Twelve O'Clock Sharp
660 T H E COMMONWEAL October 30, 1929 m How does Dr. Sadler or anyone else know there is no such thing as Santa Claus?" Seriously, in spite of our diversion at the spectacle of two...
...That places where drink flows tend also to become haunts of sex indulgence unless scrupulously supervised is eternally evident...
...They are willing to work (all who really know the Indians testify to their efficiency as workers) but there has been no work for them to do...
...WILBUR'S "WARDS" HE Lake Mohonk conference on Indian problems was notable chiefly for the memorandum submitted by the Secretary of the Interior...
...But, as was said at the beginning, the city cannot be shouldered with all the responsibility...
...Even so, it is not enough to point out the hopelessness and folly of prohibition...
...The number of arraignments for prostitution in the Separate Court for Women, October 30, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 66I Manhattan, was more than twice as large in I928 as it was in ~925, and the proportionate increase of wayward minors is even greater...
...But--and here is the point of sovereign importance--"while only 9 percent of the total number of investigations were made in night clubs and speakeasies, yet they revealed a proportion of 78 percent of all the violations found...
...Santa Claus is as hardy an entity as you are likely to meet in a day's march through the human mind, but we cannot see how he is to keep his blood and bounce if he is labeled and ticketed as a specimen in the psychological museum...
...In so far as the municipal government itself is concerned, it can with difficulty cope with either the corrupting influence of the wealth now involved in bootlegging or with a marked public desire that the supply of drinkable alcohol be conserved...
...But the extent to which an old evil has grown anew is surprising indeed...
...A series of I4,399 investigations brought to light 1,443 cases of offense...
...How glaringly the federal government has failed to control a liquor trade which once it had at least the power to regulate through licenses is plain to anybody who walks with open eyes down any city street anywhere...
...To it we probably owe the appointment of Mr...
...This year the Committee's report calls attention to several startling facts...
...Wilbur's statement of a policy to place "the Indian and his property upon the normal basis of contributing citizenship" within twenty-five years that makes his message of special importance...
...The following passage from the report offers an interpretive summary of conditions that merits consideration: "Instead of a white slave traffic, the current traffic is what might be termed a traffic in hostesses, girls who apply at the agencies as the principal avenue to employment in clubs and speakeasies and who thus find themselves the subjects of bribes, promises and solicitations...
...Among these last the Committee of Fourteen occupies an honored place, not only because it has been at work during twenty-five years, but also because its concern is with a particularly malignant form of social vice...
...To some extent these alarming figures may, no doubt, be explained by a general moral collapse, reflected clearly in the literature and drama of the time...
...Rhoades and Mr...
...Children have been herded into schools far away from their homes, often in uncongenial climates...
...Ninety percent of the worst dives in the district were owned and managed by whites...
...What the Indian will pay attention to in the Secretary's message is the statement that "the principal immediate problem is to do substantial justice to the Indian children of today so that they may have adequate educational and health opportunities...
...Will there continue to be if science takes him up in a really serious way...
...We believe that the Committee of Fourteen has written a document which, if it can get into the hands of thoughtful persons, will effectively call attention to urban diseases that clamor for remedying...
...On the reservations, particularly in the Southwest, education and health have hardly been compatible so far...
...After ten years of schooling, Indian youths have been released ("released" is the word) to find that there is nothing on earth for them to do with themselves...
...Scattergood as Commissioner and Assistant Commissioner of Indian Affairs, it has been generally predicted that things would look up for the Indian...
...And when one thinks of the nearly three thousand girls arraigned during the past year in Manhattan alone, one cannot help being appalled by the spectacle of vice, misery and bottomless degradation...
...The traditional race policy is certainly wrong, if only because of its dismal reaction upon whites themselves...
...But it was not Mr...
...It is New York itself which summons into being vigilant organizations...
...Trachoma and tuberculosis have gone with the A B C's...
...Scattergood...
...Added to these are certain influences of the lower class night dubs, such as the breaking down in morale caused by the long hours of work, the constant drinking of bad liquor, the lack of adequate sleep, economic pressure and association with criminals...
...Wilbur as Secretary of the Interior, and with Mr...
...It is even difficult to prevent actual traffic in girls, although some of the cruder forms of this practice have disappeared...
...They have been as hungry at school as on the range, and unhappier...
...Most of them have had their ten years in the government schools...
...What counts is a satisfactory answer to his present needs...
...These then come upon problems created by national legislation or the carelessness of other communities...
...Secretary Wilbur shows that he has thought about these problems, and that he is willing to go all the way toward ending them...
...It is a fine tribute to the soundness of civic feeling that all such difficulties do not harden the urban conscience...
...but it is certainly not a convincing explanation of a condition over which white officials have control and in which white customers are a major factor...
...A certain type of employment agency seems virtually to have become an institution for cajoling young and attractive women into a species of night life from which they can hardly be expected to emerge unscathed...
...If they were hungry at home, at least they were amid familiar surroundings...
...The coupling of education with health here is significant...
...Rhoades and Mr...
...When one considers, with the report, that the Negro population of Harlem is forced to combine its experience of transition from rural life to urban circumstance with housing conditions of a sort venomously deadly to family life, one sees that the prevalent fashionableness of "blues" and other supposed Negro creations reposes upon very grim foundations...
...The first is "the mushroom growth of night clubs and speakeasies and the adjustment to them of commercialized prostitution...
...and yet, as will be seen, the two things are closely related...
...The Committee admits that social vigilance is exceedingly difficult under the circumstances, and advocates only a few specific legislative changes designed to widen the authority of the police...
...The city, in other words, is representative of the country and indicative of its civilization...
...With Mr...
...They have been forced into a "civilized" way of living, but no help has been offered them to continue in that way of living...
...Everything which agencies of redemption and salvage can accomplish ought to be done, particularly in so far as young women adrift in the city are concerned...
...and of course the visiting smalltowner, bent on a lark, begins to feel rubicund and energetic about midnight...
...Here vice in all its forms thrives as the meadow blooms in spring...
...A long period of parsimony has been damaging...
...MR...
...It is very hard to stamp out prostitution, despite the fact that mankind universally realizes the degradation of the unfortunate women involved...
...The Committee investigated 392 night clubs and found that all but twelve were catering to prostitution...
...Twenty-five years more of such bungling as has been going on, and there may be no Indian problem to speak of because there may be no Indians...
...That devastating report on the Indian Administration by the Baltimore Institute of Government Research in 1928 revealed a system so inefficient and so unfair that it is almost a wonder the Indian has survived at all...
...Indeed this part of the business is served by an elaborate personnel, extending all the way from employment agencies to which girls turn for work in the theatre or the cabaret to the "hostesses," with a retinue of procurers, runners and gangsters thrown in for good measure...
...The responsibility for making that opportunity rests with the government, which is his guardian...
...And so lawlessness breeds license, and license vice, until the stench of the thing dings about everyone's nostrils...
...Seriously, in spite of our diversion at the spectacle of two pedagogues invading Barrieland with heavy-footed tread, we confess to a certain uneasiness at all this...
...And if the present report is not altogether a source of satisfaction, it is nevertheless a proof that conscience still abides...
...But the subject is especially interesting now because of the chance it affords to observe causative social influences at work...
...certainly it is the basis of the present administration's interest in and policy toward Indian affairs...
...It is especially powerless, however, against the viler types of speakeasy, which can even elude a thoroughly honest and well-manned city police force, well acquainted with the terrain...
...He exists to fill stockings and drive reindeer, not to subserve some function of "dramatization...
...Successive migrations of work hunters, put on the move by changing industrial conditions, strain housing and police facilities to the utmost...
...Sadler or anyone else know there is no such thing as Santa Claus...
...Happily the report was not without effect...
...Now as nineteen hundred years ago it will not do to cast stones at these women...
...Night club and speakeasy assume many forms and lead to varying social results...
...We think that the Indian himself must feel that the glory of future citizenship is mild stuff...
...The Committee definitely avoids all tendency to link this situation with the unregulated traffic in liquor which has followed the enactment of federal prohibition...
...There would seem to be no obstacle in the way of immediate intensive campaigns looking to the procurement of work for these Indians9 9. . There is no reason why the attitude toward the educated young Indian should be different from that toward the white boy who has finished school," and particularly "The opportunity must be made for him...
...The idle adult Indians whom Secretary Wilbur speaks about are not uneducated tribesmen...
...Yes, there is a Santa Claus--yet...
...New York, for instance, is accustomed to appreciative co6peration between its governing forces and various private com...
...Certainly his destiny has not before been at the disposal of men at once so sympathetic and so capable9 Habitually hungry, without control of his own tribal funds, deprived of his water rights, without a voice in selecting his children's place of education, it was high time that his friends appeared in official places...
...660 T H E COMMONWEAL October 30, 1929 m How does Dr...
...TWELVE O'CLOCK SHARP HE extent to which any large city is its own moral boss must remain unknowable...
...It has been an awareness of facts like these, which unearth deposits of social poison, which has lately induced The Commonweal to air the relations between the Negro and American civilization with as much frankness and charity as possible...
...and as a matter of fact the whole territory is described as a place to which "certain classes of whites go on a moral vacation...
...mittees which mount guard for one reason or another...
...But as the result of careful investigations the Committee has been able to localize two sources of the evil...
...Their teachers have been handicapped by an unstable system which has shifted them about before they have been able to get their bearings...
...The 'easy morality' of the Negro," declares the report, "may or may not be a fair allegation...
...More startling, perhaps, is the situation in Harlem, "the comparatively small area at the northeasterly end of Manhattan Island which has become the site of the world's largest centre of Negro population...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 26
