Viewing myself as a human machine, I cannot understand how the human race has survived. Even conceding that I was normal, it is so much the worse for normality. I simply belong to a monstrous breed. There is not one important layman’s practice that we have organized with regard to discipline and efficiency. If bricklayers waste motions in laying bricks, how about the motions wasted in lifting one’s hat and the circumvolutions in putting links in one’s cuffs? How about the impulsive child who wastes motions so recklessly in giving his mother a hug? The discovery seemed chilly that everything could be scientifically managed, everything could be perfected if one took up an altitudinous position at the center of one’s life. But a fear of being chilly is a mark of inferiority. It ill becomes a human machine.
Yearning to live scrupulously on twenty-four hours a day, with vague longings to eat very little and sleep very little and master jiu jitsu and breathe deep and chew hard and practice Mueller exercises and give up tobacco and coffee and hug my mother scientifically and save waste motions in putting on my shirt, I happened to come across two European thinkers, a physician and a metaphysician. Paralleling Shakespeare’s knowledge of dead languages by my own knowledge of live ones, I could not read these masters in the original to determine whether they blended like oil and vinegar or fought like water and oil. But in the eagerness of philosophic poverty I grasped just two delightful words from them, “instinct” and “repression.” The metaphysician’s secret of life, apparently, was to drop using one’s so-called intelligence so frantically, to become more like those marvels of instinct, the hyena and the whale. The physician merely seemed to put the Ten Commandments in their place. To tell the truth, his detection of “repression” gave me no tangible promise. I exculpate the doctor. But the evolutionist turned my thoughts away from the early worries of discipline. This is the latest ball in the air that the kitten is chasing, with no suspicion of any tantalizing invisible string.
THE NEXT NEW YORK
You’d get awfully tired if I told you everything about my visit to New York in A. D. 1991. Some things are too complicated even to refer to, many things I’ve already forgotten, and a number of things I didn’t understand. But as I had to return to my work as prison doctor in 1919 after a week of 1991 I grasped a few top impressions that may interest you. I hope I can give them to you straight.
The people on the street took my eye the minute I arrived in town. They looked so pleasing and they wore such stunning clothes. You know that at present, with the long indoor working day and the mixture of embalmed and storage and badly cooked food, the number of pasty-faced and emaciated men and women is very high. I exempt the hearty sweating classes like the structural iron workers and teamsters and porters and even policemen. You could recruit a fine-looking club from the building trades. But stand any afternoon on Fifth Avenue and size up the condition of the passers-by. You see shopgirls in thin cotton who are under-weight, under-slept, miserably nourished and devitalized. You see pimply waiters and stooping clerks. You see weary, fish-eyed mothers who look as if every day was washing day. Scores of sagging middle-aged people go by, who ought to be taken to a clinic. A little earlier in the afternoon it’s almost impossible to share the sidewalk with the squat factory hands who overflow at the lunch hour. They’re hard to kill, these poor fellows, but they’re a puny, stinking, stunted, ill-favored horde. But the greater cleanliness of the people later on, and their better clothes, doesn’t put them in a very different class. You hear a good deal about the queens you see, but, really, the city streets of New York in 1919, streaming with people who have dun clothes to match dun faces, make you wonder what’s the use.
These people in 1991 were good to look at! The three-hour working day had a lot to do with it, of course, and the basic economic changes. But what leads me first to speak of appearances is the huge responsibility that had gone to hygienists. I mean educational and administrative. In 1991, I found, people were really acting on the theory that you can’t have civilization without sound bodies. The idea itself was as old as an old joke, a platitude in the mouth of every pill-vender. But the city was working on it as if it were a pivotal truth, and this meant a total revision of ordinary conduct.
Building the Panama Canal was a simple little job compared to making New York hygienic. Thirty years must have been spent in getting the folks to realize that no man and woman had any hygienic excuse for breeding children within the city limits. It was sixty years, I was told, before it was official that a city child was an illegitimate child. At first mothers kicked hard when the illegitimates were confiscated, but in the end they came to see justice in the human version of the slogan, “an acre and a cow.” It got rid of the good old city-bred medical formula that the best way to handle pregnancy is to handle it as a pathological condition. Of course this prohibition movement made all sorts of people mad. A bunch of Gold Coast women held out for a long time on the score of personal liberty. Women had private city babies where the inspectors couldn’t get at them. You know, just like private whisky. But in the end the prohibitionists won, and it had an enormous effect on cleaning up Manhattan. It cut out all but the detached and the transient residents, and with the breathing space rules, these were far less than you’d suppose. Even with the great area of garden-roofs, the fixed residents were not much more than 100,000.
This demobilization wasn’t special to New York. In other places there were much more rigid “units.” Hygiene, nothing else, decided the unit size of cities in 1991. The old sprawling haphazard heterogeneous city gave place to the “modern” unit, permanent residences within the city never being open to families that had children under fourteen. For the heads of such families, however, the transportation problem was beautifully solved. Every unit city came to be so constructed that within half an hour of the “fresh air and exercise” homes, men and women could reach factories and warehouses in one direction, and offices and courts and banks and exchanges in another. This was after they realized the high cost of noise and dirt. The noiseless, dirtless, swift, freight train took the place of most trucks, and of course the remaining trucks shot up and down the non-pedestrian sanitary alleys. Another thing that interested me was the plexus of all the things that are to be exhibited. This involved a great problem for New York before factories were deported and the moving “H. G. Wells” sidewalks introduced. How to economize time and space, and yet not produce too close a homogeneity, too protein an intellectual and æsthetic and social diet, became a fascinating question. But the devotion of Blackwell’s Island to summer and winter art and music, with all the other islands utilized for permanent exhibitions gave the city directors a certain leeway. The islands were made charming. I was quite struck over there, I think, on a new island in Flushing Bay, by the guild-managed shows of clothing, where you sat and watched the exhibits traveling on an endless belt, that stopped when you wanted it to—the kind that art exhibitions adopted for certain purposes. You see, the old department stores had passed away as utterly as the delivery horse and display advertising and the non-preventive physician. And the old game of “seasons” and fashions was abandoned soon after the celebrated trial of Condé Nast for the undermining of the taste of shopgirls. The job of the purchasing consumer was steadily simplified. Youth of both sexes learned fairly early in life what they could and what they couldn’t do personally in the use of color. No one thought of copying another’s color or design in dress any more than of copying another’s oculist prescription. And with the guild consultants always ready to help out the troubled buyer, the business of shopping for clothes became as exciting and intelligent as the pastime of visiting a private exhibition. In this way, backed up by the guilds, a daring employment of color became generally favored. But a big item in this programme was the refusal of the guilds to prescribe any costumes for people who needed medical care first. It was useless, the guilds said, to decorate a mud-pie. And the hygienists agreed.
So you got back always to the doctrine of a sound body. In the hygienic riots of 1936 some horrible lynchings took place. An expert from the Chicago stockyards was then running the New York subways. He devised the upper-berth system by which the space between people’s heads and the roof of the car could be used on express trains for hanging up passengers, like slabs of bacon. It was only after a few thousand citizens had failed to respond to the pulmotor which was kept at every station to revive weaklings, that the divine right of human beings to decent transportation became a real public issue. The hygienists made the great popular mistake of trying to save the stockyards man. They knew he had a sick soul. They believed that by psycho-analyzing him and showing he had always wanted to skin cats alive, they could put the traction question on a higher plane. Unfortunately the Hearst of that era took up the issue on the so-called popular side. He denounced the hygienists as heartless experts and showed how science was really a conspiracy in favor of the ruling class. The hygienic riots resulted in a miserable set-back to the compulsory psycho-analysis of all criminals, but the bloody assassination of the leading hygienist of the day brought about a reaction, and within thirty years no judge was allowed to serve who wasn’t an expert in psychic work and hygiene. This decision was greatly aided by the publication of a brochure revealing the relation of criminal verdicts to the established neuroses of city magistrates. The promise that this work would be extended and published as a supplement to the Federal Reporter went a long way toward converting the Bar. The old pretensions of the Bar went rapidly to pieces when political use was made of important psychological and physiological facts. The hygienists spoke of “the mighty stream of morbid compulsion broadening down to more morbid compulsion.” By 1950 no man with an Œdipus complex could even get on the Real Estate ticket, and the utter collapse of militarism came about with the magnificently scientific biographies of all the prominent armament advocates in the evil era.
I had a surprise coming for me in the total disappearance of prisons. Though I hate to confess it, I was a little amazed when I found that the old penology was just as historical in 1991 as the methodology of the Spanish Inquisition. Scientific men did possess models of prisons like Sing Sing and Trenton and Atlanta and Leavenworth, and the tiny advances in the latter prisons were thought amusing. But the deformity of the human minds and the social systems that permitted such prisons as ours was a matter for acute discussion and analysis everywhere, even in casual unspecialized groups. This general intelligence made it clear to me that social hygiene was never understood up to the middle of the twentieth century. The very name, after all, was appropriated by men afraid to specify the sex diseases they were then cleaning up. Puritanism, serviceable as it was in its time, had kept men from obtaining and examining the evidence necessary to right conclusions about conduct. “Think,” said one delightful youth to me, on my first day in 1991, “think of not knowing the first facts as to the physiological laws of continence. Think of starting out after general physical well-being by the preposterous road of universal military service. Think of electing Congressmen in the old days without applying even the Binet test to them. Why, to-day we know nothing about ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ fair as that object is, and yet we should no more stand for such indiscriminateness than we’d allow a day to go by without swimming.”