[CHAPTER SEVEN]
INDUSTRIAL CONDITIONS: MORALS
Industrial conditions, as at present constituted, not only injure the health of the body; they also endanger the soul. The Chicago Vice Commission has thus summarized these influences: "Among the economic conditions contributory to the social evil are low wages, unsanitary conditions, demoralizing relationships in stores, shops, domestic service, restaurants and hotels: the street vending of children in selling papers and gums, collecting coupons and refuse; the messenger service of boys, especially in the vicinity of disorderly houses, vicious saloons, dance halls and other demoralizing resorts; employment agencies which send servants to immoral places; the rest rooms or waiting places where applicants for work resort; too long hours and the high pressure of work; the overcrowding of houses upon lots, and of persons in single rooms" (Report, 1911: p. 230).
When inability to secure decent lodging forces men and women to occupy the same sleeping rooms, there must be an inevitable lowering of moral standards. One case is recorded in "Packingtown," where eight persons—men and women—were sleeping in a room approximately ten by fifteen feet.[85] When a woman pays less than $1.50 a week for board and lodging, as many are forced to do (see page 71f) she can have no privacy. "If there are men lodgers in the house, the entrance to their room is sometimes through the girl's room, or vice versa. In one house visited, the women received the agent about nine P.M. in the room of a man lodger who had already gone to bed. This seemed to be the only available sitting room and disconcerted no one save the agent" (l. c., p. 62).
The girl who lives away from home in a cheap boarding house is no myth. In Pittsburgh, "in the garment trades she numbers 38% of the total force; in the wholesale millinery trade 10%; in the mercantile houses 20%. On the lowest estimate, there are 2300 of her kind in Pittsburgh."[86]
It is not only low wages, as leading to a lack of decent housing, that has a bad moral effect. All are born with a natural craving for happiness, and long hours of work under a nervous strain intensify this desire. Economic conditions have kept most of those in the grip of such a situation from developing the higher side of their nature until they can find pleasure and recreation in a symphony concert or an epic poem. The jaded nerves need a stronger stimulus to cause pleasure. "The desire for ecstasy," says Algar Thorold, a keen psychological observer, "is at the very root and heart of our nature. This craving, when bound down by the animal instincts, meets us on every side in those hateful contortions of the social organism called the dram-shop and the brothel."[87]
As a consequence of this insatiable longing for pleasure and the inability to pay for it, thousands of young women in our big cities patronize public dance halls and other questionable places of amusement. The code of their social set has come to sanction accepting tickets for such places, refreshments, etc., from men met haphazard at these resorts.[88]
Dance halls are such a serious menace to public morals that legislation has become necessary. Elizabeth, Paterson, Newark and Hoboken, New Jersey, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville, Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, Kansas City, and Cleveland are all agitating the question of their regulation (Survey, June 3, 1911, p. 345). A. B. Williams, general secretary of the Humane Society of this last city, is quoted as declaring that "one out of every ten children in Cleveland is born out of wedlock. In nine out of every ten cases that we handle, the mothers tell us, 'I met him at a public dance'" (l. c., p. 346).