Part 4 (1/2)
In casting about for a concrete example to ill.u.s.trate some of the points under discussion I hesitated a long time before the wealth of material. No age has produced such a mult.i.tude 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 ma.s.sive 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 statesmans.h.i.+p, 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 prost.i.tute 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 pa.s.sionate 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 compa.s.sion.” 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 a.n.a.lyst of motive.
We need only note the vast interest in the subject--that it extends across cla.s.s 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 prost.i.tutes 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 prost.i.tution is so varied that n.o.body 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 prost.i.tution. 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 s.h.i.+fting and very elastic; it includes the unsuspected; and I am inclined to believe that it is the natural refuge of the ”suppressed” prost.i.tute. 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 prost.i.tution 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 prost.i.tutes 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.
l.u.s.t has a thousand avenues. The brothel, the flat, the a.s.signation house, the tenement, saloons, dance halls, steamers, ice-cream parlors, Turkish baths, ma.s.sage 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 a.s.sumes.
The Commission gives a very fair picture of these manifestations. A ma.s.s of material is offered which does in a way show where and how and to what extent l.u.s.t 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 pa.s.ses by with a plat.i.tude.
”So long as there is l.u.s.t 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 prost.i.tution 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. l.u.s.t 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 l.u.s.t, 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 a.n.a.lyzing 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 a.s.sumed at a specific date in a certain city. The dynamic force which created these conditions, which will continue to create them--l.u.s.t--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 l.u.s.t 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 plat.i.tude and have become a fertile idea. For a plat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sed by. Perhaps we can raise it again and follow the hints it unfolds.
If l.u.s.t 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 fict.i.tious sense of activity. But the ideal of ”annihilation” becomes an irrelevant and meaningless phrase. If l.u.s.t 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 l.u.s.t itself as inherently evil. The members a.s.sumed without criticism the traditional dogma of Christianity that s.e.x in any manifestation outside of marriage is sinful. But practical sense told them that s.e.x 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 a.s.sumption that all expressions not legalized are sinful shut them off from any constructive answer to their problem. Seeing prost.i.tution or something equally bad as the only way s.e.x can find an expression they really set before religion and education the impossible task of removing l.u.s.t ”from the hearts of men.” So when their report puts at its head that absolute annihilation of prost.i.tution 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 prost.i.tution, not alone all the methods of expression which l.u.s.t seeks out, but l.u.s.t 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual vice. One way presumably is that divorced women often become prost.i.tutes. 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 prost.i.tute. This evil is totally different from the first: in one case divorce contributes to prost.i.tution, in the other, prost.i.tution 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 prost.i.tution. 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 prost.i.tution tabooed, the Commission has a choice between sterilization and--let us say--other methods of expression.