As an example of the improvements already accomplished by the occupation there is the matter of marriage. Formerly it was almost impossible for the mass of the people to form legal unions; the cost was too great and the requirements of birth certificates and other formalities insurmountable. As a result, marriage had come to be looked upon as a superfluous ceremony. This condition, more or less universal throughout the West Indies, is a deliberate legacy of olden times. The exploiters of the islands, particularly the Spaniards, abetted by the church, whose prosperity depended on their prosperity, purposely made marriage difficult among the laboring classes. A married woman and her children could demand support from her husband; a mere consort added to the available labor supply, because she was obliged to earn her livelihood in the fields and to send her children there early in life. Though there were men who treated their irregular families as legal dependents before the Americans came, illegitimate children were frequently abandoned, mistreated, or exploited to a degree that drove many of them to turn bandit. At best they suffered for want of a firm fatherly hand in their early years. The occupation attacked this problem by forcing men to pay for the support and schooling of their “outside” children. As little stigma attaches to this social misbehavior in Santo Domingo, there was seldom any difficulty in establishing the parentage. It was usually common knowledge. Even the priests have families in the majority of cases, many of them frankly acknowledging their sons and daughters. There are men in Santo Domingo, some of them veritable pillars of society, who suddenly saw their burdens increased from two or three children to twenty-five under the new law. Marriages are now free, and are public ceremonies. They almost always take place at night, and crowds gather outside the wide-open, lighted house. Members of the family come out and talk with friends in the throng now and then but do not invite them inside. About the parlor table sit the bride and groom, the notary and the priest, surrounded by the standing relatives and intimate amigos and compadres. There is much signing of documents and ledgers, each followed by a sort of rapturous sigh from the curious throng in the street, which under no circumstances short of a downpour gives any signs of breaking up until the new couple has retired from the scene. Most dances, fiestas, and family celebrations are like that in Santo Domingo, where the principal room always faces the street and the heat makes closed doors and windows worse than superfluous. Sometimes these open, chair-forested parlors are on a level with the sidewalk, sometimes several feet below it, but it is impossible to avoid a peep inside, even if one does not join the crowd. Besides, there is nothing secretive about such Dominican festivities; the bride who did not see a throng gathered before her door on her wedding night would probably weep her eyes out before morning.
When the Americans arrived there were only 18,000 pupils nominally attending the schools of Santo Domingo. There were no rural schools whatever. Many “teachers” never taught at all, but were merely political henchmen who drew salaries, some of them wholly illiterate. Some of them farmed their “pupils” out or worked them in their own fields. Superintendents and inspectors rarely did either, and kept no records whatever. Listen to a passage from a novel by a sworn enemy of the occupation:
The average Dominican woman frequented—the word is well chosen—a school of first letters sustained and directed by a priest, where she learned to read and write after a fashion, the barest rudiments of arithmetic and geography, and a world of prayers which the good priest made special effort to teach her. She had the catechism at her fingers’ ends, but except for the forms of devotion she was a complete ignoramus who took seriously any nonsense told her by those who happened, falsely or otherwise, to have her confidence.
There was not even a basis on which to build an educational system. Those charged with the task had to begin from the ground up. The peculiar status of Santo Domingo gives it an American Minister of Public Instruction and a native superintendent, the reverse of the case in Haiti. Both are earnest men, but pedagogy is not on the curriculum at Annapolis. No attempt has been made to Americanize the schools, as in Porto Rico and the Philippines, which is proper enough politically but questionable educationally. Every man has been made personally responsible for the men under him, clear down through the system. The occupation now has 100,000 pupils in the schools, with as many still unprovided for; but many of the former attend only half time for lack of accommodations. Dominican illiteracy still exceeds ninety per cent., and information passes chiefly by word of mouth, with consequent garbling. An attempt is being made to have the university in the capital teach only “practical” subjects, banishing the lofty culture with which the Latin-American loves to flirt. One gets the impression, however, that there is more attention and expense bestowed upon the elaborate educational pamphlets that pour in a constant stream from the government presses than on the adobe school houses and the barefoot urchins who attend them.
The Dominican of the masses is kindly, hospitable, long-suffering, and hopeful; in spite of having been exploited and mistreated for centuries, despite his tendency to settle things by force of arms and his low value on human life, he is still simple and good-hearted underneath. Even in the days of revolution lone Americans went in safety where a company of marines now moves with caution. The mothers of American girls married to officers of the occupation would be horrified to know that their daughters use murderers from the Guardia prisons as cooks and servants, yet such arrangements scarcely attract a passing comment among the Americans in Santo Domingo. Like all Latin-Americans, the dominicano has no compassion, either for animals or his fellow-men. Brave enough in physical combat, he has little moral courage—I have already mentioned the inability of native officials to discipline their own people. Worst of all, he has no idea how to curb his politicians. The best families emigrated to Cuba during the twenty-two years of Haitian rule, and the latter closed the university and many of the schools as superfluous luxuries, which may be among the reasons why the “higher” classes do not measure up correspondingly in character with the masses. A rise in the social scale seems frequently to bring a drop in moral standards. As an example: The son of a shoemaker worked his way through school with truly American spirit; he studied medicine in Paris, learned English and French, is a voracious reader of all the literature of his profession in several languages. Yet when a poor countryman with a broken skull was brought in to him by a Guardia detachment, he declined to attend him, after beginning the operation, because no one could assure him his $500 fee.
The Dominicans have few strictly native customs, their chief characteristic being their fondness for revolutions. They are gay, vivacious, and frivolous, fond of music and dancing, and find a great deal of amusement in the most trivial pastimes. Bull-fights have long since disappeared, but cock-fighting is the universal male sport, and on Sundays and feast days the cockpit is the center of attraction. Not a city or village is without its gallera; in the country districts there is sure to be one within easy distance of every collection of thatched huts. On any holiday the traveler along the principal roads and highways is certain to meet a cavalcade of horsemen, each carefully carrying in a sack what the initiated know to be a prize rooster.
The chief gallera of Santo Domingo City was just back of our lodging. On Sunday we were awakened at dawn by its uproar, which varied in volume but never once ceased entirely until sunset. In the afternoon I wandered into the enclosure; paid an admission fee of twenty-five cents, and, climbing the tank-like outer wall, crowded into a place up near the round sheet-iron roof. The sport is legalized and a part of the gate-money goes to the municipality, netting some $1,500 a year. This is a mere bagatelle, however, compared to the sums that change hands among the spectators during a single day’s sport. Like most Spanish games, betting is the chief raison d’être of the cock-fight. The constant, deafening hubbub recalled the curb market of New York, as well as the ball games of Havana. Before each separate contest there were long waits while the shrieking spectators placed their wagers on the two haughty, gorgeous birds tenderly held by their owners or hired seconds.
It came as a surprise to find what class of men attend these contests in the capital. The circle of faces rising eight tiers high above the earth-floored pit were in many cases wholly free from negro strain; the great majority of the audience was not merely well-dressed, they showed considerable evidence of moderate affluence. Wealthy merchants and men high in local affairs, two or three ex-ministers, were pointed out to me as owners of one or several contending cocks. “Chickens” would be a more exact term, for the fighters, unlike the spectators, were not confined to one sex. The toilettes of the birds were fantastic in the extreme—each had been clipped, picked, or otherwise denuded of its feathers on various parts of the body, particularly the thighs and neck, according to the whim or expert opinion of its trainer, and the appearance of its bare skin demonstrated that it was indeed in the “pink” of condition. An invariable formality preceded each contest. On a square board hanging stiffly on poles from the roof was placed a pair of scales in which the two opponents were weighed in their sacks, custom requiring that they balance one another to the fraction of an ounce. Then, when a lull in the betting showed that the spectators had decided their odds, the owner or his agent filled his mouth with rum and water and spurted it in a fine spray over the bird from haughty head to bare legs, and the fight was on.
The first battle after my arrival was between a black hen and a red India rooster. From the moment of release they went straight at it, like professional boxers. Now and then they clinched, but as there was no referee to separate them they eventually broke away themselves. Then the rooster took to running round and round the ring, the hen after him, which a “fan” beside me called clever strategy. During the early part of the fight the favorite changed with every peck, or slash of the spurs. Shouts loud as those at a Thanksgiving football game seemed to set the tin roof above us to vibrating. The shrieks of the bettors were emphasized by waving hands, by jumping up and down, by shaking money in one another’s faces and placing wagers at a distance by lightning-quick, cabalistic gestures. Those who hazarded a mere ten dollars a “throw” were the most insignificant of “pikers”; on every side flashed hundred-dollar bills, sometimes two or three of them in the same hand. Screams of ecstasy greeted each clever spur-stroke, awakening a loathsome disgust for one’s fellow-men. I found myself wondering how many of these shrieking fanáticos had a tenth as much nerve as their gamey chickens. Certainly none of them would have endured so much punishment without crying quits. Gradually the bets dropped from even to ten to one. The rooster was getting the worst of it. He had gone stone blind, his head was a mass of blood, he was so groggy on his feet that he fell dizzily on his side now and then, only to struggle up again and fight on, pecking the air at random while his opponent continued a grueling punishment. The owner on the side lines kept shouting frantic advice to him,—“Anda, cobarde! Pica, gallo!” A lucky peck or spur-thrust sometimes suddenly gives the battle even to a blind cock, hence there was still hope. Toward the end the rooster frequently lay down from sheer fatigue, his opponent respecting his fallen condition with knightly honor and never once touching him until he had wobbled to his feet again. The exhibition became monotonously disgusting, even some of the “fans” began to protest, and at length the owner stepped into the pit with a deprecating shrug of the shoulders and snatched up the rooster, rudely, in one hand, like some carrion crow. His bleeding head hung as if he were dead. Even when a gamecock wins, it cannot fight again for months; if it loses it means the garbage heap or at best some pauper’s pot. A man at the ringside pulled the natural spurs off the defeated bird for use on some other less well-armed fowl, losing bettors began to hunt up the winners and pay their debts, and another throng invaded the ring in preparation for the next disgusting contest.