For some time sounds of confused disputation have been coming out
of Denver and gathering the attention of the world. The story is
complex in its telling but simple in its essentials. Judge Lindsey,
of the well-known Juvenile Court in that city, is being subjected to
processes of ousting that need not hold our attention too closely.
Mighty forces have worked for his overthrow. The Ku Klux Klansmen have
gathered in “Klavern” against the Judge. The Grand Dragon of the Ku
Klux Klan, a Baptist minister in his less fiery moments, seems to be in
unwonted alliance with eminent Roman Catholic leaders against him. He
is violently assailed and violently supported. In detail the conflict
becomes squabble, but the matter upon which issue is raised is one of
quite fundamental significance to any one concerned with the present
drift of things. The fight rages about the institution of marriage.
Judge Lindsey has been offering to improve it.
That Juvenile Court in Denver is known throughout the civilized world.
It has attracted many European students and inquirers. It is as old
as the century. It owes its constitution and methods very largely to
Lindsey’s indefatigable zeal. Its primary function was the separation
of delinquent children and juvenile first offenders from the hard
atmosphere of the common police court. They were to be dealt with upon
special lines, saved from the stigma of conviction, and if possible
turned back from becoming members of the criminal class. This task
the court has performed admirably. Its functions developed into very
valuable preventive work. It became a place of reconciliation between
parents and erring and recalcitrant sons and daughters, it shepherded
home a multitude of runaways, and it saved great numbers of misguided
and luckless girls from shame and degradation. Naturally it antagonized
the saloon and the white-slave trader. For twenty years it worked with
the blessing of the Roman Catholic community. Father McMenamin, one of
the leading clergy in Denver, described it as “a constructive force in
our community, and a godsend to many a boy and girl.”
The Klansmen, however, were early hostile, and their first hostility
was based on the good relations between the Juvenile Court and the
Catholics. They denounced Judge Lindsey for sending girls, girls of
Catholic antecedents, to the Catholic House of the Good Shepherd, to
work for nothing, as they alleged, in the laundry and be debauched.
That was their agreeable version of the methods of a well-managed
Catholic Home of spotless repute. It is interesting to consider the
proposals that could bring Klansmen and Catholic, in spite of this,
into alliance against the Judge.
Nothing could better illuminate the struggle between innovation and
conservative reaction in matrimonial relations that goes on to-day
all over the civilized world. It is not a struggle between good men
and bad men; it is a struggle between novel and established ideas,
between projected and time-honoured social usages. Father McMenamin
and Judge Lindsey are well-known men in Denver; their characters have
been gauged by years of public service, and there can be no question
that each is a conspicuously honest, trustworthy, disinterested leader.
The Klansmen lie a little under the shadow of “Elmer Gantry,” that
deadly book; there is much rant, froth, and violence upon their Denver
record, and their testimonial remains in suspense, but for our present
purposes we can very well restrict the issue to the two unquestionably
straightforward protagonists, Judge Lindsey and Father McMenamin.
Now this is what has blown up Judge Lindsey and his Juvenile Court in
Denver. After years of experience of adolescent misbehaviour he has
come to the conclusion that in our modern community marriage is delayed
too late, and that a long and lengthening gap has been opened between
the days when school and college are left behind and the days when it
seems safe and reasonable to settle down and found a family. There is
a growing proportion of fretting and impatient young people in the
community, and out of their undisciplined eagerness springs a tangle
of furtive promiscuity, prostitution, disease, crime, and general
unhappiness. Young men cannot apply themselves to sound work because of
nature’s strong preoccupation, and the life of possibly even a majority
of young women is a life of tormented uncertainty. Judge Lindsey,
with the weight of a new immense experience upon him, and with the
assertions of the advocates of birth control before him, has suggested
a more orderly accommodation of social life to the new conditions.
He has proposed a type of preliminary marriage which he calls
Companionate Marriage. This is to be a marriage undertaken by two
people for “mutual comfort,” as the Prayer-book has it, with a
full knowledge of birth control, and with the deliberate intention
of not having children. So long as there are no children and with
due deliberation, this companionate marriage may be dissolved by
mutual consent. On the other hand, at any time the couple may turn
their marriage into the permanent “family marriage” form. That is
his proposal, and the State of Colorado has full power to make the
experiment of such an institution. He wants such laws to be made. He
believes that in most cases such marriages would develop naturally into
permanent unions and that their establishment would clear the social
atmosphere of a vast distressful system of illicit relationships,
irrevocable blunders, abortions, desertions, crimes, furtive
experimenting and all those dangers to honour, health, and happiness
that go with furtiveness in these matters. He believes it would mean a
great simplification and purification of social life and the release of
much vexed and miserable energy.
Now before we consider the opposition of Father McMenamin to this
project it may be well to note the fact that there is a considerable
conflict of authority about this birth control. It is certainly not
a sure and complete avoidance of offspring in all cases, though with
due observances and with most people it works as Judge Lindsey counts
upon its working. But a certain small percentage of his companionate
marriages will unintentionally convert themselves into normal family
marriages. Birth control does not certainly remove, it does but
diminish, the probability of consequences, and it affords no such
opening of “flood gates” to “unbridled licence,” and so forth, as its
antagonists assume. Furtive and illicit indulgence are not relieved of
anxiety by current birth-control knowledge. That is one point in this
question not generally made clear.
Another criticism of wilfully restrained fecundity seems to be of
far less value. People of medical and quasi-scientific standing who
dislike birth control talk of its disastrous effects upon the nerves
and general health. They babble of “nervous wrecks.” They produce
no evidence of these effects, they assert that they exist and talk
copiously of their own remarkable opportunities for observation. But
equally authoritative witnesses of an opposite school of thought, with
equally remarkable opportunities for observation, will talk of the
disastrous consequences of chastity and suppression. It is a field in
which most people seem to think with individual bias and a violent
disregard of fact. The truth seems to be that the human constitution
is remarkably adaptable in these matters, a normal individual can
establish habits of self-indulgence or habits of restraint, can pass
from phases of great liveliness to phases of apathy and remain a happy
and healthy organism. We can build up systems of habit either way.
There is no standard sexual life.
Quite apart from the varieties of temperamental type, each type is
capable of living in a variety of ways and there is practically nothing
in any of these vehement asseverations for or against this or that
liberty or this or that restriction. Many abstinent people and many
declared birth-controllers are obviously healthy and vigorous people;
the way of living of one sort is just as healthy as the way of living
of the other sort; there are sturdy old rakes, equally sturdy priests
and other celibates, hale grandmothers of a multitude, and brisk and
happy old maids. One has but to look around one at the people one meets
to make all this alarmist propaganda dissolve away.
Speaking very loosely and generally I would give it as my own matured
impression that amidst the strains, provocations, challenges, incessant
suggestions and reminders of modern life, it conduces to calm of mind
and personal pride, it is the least troublesome and easiest way of
living for most people, to lead a life of normal sexual reactions
reasonably safeguarded against overwhelming offspring, and that all
the specific demands of nature upon the nerves and health of even the
most feminine of women are to be met by bringing one or two children
into the world. Nature is much more accommodating than moral and social
theories. The question of physical health has indeed very little to do
with these discussions. It is a pity that each side will drag it in.
But after dismissing that much of the argument there still remains a
complex tangle of perplexities about marriage. It is a tangle that it
may be perhaps impossible to resolve altogether. Many modern people
discuss it as though it was a simple problem for the comfortable
satisfaction of physical desire. But in the human being there is no
such thing as unmixed physical desire; there is always in matters
sexual a stir of the imagination. Thereby even the grossest sexual
indulgence is lifted to a plane above gourmandize or gluttony. And
also, long before one begins to think about the way in which children
affect the problem, there is a vast system of reactions between men and
women over and above sexuality. There is a general magic, there are
elements of admiration, vague pleasure, fear and friendship long before
the development of those crowding preferences that become love. Further
beyond the passion of love, resting upon that as a basis, resting upon
the intimacy and association it establishes, is married love, which is
the deepest and tenderest relationship on earth. It is in its fullness
a slow growth; perhaps it needs youth and a struggle in common for its
perfect establishment, perhaps like some sorts of fruit it needs cold
and storm as well as sunshine for its ripening.
In the atmosphere created by this sure, deep-rooted married love alone
can one find the happy assurance, the perfect security of help and
loyal sympathy in which children will grow easily and insensibly to the
loyalties, the habitual serviceableness, the necessary generosities, of
modern citizenship.
I believe at the bottom of the mind of such a good man as Father
McMenamin in his antagonism to Judge Lindsey is an intense conviction
that for most people married love is the highest good, and certainly
that is the persuasion of all his more reputable allies. They think it
is not only the highest personal good but the highest social good. And
because they know it is a thing of slow growth, they want to protect
people against hasty and fitful breaches, to tie them irrevocably,
to bind their habits and interests into one indissoluble bundle, so
that they may grow together in spite of themselves. They hate any
thought of divorce. They distrust birth control because it seems to
them to minimize fidelity. They will not trust people to find out for
themselves in time how good and precious this thorough, permanent,
inseparable union can be. They are afraid that Judge Lindsey’s
companionate marriages will be too readily voided and that a shallow,
promiscuous habit of mind will be established in young people. Judge
Lindsey argues, on the contrary, that his project enables them to begin
a lifelong association at the very outset of their emotional lives and
that the greater danger of promiscuity and the trivialization of the
sexual life lies in a delayed marriage. He thinks that the rigidities
of the established system defeat its own ends. The real issue lies
there.
This is not fundamentally a religious question. People are too
inclined to think that the Roman Catholic Church is opposed to any
dissolution of marriage or the family, as a part of its faith, but
this is a complete mistake. The Roman Catholic Church, it is true,
sets its face against divorce, but on the other hand it will annul a
marriage with great facility and so reduce children who have imagined
themselves to be legitimate to the status of bastards, a thing no sort
of civil divorce has ever done. If such annulments are infrequent in
the Roman Catholic community, that is not because of any doctrinal bar
to them, but because the habits and organization and common sense of
that community are against a ready resort to such releases. It is as
unfair to accuse Roman Catholicism of distinctive rigidity here as it
is to charge liberal thinkers with immoral motives. Religious prejudice
is as much out of place in this discussion as medical prejudice. The
real issue is one of social psychology; whether one universal binding,
invariable, intolerant marriage contract does or does not conduce to
the establishment in the larger number of cases of this deep, fine,
full, rich, socially beneficial, child-protecting relationship of
married love or whether that is a harmful delusion. Those who are with
Father McMenamin are of the former opinion; those who are with Judge
Lindsey, of the latter.
For my own part I must confess myself not so much on the side of
Judge Lindsey as further away from Father McMenamin on the other side
out beyond Judge Lindsey. I want people to have all the knowledge
and freedom I can in these things as in all things. I think that
compulsion defeats its own ends and that animals and human beings have
an instinctive disposition to resist being forced along paths that,
left to themselves, they would quite naturally follow. A vast amount of
sexual misbehaviour is _provoked_ by prohibitions and proscriptions.
It does not follow that because a thing is very, very good it ought to
be forced upon everybody. There are great varieties of character in
the world and for many of them married love is impossible. There are
many who miss a full natural development of married love and yet have a
reasonable claim for respect and consideration in less complete or less
enduring relationships.
People are needlessly afraid of a variety of reputable contracts and
of freedom in the unions of men and women because they do not realize
how natural and necessary is the habitual association of one man with
one woman in the workaday world. It is a thing you can safely leave
most people to discover and realize for themselves. If people were
completely free to do anything they pleased in sexual matters, they
would do, only more easily and happily, much the same things that we
take great pains to insist they shall do and compel them to do now. As
many would pair as pair now and perhaps more, and the unfortunate and
the unpairable would not be made to suffer for bad luck or singularity
of temperament. People would not be constrained; there would be less
shame and less persecution through it all. There would be easier
readjustment after mistakes, earlier mating in most cases, and a great
diminution of prostitution and the quasi-criminal sexual underworld.
On the whole, I think that popular thought and will are moving steadily
in the direction of rationalism, candour, and charity in sexual things
and away from emotionalism, concealment, compulsion, and repression.
This dispute at Denver is certainly only one of the opening incidents
in a very wide and far-reaching movement for the courageous revision
and modernization of marriage.
_26 June, 1927._