WOMAN'S HELPING HAND TO THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER
Annie, Sadie, Edna, thousands of girls like them, girls of whom almost
identical stories might be told, help to swell the long procession of
prodigals every succeeding year. They joined that procession ignorantly
because they thirsted for pleasure. Their days were without interest,
their minds were unfurnished with any resources. At fourteen most of
them left public school. Reading and writing are about as much
intellectual accomplishments as the school gives them, and the work
waiting for them in factory, mill, or department store is rarely of a
character to increase their intelligence.
Ask a girl, "Why do you go to the dance hall? Why don't you stay home
evenings?" Nine times in ten her answer will be: "What should I do with
myself, sitting home and twirling my fingers?"
If you suggest reading, she will reply: "You can't be reading all the
time." In other words, there is no intellectual impulse, but instead an
instinct for action.
The crowded tenement, the city slum, an oppressive system of ill-paid
labor, these are evils which a gradually developing social conscience
must one day eliminate. Their tenure will not be disturbed to-day,
to-morrow, or next day. Their evil influence can be offset, in some
measure, by a recognition on the part of the community of a debt,--a
debt to youth.
The joy of life, inherent in every young creature, including the young
human creature, seeks expression in play, in merriment, and will not be
denied.
The oldest, the most persistent, the most attractive, the most
satisfying expression of the joy of life is the dance. Other forms of
recreation come in for brief periods, but their vogue is always
transitory. The roller skating craze, for example, waxed, waned, and
disappeared. Moving pictures and the nickelodeon have had their day, and
are now passing. The charm, the passion, the lure of the dance remains
perennial. It never wholly disappears. It always returns.
In New York City alone there are three hundred saloon dance halls. Three
hundred dens of evil where every night in the year gallons of liquid
damnation are forced down the throats of unwilling drinkers! Where
the bodies and souls of thousands of girls are annually destroyed,
because the young are irresistibly drawn toward joy, and because we, all
of us, good people, busy people, indifferent people, unseeing people,
have permitted joy to become commercialized, have turned it into a
commodity to be used for money profit by the worst elements in society.
Could a more inverted scheme of things have been devised in a madhouse?
New York is by no means unique. Every city has its dance hall problem;
every small town its girl and boy problem; every country-side its
tragedy of the girl who, for relief from monotony, goes to the city and
never returns.
It is strange that nowhere, until lately, in city, town, or country, has
it occurred to any one that the community owed anything to this
insatiable thirst for joy.
Consider, for instance, the age-long indifference of the oldest of all
guardians of virtue, the Christian Church. To the demand for joy the
evangelical church has returned the stern reply: "To play cards, to go
to the theater, above all, to dance, is wicked." The Methodist Church,
for one, has this baleful theory written in its book of discipline, and
persistent efforts on the part of enlightened clergy and lay members
have utterly failed to expurgate it. The Catholic, Episcopalian, and
Lutheran churches utter no such strictures, but in effect they defend
the theory that joy, if not in itself an evil, at least is no necessity
of life.
To meet the growing social discontent, the increasing indifference to
old forms of religion, the open dissatisfaction with religious
organizations which had degenerated into clubs for rich men, there was
developed some years ago in America the "institutional church." This was
an honest effort to give to church members, and to those likely to
become church members, opportunity for social and intellectual
diversion. Parish houses and settlements were established, and these
were furnished with splendid gymnasiums, club rooms, committee rooms,
auditoriums for concerts and lectures, kitchens for cooking lessons, and
provision besides for basketry, sewing, and embroidery classes. These
are all good, and so are the numberless reading, debating, and study
clubs good, as far as they go. But what a pitifully short way they go!
They have built up congregations somewhat, but they have made not the
slightest impression on the big social problem. The reason is plain. The
appeal of the institutional church is too intellectual. It reaches only
that portion of the masses who stand least in need of social
opportunity.
To this accusation the church, man instituted and man controlled since
the beginning of the Christian Era, replies that it does all that can
be done for the uplift of humanity. That the church seems to be losing
its hold on the masses of people is attributed to a general drift of
degenerate humanity towards atheism and unbelief.
The people, the great world of people,--what a field for the church to
work in, if it only chose! The great obstacle is that the church
(leaving out the institutional church), on Sunday a vital, living force,
is content to exist all the other days in the week merely as a building.
Six days and more than half six evenings in the week the churches stand
empty and deserted. Simply from the point of view of material economy
this waste in church property, reduced to dollars and cents, would
appear deplorable. From the point of view of social economy, reduced to
terms of humanity, the waste is heartbreaking.
What would happen if something should loose those churches, or, at any
rate, their big Sunday-school rooms and their ample basements from this
icy exclusiveness, this week-day aloofness from humanity? Can you
picture them at night, streaming with light, gay with music, filled with
dancing crowds? not crowds from homes of wealth and comfort, but crowds
from streets and byways; crowds for which, at present, the underworld
spreads its nets? The great mass of the people, packed in dreary
tenements, slaves of machinery by day, slaves of their own starved souls
by night, must go somewhere for relaxation and forgetfulness. What would
happen if the church should invite them, not to pray but to play?
Some of the results might be a decrease in vice, in drinking, gambling,
and misery. At least we may infer as much from the success of the
occasional experiments which have been tried. We have a few examples to
prove that human nature is not the low, brutish thing it has too often
been described. It does not invariably choose wrong ways, but, on the
contrary, when a choice between right ways and wrong ways is presented,
the right is almost always preferred.
A year ago in Chicago there was witnessed a spectacle which, for utter
brutality and blindness of heart, I hope never to see duplicated.
Chicago had for some time been in the midst of a vigorous crusade
against organized vice. Too long neglected by the authorities and the
public, the so-called levee districts of the city had fallen into the
hands of grafting police officials, who, working with the lowest of
degraded of men, had created an open and most brazen vice syndicate.
Without going into details, it is enough to say that conditions finally
became so scandalous that all Chicago rose in horror and rebellion. The
police department was thoroughly overhauled, and a new chief appointed
who undertook in all earnestness to suppress the worst features of the
system. He had no new weapons it is true, and he probably had no
notion that he could make any impression on the evil of prostitution.
But he might have restored external decency and order, and he might
possibly have prepared the way for some scientific examination of the
problem. But a thing happened: one of those shocking blunders we too
often let happen. The efforts of the chief of police were set back,
because of that blunder, no one can tell how far. A new hysteria of vice
and disorder dates from the hour the blunder was made.
In October of 1909 "Gypsy" Smith, a noted evangelical preacher of the
itinerant order, was holding revival meetings in an armory on the South
Side of Chicago. With mistaken zeal this man announced that he was going
down into the South Side Levee and with one effort would reclaim every
one of the wretched inhabitants. He invited his immense congregation to
follow him there, and assist in the greatest crusade against vice the
world had ever seen.
In Chicago, as in other cities, no procession or parade is allowed to
march without permission from police headquarters. To the sorrow of all
those who believed that reform had really begun, Chief of Police Steward
issued a permit to "Gypsy" Smith. It is probable that the chief feared
the effect of a refusal. To lift up the fallen has ever been one of the
functions of religious bodies. Before issuing the permit, it is said
that he used all his powers of persuasion against the parade.
By orders from headquarters every house in the district was closed,
shuttered, and pitch dark on the night of the parade. Every door was
locked, and the most complete silence reigned within. It was into a
city of silence that the procession of nearly five thousand men, women,
and young people of both sexes marched on that October midnight. In the
glare of red fire and flaming torches, to the confused blare of many
Salvation Army brass bands, the quavering of hymn tunes, including the
classic, "Where Is My Wandering Boy To-night," and the constant
explosion of photographers' flashlights, the long procession stumbled
and jostled its way through streets that gave back for answer darkness
and silence.
But afterwards! The affair had been widely advertised, and it drew a
throng of spectators, not only from every quarter of the city, but from
every suburb and surrounding country town. Young men brought their
sweethearts, their sisters, to see the "show." As "Gypsy" Smith's
procession wound its noisy way out of the district, and back into the
armory, this great mob of people surged into the streets pruriently
eager to watch the awakening of the levee. It came. Lights flashed up in
almost every house. The women appeared at the windows and even in the
street. Saloon doors were flung open. The sound of pianos and
phonographs rose above the clamor of the mob. Pandemonium broke loose as
the crowds flung themselves into the saloons and other resorts. The
police had to beat people back from the doors with their clubs. A riot,
an orgy, impossible to describe, impossible to forget, ensued. Many of
those who took part in it had never been in such a district before.
This horrible scene somehow typified to my mind the whole blind,
chaotic, senseless attitude which society has preserved toward the most
baffling of all its problems. Nothing done to prevent the evil, because
no one knew what to do. After the evil was an established fact, after
the hearts of the victims were thoroughly hardened, after the last hope
of return had perished, then a "vice crusade"--led by a man!
Another scene witnessed about the same time seems to me to typify the
new attitude which society--led by women--is assuming towards its
problem. It was in the large kindergarten room of one of the oldest of
Chicago's social centers,--the Ely Bates Settlement. A group of little
Italian girls, peasant clad in the red and green colors of their native
land, swung around the room at a lively pace singing the familiar "Santa
Lucia." As the song ended the children suddenly broke into the maddest
of dances, a tarantella. Led by a graceful young girl, one of the
settlement workers, they danced with the joyous abandon of youthful
spirits untrammeled, ending the dance with a chorus of happy laughter.
This was only one group of many hundreds in every quarter of
Chicago,--in schools, settlements, kindergartens, and other
centers,--who were rehearsing for the third of the annual play
festivals given out of doors each year in Chicago. The festivals are
held in the most spacious of the seventeen wonderful public gardens and
playgrounds established of late throughout the city. Lasting all day,
this annual carnival of play is shared by school children, working girls
and boys, and young men and women. In the morning the children play and
perform their costume dances. In the afternoon the fields are given up
to athletic sports of older children, and in the evening young men and
women, of all nationalities, many wearing their old-world peasant
dresses, revive the plays and the dances of their native lands. Tens of
thousands view the beautiful spectacle, which each year excites more
interest and assumes an added importance in the civic life of Chicago.
Each of the large parks in Chicago's system is provided with a municipal
dance hall, spacious buildings with perfect floors, good light, and
ventilation. Any group of young people are at liberty to secure a hall,
rent free, for dancing parties. The city imposes only one
condition,--that the dances be chaperoned by park supervisors.
Beautifully decorated with growing plants from the park greenhouses
these municipal dance halls are scenes of gayety almost every night in
the year. Park restaurants in connection with the halls furnish good
food at low prices. Of course no liquor is sold. Nobody wants it. This
is proved by the fact that saloon dance halls in the neighborhood of the
parks have been deserted by their old patrons.
Women have recognized the debt to youth and the joy of life, and they
are preparing to pay it.
In this latest form of social service they have entered a battlefield
where the powers of righteousness have ever fought a losing fight. Men
have grappled with the social evil without success. They have labored
to discover a substitute for the saloon, and they have failed. They have
tried to suppress the dance hall and they have failed. They have made
laws against evil resorts, and they have sent agents of the police to
enforce their laws, but to no effect.
The failure of the men does not dishearten or discourage the women who
have taken up the work. They believe that they have discovered an
altogether new way in which to fight the social evil.
They propose to turn against it its own most powerful weapons. The joy
of life is to be fed with proper food instead of poison. Girls and young
men are to be offered a chance to escape the nets stretched for them by
the underworld. In many cities women's clubs and women's societies are
establishing on a small scale amusement and recreation centers for young
people. In New York Miss Virginia Potter, niece of the late Bishop
Potter, and Miss Potter's colleagues in the Association of Working
Girls' Clubs, have opened a public dance hall. The use of the large
gymnasium of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls was secured, and every
Saturday evening, from eight until eleven, young men and women come in
and dance to excellent music, under the instruction, if they need it,
of a skilled dancing-master. A small fee is charged, partly to defray
expenses, and partly to attract a class of people who disdain
philanthropy and settlements. The experiment is new, but it is
undoubtedly successful. As many as two hundred couples have been
admitted in an evening. In half a dozen cities women's clubs and women's
committees are at work on this matter of establishing amusement and
recreation centers for young people. In New York a Committee on
Amusement and Vacation Resources of Working Girls has for its president
a social worker of many years, Mrs. Charles M. Israels. Associated with
the committee are many other well-known social economists,--women of
wealth and influence who have given years to the service of working
girls. The committee began its work by a scientific investigation into
the dance halls of New York, the summer parks and picnic grounds in the
outlying districts, and of the summer excursion boats which ply up and
down the Hudson River and Long Island Sound. The revelations made by
this investigation, carried on under the supervision of Miss Julia
Schoenfeld, were terrible enough. They were made to appear still more
terrible when it was known that men of the highest social and commercial
standing were profiting hugely from the most vicious forms of
amusement. A state senator is one of the largest stockholders in Coney
Island resorts of bad character. An ex-governor of the State controls a
popular excursion boat, on which staterooms are rented by the hour, for
immoral purposes no one can possibly doubt. The women of the committee
submitted the findings of their investigators to the managers of these
amusement places and to the directors of the steamboat lines, and in
many instances reforms have been promised. The point is that a committee
of women had to finance an investigation to show these business men the
conditions which were adding to their wealth, and into which they had
never even inquired.
Another investigation made by the committee revealed the meagerness of
the provision made by churches, settlements, and business establishments
for working girls' vacations. There are, in round numbers, four hundred
thousand working women in Greater New York. Of these, something like
three hundred thousand are unmarried girls between the ages of fourteen
and thirty. In all, only 6,874 of these young toilers, who earn on an
average six dollars a week, are provided with vacation outings. They are
usually given vacations, with or without pay, but they spend the idle
time at Coney Island, on excursion boats, or in the dance hall.
Of the 1,257 churches and synagogues of New York, only six report
organized vacation work for girls and women. Of the twenty or more large
department stores, employing thousands of women, only three have
vacation houses in the country. Of the hundred or more social
settlements in New York only fifteen provide summer homes. There are
several vacation societies which do good work with limited resources,
but they are able to care for comparatively few. We have heard much of
fresh air work for children, and we can afford to hear more. But that
the fresh air work for young girls and women who toil long hours in
factory and shop must be extended, this committee's investigation
definitely establishes.
The first practical work of the committee, after the investigation of
amusement and recreation places, was a bill introduced into the State
Legislature providing for the licensing and regulation of public dancing
academies, prohibiting the sale of liquor in such establishments, and
holding the proprietor responsible for indecent dancing and improper
behavior.
Against the bitter opposition of the dancing academy proprietors the
bill became a law and went into effect in September, 1909. Almost
immediately it was challenged on constitutional grounds. The committee
promptly introduced another bill, this one to regulate dance halls.
This bill, which passed the legislature and is now a law, aims to wipe
out the saloon dance hall absolutely, and so to regulate the sale of
liquor in all dancing places that the drink evil will be cut down to a
minimum. The license fee of fifty dollars a year will eliminate the
lowest, cheapest resorts, and a rigid system of inspection will not only
go far towards preserving good order, but will do away with the
wretchedly dirty, ill-smelling, unsanitary fire traps in which many
halls are located. The dance-hall proprietor who encourages or even
tolerates "tough" dancing, or who admits to the floor "White Slavers,"
procurers, or persons of open immorality, will be liable to forfeiture
of his license.
The committee has done more than try to reform existing dance halls. It
has taken steps to establish, in neighborhoods where evil resorts
abound, attractive dance halls, where a decent standard of conduct is
combined with all the best features of the evil places--good floors,
lively music, bright lights. Two corporations have been organized for
the maintenance, in various parts of the city, of model dance halls, and
one hall has already been opened. The patrons of the model dance hall do
not know that it is a social experiment paid for by a committee of
women. It is run exactly like any public dancing place, only in an
orderly fashion.
Every extension of use of public places, schools, parks, piers, as
recreation places for young people between fifteen and twenty is
encouraged and supported by the committee. Already two public schools
have organized dancing classes, and several settlements have thrown open
their dances to the public where formerly they were attended only by
settlement club members.
By helping working girls to find cheap vacation homes in the country,
and by establishing vacation banks to help the girls save for their
summer outings, the committee hopes to discourage some of the haphazard
picnic park dissipation. In summer many trades are slack, girls are
idle, and out of sheer boredom they hang around the parks seeking
amusement. It is only a theory, perhaps, but Mrs. Israels and the others
on her committee believe that if many of these girls knew that a country
vacation were within the possibilities, they would gladly save money
towards it. At present the vacation facilities of working girls in large
cities are small. In New York, where at least three hundred thousand
girls and women earn their bread, only about six thousand are helped to
summer vacations in the country. What these women are doing now on a
small scale, experimentally, will soon be adopted, as their children's
playgrounds, their kindergartens, their vacation schools, and other
enterprises have been adopted, by the municipalities. Their probation
officers, long paid out of club treasuries, have already been
transferred to many cities, east and west. Soon municipal dance halls,
municipal athletic grounds, municipal amusement and recreation centers
for all ages and all classes will be provided.
Already New York is preparing for such a campaign. The newly-appointed
Parks Commissioner, Charles B. Stover, looking over his office force,
dismissed one secretary whose function seemed largely ornamental, and
diverted his salary of four thousand dollars to recreation purposes for
young people. Commissioner Stover desires the appointment of a city
officer who shall be a Supervisor of Recreations, a man or a woman whose
entire time shall be devoted to discovering where recreation parks,
dancing pavilions, music, and other forms of pleasure are needed, and
how they may be made to do the most good. A neighborhood that thirsts
for concerts ought to have them. A community that desires to dance
deserves a dance hall. In the long run, how infinitely better, how much
more economical for the city to furnish these recreations, normally and
decently conducted, than to bear the consequences of an order of things
like the present one. The new order must come. It is the only way yet
pointed out by which we may hope to close those other avenues, where the
joy of youth is turned into a cup of trembling, and the dancing feet of
girlhood are led into mires of shame.