You'd get awfully tired if I told you everything about my visit to New
York in A. D. 1991. Some things are too complicated even to refer to,
many things I've already forgotten, and a number of things I didn't
understand. But as I had to return to my work as prison doctor in 1919
after a week of 1991 I grasped a few top impressions that may interest
you. I hope I can give them to you straight.
The people on the street took my eye the minute I arrived in town. They
looked so pleasing and they wore such stunning clothes. You know that at
present, with the long indoor working day and the mixture of embalmed
and storage and badly cooked food, the number of pasty-faced and
emaciated men and women is very high. I exempt the hearty sweating
classes like the structural iron workers and teamsters and porters and
even policemen. You could recruit a fine-looking club from the building
trades. But stand any afternoon on Fifth Avenue and size up the
condition of the passers-by. You see shopgirls in thin cotton who are
under-weight, under-slept, miserably nourished and devitalized. You see
pimply waiters and stooping clerks. You see weary, fish-eyed mothers who
look as if every day was washing day. Scores of sagging middle-aged
people go by, who ought to be taken to a clinic. A little earlier in the
afternoon it's almost impossible to share the sidewalk with the squat
factory hands who overflow at the lunch hour. They're hard to kill,
these poor fellows, but they're a puny, stinking, stunted, ill-favored
horde. But the greater cleanliness of the people later on, and their
better clothes, doesn't put them in a very different class. You hear a
good deal about the queens you see, but, really, the city streets of New
York in 1919, streaming with people who have dun clothes to match dun
faces, make you wonder what's the use.
These people in 1991 were good to look at! The three-hour working day
had a lot to do with it, of course, and the basic economic changes. But
what leads me first to speak of appearances is the huge responsibility
that had gone to hygienists. I mean educational and administrative. In
1991, I found, people were really acting on the theory that you can't
have civilization without sound bodies. The idea itself was as old as an
old joke, a platitude in the mouth of every pill-vender. But the city
was working on it as if it were a pivotal truth, and this meant a total
revision of ordinary conduct.
Building the Panama Canal was a simple little job compared to making New
York hygienic. Thirty years must have been spent in getting the folks to
realize that no man and woman had any hygienic excuse for breeding
children within the city limits. It was sixty years, I was told, before
it was official that a city child was an illegitimate child. At first
mothers kicked hard when the illegitimates were confiscated, but in the
end they came to see justice in the human version of the slogan, "an
acre and a cow." It got rid of the good old city-bred medical formula
that the best way to handle pregnancy is to handle it as a pathological
condition. Of course this prohibition movement made all sorts of people
mad. A bunch of Gold Coast women held out for a long time on the score
of personal liberty. Women had private city babies where the inspectors
couldn't get at them. You know, just like private whisky. But in the end
the prohibitionists won, and it had an enormous effect on cleaning up
Manhattan. It cut out all but the detached and the transient residents,
and with the breathing space rules, these were far less than you'd
suppose. Even with the great area of garden-roofs, the fixed residents
were not much more than 100,000.
This demobilization wasn't special to New York. In other places there
were much more rigid "units." Hygiene, nothing else, decided the unit
size of cities in 1991. The old sprawling haphazard heterogeneous city
gave place to the "modern" unit, permanent residences within the city
never being open to families that had children under fourteen. For the
heads of such families, however, the transportation problem was
beautifully solved. Every unit city came to be so constructed that
within half an hour of the "fresh air and exercise" homes, men and women
could reach factories and warehouses in one direction, and offices and
courts and banks and exchanges in another. This was after they realized
the high cost of noise and dirt. The noiseless, dirtless, swift, freight
train took the place of most trucks, and of course the remaining trucks
shot up and down the non-pedestrian sanitary alleys. Another thing that
interested me was the plexus of all the things that are to be exhibited.
This involved a great problem for New York before factories were
deported and the moving "H. G. Wells" sidewalks introduced. How to
economize time and space, and yet not produce too close a homogeneity,
too protein an intellectual and aesthetic and social diet, became a
fascinating question. But the devotion of Blackwell's Island to summer
and winter art and music, with all the other islands utilized for
permanent exhibitions gave the city directors a certain leeway. The
islands were made charming. I was quite struck over there, I think, on a
new island in Flushing Bay, by the guild-managed shows of clothing,
where you sat and watched the exhibits traveling on an endless belt,
that stopped when you wanted it to--the kind that art exhibitions
adopted for certain purposes. You see, the old department stores had
passed away as utterly as the delivery horse and display advertising and
the non-preventive physician. And the old game of "seasons" and fashions
was abandoned soon after the celebrated trial of Conde Nast for the
undermining of the taste of shopgirls. The job of the purchasing
consumer was steadily simplified. Youth of both sexes learned fairly
early in life what they could and what they couldn't do personally in
the use of color. No one thought of copying another's color or design in
dress any more than of copying another's oculist prescription. And with
the guild consultants always ready to help out the troubled buyer, the
business of shopping for clothes became as exciting and intelligent as
the pastime of visiting a private exhibition. In this way, backed up by
the guilds, a daring employment of color became generally favored. But a
big item in this programme was the refusal of the guilds to prescribe
any costumes for people who needed medical care first. It was useless,
the guilds said, to decorate a mud-pie. And the hygienists agreed.
So you got back always to the doctrine of a sound body. In the hygienic
riots of 1936 some horrible lynchings took place. An expert from the
Chicago stockyards was then running the New York subways. He devised the
upper-berth system by which the space between people's heads and the
roof of the car could be used on express trains for hanging up
passengers, like slabs of bacon. It was only after a few thousand
citizens had failed to respond to the pulmotor which was kept at every
station to revive weaklings, that the divine right of human beings to
decent transportation became a real public issue. The hygienists made
the great popular mistake of trying to save the stockyards man. They
knew he had a sick soul. They believed that by psycho-analyzing him and
showing he had always wanted to skin cats alive, they could put the
traction question on a higher plane. Unfortunately the Hearst of that
era took up the issue on the so-called popular side. He denounced the
hygienists as heartless experts and showed how science was really a
conspiracy in favor of the ruling class. The hygienic riots resulted in
a miserable set-back to the compulsory psycho-analysis of all criminals,
but the bloody assassination of the leading hygienist of the day brought
about a reaction, and within thirty years no judge was allowed to serve
who wasn't an expert in psychic work and hygiene. This decision was
greatly aided by the publication of a brochure revealing the relation of
criminal verdicts to the established neuroses of city magistrates. The
promise that this work would be extended and published as a supplement
to the Federal Reporter went a long way toward converting the Bar. The
old pretensions of the Bar went rapidly to pieces when political use was
made of important psychological and physiological facts. The hygienists
spoke of "the mighty stream of morbid compulsion broadening down to more
morbid compulsion." By 1950 no man with an OEdipus complex could even
get on the Real Estate ticket, and the utter collapse of militarism came
about with the magnificently scientific biographies of all the prominent
armament advocates in the evil era.
I had a surprise coming for me in the total disappearance of prisons.
Though I hate to confess it, I was a little amazed when I found that the
old penology was just as historical in 1991 as the methodology of the
Spanish Inquisition. Scientific men did possess models of prisons like
Sing Sing and Trenton and Atlanta and Leavenworth, and the tiny advances
in the latter prisons were thought amusing. But the deformity of the
human minds and the social systems that permitted such prisons as ours
was a matter for acute discussion and analysis everywhere, even in
casual unspecialized groups. This general intelligence made it clear to
me that social hygiene was never understood up to the middle of the
twentieth century. The very name, after all, was appropriated by men
afraid to specify the sex diseases they were then cleaning up.
Puritanism, serviceable as it was in its time, had kept men from
obtaining and examining the evidence necessary to right conclusions
about conduct. "Think," said one delightful youth to me, on my first day
in 1991, "think of not knowing the first facts as to the physiological
laws of continence. Think of starting out after general physical
well-being by the preposterous road of universal military service. Think
of electing Congressmen in the old days without applying even the Binet
test to them. Why, to-day we know nothing about 'the pursuit of
happiness,' fair as that object is, and yet we should no more stand for
such indiscriminateness than we'd allow a day to go by without
swimming."
The youth, I should specify, was a female youth, what we call a girl. I
had nothing to say to her. But my mind shot back to 1919, to which I was
so soon to return, and I thought of a millionaire's device I had once
seen in Chicago. Deep in the basement of a great factory building there
was a small electric-lighted cell, and in this bare cell there was a
gymnastic framework, perhaps four feet high, on which was strapped an
ordinary leather saddle. In front of the saddle there rose two thin
steel sticks, and out of them came thin leather reins. By means of a
clever arrangement of springs down below that responded to an electric
current, the whole mechanism was able to move up and down and backward
and forward in short stabby jerks that were supposed to stir up your
gizzard in practically the same way as the motion of a horse. This was,
in fact, a synthetic horse, bearing the same aesthetic relation to a
real horse that a phonograph song does to a real song that is poured
out, so to speak, in the sun. And here, in the bald basement cell with
its two barred basement windows (closed), the constipated millionaires
take their turns, whenever they can bear it, going through the canned
motions of a ride, staring with bored eyes at the blind tiled wall in
front of them. So far, in 1919, had the worship of Hygeia carried the
helot-captains of industry. And from that basement, from that heathen
symbol of perverted exercise, men had returned to a primary acceptance
of the human body and a primary law that its necessities be everywhere
observed. Not such a great accomplishment, I thought, in seventy years.
And yet it gave to mankind the leg-up they had to have for the happiness
they long for.