What kind of mother will they make?
Current Fiction Heroes
By Hamlin Garland
[ . . . ]
I admit to certain old-fashioned prejudices. I don’t like to see women smoke, and I don’t like to hear them swear, even in plays. I am saddened when I find them writing (or defending) pornographic fiction, or performing as actresses in debasing-dramas written by men. As an individualist I grant women equal rights with men, but I am not pleased when I see them taking on the vices of men. That kind of individualism seems a reverse, not an advance.
As I walk the pavements of Fifth Avenue, meeting swarms of young girls in flesh-colored stockings, with bobbed hair and painted lips, I wonder what their ideals of womanhood can be. On what model do they form their manners? What kind of mothers will they make?
In a recent issue of the Theatre Magazine I found the answer to this question stated powerfully and fully. It is especially valuable, for it comes from a man in the thick of this debate. Under the heading “The Red Lamp in the Theatre” he propounds these questions:
The woman libertine is in process of glorification in book as well as play. Robed in scanty silks and covered with jewels, she is depicted on the stage and scenes as living in ease and luxury without labor. To the shopgirl she must appear the supremely worth-while person. She has nothing to do with the grimy work-a-day world. She is entirely without purpose save that of selfishly enjoying herself—a parasite upon those whose toil keeps society moving slowly upward away from the brute, and her lovers are of the same purposeless type.
That such plays, such stories, are profoundly affecting the manners of our boys and girls cannot be disputed, and New York City is the chief centre of this baleful influence. The scenes of these stories, these pictures, these plays, are usually laid in the resorts of New York City. Managers are not friendly to plots laid in other, and especially inland, cities or towns, and magazine editors more and more demand similar themes and similar heroines.
The worst of this situation, to my mind, lies in the fact that New York, no longer predominately American, is the jury of final appeal. Seen from the Middle West or the South, Manhattan is a city of aliens, with a vast and growing colony of European peasants, merchants and newly rich who know little and care less for American tradition. I also feel this. After being away on a lecture trip in the interior, I return each time to Manhattan as to a foreign port. The people in the street appear mean in stature and brutal in manner. It is in the small towns of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois that I overtake the vanishing America of my youth.
It is an occasional investigation of this sort which leads me to deplore the agencies which are sluicing out upon the youth of the village the moral filth of the city. Everywhere I go I find the Victrola belching out the brazen clang of jazz, screaming its suggestive songs of the music hall and bawling off-color jests of the Broadway cabaret. The “popular” magazine, with its flashy illustrations, its Arrow-Brand-Collar heroes and its “daring” heroines, is on every news stand, while the moving picture house offers the villager and the farmboy inspiring glimpses of the doings of New York’s underworld. It is in this way that certain agencies of our great metropolis exploit and corrupt the small town.
No doubt I shall be called hopelessly fossilized when I say that I cannot endure the modern dances. It is not a question of religious precept with me, it is a question of decency. These grotesque movements (I am told) came up from the low dives of the South American harbors. “They are in effect a mixture of the jungle and the red light resorts of Paris,” one expert declares. This I can well believe; certainly the nudity of the women and the action of the men would indicate such an origin. I find them not only ugly but subversive of all that civilization has built up in the way of modesty in women and dignity in men. This too, is an aftermath of the great war.
After reading a tableful of our illustrated magazines and making the rounds of our hotels and theatres, a stranger would naturally conclude that we are a nation of jazzers, lounge lizards, gourmandizers and profligates. [ . . . ]
I resent the implications of such New York plays and New York pictures. Their characters are not American in the deeper meaning of the word. The men and women who made America, who cleared the forests, founded the cities and established schools did not dance suggestive dances to the sound of a jazz band. [. . .]
[Hamlin Garland, “Current Fiction Heroes,” New York Times, December 23, 1923, p.14.]
By Hamlin Garland
[ . . . ]
I admit to certain old-fashioned prejudices. I don’t like to see women smoke, and I don’t like to hear them swear, even in plays. I am saddened when I find them writing (or defending) pornographic fiction, or performing as actresses in debasing-dramas written by men. As an individualist I grant women equal rights with men, but I am not pleased when I see them taking on the vices of men. That kind of individualism seems a reverse, not an advance.
As I walk the pavements of Fifth Avenue, meeting swarms of young girls in flesh-colored stockings, with bobbed hair and painted lips, I wonder what their ideals of womanhood can be. On what model do they form their manners? What kind of mothers will they make?
In a recent issue of the Theatre Magazine I found the answer to this question stated powerfully and fully. It is especially valuable, for it comes from a man in the thick of this debate. Under the heading “The Red Lamp in the Theatre” he propounds these questions:
What is the matter with the theatre? Who or what is to blame for the blight that has fallen upon it? Why is it gradually losing its importance, and at the same time the sympathy and support of people of taste and intelligence? * * *The italics are mine, but all that the editor sys of abortive heroines upon the stage can be applied to present day fiction.
The drama today is a reflection of the condition of the world as left by the aftermath of the great war. * * * The idle, profiteering, thoughtless public wanted to be amused. * * * the playwright who could attract and entertain the mob became the lion of the hour. He gave them plays in which prostitutes were the heroines. * * * The red-lamp district was transferred from the “Tenderloin” to the stage. * * *
In better, saner times, the red light symbolized danger—a leprous spot to avoid. * * * In America we are more progressive. There are no red lights in our side streets, but they burn—even more brightly—on our stage: The prostitute—that is the character our rapid-fire, up-to-date dramatist prefers to exploit for the fattening of his bank account. The youth just out of college, the virgin of blushing sixteen is shown the life of the harlot in all it unsavory, hideous details. * * *
These managers and authors say they give the public what it wants—but the fare provided really what the public wants? Is not there another public, the public which flocked to see “Abraham Lincoln”? * * * Is it true that we want filthy plays? * * * After all, the great majority of the people are clean and right thinking. As to the libidinously inclined minority, they must be taught to stop thinking along prostitute lines. Wantonness, waste, jazz, gambling, drunkenness—all that is part of Satan’s curriculum. * * *
A certain class of woman playgoers likes to see the prostitute on the stage. Perhaps they see in the hectic heroine what they might have been in other circumstances. Weak, unmoral, barren by principle, let their empty headed daughters imitate the harlot in dress and manner, and their sons go to ruin for her.
The woman libertine is in process of glorification in book as well as play. Robed in scanty silks and covered with jewels, she is depicted on the stage and scenes as living in ease and luxury without labor. To the shopgirl she must appear the supremely worth-while person. She has nothing to do with the grimy work-a-day world. She is entirely without purpose save that of selfishly enjoying herself—a parasite upon those whose toil keeps society moving slowly upward away from the brute, and her lovers are of the same purposeless type.
That such plays, such stories, are profoundly affecting the manners of our boys and girls cannot be disputed, and New York City is the chief centre of this baleful influence. The scenes of these stories, these pictures, these plays, are usually laid in the resorts of New York City. Managers are not friendly to plots laid in other, and especially inland, cities or towns, and magazine editors more and more demand similar themes and similar heroines.
The worst of this situation, to my mind, lies in the fact that New York, no longer predominately American, is the jury of final appeal. Seen from the Middle West or the South, Manhattan is a city of aliens, with a vast and growing colony of European peasants, merchants and newly rich who know little and care less for American tradition. I also feel this. After being away on a lecture trip in the interior, I return each time to Manhattan as to a foreign port. The people in the street appear mean in stature and brutal in manner. It is in the small towns of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois that I overtake the vanishing America of my youth.
It is an occasional investigation of this sort which leads me to deplore the agencies which are sluicing out upon the youth of the village the moral filth of the city. Everywhere I go I find the Victrola belching out the brazen clang of jazz, screaming its suggestive songs of the music hall and bawling off-color jests of the Broadway cabaret. The “popular” magazine, with its flashy illustrations, its Arrow-Brand-Collar heroes and its “daring” heroines, is on every news stand, while the moving picture house offers the villager and the farmboy inspiring glimpses of the doings of New York’s underworld. It is in this way that certain agencies of our great metropolis exploit and corrupt the small town.
No doubt I shall be called hopelessly fossilized when I say that I cannot endure the modern dances. It is not a question of religious precept with me, it is a question of decency. These grotesque movements (I am told) came up from the low dives of the South American harbors. “They are in effect a mixture of the jungle and the red light resorts of Paris,” one expert declares. This I can well believe; certainly the nudity of the women and the action of the men would indicate such an origin. I find them not only ugly but subversive of all that civilization has built up in the way of modesty in women and dignity in men. This too, is an aftermath of the great war.
After reading a tableful of our illustrated magazines and making the rounds of our hotels and theatres, a stranger would naturally conclude that we are a nation of jazzers, lounge lizards, gourmandizers and profligates. [ . . . ]
I resent the implications of such New York plays and New York pictures. Their characters are not American in the deeper meaning of the word. The men and women who made America, who cleared the forests, founded the cities and established schools did not dance suggestive dances to the sound of a jazz band. [. . .]
[Hamlin Garland, “Current Fiction Heroes,” New York Times, December 23, 1923, p.14.]
posted by A. Mattson at 10:08 PM
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