and city are practically inoperative in suppressing houses of
prostitution. Because of this condition certain public officials have
given a certain discretion to the police department and have allowed
police rules and regulations to take the place of the laws and
ordinances of these districts. As a result of this discretion certain
members of the police force have become corrupt, and not only failed
to strictly obey the rules and regulations in the restricted districts
themselves, but have failed adequately to enforce the law and
ordinances outside the restricted districts.”
The diagnoses are alike, but the treatments proposed in New York and
Chicago differ materially. This should be pointed out, not only to avoid
the confusion incident to designating different measures by the same or
similar terms, but also to correct the injustice of applying objections
which are only pertinent to one measure to defeat the other.
The board of social welfare proposed for New York and the morals
commission recommended for Chicago resemble each other in organization,
but are radically different in scope and in the means suggested for
carrying out their functions. The members of both are to be appointed by
the mayor. In New York it is proposed that the members shall serve seven
years; in Chicago the term recommended is but two years: and the
appointments are to be approved by the city council. No salaries are
provided in either city, but the commissioner of health in Chicago is to
be one of the members of the commission.
The function of both bodies is to deal with vice, but the jurisdiction
of the New York board is broader and corresponds to the statutes
relating to prostitution, gambling, and liquor selling. In Chicago the
function of the commission is restricted to the social evil. It is “to
take all legal steps necessary toward the effective suppression of bawdy
and disorderly houses, houses of ill-fame and assignation, to protect,
indict and prosecute keepers, inmates and patrons of the same.” This
commission and a morals court are both aimed, by the Chicago Vice
Commission, at the “constant and persistent repression of prostitution
as the immediate method, and absolute annihilation as the ultimate
ideal.”
While the morals commission is to be limited to six clerks, attorneys
and medical inspectors, together with their helpers, and must depend
upon the courts and the regular police force to fulfil its duties, the
New York board of social welfare would have under its direct command
secret service vice squads. These, it is provided, are to be distinct
from the constabulary forces of the police, “so that the regular police
shall no longer be responsible for the control of the vices and shall be
left to their original function of preserving peace and order.” The
suggested bill in New York, creating a department of public morals,
provides for a large staff of “public morals” police, including
captains, lieutenants, sergeants, doormen, surgeons and policemen. The
number would probably be between two and three hundred, all to be
exempted from civil service restrictions.
It is against this separation of the control of vice from the regular
police force, which the citizens’ committee felt “driven to recommend,”
that the committee of the Board of Aldermen in the Curran report present
the following objections:
“The morals policemen would lose the information which the regular
police could furnish; the contact of the regular force with vice
cannot thus be removed, as they must still enter vicious resorts for
the detection and arrest of other criminals; friction and collusion
between the two police forces would be inevitable and the collection
of graft would not be eliminated; the restriction of the morals police
to dealing only with vices would tend to low standards of character
among the men enlisting in this service only; the exemption from civil
service restrictions would still further contribute to lax discipline
and demoralization; the division of responsibility between two
commissioners of police would lessen the accountability and efficiency
of both.”
In Chicago the responsibility has already been divided by the recent
ordinance reorganizing the police force. Under this a second deputy
superintendent of police has been appointed, on the basis of a
competitive civil service examination, which was thrown open to
applicants from other states. His qualifications and duties are thus
specified:
“He shall not be a member of the active bureau of the department, but
shall have supervision of the clerical, mechanical and inspection
bureau; and shall be charged with the care and custody of departmental
property and the distribution of the same; the supervision of
departmental records; the inspection of the personnel of the
department and of stations, equipment and departmental properties; the
instruction of officers and members of the department; the
ascertaining and recording of departmental efficiency, individual and
group; the receipt and investigation of all complaints of citizens
regarding members of the police force; the supervision of the strict
enforcement of all laws and ordinances pertaining to all matters
affecting public morals; and the censoring of moving pictures and
public performances of all kinds; the furnishing of a card index
system to all district commanders in their respective stations, which
they shall keep to show, at all times, up to date, the name,
description, character, haunts, habits, associates and relatives of
every known person of bad character residing in or frequenting such
district, including pick-pockets, hold-up men, safe blowers,
confidence men, vagrants, pimps, prostitutes and people who are
operating or have operated gambling houses. All these functions shall
be performed under the direction of the general superintendent of
police.”
This second bureau with its second deputy superintendent well
discriminates and divides the clerical, inspectional and disciplinary
functions of the police department from those of the active force. But
to superimpose upon all these well co-ordinated duties the entire
responsibility for “supervising the strict enforcement of all laws and
ordinances pertaining to all matters affecting public morals” threatens
to make impossible either the efficient fulfilment of those routine
functions or the effective repression of vice. Yet this measure was
evidently preferred by the city administration to the morals commission
and was substituted for it, because the ordinance recommended by the
Vice Commission to the mayor has never been introduced in the city
council.
Against the precedents and preferences of the regular police force for
the segregation and regulation of vice, backed by the mayor’s preference
for the same policy, what can this lone “second deputy” do to secure
“the strict enforcement of these laws and ordinances”? His appointment
and helplessness are new arguments for a morals commission to support
him both in the enforcement of the law and in publicly placing
responsibility for its non-enforcement.
The substitution of this subterfuge in lieu of the morals commission can
be explained in the same way that Chief Justice Harry Olson, of the
Municipal Court of Chicago, accounts for the unexpected closing of the
segregated districts. He traced the sudden change in the attitude of
county and city officials toward segregated vice to the decision of the
Circuit Court which granted a permanent injunction restraining the use
of certain property in the segregated district for immoral purposes.
“This order of the Chancery Court was,” he said, “the Appomattox of the
war upon openly tolerated vice in Chicago.” For this decision served
notice that any citizen, by invoking the aid of the courts, could
restrain vice, if the public officials were unable or unwilling to do
so. “It was thus the beginning of the end,” he declared.
The morals court, he said, would further act as a check upon the second
deputy superintendent of police, because “the records and the statistics
of the court will show the names of the owners of such houses, together
with their proprietors, inmates and frequenters, and will disclose the
business of the promoters of the traffic and others who may profit
therefrom.” So if this feature of the reorganized police department was
intended by the city administration to effect its escape from the morals
commission as one horn of the dilemma presented by the Vice Commission,
Justice Olson clearly shows that the morals courts is the other horn.
Neither the police of the city administration, nor the state’s attorney
of the county, can escape if citizens seek warrants from the morals
court or injunctions from the Circuit Court.
The inquiry into the relation of low wages to the demoralization of
young girls and women, and the propaganda to correct this tendency by
minimum wage laws will bear close watching. It may not only injure the
broader movement to secure minimum wage laws based upon just and safe
economic grounds, but it may also divert attention from the enactment
and enforcement of laws against commercialized vice. For the ensnaring
of victims is accomplished through many more devious ways than can be
charged up to low wages.
WOMEN POLICE
LOUISE de KOVEN BOWEN
In all our large cities thousands of young people, weary from their
monotonous work in shop or factory, seek the streets in the evening
imperiously asserting their right to pleasure. Business enterprise has
taken advantage of this natural desire for recreation, and
commercialized amusements have sprung up on all sides ready to cater to
every taste of this childish multitude. Penny arcades, slot machines,
moving picture shows, cheap theaters, amusements parks and dance halls
are all attempting to lure children with every device known to modern
advertising. Young people are thus without protection and exposed to
temptation at the very moment when they are least able to withstand it.
Many students of municipal affairs believe that every large city should
have morals police, of whom a certain number should be women, if it
would properly protect young girls for whose unwary feet so many
pitfalls are spread, and if it would deal adequately with
prostitution—that grave menace to health and morals.
We need women police in the theaters of every city to watch the girls
who attend these entertainments and accept the invitations of young men
offered with disreputable intentions. In the majority of cheap theaters
the moving pictures are shown in a dim light and the danger to young
people has been shifted from the stage to the auditorium. The darkened
room affords opportunity for familiarity, and there should be women
police to see that conventionalities and decencies are observed.
There should be women police in our dance halls—the happy hunting ground
of the white slave trader—to watch the girls and also the boys, to warn
the girls when they are seen taking too much liquor and to watch that if
intoxicated they are not accompanied from the hall by young men who have
plied them with liquor for illicit purposes. They should also see that
young unsophisticated boys are not victimized by professional
prostitutes who take advantage of inexperienced youths who come to the
city for the first time and visit the dance halls to “see the sights.”
Women police should be stationed on pleasure boats and at bathing
beaches and should ever be on the alert for conditions which demoralize
children. We need women police in our amusement parks to mingle with the
crowds at the gates and to save young girls from accepting invitations
from men who hope to be repaid later in the evening. We need women
police in such places to follow girls who are seen going to lonely parts
of the parks accompanied by young men. In fact, we need women police to
“mother” the girls in all public places where the danger to young people
is great.
In our station houses we should have women police in whose charge girls
should be placed. Women police could accompany the girls to trial and be
with them when they are subjected to harassing questions so often put to
them by attorneys, and women police should accompany girls to the
institutions to which they are committed by the court. The work of the
woman police officer would not be very different from that of the woman
probation officer. The Juvenile Court officers investigate homes and
neighborhoods, watch their wards to see that they attend school or are
at work, and take charge of children after they have become delinquent.
It would be only one more step, but one urgently needed, to have women
police who would lessen the work of the probation officers by carefully
watching for those causes which lead children into the courts, by
reporting these conditions to the proper authorities and by carefully
supervising all places of amusement.
Women truant officers attached to the compulsory education department,
the women adult probation officers connected with the municipal courts,
the women factory inspectors, the women sanitary inspectors of the
health department, the women school nurses, the women supplied by the
Travelers’ Aid Association, the officers of the Juvenile Protective
Association and all other officers paid by private organizations are
doing valiant work for the young people of our cities. But we especially
need the police power which the city might vest in women trained for the
work and which would give them the necessary authority to cope with
certain dangerous situations with which private organizations have tried
in vain to deal.
Women police are not needed to handle crowds, to regulate street
traffic, to arrest drunkards and criminals, but they are sorely needed
in order that they may adequately protect the thousands of children and
young people who every day are exposed to the dangers of unsupervised
and disreputable places of amusement and for whose safety and welfare
the city is responsible.
DEMOCRATIZE THE PEACE MOVEMENT
JOHN HAYNES HOLMES
Church of the Messiah, New York
“How long, O Lord, how long!” is the cry one is moved to utter when
considering the war mania of our time and the ever-growing burden of
armaments which this delirium is forcing upon the world. The Balkans
swept from end to end with the scourge of “fire and sword,” Italy
fattening upon the unholy spoils wrested from effete Turkey, Russia
recreating the armies and navies annihilated by Japan, Germany
increasing her military forces to hitherto unheard of proportions,
France answering her neighbor’s challenge by raising her enlistment
period for citizens from two to three years, England insisting on a
five-Dreadnoughts-a-year basis, and her colonies building ships for the
imperial navy! What a spectacle! And Jesus Christ dead two thousand
years ago!
Here in America, there is a cheering sign in the refusal of the
Democratic Congress, through two successive terms, to provide for the
construction of more than a single battleship. But this was more than
counterbalanced by the defeat of ex-President Taft’s arbitration
treaties, the fortification of the Panama Canal, and the movement to
place the militia of the various states in the pay of the federal
government!
In the face of these facts, one is tempted to ask if there is not
something the matter with the organized peace movement, that it makes so
little headway against the onsweeping flood of frenzied militarism. The
movement has ample brains and sufficient money: it is active,
intelligent, resourceful. But has it the passion of a great ideal—does
it really mean business—has it got “guts,” to use the fine old
Anglo-Saxon phrase, as well as “gray-matter?”
It is on this point, the most essential of all, that one begins to have
doubts and fears. Why are there so many vice-presidents of peace
societies who are supporters of the big navy policy—why so many
advocates of peace who are enthusiastic preparers for war—why so many
disciples of good will who believe in peace in the abstract but in
battleships in the concrete? Above all, if the peace societies are
really in earnest, why are they so slow in joining hands and hearts with
the vast hosts of labor throughout the world—the unionists, Socialists,
syndicalists, and all the rest, who constitute at this moment the one
really serious menace to the supremacy of the war lords?
It is here, to my mind, in this last query, that we find the real
weakness of the organized peace movement. This movement is too academic,
too aristocratic, too exclusive. It is too much confined to earnest
scholars who deal in theories, and amiable social leaders who deal in
fads. It holds too many dinners at $10 a plate, conducts too many
meetings in luxurious parlors and salons, and puts its privileges of
membership and co-operation at too high a price of refinement, culture
and material wealth. There is too much “function” and not enough
“crusade!” Too much library dust, midnight oil, pink tea, after-dinner
speaking, and not enough sweat and tears and blood. Bankers, lawyers,
clergymen, college professors, club women—these are all right and we
need them every one. But they can never in the world accomplish their
aim alone.
It is the common people—peasants, artisans, factory workers—who pay the
price of war and it is only through the organized revolt of these people
that the curse of militarism can be destroyed. Here, in “the
multitudes,” whom Jesus sought out with so true an instinct, do we find
the hope of future peace upon earth. No movement which ignores this
factor in the situation can be regarded either as efficient or genuinely
in earnest. Sincere it may be, I grant you, but sincere in that narrow,
unsympathetic, petty way which has blasted many a precious hope and
destroyed many a noble cause! It is time for the peace movement to
democratize itself, to work from the bottom up and not from the top
down, to organize, inspire, co-operate with the workers in their
rebellion against militarism. This done, something will happen in the
world of armies and navies, and happen quick! But not before!
And is it not here that the social worker may count for much? No one
hates or should hate war more bitterly. No one sympathizes with the
organized peace societies more deeply. No one understands the common
people more truly. Is it not time for him to act?
BOOKS
MODERN PROBLEMS
By Sir Oliver Lodge. George H. Doran Co. 348 pp. Price $2.00; by mail of
THE SURVEY $2.13.
Sir Oliver Lodge is a scientist with a worldwide reputation, whose
opinions on the structure of atoms, on X-rays or on Hertzian waves
command instant attention. But when he expounds such remote and
multifarious subjects as “free will and determinism,” “Bergson’s
philosophy,” “universal arbitration,” “the production and sale of
drink,” “the functions of money,” “charity organization” and a score of
others, he rouses the suspicions of the wary. “Nobody could possibly be
as wise as Daniel Webster looked,” and nobody could possibly be as wise
as an authoritative knowledge of these topics implies.
Yet the learned knight has acquitted himself creditably. The essays are
random papers, addresses at commencement exercises and the like, as good
as such occasions warranted, though hardly, in some cases, worth the
dignity of permanent print.
Sir Oliver Lodge, despite his rise to the presidency of Birmingham
University, has escaped the commonest of British diseases—snobbery. His
eyes are not blinded, by fatty layers of prosperity, to the misery that
stalks about the country. He is not elated at the sight of those piles
of iron and slag, those miles of furnaces and factories, those leagues
of rabbit-hutch cottages, which stretch, northwest of Birmingham, a
“Black Country” that even Satan might disown, the heart of manufacturing
England, a blasted region where no blade of grass is green and no life
can be clean and elevated.
The author is saturated with the feeling and teaching of Ruskin, in whom
these blighted acres, and other fair districts which Mammom had
despoiled, raised such righteous tempests of wrath. It is refreshing to
find in high places the gospel of Ruskin, that half-forgotten prophet of
social righteousness, re-stated with conviction and re-applied to fresh
problems.
Sir Oliver is grateful to the organized charity workers who “immerse
themselves in this mass of misery and incipient or threatening
degradation, in hope that they may raise individuals out of it”; but,
with more pleasure, he pleads for that statesmanship which will root out
the causes of wretchedness. He must be a whole-hearted supporter of
Lloyd-George’s schemes of social insurance, old-age pensions, taxation
of land values and better education. With tax-payers’ associations he is
surely unpopular, for he actually denounces thrift in government and
advocates spending more and ever more on public undertakings. He laments
that a surplus in the national revenue is made the excuse for lowering
taxes, while there are a thousand good objects on which the surplus
could be spent. Perhaps that argument is the easier because, like the
great majority, he owns not a foot of soil in what is euphemistically
styled “his” country. Were he in America he would appear before boards
of estimate and the like and plead for more money for schools,
playgrounds, hospitals, and health work.
Sometimes his economics are disputable, as when he asserts that “human
labor is the ultimate standard of value, and coins might instructively
be inscribed in terms of labor.” Even the Marxian Socialists are shy
today about defending their prophet’s theory of labor value. But slips
like that are inevitable where so wide a range of topics is attacked.
Altogether the volume can be recommended to those numerous casual
readers who like a little of everything and not much of anything.
JOHN MARTIN.
THE BURDEN OF POVERTY
By Charles F. Dole. B. W. Huebsch. 124 pp. Price $.50; by mail of THE
SURVEY $.55.
THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND AMERICAN LIFE
By Chauncey B. Brewster. Thomas Whittaker, Inc. 143 pp. Price $.80; by
mail of THE SURVEY $.87.
THE MINISTER AND THE BOY
By Allen Hoben. University of Chicago Press. 171 pp. Price $1.00; by
mail of THE SURVEY $1.10.
BOY LIFE AND SELF-GOVERNMENT
By George Walter Fiske. Young Men’s Christian Association Press. 310
pp. Price $1.00; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.06.
THAT BOY OF YOURS
By J. S. Kirtley. Geo. H. Doran Co. 256 pp. Price $1.00; by mail of
THE SURVEY $1.10.
THE FAMILY
By Charles Franklin Thwing and Carrie F. Thwing. Lothrop, Lee and
Shepard Co. 258 pp. Price $1.60; by mail of THE SURVEY $1.75.
The distinctive notes in Dr. Charles F. Dole’s The Burden of Poverty are
two—the new consciousness of the spiritual nature of man whereby poverty
becomes a problem and the spiritual urgency to meet it due to the mighty
idealism of religion. Whether conscious of a religious motive or not, or
even in conscious reaction from something repellent in some religious
concept, all to whom poverty is a problem and who are urged thereby to
sacrifice for others are said to be moved at both points by a religious
motive.
The extent and causes of poverty are accounted for in largest part by
industrial conditions, the economic burdens of land, rent and interest,
immigration, drink and war. But to whatever factors the problem is due
it can be met only as man becomes more religious, which the author makes
equivalent to being more human and more civilized. Socialism rises above
its “difficulties”, if at all, only as it becomes so human as to be “a
form of the religion of pity and sympathy.” It fails most “in not
understanding the spiritual implication of democracy, because a
materialistic democracy is impossible.”
Keeping well “this side of socialism” and claiming something better than
it, Dr. Dole presents a platform for social progress which he thinks
appeals to a larger consensus of judgment and synthesis of action. It
summons all to end war, intemperance, tuberculosis, and occupational and
vice diseases; to educate for responsibility and efficiency; to redress
industrial injury and injustice; to abolish special privileges, double
standards and discriminations against sex or class.