EDITORIAL GRIST

ISABEL C. BARROWS

How hard it is for a man who has at heart the principles of prison reform to carry them out in an old institution that should be leveled to the ground! J. K. Codding, warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary, writing in his eighteenth biennial report, expresses a wish to repair broken men and remake defective ones by plenty of productive labor, wise and firmly administered discipline, proper bodily care, and such mental and spiritual training as is possible under the limited opportunities afforded by a penitentiary. Prison recreations he advocates “not solely for the purpose of giving pleasure to the prisoners, nor as a prison fad, but for the same reason that we give them work, discipline and wholesome food.”

But what can he do to carry out such a program in a prison where the cells are “little dingy, dark holes in the wall, damp, musty and disease breeding—an absolute disgrace to Kansas”? The prison physician echoes this complaint:

“If the institution hopes to make its inmates strive for better things in life it will have to set a better example. Compelling a man, after a day’s work to go into one of the little cells now provided, and sleep on a bag of straw only half wide enough, and almost as unyielding as the floor, will certainly never do it.”

Yet the power of personality is felt in spite of this. The officers are all under civil service and selected only for fitness. The warden says “a more courteous, prompt and efficient lot of prison officials cannot be found in any other penitentiary in the United States.” The prisoners themselves respond to the wise treatment they receive and show it “in their willingness and ability to do the work assigned them; in their almost uniformly kind and courteous treatment of the officers; in the absence of any destruction of prison property; in the few punishments and in their general cheerfulness and obedience.”

Kansas ought to give a good warden a good prison with plenty of land about it.

A. J. McKELWAY

Child labor is even more a cause than an effect of poverty. This was the point emphasized at the ninth annual conference of the National Child Labor Committee, which was recently held at Jacksonville, Fla. The meeting Was characterized by fearless and frank descriptions of conditions in the different states and especially in the South. Apology and defence, based on a comparison of child labor conditions from the sectional point of view, found no place at the conference. Delegates from the North and from the South vied in acknowledging the shame of a common sin.

The other distinctive note was that co-operation among all classes of social workers is needed to gain this reform. This note was sounded in a strong resolution which called upon many national organizations to supply not only the active sympathy of their membership but special investigations of child labor conditions from the different points of view which these organizations have taken in their respective spheres of work. Mention was particularly made of the National Education Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Medicine, the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, the American Red Cross, the American Bar Association, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Social Service Commission of the Federation of Churches, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Conference of Catholic Charities, the National Conference of Charities and Correction, the American Association for Labor Legislation, and the American Federation of Labor. Finally, since the child-employing industries, while forming only a small percentage of industrial establishments, have brought the reproach of child labor upon American industry itself, the National Manufacturers’ Association was also mentioned.

At the opening meeting four questions were discussed: Is the immature child a proper object of charitable relief? Shall the state pensionwidows? Shall the school support the child? Shall charitable societies relieve family distress by finding work for children? The last question, so far as it was referred to at all, was emphatically answered in the negative, as the first was in the affirmative. The discussion turned chiefly upon the question of mothers’ pensions and the respective value of public relief and private philanthropy. The sentiment of the conference was plainly for a carefully guarded form of mothers’ pension by the state. This, it was felt, should be considered in relation to other remedies such as the minimum wage, workmen’s compensation, and the prevention of those industrial accidents which so often deprive the family of the chief breadwinner. It was also felt that such pensions should be regarded from the standpoint of justice rather than of charity, the mother to be looked upon as rendering service to the state as the bearer and rearer of children.

A thorough acquaintance with the recent discussions of the problem inThe Surveywas displayed and there was some apprehension expressed of the many failures through ill-considered legislation probable before success would be finally reached. The majority apparently believed that pensioning mothers was not simply a problem of relief but one comprising other elements, as the word “pension” rightly indicates. While it was recognized that hungry children make poor pupils, it was felt that any further weakening of parental responsibility for the child by the school would be unfortunate. The discussion along these lines included talks by Sherman C. Kingsley of Chicago; Jean Gordon of New Orleans; Mrs. Florence Kelley of New York; Grace Strachan of New York; Mrs. W. L. Murdoch of Birmingham; A. T. Jamieson of Greenwood, S. C., president of the South Carolina Conference of Charities; R. T. Solensten of the Associated Charities, Jacksonville, Fla.; Leon Schwartz of the B’nai B’rith, Mobile, Ala.; Mary H. Newell of the Associated Charities, Columbus, Ga., and others.

Rabbi David Marx of Atlanta added a touch of scholarly research to one session in his paper on Ancient Standards of Child Protection. Economic factors were discussed by Miss Gordon, who spoke on the eight-hour day and by Richard K. Conant, secretary of the Massachusetts Child Labor Committee, who dealt convincingly with the fact that the textile industry in Massachusetts no longer depends upon child labor in spite of the numerous plaints concerning the ruin of the industry of the sort which Dickens satirized in Hard Times.

W. H. Swift, secretary of the North Carolina Child Labor Committee, who had just come from a struggle with the Legislature, vigorously attacked the contention that mill work is better for children than the squalor of some of the mountain towns. He described his own childhood in an “average mountain home” in the South as the oldest of ten children, all of whom, he said incidentally are now doing pretty well in life. He told of the sacrifices by his father for their education and said that any time within the past twenty years, his father might have moved to a cotton mill town and lived on the labor of his children if he had been willing to do so. In all probability in that case the children would have been doomed to the common fate of cotton factory workers, with the low wages and hopeless outlook of an unskilled trade. Then he said that he was the father of three children and had lived for years next door to the best cotton mill in North Carolina. But if he should lose his means of livelihood and be forced to labor with his hands, rather than put his three young children in a cotton mill, he would “take them back to the mountains, build a shack by the side of a spring and plow with a brindled steer on the barren, ivy-covered plains of the Pick-Breeches.” His reference was to a well-known area in North Carolina where no one has ever been known to make a living. Mr. Swift’s partial defeat in the legislative fight—the abolition of night work for children under sixteen only was secured—has made him all the more determined to continue the war until his state shall adequately protect its working children from exploitation.

One especially significant address was by Rev. C. E. Weltner of Columbia, S. C. After many years’ experience in charge of the “betterment work” of one of the noted mills of Columbia, Mr. Weltner said he had come to the conclusion that a better way to spend any surplus earnings is in adding to the pay envelope so that the people may do a few things for themselves. The message of the conference was carried to many sections of the city through a series of parlor conferences, eleven in all, held on one of the afternoons.

The principal speakers at one of the evening meetings were John A. Kingsbury, of New York, who spoke on the poverty caused by child labor, and Julia C. Lathrop of the Federal Children’s Bureau, who gave an admirable outline of the functions of the new bureau and of its first effort to secure birth registration laws and to learn the causes of infant mortality. Lewis W. Hine, social photographer, threw upon the screen pictures of child labor conditions among the canneries of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, showing children of tender ages engaged in shucking oysters and shelling shrimp. Child Labor and Health occupied a morning session. Dr. W. H. Oates, state factory inspector for Alabama, made a forcible protest as a physician against conditions which tend to cause diseasesof the throat and lungs in the children of the cotton mills. Mr. Brown spoke of the evils of the night-messenger service and Dr. Lindsay discussed improvement in child labor legislation.

A successful new feature of the conference was a meeting for children held at the Imperial Theater. It developed into two meetings, for the thousand children expected were doubled in number. Children themselves gave the stories of different child-employing industries, with the help of the stereopticon.

At the final meeting Senator Hudson, of Florida, presided. The writer made his annual protest against cotton mill conditions in the South, the subject this time being Our Modern Feudalism. Jerome Jones of Atlanta, prominent in southern labor circles, spoke of the connection between child labor and low wages. Mrs. Kelley gave one of her vigorous talks on the child breadwinner and the dependent parent. Owen R. Lovejoy appealed for more effective support of the cause of child labor reform by showing how widespread the evil is, how fearful the abuses are in many instances, and explained that the resources at the command of the committee, in the face of the enemies and obstacles to be overcome, are very meager.

Florida conditions and legislative problems were discussed at an informal gathering and this culminated in the organization of the Florida Child Labor Committee, with Dr. John W. Stagg of Orlando, as chairman and Marcus C. Fagg of the Children’s Home Society, Jacksonville, as secretary. The Florida Legislature is now in session.

GRAHAM TAYLOR

It is as obvious in New York and Chicago as it has been in some other cities that the effort to secure a morals commission for city governments is intended not only to repress and prevent the social evil but also quite as much to protect and improve the morals of the police, which are corrupted under the present conditions.

Indeed, this is directly stated in the Report of the Citizens’ Committee appointed at the Cooper Union meeting held in New York last August, after a commanding officer of the police force had been implicated in the murder of Rosenthal by the “gun men”:

“The corruption is so ingrained that the man of ordinary decent character entering the force and not possessed of extraordinary moral fiber may easily succumb.... Such a system makes for too many of the police an organized school of crime.... We know that the connection between members of the police force and crime, or commercialized vice, is continuous, profitable and so much a matter of course that explicit bargains do not have to be made, both the keeping and breaking of faith being determined by these policemen for their own profit.

“Our recommendations on the excise and prostitution problems are intended to benefit the police situation.... While improvement in the police department will incalculably improve the tone of the city’s morals without any change in the statutory standards, nevertheless we have throughout hewn to the line of police reform and not of vice suppression.”

The Chicago Vice Commission came to a similar conclusion:

“In certain restricted districts the laws and ordinances of the state 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 areboth 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.

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 womensanitary 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.

JOHN HAYNES HOLMESChurch of the Messiah, New York

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?

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