That is a dark picture. A bright one was vividly painted to the writer by Mrs. Edward McDowell, who is devoting herself to the interests which aroused her great husband’s greatest enthusiasm: the development and democratization of music in America. The remarkable success of the Peterboro pageant is well-known throughout the country, and yet as Mrs. McDowell pointed out, the people who worked so hard and who so artistically rendered the music and dances and dramatic action were the townsfolk and laborers of a small New England village. With the achievement of this pageant in mind, Mrs. McDowell after a visit to the Chicago playgrounds in the immigrant districts was enthusiastic over what might be done with the coöperation of the Bohemians, Germans, Scandinavians, Italians and Poles and other art-loving nationalities.
In almost all towns and cities there are free public libraries. In a growing number there are institutes in which painting and sculpture are exhibited without charge; and do we not see, here and there, the beginnings of a movement to present good music, either without charge or at a cost so small as to place it within the reach of all?
In this development of the passion for good music through coöperation among the people, we are just beginning to recognize the needs of the negroes who, by poverty or the sharp color line, have been excluded from the proper encouragement of their own talents and tastes. The Music School Settlement for Colored People in New York City is becoming the nucleus of a recreation center for colored people in which the dramatic and musical instincts of the race will be developed in an interesting and creditable way. But it is not alone in the effect it has on the colored people that the Settlement may be said to have demonstrated its usefulness; it has also been the means of interesting an increasing number of white people in the needs and aspirations of the colored. It is only by mutual understanding and sympathy that the negro question can be solved. The Music School Settlement for Colored People is trying in its own way to help in the solution of this grave social problem. The officers of the Settlement include men and women, and women have been generous contributors to the support of its work.
Motion Pictures
As the moving-picture “show” creeps into every crossroads village and multiplies in the cities, it becomes the people’s theater. In proportion as a theater is educational or demoralizing in its influence, the “movie” becomes the people’s school. What lessons do the people learn there or is the influence of the movie negative?
“What kind of motion pictures do you like best and why?” was put recently to more than 2,000 school children in the grammar grades of Providence, Rhode Island. Mrs. Dwight K. Bartlett, who conducted this investigation for the Rhode Island Congress of Mothers, classified the replies as follows:
| Grade | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Totals. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Comedy | 85 | 90 | 99 | 100 | 374 |
| Western or cowboy | 192 | 211 | 186 | 146 | 735 |
| Educational | 95 | 183 | 317 | 312 | 907 |
| Drama | 25 | 34 | 36 | 44 | 139 |
| Do not attend | 20 | 44 | 47 | 45 | 156 |
| Crime | 5 | 19 | 19 | 29 | 72 |
| 2383 |
The influence exercised by certain pictures is exemplified by some of the answers Mrs. Bartlett received.
A sixth-grade child said, “A child that goes in and sees exciting pictures comes out excited and starts playing what we saw and becomes wild.”
“Western pictures sometimes make youths go out West to become cowboys and run away from home.”