Ideals of Peace, etc._
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1930
COPYRIGHT, 1909,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1909
Norwood Press:
Berwick & Smith Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO MY DEAR FRIEND
Louise de Koben Bowen
WITH SINCERE ADMIRATION FOR HER UNDERSTANDING OF THE NEEDS OF CITY
CHILDREN AND WITH WARM APPRECIATION OF HER SERVICE AS PRESIDENT OF THE
JUVENILE PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION OF CHICAGO
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Youth in the City 3
CHAPTER II
The Wrecked Foundations of Domesticity 25
CHAPTER III
The Quest for Adventure 51
CHAPTER IV
The House of Dreams 75
CHAPTER V
The Spirit of Youth and Industry 107
CHAPTER VI
The Thirst for Righteousness 139
FOREWORD
Much of the material in the following pages has appeared in current
publications. It is here presented in book form in the hope that it
may prove of value to those groups of people who in many cities are
making a gallant effort to minimize the dangers which surround young
people and to provide them with opportunities for recreation.
CHAPTER I
YOUTH IN THE CITY
Nothing is more certain than that each generation longs for a
reassurance as to the value and charm of life, and is secretly afraid
lest it lose its sense of the youth of the earth. This is doubtless
one reason why it so passionately cherishes its poets and artists who
have been able to explore for themselves and to reveal to others the
perpetual springs of life's self-renewal.
And yet the average man cannot obtain this desired reassurance through
literature, nor yet through glimpses of earth and sky. It can come to
him only through the chance embodiment of joy and youth which life
itself may throw in his way. It is doubtless true that for the mass of
men the message is never so unchallenged and so invincible as when
embodied in youth itself. One generation after another has depended
upon its young to equip it with gaiety and enthusiasm, to persuade it
that living is a pleasure, until men everywhere have anxiously
provided channels through which this wine of life might flow, and be
preserved for their delight. The classical city promoted play with
careful solicitude, building the theater and stadium as it built the
market place and the temple. The Greeks held their games so integral a
part of religion and patriotism that they came to expect from their
poets the highest utterances at the very moments when the sense of
pleasure released the national life. In the medieval city the knights
held their tourneys, the guilds their pageants, the people their
dances, and the church made festival for its most cherished saints
with gay street processions, and presented a drama in which no less a
theme than the history of creation became a matter of thrilling
interest. Only in the modern city have men concluded that it is no
longer necessary for the municipality to provide for the insatiable
desire for play. In so far as they have acted upon this conclusion,
they have entered upon a most difficult and dangerous experiment; and
this at the very moment when the city has become distinctly
industrial, and daily labor is continually more monotonous and
subdivided. We forget how new the modern city is, and how short the
span of time in which we have assumed that we can eliminate public
provision for recreation.
A further difficulty lies in the fact that this industrialism has
gathered together multitudes of eager young creatures from all
quarters of the earth as a labor supply for the countless factories
and workshops, upon which the present industrial city is based. Never
before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly
released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk
unattended upon city streets and to work under alien roofs; for the
first time they are being prized more for their labor power than for
their innocence, their tender beauty, their ephemeral gaiety. Society
cares more for the products they manufacture than for their immemorial
ability to reaffirm the charm of existence. Never before have such
numbers of young boys earned money independently of the family life,
and felt themselves free to spend it as they choose in the midst of
vice deliberately disguised as pleasure.
This stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play
has, of course, brought about a fine revenge. The love of pleasure
will not be denied, and when it has turned into all sorts of malignant
and vicious appetites, then we, the middle aged, grow quite distracted
and resort to all sorts of restrictive measures. We even try to dam up
the sweet fountain itself because we are affrighted by these neglected
streams; but almost worse than the restrictive measures is our
apparent belief that the city itself has no obligation in the matter,
an assumption upon which the modern city turns over to commercialism
practically all the provisions for public recreation.
Quite as one set of men has organized the young people into industrial
enterprises in order to profit from their toil, so another set of men
and also of women, I am sorry to say, have entered the neglected field
of recreation and have organized enterprises which make profit out of
this invincible love of pleasure.
In every city arise so-called "places"--"gin-palaces," they are
called in fiction; in Chicago we euphemistically say merely
"places,"--in which alcohol is dispensed, not to allay thirst, but,
ostensibly to stimulate gaiety, it is sold really in order to empty
pockets. Huge dance halls are opened to which hundreds of young people
are attracted, many of whom stand wistfully outside a roped circle,
for it requires five cents to procure within it for five minutes the
sense of allurement and intoxication which is sold in lieu of innocent
pleasure. These coarse and illicit merrymakings remind one of the
unrestrained jollities of Restoration London, and they are indeed
their direct descendants, properly commercialized, still confusing joy
with lust, and gaiety with debauchery. Since the soldiers of Cromwell
shut up the people's playhouses and destroyed their pleasure fields,
the Anglo-Saxon city has turned over the provision for public
recreation to the most evil-minded and the most unscrupulous members
of the community. We see thousands of girls walking up and down the
streets on a pleasant evening with no chance to catch a sight of
pleasure even through a lighted window, save as these lurid places
provide it. Apparently the modern city sees in these girls only two
possibilities, both of them commercial: first, a chance to utilize by
day their new and tender labor power in its factories and shops, and
then another chance in the evening to extract from them their petty
wages by pandering to their love of pleasure.
As these overworked girls stream along the street, the rest of us see
only the self-conscious walk, the giggling speech, the preposterous
clothing. And yet through the huge hat, with its wilderness of
bedraggled feathers, the girl announces to the world that she is here.
She demands attention to the fact of her existence, she states that
she is ready to live, to take her place in the world. The most
precious moment in human development is the young creature's assertion
that he is unlike any other human being, and has an individual
contribution to make to the world. The variation from the established
type is at the root of all change, the only possible basis for
progress, all that keeps life from growing unprofitably stale and
repetitious.
Is it only the artists who really see these young creatures as they
are--the artists who are themselves endowed with immortal youth? Is it
our disregard of the artist's message which makes us so blind and so
stupid, or are we so under the influence of our _Zeitgeist_ that we
can detect only commercial values in the young as well as in the old?
It is as if our eyes were holden to the mystic beauty, the redemptive
joy, the civic pride which these multitudes of young people might
supply to our dingy towns.
The young creatures themselves piteously look all about them in order
to find an adequate means of expression for their most precious
message: One day a serious young man came to Hull-House with his
pretty young sister who, he explained, wanted to go somewhere every
single evening, "although she could only give the flimsy excuse that
the flat was too little and too stuffy to stay in." In the difficult
rôle of elder brother, he had done his best, stating that he had taken
her "to all the missions in the neighborhood, that she had had a
chance to listen to some awful good sermons and to some elegant hymns,
but that some way she did not seem to care for the society of the best
Christian people." The little sister reddened painfully under this
cruel indictment and could offer no word of excuse, but a curious
thing happened to me. Perhaps it was the phrase "the best Christian
people," perhaps it was the delicate color of her flushing cheeks and
her swimming eyes, but certain it is, that instantly and vividly there
appeared to my mind the delicately tinted piece of wall in a Roman
catacomb where the early Christians, through a dozen devices of spring
flowers, skipping lambs and a shepherd tenderly guiding the young, had
indelibly written down that the Christian message is one of
inexpressible joy. Who is responsible for forgetting this message
delivered by the "best Christian people" two thousand years ago? Who
is to blame that the lambs, the little ewe lambs, have been so caught
upon the brambles?
But quite as the modern city wastes this most valuable moment in the
life of the girl, and drives into all sorts of absurd and obscure
expressions her love and yearning towards the world in which she
forecasts her destiny, so it often drives the boy into gambling and
drinking in order to find his adventure.
Of Lincoln's enlistment of two and a half million soldiers, a very
large number were under twenty-one, some of them under eighteen, and
still others were mere children under fifteen. Even in those stirring
times when patriotism and high resolve were at the flood, no one
responded as did "the boys," and the great soul who yearned over them,
who refused to shoot the sentinels who slept the sleep of childhood,
knew, as no one else knew, the precious glowing stuff of which his
army was made. But what of the millions of boys who are now searching
for adventurous action, longing to fulfil the same high purpose?
One of the most pathetic sights in the public dance halls of Chicago
is the number of young men, obviously honest young fellows from the
country, who stand about vainly hoping to make the acquaintance of
some "nice girl." They look eagerly up and down the rows of girls,
many of whom are drawn to the hall by the same keen desire for
pleasure and social intercourse which the lonely young men themselves
feel.
One Sunday night at twelve o'clock I had occasion to go into a large
public dance hall. As I was standing by the rail looking for the girl
I had come to find, a young man approached me and quite simply asked
me to introduce him to some "nice girl," saying that he did not know
any one there. On my replying that a public dance hall was not the
best place in which to look for a nice girl, he said: "But I don't
know any other place where there is a chance to meet any kind of a
girl. I'm awfully lonesome since I came to Chicago." And then he added
rather defiantly: "Some nice girls do come here! It's one of the best
halls in town." He was voicing the "bitter loneliness" that many city
men remember to have experienced during the first years after they had
"come up to town." Occasionally the right sort of man and girl meet
each other in these dance halls and the romance with such a tawdry
beginning ends happily and respectably. But, unfortunately, mingled
with the respectable young men seeking to form the acquaintance of
young women through the only channel which is available to them, are
many young fellows of evil purpose, and among the girls who have left
their lonely boarding houses or rigid homes for a "little fling" are
likewise women who openly desire to make money from the young men whom
they meet, and back of it all is the desire to profit by the sale of
intoxicating and "doctored" drinks.
Perhaps never before have the pleasures of the young and mature become
so definitely separated as in the modern city. The public dance halls
filled with frivolous and irresponsible young people in a feverish
search for pleasure, are but a sorry substitute for the old dances on
the village green in which all of the older people of the village
participated. Chaperonage was not then a social duty but natural and
inevitable, and the whole courtship period was guarded by the
conventions and restraint which were taken as a matter of course and
had developed through years of publicity and simple propriety.
The only marvel is that the stupid attempt to put the fine old wine
of traditional country life into the new bottles of the modern town
does not lead to disaster oftener than it does, and that the wine so
long remains pure and sparkling.
We cannot afford to be ungenerous to the city in which we live without
suffering the penalty which lack of fair interpretation always
entails. Let us know the modern city in its weakness and wickedness,
and then seek to rectify and purify it until it shall be free at least
from the grosser temptations which now beset the young people who are
living in its tenement houses and working in its factories. The mass
of these young people are possessed of good intentions and they are
equipped with a certain understanding of city life. This itself could
be made a most valuable social instrument toward securing innocent
recreation and better social organization. They are already serving
the city in so far as it is honeycombed with mutual benefit societies,
with "pleasure clubs," with organizations connected with churches and
factories which are filling a genuine social need. And yet the whole
apparatus for supplying pleasure is wretchedly inadequate and full of
danger to whomsoever may approach it. Who is responsible for its
inadequacy and dangers? We certainly cannot expect the fathers and
mothers who have come to the city from farms or who have emigrated
from other lands to appreciate or rectify these dangers. We cannot
expect the young people themselves to cling to conventions which are
totally unsuited to modern city conditions, nor yet to be equal to the
task of forming new conventions through which this more agglomerate
social life may express itself. Above all we cannot hope that they
will understand the emotional force which seizes them and which, when
it does not find the traditional line of domesticity, serves as a
cancer in the very tissues of society and as a disrupter of the
securest social bonds. No attempt is made to treat the manifestations
of this fundamental instinct with dignity or to give it possible
social utility. The spontaneous joy, the clamor for pleasure, the
desire of the young people to appear finer and better and altogether
more lovely than they really are, the idealization not only of each
other but of the whole earth which they regard but as a theater for
their noble exploits, the unworldly ambitions, the romantic hopes, the
make-believe world in which they live, if properly utilized, what
might they not do to make our sordid cities more beautiful, more
companionable? And yet at the present moment every city is full of
young people who are utterly bewildered and uninstructed in regard to
the basic experience which must inevitably come to them, and which has
varied, remote, and indirect expressions.
Even those who may not agree with the authorities who claim that it is
this fundamental sex susceptibility which suffuses the world with its
deepest meaning and beauty, and furnishes the momentum towards all
art, will perhaps permit me to quote the classical expression of this
view as set forth in that ancient and wonderful conversation between
Socrates and the wise woman Diotima. Socrates asks: "What are they
doing who show all this eagerness and heat which is called love? And
what is the object they have in view? Answer me." Diotima replies: "I
will teach you. The object which they have in view is birth in beauty,
whether of body or soul.... For love, Socrates, is not as you imagine
the love of the beautiful only ... but the love of birth in beauty,
because to the mortal creature generation is a sort of eternity and
immortality."
To emphasize the eternal aspects of love is not of course an easy
undertaking, even if we follow the clue afforded by the heart of every
generous lover. His experience at least in certain moments tends to
pull him on and out from the passion for one to an enthusiasm for that
highest beauty and excellence of which the most perfect form is but an
inadequate expression. Even the most loutish tenement-house youth
vaguely feels this, and at least at rare intervals reveals it in his
talk to his "girl." His memory unexpectedly brings hidden treasures to
the surface of consciousness and he recalls the more delicate and
tender experiences of his childhood and earlier youth. "I remember the
time when my little sister died, that I rode out to the cemetery
feeling that everybody in Chicago had moved away from the town to
make room for that kid's funeral, everything was so darned lonesome
and yet it was kind of peaceful too." Or, "I never had a chance to go
into the country when I was a kid, but I remember one day when I had
to deliver a package way out on the West Side, that I saw a flock of
sheep in Douglas Park. I had never thought that a sheep could be
anywhere but in a picture, and when I saw those big white spots on the
green grass beginning to move and to turn into sheep, I felt exactly
as if Saint Cecilia had come out of her frame over the organ and was
walking in the park." Such moments come into the life of the most
prosaic youth living in the most crowded quarters of the cities. What
do we do to encourage and to solidify those moments, to make them come
true in our dingy towns, to give them expression in forms of art?
We not only fail in this undertaking but even debase existing forms of
art. We are informed by high authority that there is nothing in the
environment to which youth so keenly responds as to music, and yet the
streets, the vaudeville shows, the five-cent theaters are full of the
most blatant and vulgar songs. The trivial and obscene words, the
meaningless and flippant airs run through the heads of hundreds of
young people for hours at a time while they are engaged in monotonous
factory work. We totally ignore that ancient connection between music
and morals which was so long insisted upon by philosophers as well as
poets. The street music has quite broken away from all control, both
of the educator and the patriot, and we have grown singularly careless
in regard to its influence upon young people. Although we legislate
against it in saloons because of its dangerous influence there, we
constantly permit music on the street to incite that which should be
controlled, to degrade that which should be exalted, to make sensuous
that which might be lifted into the realm of the higher imagination.
Our attitude towards music is typical of our carelessness towards all
those things which make for common joy and for the restraints of
higher civilization on the streets. It is as if our cities had not yet
developed a sense of responsibility in regard to the life of the
streets, and continually forget that recreation is stronger than
vice, and that recreation alone can stifle the lust for vice.
Perhaps we need to take a page from the philosophy of the Greeks to
whom the world of fact was also the world of the ideal, and to whom
the realization of what ought to be, involved not the destruction of
what was, but merely its perfecting upon its own lines. To the Greeks
virtue was not a hard conformity to a law felt as alien to the natural
character, but a free expression of the inner life. To treat thus the
fundamental susceptibility of sex which now so bewilders the street
life and drives young people themselves into all sorts of
difficulties, would mean to loosen it from the things of sense and to
link it to the affairs of the imagination. It would mean to fit to
this gross and heavy stuff the wings of the mind, to scatter from it
"the clinging mud of banality and vulgarity," and to speed it on
through our city streets amid spontaneous laughter, snatches of lyric
song, the recovered forms of old dances, and the traditional rondels
of merry games. It would thus bring charm and beauty to the prosaic
city and connect it subtly with the arts of the past as well as with
the vigor and renewed life of the future.