WELL MEANING BUT UNMEANING: THE CHICAGO VICE REPORT
In casting about for a concrete example to illustrate some of the points
under discussion I hesitated a long time before the wealth of material.
No age has produced such a multitude of elaborate studies, and any
selection was, of course, a limiting one. The Minority Report of the
English Poor Law Commission has striking merits and defects, but for our
purposes it inheres too deeply in British conditions. American tariff and
trust investigations are massive enough in all conscience, but they are
so partisan in their origin and so pathetically unattached to any
recognized ideal of public policy that it seemed better to look
elsewhere. Conservation had the virtue of arising out of a provident
statesmanship, but its problems were largely technical.
The real choice narrowed itself finally to the Pittsburgh Survey and the
Chicago Vice Report. Had I been looking for an example of the finest
expert inquiry, there would have been little question that the vivid and
intensive study of Pittsburgh's industrialism was the example to use. But
I was looking for something more representative, and, therefore, more
revealing. I did not want a detached study of some specially selected
cross-section of what is after all not the typical economic life of
America. The case demanded was one in which you could see representative
American citizens trying to handle a problem which had touched their
imaginations.
Vice is such a problem. You can always get a hearing about it; there is
no end of interest in the question. Rare indeed is that community which
has not been "Lexowed," in which a district attorney or a minister has
not led a crusade. Muckraking began with the exposure of vice; men like
Heney, Lindsey, Folk founded their reputations on the fight against it.
It would be interesting to know how much of the social conscience of our
time had as its first insight the prostitute on the city pavement.
We do not have to force an interest, as we do about the trusts, or even
about the poor. For this problem lies close indeed to the dynamics of our
own natures. Research is stimulated, actively aroused, and a passionate
zeal suffuses what is perhaps the most spontaneous reform enthusiasm of
our time. Looked at externally it is a curious focusing of attention. Nor
is it explained by words like "chivalry," "conscience," "social
compassion." Magazines that will condone a thousand cruelties to women
gladly publish series of articles on the girl who goes wrong; merchants
who sweat and rack their women employees serve gallantly on these
commissions. These men are not conscious hypocrites. Perhaps like the
rest of us they are impelled by forces they are not eager to examine. I
do not press the point. It belongs to the analyst of motive.
We need only note the vast interest in the subject--that it extends
across class lines, and expresses itself as an immense good-will. Perhaps
a largely unconscious absorption in a subject is itself a sign of great
importance. Surely vice has a thousand implications that touch all of us
directly. It is closely related to most of the interests of
life--ramifying into industry, into the family, health, play, art,
religion. The miseries it entails are genuine miseries--not points of
etiquette or infringements of convention. Vice issues in pain. The world
suffers for it. To attack it is to attack as far-reaching and real a
problem as any that we human beings face.
The Chicago Commission had no simple, easily measured problem before it.
At the very outset the report confesses that an accurate count of the
number of prostitutes in Chicago could not be reached. The police lists
are obviously incomplete and perhaps corrupt. The whole amorphous field
of clandestine vice will, of course, defeat any census. But even public
prostitution is so varied that nobody can do better than estimate it
roughly. This point is worth keeping in mind, for it lights up the
remedies proposed. What the Commission advocates is the constant
repression and the ultimate annihilation of a mode of life which refuses
discovery and measurement.
The report estimates that there are five thousand women in Chicago who
devote their whole time to the traffic; that the annual profits in that
one city alone are between fifteen and sixteen million dollars a year.
These figures are admittedly low for they leave out all consideration of
occasional, or seasonal, or hidden prostitution. It is only the nucleus
that can be guessed at; the fringe which shades out into various degrees
of respectability remains entirely unmeasured. Yet these suburbs of the
Tenderloin must always be kept in mind; their population is shifting and
very elastic; it includes the unsuspected; and I am inclined to believe
that it is the natural refuge of the "suppressed" prostitute. Moreover it
defies control.
The 1012 women recognized on the police lists are of course the most
easily studied. From them we can gather some hint of the enormous
bewildering demand that prostitution answers. The Commission informs us
that this small group alone receives over fifteen thousand visits a
day--five million and a half in the year. Yet these 1012 women are only
about one-fifth of the professional prostitutes in Chicago. If the
average continues, then the figures mount to something over 27,000,000.
The five thousand professionals do not begin to represent the whole
illicit traffic of a city like Chicago. Clandestine and occasional vice
is beyond all measurement.
The figures I have given are taken from the report. They are said to be
conservative. For the purposes of this discussion we could well lower the
27,000,000 by half. All I am concerned about is in arriving at a sense of
the enormity of the impulse behind the "social evil." For it is this that
the Commission proposes to repress, and ultimately to annihilate.
Lust has a thousand avenues. The brothel, the flat, the assignation
house, the tenement, saloons, dance halls, steamers, ice-cream parlors,
Turkish baths, massage parlors, street-walking--the thing has woven
itself into the texture of city life. Like the hydra, it grows new heads,
everywhere. It draws into its service the pleasures of the city.
Entangled with the love of gaiety, organized as commerce, it is literally
impossible to follow the myriad expressions it assumes.
The Commission gives a very fair picture of these manifestations. A mass
of material is offered which does in a way show where and how and to what
extent lust finds its illicit expression. Deeper than this the report
does not go. The human impulses which create these social conditions, the
human needs to which they are a sad and degraded answer--this human
center of the problem the commission passes by with a platitude.
"So long as there is lust in the hearts of men," we are told, "it will
seek out some method of expression. Until the hearts of men are changed
we can hope for no absolute annihilation of the Social Evil." But at the
head of the report in black-faced type we read:
"Constant and persistent repression of prostitution the immediate method;
absolute annihilation the ultimate ideal."
I am not trying to catch the Commissioners in a verbal inconsistency. The
inconsistency is real, out of a deep-seated confusion of mind. Lust will
seek an expression, they say, until "the hearts of men are changed." All
particular expressions are evil and must be constantly repressed. Yet
though you repress one form of lust, it will seek some other. Now, says
the Commission, in order to change the hearts of men, religion and
education must step in. It is their business to eradicate an impulse
which is constantly changing form by being "suppressed."
There is only one meaning in this: the Commission realized vaguely that
repression is not even the first step to a cure. For reasons worth
analyzing later, these representative American citizens desired both the
immediate taboo and an ultimate annihilation of vice. So they fell into
the confusion of making immediate and detailed proposals that have
nothing to do with the attainment of their ideal.
What the commission saw and described were the particular forms which a
great human impulse had assumed at a specific date in a certain city. The
dynamic force which created these conditions, which will continue to
create them--lust--they refer to in a few pious sentences. Their
thinking, in short, is perfectly static and literally superficial. In
outlining a ripple they have forgotten the tides.
Had they faced the human sources of their problem, had they tried to
think of the social evil as an answer to a human need, their researches
would have been different, their remedies fruitful. Suppose they had kept
in mind their own statement: "so long as there is lust in the hearts of
men it will seek out some method of expression." Had they held fast to
that, it would have ceased to be a platitude and have become a fertile
idea. For a platitude is generally inert wisdom.
In the sentence I quote the Commissioners had an idea which might have
animated all their labors. But they left it in limbo, they reverenced it,
and they passed by. Perhaps we can raise it again and follow the hints it
unfolds.
If lust will seek an expression, are all expressions of it necessarily
evil? That the kind of expression which the Commission describes is evil
no one will deny. But is it the only possible expression?
If it is, then the taboo enforced by a Morals Police is, perhaps, as good
a way as any of gaining a fictitious sense of activity. But the ideal of
"annihilation" becomes an irrelevant and meaningless phrase. If lust is
deeply rooted in men and its only expression is evil, I for one should
recommend a faith in the millennium. You can put this Paradise at the
beginning of the world or the end of it. Practical difference there is
none.
No one can read the report without coming to a definite conviction that
the Commission regards lust itself as inherently evil. The members
assumed without criticism the traditional dogma of Christianity that sex
in any manifestation outside of marriage is sinful. But practical sense
told them that sex cannot be confined within marriage. It will find
expression--"some method of expression" they say. What never occurred to
them was that it might find a good, a positively beneficent method. The
utterly uncriticised assumption that all expressions not legalized are
sinful shut them off from any constructive answer to their problem.
Seeing prostitution or something equally bad as the only way sex can find
an expression they really set before religion and education the
impossible task of removing lust "from the hearts of men." So when their
report puts at its head that absolute annihilation of prostitution is the
ultimate ideal, we may well translate it into the real intent of the
Commission. What is to be absolutely annihilated is not alone
prostitution, not alone all the methods of expression which lust seeks
out, but lust itself.
That this is what the Commission had in mind is supported by plenty of
"internal evidence." For example: one of the most curious recommendations
made is about divorce--"The Commission condemns the ease with which
divorces may be obtained in certain States, and recommends a stringent,
uniform divorce law for all States."
What did the Commission have in mind? I transcribe the paragraph which
deals with divorce: "The Vice Commission, after exhaustive consideration
of the vice question, records itself of the opinion that divorce to a
large extent is a contributory factor to sexual vice. No study of this
blight upon the social and moral life of the country would be
comprehensive without consideration of the causes which lead to the
application for divorce. These are too numerous to mention at length in
such a report as this, but the Commission does wish to emphasize the
great need of more safeguards against the marrying of persons physically,
mentally and morally unfit to take up the responsibilities of family
life, including the bearing of children."
Now to be sure that paragraph leaves much to be desired so far as
clearness goes. But I think the meaning can be extracted. Divorce is a
contributory factor to sexual vice. One way presumably is that divorced
women often become prostitutes. That is an evil contribution,
unquestionably. The second sentence says that no study of the social evil
is complete which leaves out the _causes_ of divorce. One of those causes
is, I suppose, adultery with a prostitute. This evil is totally different
from the first: in one case divorce contributes to prostitution, in the
other, prostitution leads to divorce. The third sentence urges greater
safeguards against undesirable marriages. This prudence would obviously
reduce the need of divorce.
How does the recommendation of a stringent and uniform law fit in with
these three statements? A strict divorce law might be like New York's: it
would recognize few grounds for a decree. One of those grounds, perhaps
the chief one, would be adultery. I say this unhesitatingly for in
another place the Commission informs us that marriage has in it "the
elements of vested rights."
A strict divorce law would, of course, diminish the number of "divorced
women," and perhaps keep them out of prostitution. It does fit the first
statement--in a helpless sort of way. But where does the difficulty of
divorce affect the causes of it? If you bind a man tightly to a woman he
does not love, and, possibly prevent him from marrying one he does love,
how do you add to his virtue? And if the only way he can free himself is
by adultery, does not your stringent divorce law put a premium upon vice?
The third sentence would make it difficult for the unfit to marry. Better
marriages would among other blessings require fewer divorces. But what of
those who are forbidden to marry? They are unprovided for. And yet who
more than they are likely to find desire uncontrollable and seek some
other "method of expression"? With marriage prohibited and prostitution
tabooed, the Commission has a choice between sterilization and--let us
say--other methods of expression.
Make marriage difficult, divorce stringent, prostitution impossible--is
there any doubt that the leading idea is to confine the sex impulse
within the marriage of healthy, intelligent, "moral," and monogamous
couples? For all the other seekings of that impulse what has the
Commission to offer? Nothing. That can be asserted flatly. The Commission
hopes to wipe out prostitution. But it never hints that the success of
its plan means vast alterations in our social life. The members give the
impression that they think of prostitution as something that can be
subtracted from our civilization without changing the essential character
of its institutions. Yet who that has read the report itself and put
himself into any imaginative understanding of conditions can escape
seeing that prostitution to-day is organic to our industrial life, our
marriage sanctions, and our social customs? Low wages, fatigue, and the
wretched monotony of the factory--these must go before prostitution can
go. And behind these stand the facts of woman's entrance into
industry--facts that have one source at least in the general poverty of
the family. And that poverty is deeply bound up with the economic system
under which we live. In the man's problem, the growing impossibility of
early marriages is directly related to the business situation. Nor can we
speak of the degradation of religion and the arts, of amusement, of the
general morale of the people without referring that degradation to
industrial conditions.
You cannot look at civilization as a row of institutions each external to
the other. They interpenetrate and a change in one affects all the
others. To abolish prostitution would involve a radical alteration of
society. Vice in our cities is a form of the sexual impulse--one of the
forms it has taken under prevailing social conditions. It is, if you
please, like the crops of a rude and forbidding soil--a coarse, distorted
thing though living.
The Commission studied a human problem and left humanity out. I do not
mean that the members weren't deeply touched by the misery of these
thousands of women. You can pity the poor without understanding them; you
can have compassion without insight. The Commissioners had a good deal of
sympathy for the prostitute's condition, but for that "lust in the hearts
of men," and women we may add, for that, they had no sympathetic
understanding. They did not place themselves within the impulse.
Officially they remained external to human desires. For what might be
called the _élan vital_ of the problem they had no patience. Certain sad
results of the particular "method of expression" it had sought out in
Chicago called forth their pity and their horror.
In short, the Commission did not face the sexual impulse squarely. The
report is an attempt to deal with a sexual problem by disregarding its
source. There are almost a hundred recommendations to various
authorities--Federal, State, county, city, police, educational and
others. I have attempted to classify these proposals under four headings.
There are those which mean forcible repression of particular
manifestations--the taboos; there are the recommendations which are
purely palliative, which aim to abate some of the horrors of existing
conditions; there are a few suggestions for further investigation; and,
finally, there are the inventions, the plans which show some desire to
find moral equivalents for evil--the really statesmanlike offerings.
The palliative measures we may pass by quickly. So long as they do not
blind people to the necessity for radical treatment, only a doctrinaire
would object to them. Like all intelligent charities they are still a
necessary evil. But nothing must be staked upon them, so let us turn at
once to the constructive suggestions: The Commission proposes that the
county establish a "Permanent Committee on Child Protection." It makes no
attempt to say what that protection shall be, but I think it is only fair
to let the wish father the thought, and regard this as an effort to give
children a better start in life. The separation of delinquent from
semi-delinquent girls is a somewhat similar attempt to guard the weak.
Another is the recommendation to the city and the nation that it should
protect arriving immigrants, and if necessary escort them to their homes.
This surely is a constructive plan which might well be enlarged from mere
protection to positive hospitality. How great a part the desolating
loneliness of a city plays in seductions the individual histories in the
report show. Municipal dance halls are a splendid proposal. Freed from a
cold and over-chaperoned respectability they compete with the devil.
There, at least, is one method of sexual expression which may have
positively beneficent results. A municipal lodging house for women is
something of a substitute for the wretched rented room. A little
suggestion to the police that they send home children found on the
streets after nine o'clock has varied possibilities. But there is the
seed of an invention in it which might convert the police from mere
agents of repression to kindly helpers in the mazes of a city. The
educational proposals are all constructive: the teaching of sex hygiene
is guardedly recommended for consideration. That is entirely justified,
for no one can quarrel with a set of men for leaving a question open.
That girls from fourteen to sixteen should receive vocational training in
continuation schools; that social centers should be established in the
public schools and that the grounds should be open for children--all of
these are clearly additions to the positive resource of the community. So
is the suggestion that church buildings be used for recreation. The call
for greater parental responsibility is, I fear, a rather empty platitude,
for it is not re-enforced with anything but an ancient fervor.
How much of this really seeks to create a fine expression of the sexual
impulse? How many of these recommendations see sex as an instinct which
can be transmuted, and turned into one of the values of life? The dance
halls, the social centers, the playgrounds, the reception of
strangers--these can become instruments for civilizing sexual need. The
educational proposals could become ways of directing it. They could, but
will they? Without the habit of mind which sees substitution as the
essence of statecraft, without a philosophy which makes the invention of
moral equivalents its goal, I for one refuse to see in these
recommendations anything more than a haphazard shooting which has
accidentally hit the mark. Moreover, I have a deep suspicion that I have
tried to read into the proposals more than the Commission intended.
Certainly these constructions occupy an insignificant amount of space in
the body of the report. On all sides of them is a mass of taboos. No
emotional appeal is made for them as there is for the repressions. They
stand largely unnoticed, and very much undefined--poor ghosts of the
truth among the gibbets.
An inadvertent platitude--that lust will seek an expression--and a few
diffident proposals for a finer environment--the need and its
satisfaction: had the Commission seen the relation of these incipient
ideas, animated it, and made it the nerve center of the study, a genuine
program might have resulted. But the two ideas never met and fertilized
each other. Nothing dynamic holds the recommendations together--the mass
of them are taboos, an attempt to kill each mosquito and ignore the
marsh. The evils of prostitution are seen as a series of episodes, each
of which must be clubbed, forbidden, raided and jailed.
There is a special whack for each mosquito: the laws about excursion
boats should be enforced; the owners should help to enforce them; there
should be more officers with police power on these boats; the sale of
liquor to minors should be forbidden; gambling devices should be
suppressed; the midwives, doctors and maternity hospitals practicing
abortions should be investigated; employment agencies should be watched
and investigated; publishers should be warned against printing suspicious
advertisements; the law against infamous crimes should be made more
specific; any citizen should have the right to bring equity proceedings
against a brothel as a public nuisance; there should be relentless
prosecution of professional procurers; there should be constant
prosecution of the keepers, inmates, and owners of bawdy houses; there
should be prosecution of druggists who sells drugs and "certain
appliances" illegally; there should be an identification system for
prostitutes in the state courts; instead of fines, prostitutes should be
visited with imprisonment or adult probation; there should be a penalty
for sending messenger boys under twenty-one to a disorderly house or an
unlicensed saloon; the law against prostitutes in saloons, against
wine-rooms and stalls in saloons, against communication between saloons
and brothels, against dancing in saloons--should be strictly enforced;
the police who enforce these laws should be carefully watched, grafters
amongst them should be discharged; complaints should be investigated at
once by a man stationed outside the district; the pressure of publicity
should be brought against the brewers to prevent them from doing business
with saloons that violate the law; the Retail Liquor Association should
discipline law-breaking saloon-keepers: licenses should be permanently
revoked for violations; no women should be allowed in a saloon without a
male escort; no professional or paid escorts should be permitted; no
soliciting should be allowed in saloons; no immoral or vulgar dances
should be permitted in saloons; no intoxicating liquor should be allowed
at any public dance; there should be a municipal detention home for
women, with probation officers; police inspectors who fail to report
law-violations should be dismissed; assignation houses should be
suppressed as soon as they are reported; there should be a "special
morals police squad"; recommendation IX "to the Police" says they "should
wage a relentless warfare against houses of prostitution, immoral flats,
assignation rooms, call houses, and disorderly saloons in all sections of
the city"; parks and playgrounds should be more thoroughly policed;
dancing pavilions should exclude professional prostitutes; soliciting in
parks should be suppressed; parks should be lighted with a search-light;
there should be no seats in the shadows....
To perform that staggering list of things that "should" be done you
find--what?--the police power, federal, state, municipal. Note how vague
and general are the chance constructive suggestions; how precise and
definite the taboos. Surely I am not misstating its position when I say
that forcible suppression was the creed of this Commission. Nor is there
any need of insisting again that the ultimate ideal of annihilating
prostitution has nothing to expect from the concrete proposals that were
made. The millennial goal was one thing; the immediate method quite
another. For ideals, a pious phrase; in practice, the police.
Are we not told that "if the citizens cannot depend upon the men
appointed to protect their property, and to maintain order, then chaos
and disorganization resulting in vice and crime must follow?" Yet of all
the reeds that civilization leans upon, surely the police is the
frailest. Anyone who has had the smallest experience of municipal
politics knows that the corruption of the police is directly
proportionate to the severity of the taboos it is asked to enforce. Tom
Johnson saw this as Mayor of Cleveland; he knew that strict law
enforcement against saloons, brothels, and gambling houses would not stop
vice, but would corrupt the police. I recommend the recent spectacle in
New York where the most sensational raider of gambling houses has turned
out to be in crooked alliance with the gamblers. And I suggest as a hint
that the Commission's recommendations enforced for one year will lay the
foundation of an organized system of blackmail and "protection," secrecy
and underground chicanery, the like of which Chicago has not yet seen.
But the Commission need only have read its own report, have studied its
own cases. There is an illuminating chapter on "The Social Evil and the
Police." In the summary, the Commission says that "officers on the beat
are bold and open in their neglect of duty, drinking in saloons while in
uniform, ignoring the solicitations by prostitutes in rear rooms and on
the streets, selling tickets at dances frequented by professional and
semi-professional prostitutes; protecting 'cadets,' prostitutes and
saloon-keepers of disorderly places."
Some suspicion that the police could not carry the burden of suppressing
the social evil must have dawned on the Commission.
It felt the need of re-enforcement. Hence the special morals police
squad; hence the investigation of the police of one district by the
police from another; and hence, in type as black as that of the ideal
itself and directly beneath it, the call for "the appointment of a morals
commission" and "the establishment of a morals court." Now this
commission consists of the Health Officer, a physician and three citizens
who serve without pay. It is appointed by the Mayor and approved by the
City Council. Its business is to prosecute vice and to help enforce the
law.
Just what would happen if the Morals Commission didn't prosecute hard
enough I do not know. Conceivably the Governor might be induced to
appoint a Commission on Moral Commissions in Cities. But why the men and
women who framed the report made this particular recommendation is an
interesting question. With federal, state, and municipal authorities in
existence, with courts, district attorneys, police all operating, they
create another arm of prosecution. Possibly they were somewhat
disillusioned about the present instruments of the taboo; perhaps
they imagined that a new broom would sweep clean. But I suspect an
inner reason. The Commission may have imagined that the four
appointees--unpaid--would be four men like themselves--who knows, perhaps
four men from among themselves? The whole tenor of their thinking is to
set somebody watching everybody and somebody else to watching him. What
is more natural than that they should be the Ultimate Watchers?
Spying, informing, constant investigations of everybody and everything
must become the rule where there is a forcible attempt to moralize
society from the top. Nobody's heart is in the work very long; nobody's
but those fanatical and morbid guardians of morality who make it a life's
specialty. The aroused public opinion which the Commission asks for
cannot be held if all it has to fix upon is an elaborate series of
taboos. Sensational disclosures will often make the public flare up
spasmodically; but the mass of men is soon bored by intricate rules and
tangles of red tape; the "crusade" is looked upon as a melodrama of real
life--interesting, but easily forgotten.
The method proposed ignores the human source: by a kind of poetic justice
the great crowd of men will ignore the method. If you want to impose a
taboo upon a whole community, you must do it autocratically, you must
make it part of the prevailing superstitions. You must never let it reach
any public analysis. For it will fail, it will receive only a shallow
support from what we call an "enlightened public opinion." That opinion
is largely determined by the real impulses of men; and genuine character
rejects or at least rebels against foreign, unnatural impositions. This
is one of the great virtues of democracy--that it makes alien laws more
and more difficult to enforce. The tyrant can use the taboo a thousand
times more effectively than the citizens of a republic. When he speaks,
it is with a prestige that dumbs questioning and makes obedience a habit.
Let that infallibility come to be doubted, as in Russia to-day, and
natural impulses reassert themselves, the great impositions begin to
weaken. The methods of the Chicago Commission would require a tyranny, a
powerful, centralized sovereignty which could command with majesty and
silence the rebel. In our shirt-sleeved republic no such power exists.
The strongest force we have is that of organized money, and that
sovereignty is too closely connected with the social evil, too dependent
upon it in a hundred different ways, to undertake the task of
suppression.
For the purposes of the Commission democracy is an inefficient weapon.
Nothing but disappointment is in store for men who expect a people to
outrage its own character. A large part of the unfaith in democracy, of
the desire to ignore "the mob," limit the franchise, and confine power to
the few is the result of an unsuccessful attempt to make republics act
like old-fashioned monarchies. Almost every "crusade" leaves behind it a
trail of yearning royalists; many "good-government" clubs are little
would-be oligarchies.
When the mass of men emerged from slavish obedience and made democracy
inevitable, the taboo entered upon its final illness. For the more
self-governing a people becomes, the less possible it is to prescribe
external restrictions. The gap between want and ought, between nature and
ideals cannot be maintained. The only practical ideals in a democracy are
a fine expression of natural wants. This happens to be a thoroughly Greek
attitude. But I learned it first from the Bowery. Chuck Connors is
reported to have said that "a gentleman is a bloke as can do whatever he
wants to do." If Chuck said that, he went straight to the heart of that
democratic morality on which a new statecraft must ultimately rest. His
gentleman is not the battlefield of wants and prohibitions; in him
impulses flow freely through beneficent channels.
The same notion lies imbedded in the phrase: "government must serve the
people." That means a good deal more than that elected officials must
rule for the majority. For the majority in these semi-democratic times is
often as not a cloak for the ruling oligarchy. Representatives who
"serve" some majorities may in reality order the nation about. To serve
the people means to provide it with services--with clean streets and
water, with education, with opportunity, with beneficent channels for its
desires, with moral equivalents for evil. The task is turned from the
damming and restricting of wants to the creation of fine environments for
them. And the environment of an impulse extends all the way from the
human body, through family life and education out into the streets of the
city.
Had the Commission worked along democratic lines, we should have had
recommendations about the hygiene and early training of children, their
education, the houses they live in and the streets in which they play;
changes would have been suggested in the industrial conditions they face;
plans would have been drawn for recreation; hints would have been
collected for transmuting the sex impulse into art, into social endeavor,
into religion. That is the constructive approach to the problem. I note
that the Commission calls upon the churches for help. Its obvious
intention was to down sex with religion. What was not realized, it seems,
is that this very sex impulse, so largely degraded into vice, is the
dynamic force in religious feeling. One need not call in the testimony of
the psychologists, the students of religion, the æstheticians or even of
Plato, who in the "Symposium" traced out the hierarchy of love from the
body to the "whole sea of beauty." Jane Addams in Chicago has tested the
truth by her own wide experience, and she has written what the Commission
might easily have read,--that "in failing to diffuse and utilize this
fundamental instinct of sex through the imagination, we not only
inadvertently foster vice and enervation, but we throw away one of the
most precious implements for ministering to life's highest needs. There
is no doubt that this ill-adjusted function consumes quite unnecessarily
vast stores of vital energy, even when we contemplate it in its immature
manifestations which are infinitely more wholesome than the dumb swamping
process. All high school boys and girls know the difference between the
concentration and the diffusion of this impulse, although they would be
hopelessly bewildered by the use of terms. They will declare one of their
companions to be 'in love' if his fancy is occupied by the image of a
single person about whom all the new-found values gather, and without
whom his solitude is an eternal melancholy. But if the stimulus does not
appear as a definite image, and the values evoked are dispensed over the
world, the young person suddenly seems to have discovered a beauty and
significance in many things--he responds to poetry, he becomes a lover of
nature, he is filled with religious devotion or with philanthropic zeal.
Experience, with young people, easily illustrates the possibility and
value of diffusion."
It is then not only impossible to confine sex to mere reproduction; it
would be a stupid denial of the finest values of civilization. Having
seen that the impulse is a necessary part of character, we must not hold
to it grudgingly as a necessary evil. It is, on the contrary, the very
source of good. Whoever has visited Hull House can see for himself the
earnest effort Miss Addams has made to treat sex with dignity and joy.
For Hull House differs from most settlements in that it is full of
pictures, of color, and of curios. The atmosphere is light; you feel none
of that moral oppression which hangs over the usual settlement as over a
gathering of missionaries. Miss Addams has not only made Hull House a
beautiful place; she has stocked it with curious and interesting objects.
The theater, the museum, the crafts and the arts, games and dances--they
are some of those "other methods of expression which lust can seek." It
is no accident that Hull House is the most successful settlement in
America.
Yet who does not feel its isolation in that brutal city? A little Athens
in a vast barbarism--you wonder how much of Chicago Hull House can
civilize. As you walk those grim streets and look into the stifling
houses, or picture the relentless stockyards, the conviction that vice
and its misery cannot be transmuted by policemen and Morals Commissions,
the feeling that spying and inspecting and prosecuting will not drain the
marsh becomes a certainty. You want to shout at the forcible moralizer:
"so long as you acquiesce in the degradation of your city, so long as
work remains nothing but ill-paid drudgery and every instinct of joy is
mocked by dirt and cheapness and brutality,--just so long will your
efforts be fruitless, yes even though you raid and prosecute, even though
you make Comstock the Czar of Chicago."
But Hull House cannot remake Chicago. A few hundred lives can be changed,
and for the rest it is a guide to the imagination. Like all utopias, it
cannot succeed, but it may point the way to success. If Hull House is
unable to civilize Chicago, it at least shows Chicago and America what a
civilization might be like. Friendly, where our cities are friendless,
beautiful, where they are ugly; sociable and open, where our daily life
is furtive; work a craft; art a participation--it is in miniature the
goal of statesmanship. If Chicago were like Hull House, we say to
ourselves, then vice would be no problem--it would dwindle, what was left
would be the Falstaff in us all, and only a spiritual anemia could worry
over that jolly and redeeming coarseness.
What stands between Chicago and civilization? No one can doubt that to
abolish prostitution means to abolish the slum and the dirty alley, to
stop overwork, underpay, the sweating and the torturing monotony of
business, to breathe a new life into education, ventilate society with
frankness, and fill life with play and art, with games, with passions
which hold and suffuse the imagination.
It is a revolutionary task, and like all real revolutions it will not be
done in a day or a decade because someone orders it to be done. A change
in the whole quality of life is something that neither the policeman's
club nor an insurrectionary raid can achieve. If you want a revolution
that shall really matter in human life--and what sane man can help
desiring it?--you must look to the infinitely complicated results of the
dynamic movements in society. These revolutions require a rare
combination of personal audacity and social patience. The best agents of
such a revolution are men who are bold in their plans because they
realize how deep and enormous is the task.
Many people have sought an analogy in our Civil War. They have said that
as "black slavery" went, so must "white slavery." In the various
agitations of vigilance committees and alliances for the suppression of
the traffic they profess to see continued a work which the abolitionists
began.
In A. M. Simons' brilliant book on "Social Forces in American History"
much help can be found. For example: "Massachusetts abolished slavery at
an early date, and we have it on the authority of John Adams
that:--'argument might have had some weight in the abolition of slavery
in Massachusetts, but the real cause was the multiplication of laboring
white people, who would not longer suffer the rich to employ these sable
rivals so much to their injury.'" No one to-day doubts that white labor
in the North and slavery in the South were not due to the moral
superiority of the North. Yet just in the North we find the abolition
sentiment strongest. That the Civil War was not a clash of good men and
bad men is admitted by every reputable historian. The war did not come
when moral fervor had risen to the exploding point; the moral fervor came
rather when the economic interests of the South collided with those of
the North. That the abolitionists clarified the economic interests of the
North and gave them an ideal sanction is true enough. But the fact
remains that by 1860 some of the aspirations of Phillips and Garrison had
become the economic destiny of this country.
You can have a Hull House established by private initiative and
maintained by individual genius, just as you had planters who freed their
slaves or as you have employers to-day who humanize their factories. But
the fine example is not readily imitated when industrial forces fight
against it. So even if the Commission had drawn splendid plans for
housing, work conditions, education, and play it would have done only
part of the task of statesmanship. We should then know what to do, but
not how to get it done.
An ideal suspended in a vacuum is ineffective: it must point a dynamic
current. Only then does it gather power, only then does it enter into
life. That forces exist to-day which carry with them solutions is evident
to anyone who has watched the labor movement and the woman's awakening.
Even the interests of business give power to the cause. The discovery of
manufacturers that degradation spoils industrial efficiency must not be
cast aside by the radical because the motive is larger profits. The
discovery, whatever the motive, will inevitably humanize industry a good
deal. For it happens that in this case the interests of capitalism and of
humanity coincide. A propaganda like the single-tax will undoubtedly find
increasing support among business men. They see in it a relief from the
burden of rent imposed by that older tyrant--the landlord. But the
taxation of unimproved property happens at the same time to be a splendid
weapon against the slum.
Only when the abolition of "white slavery" becomes part of the social
currents of the time will it bear any interesting analogy to the
so-called freeing of the slaves. Even then for many enthusiasts the
comparison is misleading. They are likely to regard the Emancipation
Proclamation as the end of chattel slavery. It wasn't. That historic
document broke a legal bond but not a social one. The process of negro
emancipation is infinitely slower and it is not accomplished yet.
Likewise no statute can end "white slavery." Only vast and complicated
changes in the whole texture of social life will achieve such an end. If
by some magic every taboo of the commission could be enforced the
abolition of sex slavery would not have come one step nearer to reality.
Cities and factories, schools and homes, theaters and games, manners and
thought will have to be transformed before sex can find a better
expression. Living forces, not statutes or clubs, must work that change.
The power of emancipation is in the social movements which alone can
effect any deep reform in a nation. So it is and has been with the negro.
I do not think the Abolitionists saw facts truly when they disbanded
their organization a few years after the civil war. They found too much
comfort in a change of legal status. Profound economic forces brought
about the beginning of the end of chattel slavery. But the reality of
freedom was not achieved by proclamation. For that the revolution had to
go on: the industrial life of the nation had to change its character,
social customs had to be replaced, the whole outlook of men had to be
transformed. And whether it is negro slavery or a vicious sexual bondage,
the actual advance comes from substitutions injected into society by
dynamic social forces.
I do not wish to press the analogy or over-emphasize the particular
problems. I am not engaged in drawing up the plans for a reconstruction
or in telling just what should be done. Only the co-operation of expert
minds can do that. The place for a special propaganda is elsewhere. If
these essays succeed in suggesting a method of looking at politics, if
they draw attention to what is real in social reforms and make somewhat
more evident the traps and the blind-alleys of an uncritical approach,
they will have done their work. That the report of the Chicago Vice
Commission figures so prominently in this chapter is not due to any
preoccupation with Chicago, the Commission or with vice. It is a text and
nothing else. The report happens to embody what I conceive to be most of
the faults of a political method now decadent. Its failure to put human
impulses at the center of thought produced remedies valueless to human
nature; its false interest in a particular expression of
sex--vice--caused it to taboo the civilizing power of sex; its inability
to see that wants require fine satisfactions and not prohibitions drove
it into an undemocratic tyranny; its blindness to the social forces of
our age shut off the motive power for any reform.
The Commission's method was poor, not its intentions. It was an average
body of American citizens aroused to action by an obvious evil. But
something slipped in to falsify vision. It was, I believe, an array of
idols disguised as ideals. They are typical American idols, and they
deserve some study.