Bandit quips. . .

"The New York Commissioner of Police applies for 2,000 more cops, some of the bobbed-haired bandits being unprovided with escorts."

[George Rothwell Brown, "Post-Scripts," Washington Post April 19, 1924]

JAZZ WEDDING THRILLS 2,000

Nuptial Procession Foxtrots to Altar in First Syncopated Marriage Ceremony.

EVEN DAN CUPID SHIMMIES

First syncopated marriage ceremony

Violins Croon and Saxophones Groan as Knot Is Tied at Roseland.

Ever since Kathleen Bott became engaged to Robert Wagner, she dreamed of a big wedding with all the modern accessories. But she never dreamed of as marriage so spectacular, so ultra-modern as that which she passed through last night.

It was the first jazz wedding of all time. It was staged in the huge dance-hall at Rosland, Broadway and Fifty-first street, where 2,000 persons cheered and showered rice on the elated couple.

From beginning to end the ceremony was syncopated. Two big jazz orchestras crooned and chuckled and moaned through the bridal chorus of Lohengrin.

FOX TROTTERS PARADE

Down the roped aisle came twenty bridesmaids and twenty groomsmen, fox-trotting with shaking shoulders, swaying hips and sparkling eyes, toward the altar, where stood the Rev. Dr. William Klett, pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Mediator in Brooklyn, with Bible in hand.

Followed twenty flower girls, in ballet costume with slippers of gold, and they piroutted and pranced in a long zig-zag movement to the tantalizing time of the bands. After them a Cupid stepped backward with shimmying little body and shaking head.

NO “OBEY,” EITHER!

Katherine and Robert couldn’t be married at high noon—that was too old fashioned—and so they were married at high midnight on the Leap Year day, and there was no “obey” in the service either!

As they stepped from the altar the crowd broke through and engulfed them, the band blared “Goodbye Girlie, I’m Through,” and everybody got a wriggle on. [ . . . ]

[New York American, March 1, 1924, p.5.]

“Is Dread Bob-Haired Bandit Female Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde?

"Strange Phase of Modern Feminism Keeps Whole of Police Guessing Hard."

A Is the bob-haired bandit the first specimen of a new variety of criminal? Or is she an old variety acting in a new way? [ . . . ]

"Police theories to account for this peculiar development of feminism are many."

[She is ] a stenographer meekly taking dictation by day and a bandit giving orders, pistol in hand, by night.

[Her] fondness for grocery and tea stores might be the instinctive turning of a woman to the places with which she is most familiar, or she might choose these places deliberately because she could enter there without any possible suspicion."

[The New York World interviewed two anonymous experts in the field of banditry, Gangster #1 & Gangster #2]

[According to Gangster #1:]

"There isn't just one bob-haired bandit," said a former gangster who is now said to be trying to go straight. "There are several. We have always had girl bandits, for that matter. They same ones who used to be "boob bandits" a while ago.

You see, most gangsters have female gun-toters. The police know that. When a man goes out on a hold-up job, he plans it as carefully as a general plans a war vigures out his army, his defense and so on. And he depends mostly on his girl gun-toter.

"First a machine is stolen, the plates removed and new plates put on. The girl is given a special tailor-made suit with secret pockets for revolvers. Sometimes the pockets are hidden by a ruffle added around the waist; sometimes they are in the lining of the coat, with a piece of stiffening to keep the gun from showing--though a litttle automatic doesn't make much of a bulge in a coat. Then she is given the 'gats.' When they reach the block where the hold-up is to be pulled off, she hands out revolvers to the chief, assistant chief, and the chauffeur. She walks out first, looks to see if the coast is clear and then gives the signal for them to start. After that she acts as a look out while her 'general' doe the job.

"She has been promised a percentage, plus everything from new shoes to a new evening gown, swell times and automobile rides. She gets the promise, and that's about all. A number of these girls have told me of being double-crossed in such cases.

"Slowly but surely these girls learn how the jobs are done. The girl who has been double-crossed is out for revenge. She wants to show that she can pull off a job too. She has graduated from being a girl bandit that has been "boobed" time and time again into a bob-haired bandit.

"Now instead of standing lookout for a male companion, she has them stand lookout while she does the job. She is going to be sure that what she gets is HERS!"


[Gangster #2: "formerly a well-known member of underworld gangs on the west side"]

I am positive the bob-haired bandits are all poor girls. They would like to make an honest dollar, but they can't get jobs. Result, no new dresses like their friends have who are working. When a girl has new dresses her friends stay away from her, her people bawl her out and threaten to chase her away from home and she gets disgusted with life, goes to a cheap dance hall, gets a boy "friend" who, perhaps, is in the same predicament and they plan and carry out a hold-up.
"She does not go out to kill, although she gets a revolver. She goes out to get enough to buy a new dress and keep her parents from scolding her. One job is successful and they try bigger jobs."

[Mabel Abbot, "Is Dread Bob-Haired Bandit Female Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde? Former Gangster Has Theory" New York World, April 13, 1924, p. 1-2.]

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:

    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 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 italics are mine, but all that the editor sys of abortive heroines upon the stage can be applied to present day fiction.

    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.]

How would you like to live on $10 a week?

Because You See Rouge and Furs Is No Sign of Decaying Morals

Says Factory Girls are Good-Hearted, Clean-Charactered Little Things.

MARRIAGE MAIN OBJECTIVE

Won’t Take Work Seriously, but Live in Dream of Having a Home.

Shop Girl Philosophy;
Clean Bill of Health

“Unions would help win higher wages. But the only union working girls will join is marriage.”
“More than 30,000 girls in New York earn $10 a week, yet somehow they manage to keep decent.”
“Fur coats and lipsticks don’t mean decadent morals. The American working girl is clean-charactered.”
“The ‘life’ of the average working girl in business is three years. Then she exchanges the factory for the kitchen.”

By Zoe Beckley.

How would you like to live on $10 a week? Or even $16.25, which is the medium weekly earnings of girls in four factory industries in New York City—candy, paper box, shirt and collar and tobacco? Thousands are getting less than $10.
In mercantile industries they do a little better: $17.25 a week is the average. If you pay envelope contains $25 or more you are among the seven per cent of factory workers who get that much or of the thirteen per cent of mercantile employees who do.
Gloria Swanson receives $2,500 a week. In the ten-cent store a prettier youngster than Gloria told us yesterday she got $13. Which started us wondering.
We asked Nellie Swartz about it. Miss Swartz is director of the bureau of women in industry, State Department of Labor, with offices at No. 124 East Twentieth-eighth street, and she knows a lot about the poor working girl.
We wanted to know what sets wage scales? Does Gloria contribute more to the sum of the country’s well-being then a Supreme Court Justice or a bank president? And why does Sophie Bazitz, in the candy wrapping factory, get less pay for wrapping caramels than we do for writing a piece in the paper about her? (Editor:--please don’t delete our wages until you see us about it.)
“That,” says Nellie Swartz, “has always puzzled me, too. I suppose it is bargaining ability. Environment, education, initiative and the law of supply and demand enter into it. But in the end it all comes down to bargaining power.

Worker Sees Only Marriage.

“The world is willing to pay highly or entertainment and only a few qualify. But the main trouble with the working girl is that her work is not serious to her. Marriage is her career, her life. It is an old, old story and a deep, deep psychology. Give the average working girl her choice between working slowly up to the head of her department, with $50 a week pay, and sticking at a $12 job for three years, with marriage at the end of it, and she’ll choose marriage without an instant’s hesitation.
“It may be the poorest kind of marriage, with drudgery, many babies, sickness, poverty and a drab tenement, but it is marriage. A man wants her. She is chosen. She is the mistress of a home. She has her own time to some extent. She has her rightful place in life.”
This, says Miss Swartz, is why employers do not bother to train girls for high places. They won’t stick. Even the exceptional ones won’t. They won’t join unions as men do.
It is estimated by the Minimum Wage Commission that at the rate of growth now shown by the trade unions it will be 129 years before all the women of the State are organized.
It is now more to a boss’ advantage to keep a girl pulling out basting threads, so that he can replace her without difficulty, than to encourage her to be forewoman or office manager and have her quit as soon as Sam Right comes along.

How They Do It on $15 Per.

But all this does not tell us how a girl manages to live on $10 or $15 a week until Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong does arrive with the wedding ring and three-room flat.
We know that in France a girl is not supposed to live on her meager pay. Wages are upon a quite different and extremely sophisticated social standard, just as marriages are arranged, not upon a basis of love and personal happiness, but with a view to expediency and family cohesion.
In this country it is different. Wages are supposed to be lived on. Miss Swartz says the ARE, to. And that because the working-girl is over-lavish with lipstick and rouge-puff, wears ball gowns to business and sports a fur coat, you are not to assume her morals are less stable than those of her Ritzy little sister of Fifth avenue.
“On the contrary,” Nellie Swartz assures us, “I believe they are better. Factory girls are decent, good-hearted, clean-charactered little things for the most part. But they have the fetish of clothes.”
We decided to ask Sophie herself about it. We picked up a Sophie wearing a tricky little stew-pot hat, a sleeveless frock, seal dolman and “nude” silk hose.
“I make gen’ly twelve,” said Sophie, when the preliminaries were over and confidence established, “Sometimes fourteen-fifty. SURE it’s hard getting along—” Here a shrug that said “But what can you do?” “Live? Say lissen, don’t blab this to the boss, he thinks I live at home. He only hires girls that live home. But my folks live an hour’s subway ride from where I work and believe me, I had enough of that.”
“I got a room in a flat over on East Third. I sleep with the kids—three-a them. Three-fifty a week. I make my own breakfast—oh I dunno, tea and bread sometimes coffee-cake. Twenty cents' lunch, or maybe a quarter. Dinners? Well I ain’t such a chromo I can’t get a few dinners out?
“Fellows?”
“Sure. Why not?”
Why not, indeed? What would life be with nothing to do but pack chocolates, eat with the folks on East Third and sleep with the hausfrau’s three kids!
But in Sophie’s level gaze we read just what Miss Swartz said:—Decency, a good heart, the love of clothes and the determination to get married. Speaking of clothes:—
“The fur coat?” echoed Sophie. “Division street. $195. Ten down and the rest gradual. Underthings by Woolworth,” she added with a glint of fun.
Sophie confided that her “fellow” was nearly to the point of proposing, that he was a cutter and she met him “to a dance.”
We shall probably come across Sophie on Riverside Drive in 1927 fulfilling her destiny in a mink coat and limousine while we step back to avoid its splashings.

[Zoe Beckley, “Because You See Rouge . . .” New York Telegraph and Evening Mail, c. January, 1924.]