The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets - Chapters III-IV



CHAPTER III.
THE QUEST FOR ADVENTURE.

A certain number of the outrages upon the spirit of youth may be traced to 
degenerate or careless parents who totally neglect their responsibilities; 
a certain other large number of wrongs are due to sordid men and women who 
deliberately use the legitimate pleasure-seeking of young people as lures 
into vice. There remains, however, a third very large class of offenses 
for which the community as a whole must be held responsible if it would 
escape the condemnation, "Woe unto him by whom offenses come." This class 
of offenses is traceable to a dense ignorance on the part of the average 
citizen as to the requirements of youth, and to a persistent blindness on 
the part of educators as to youth's most obvious needs.

The young people are overborne by their own undirected and misguided 
energies. A mere temperamental outbreak in a brief period of 
obstreperousness exposes a promising boy to arrest and imprisonment, an 
accidental combination of circumstances too complicated and overwhelming 
to be coped with by an immature mind, condemns a growing lad to a criminal 
career. These impulsive misdeeds may be thought of as dividing into two 
great trends somewhat obscurely analogous to the two historic divisions of 
man's motive power, for we are told that all the activities of primitive 
man and even those of his more civilized successors may be broadly traced 
to the impulsion of two elemental appetites. The first drove him to the 
search for food, the hunt developing into war with neighboring tribes and 
finally broadening into barter and modern commerce; the second urged him 
to secure and protect a mate, developing into domestic life, widening into 
the building of homes and cities, into the cultivation of the arts and a 
care for beauty.

In the life of each boy there comes a time when these primitive instincts 
urge him to action, when he is himself frightened by their undefined 
power. He is faced by the necessity of taming them, of reducing them to 
manageable impulses just at the moment when "a boy's will is the wind's 
will," or, in the words of a veteran educator, at the time when "it is 
almost impossible for an adult to realize the boy's irresponsibility and 
even moral neurasthenia." That the boy often fails may be traced in those 
pitiful figures which show that between two and three times as much 
incorrigibility occurs between the ages of thirteen and sixteen as at any 
other period of life.

The second division of motive power has been treated in the preceding 
chapter. The present chapter is an effort to point out the necessity for 
an understanding of the first trend of motives if we would minimize the 
temptations of the struggle and free the boy from the constant sense of 
the stupidity and savagery of life. To set his feet in the worn path of 
civilization is not an easy task, but it may give us a clue for the 
undertaking to trace his misdeeds to the unrecognized and primitive spirit 
of adventure corresponding to the old activity of the hunt, of warfare, 
and of discovery.

To do this intelligently, we shall have to remember that many boys in the 
years immediately following school find no restraint either in tradition 
or character. They drop learning as a childish thing and look upon school 
as a tiresome task that is finished. They demand pleasure as the right of 
one who earns his own living. They have developed no capacity for 
recreation demanding mental effort or even muscular skill, and are oblige' 
to seek only that depending upon sight, sound and taste. Many of them 
begin to pay board to their mothers, and make the best bargain they can, 
that more money may be left to spend in the evening. They even bait the 
excitement of "losing a job," and often provoke a foreman if only to see 
"how much he will stand." They are constitutionally unable to enjoy 
anything continuously and follow their vagrant wills unhindered. 
Unfortunately the city lends itself to this distraction. At the best, it 
is difficult to know what to select and what to eliminate as objects of 
attention among its thronged streets, its glittering shops, its gaudy 
advertisements of shows and amusements. It is perhaps to the credit of 
many city boys that the very first puerile spirit of adventure looking 
abroad in the world for material upon which to exercise itself, seems to 
center about the railroad. The impulse is not unlike that which excites 
the coast-dwelling lad to dream of 

"The beauty and mystery of the ships
 And the magic of the sea."  

I cite here a dozen charges upon which boys were brought into the Juvenile 
Court of Chicago, all of which might be designated as deeds of adventure. 
A surprising number, as the reader will observe, are connected with 
railroads. They are taken from the court records and repeat the actual 
words used by police officers, irate neighbors, or discouraged parents, 
when the boys were brought before the judge. (1) Building fires along the 
railroad tracks; (2) flagging trains; (3) throwing stones at moving train 
windows; (4) shooting at the actors in the Olympic Theatre with sling 
shots; (5) breaking signal lights on the railroad; (6) stealing linseed 
oil barrels from the railroad to make a fire; (7) taking waste from an 
axle box and burning it upon the railroad tracks; (8) turning a switch and 
running a street car off the track; (9) staying away from home to sleep in 
barns; (10) setting fire to a barn in order to see the fire engines come 
up the street; (11) knocking down signs; (12) cutting Western Union cable.

Another dozen charges also taken from actual court records might be added 
as illustrating the spirit of adventure, for although stealing is involved 
in all of them, the deeds were doubtless inspired much more by the 
adventurous impulse than by a desire for the loot itself: (1) Stealing 
thirteen pigeons from a barn; (2) stealing a bathing suit; (3) stealing a 
tent; (4) stealing ten dollars from mother with which to buy a revolver; 
(5) stealing a horse blanket to use at night when it was cold sleeping on 
the wharf; (6) breaking a seal on a freight car to steal "grain for 
chickens"; (7) stealing apples from a freight car; (8) stealing a candy 
peddler's wagon "to be full up just for once"; (9) stealing a hand car; 
(10) stealing a bicycle to take a ride; (11) stealing a horse and buggy 
and driving twenty-five miles into the country; (12) stealing a stray 
horse on the prairie and trying to sell it for twenty dollars.

Of another dozen it might be claimed that they were also due to this same 
adventurous spirit, although the first six were classed as disorderly 
conduct: (1) Calling a neighbor a "scab"; (2) breaking down a fence; (3) 
flipping cars; (4) picking up coal from railroad tracks; (5) carrying a 
concealed "dagger," and stabbing a playmate with it; (6) throwing stones 
at a railroad employee. The next three were called vagrancy: (1) Loafing 
on the docks; (2) "sleeping out" nights; (3) getting "wandering spells." 
One, designated petty larceny, was cutting telephone wires under the 
sidewalk and selling them; another, called burglary, was taking locks off 
from basement doors; and the last one bore the dignified title of 
"resisting an officer" because the boy, who was riding on the fender of a 
street car, refused to move when an officer ordered him off.

Of course one easily recalls other cases in which the manifestations were 
negative. I remember an exasperated and frightened mother who took a boy 
of fourteen into court upon the charge of incorrigibility. She accused him 
of "shooting craps," "smoking cigarettes," "keeping bad company," "being 
idle." The mother regrets it now, however, for she thinks that taking a 
boy into court only gives him a bad name, and that "the police are down on 
a boy who has once been in court, and that that makes it harder for him." 
She hardly recognizes her once troublesome charge in the steady young man 
of nineteen who brings home all his wages and is the pride and stay of her 
old age.

I recall another boy who worked his way to New York and back again to 
Chicago before he was quite fourteen years old, skilfully escaping the 
truant officers as well as the police and special railroad detectives. He 
told his story with great pride, but always modestly admitted that he 
could never have done it if his father had not been a locomotive engineer 
so that he had played around railroad tracks and "was onto them ever since 
he was a small kid."

There are many of these adventurous boys who exhibit a curious incapacity 
for any effort which requires sustained energy. They show an absolute lack 
of interest in the accomplishment of what they undertake, so marked that 
if challenged in the midst of their activity, they will be quite unable to 
tell you the end they have in view. Then there are those tramp boys who 
are the despair of every one who tries to deal with them.

I remember the case of a boy who traveled almost around the world in the 
years lying between the ages of eleven and fifteen. He had lived for six 
months in Honolulu where he had made up his mind to settle when the 
irresistible "Wanderlust" again seized him. He was scrupulously neat in 
his habits and something of a dandy in appearance. He boasted that he had 
never stolen, although he had been arrested several times on the charge of 
vagrancy, a fate which befell him in Chicago and landed him in the 
Detention Home connected with the Juvenile Court. The judge gained a 
personal hold upon him, and the lad tried with all the powers of his 
untrained moral nature to "make good and please the judge." Monotonous 
factory work was not to be thought of in connection with him, but his good 
friend the judge found a place for him as a bell-boy in a men's club, 
where it was hoped that the uniform and the variety of experience might 
enable him to take the first steps toward regular pay and a settled life. 
Through another bell-boy, however, he heard of the find of a diamond 
carelessly left in one of the wash rooms of the club. The chance to throw 
out mysterious hints of its whereabouts, to bargain for its restoration, 
to tell of great diamond deals he had heard of in his travels, inevitably 
laid him open to suspicion which resulted in his dismissal, although he 
had had nothing to do with the matter beyond gloating over its adventurous 
aspects. In spite of skilful efforts made to detain him, he once more 
started on his travels, throwing out such diverse hints as that of "a trip 
into Old Mexico," or "following up Roosevelt into Africa."

There is an entire series of difficulties directly traceable to the 
foolish and adventurous persistence of carrying loaded firearms. The 
morning paper of the day in which I am writing records the following:

"A party of boys, led by Daniel O'Brien, thirteen years old, had gathered 
in front of the house and O'Brien was throwing stones at Nieczgodzki in 
revenge for a whipping that he received at his hands about a month ago. 
The Polish boy ordered them away and threatened to go into the house and 
get a revolver if they did not stop. Pfister, one of the boys in O'Brien's 
party, called him a coward, and when he pulled a revolver from his pocket, 
dared him to put it away and meet him in a fist fight in the street. 
instead of accepting the challenge, Nieczgodzki aimed his revolver at 
Pfister and fired. The bullet crashed through the top of his head and 
entered the brain. He was rushed to the Alexian Brothers' Hospital, but 
died a short time after being received there. Nieczgodzki was arrested and 
held without bail."

This tale could be duplicated almost every morning; what might be merely a 
boyish scrap is turned into a tragedy because some boy has a revolver.

Many citizens in Chicago have been made heartsick during the past month by 
the knowledge that a boy of nineteen was lodged in the county jail 
awaiting the death penalty. He had shot and killed a policeman during the 
scrimmage of an arrest, although the offense for which he was being "taken 
in" was a trifling one. His parents came to Chicago twenty years ago from 
a little farm in Ohio, the best type of Americans, whom we boast to be the 
backbone of our cities. The mother, who has aged and sickened since the 
trial, can only say that "Davie was never a bad boy until about five years 
ago when he began to go with this gang who are always looking out for fun."

Then there are those piteous cases due to a perfervid imagination which 
fails to find material suited to its demands. I can recall misadventures 
of children living within a few blocks of Hull-House which may well fill 
with chagrin those of us who are trying to administer to their deeper 
needs. I remember a Greek boy of fifteen who was arrested for attempting 
to hang a young Turk, stirred by some vague notion of carrying on a 
traditional warfare, and of adding another page to the heroic annals of 
Greek history. When sifted, the incident amounted to little more than a 
graphic threat and the lad was dismissed by the court, covered with 
confusion and remorse that he had brought disgrace upon the name of Greece 
when he had hoped to add to its glory.

I remember with a lump in my throat the Bohemian boy of thirteen who 
committed suicide because he could not "make good" in school, and wished 
to show that he too had "the stuff" in him, as stated in the piteous 
little letter left behind. This same love of excitement, the desire to 
jump out of the humdrum experience of life, also induces boys to 
experiment with drinks and drugs to a surprising extent. For several years 
the residents of Hull-House struggled with the difficulty of prohibiting 
the sale of cocaine to minors under a totally inadequate code of 
legislation, which has at last happily been changed to one more effective 
and enforcible. The long effort brought us into contact with dozens of 
boys who had become victims of the cocaine habit. The first group of these 
boys was discovered in the house of "Army George." This one-armed man sold 
cocaine on the streets and also in the levee district by a system of 
signals so that the word cocaine need never be mentioned, and the style 
and size of the package was changed so often that even a vigilant police 
found it hard to locate it. What could be more exciting to a lad than a 
traffic in a contraband article, carried on in this mysterious fashion? I 
recall our experience with a gang of boys living on a neighboring street. 
There were eight of them altogether, the eldest seventeen years of age, 
the youngest thirteen, and they practically lived the life of vagrants. 
What answered to their club house was a corner lot on Harrison and 
Desplaines Streets, strewn with old boilers, in which they slept by night 
and many times by day. The gang was brought to the attention of Hull-House 
during the summer of 1904 by a distracted mother, who suspected that they 
were all addicted to some drug. She was terribly frightened over the state 
of her youngest boy of thirteen, who was hideously emaciated and his mind 
reduced almost to vacancy. I remember the poor woman as she sat in the 
reception room at Hull-House, holding the unconscious boy in her arms, 
rocking herself back and forth in her fright and despair, saying: "I have 
seen them go with the drink, and eat the hideous opium, but I never knew 
anything like this."

An investigation showed that cocaine had first been offered to these boys 
on the street by a colored man, an agent of a drug store, who had given 
them samples and urged them to try it. In three or four months they had 
become hopelessly addicted to its use, and at the end of six months, when 
they were brought to Hull-House, they were all in a. critical condition. 
At that time not one of them was either going to school or working. They 
stole from their parents, "swiped junk," pawned their clothes and 
shoes, -- did any desperate thing to "get the dope," as they called it.

Of course they continually required more, and had spent as much as eight 
dollars a night for cocaine, which they used to "share and share alike." 
It sounds like a large amount, but it really meant only four doses each 
during the night, as at that time they were taking twenty-five cents' 
worth at once if they could possibly secure it. The boys would tell 
nothing for three or four days after they were discovered, in spite of the 
united efforts of their families, the police, and the residents of Hull-
House. But finally the superior boy of the gang, the manliest and the 
least debauched, told his tale, and the others followed in quick 
succession. They were willing to go somewhere to be helped, and were even 
eager if they could go together, and finally seven of them were sent to 
the Presbyterian Hospital for four weeks' treatment and afterwards all 
went to the country together for six weeks more. The emaciated child 
gained twenty pounds during his sojourn in the hospital, the head of which 
testified that at least three of the boys could have stood but little more 
of the irregular living and doping. At the present moment they are all, 
save one, doing well, although they were rescued so late that they seemed 
to have but little chance. One is still struggling with the appetite on an 
Iowa farm and dares not trust himself in the city because he knows too 
well how cocaine may be procured in spite of better legislation. It is 
doubtful whether these boys could ever have been pulled through unless 
they had been allowed to keep together through the hospital and 
convalescing period, -- unless we had been able to utilize the gang spirit 
and to turn its collective force towards overcoming the desire for the 
drug.

The desire to dream and see visions also plays an important part with the 
boys who habitually use cocaine. I recall a small hut used by boys for 
this purpose. They washed dishes in a neighboring restaurant and as soon 
as they had earned a few cents they invested in cocaine which they kept 
pinned underneath their suspenders. When they had accumulated enough for a 
real debauch they went to this hut and for several days were dead to the 
outside world. One boy told me that in his dreams he saw large rooms paved 
with gold and silver money, the walls papered with greenbacks, and that he 
took away in buckets all that he could carry.

This desire for adventure also seizes girls. A group of girls ranging in 
age from twelve to seventeen was discovered in Chicago last June, two of 
whom were being trained by older women to open tills in small shops, to 
pick pockets, to remove handkerchiefs, furs and purses and to lift 
merchandise from the counters of department stores. All the articles 
stolen were at once taken to their teachers and the girls themselves 
received no remuneration, except occasional sprees to the theaters or 
other places of amusement. The girls gave no coherent reason for their 
actions beyond the statement that they liked the excitement and the fun of 
it. Doubtless to the thrill of danger was added the pleasure and interest 
of being daily in the shops and the glitter of "down town." The boys are 
more indifferent to this down-town life, and are apt to carry on their 
adventures on the docks, the railroad tracks or best of all upon the 
unoccupied prairie.

This inveterate demand of youth that life shall afford a large element of 
excitement is in a measure well founded. We know of course that it is 
necessary to accept excitement as an inevitable part of recreation, that 
the first step in recreation is "that excitement which stirs the worn or 
sleeping centers of a man's body and mind." It is only when it is followed 
by nothing else that it defeats its own end, that it uses up strength and 
does not create it. In the actual experience of these boys the excitement 
has demoralized them and led them into law-breaking. When, however, they 
seek legitimate pleasure, and say with great pride that they are "ready to 
pay for it," what they find is legal but scarcely more wholesome, -- it is 
still merely excitement. "Looping the loop" amid shrieks of simulated 
terror or dancing in disorderly saloon halls, are perhaps the natural 
reactions to a day spent in noisy factories and in trolley cars whirling 
through the distracting streets, but the city which permits them to be the 
acme of pleasure and recreation to its young people, commits a grievous 
mistake.

May we not assume that this love for excitement, this desire for 
adventure, is basic, and will be evinced by each generation of city boys 
as a challenge to their elders? And yet those of us who live in Chicago 
are obliged to confess that last year there were arrested and brought into 
court fifteen thousand young people under the age of twenty, who had 
failed to keep even the common law of the land. Most of these young people 
had broken the law in their blundering efforts to find adventure and in 
response to the old impulse for self-expression. It is said indeed that 
practically the whole machinery of the grand jury and of the criminal 
courts is maintained and operated for the benefit of youths between the 
ages of thirteen and twenty-five. Men up to ninety years of age, it is 
true, commit crimes, but they are not characterized by the recklessness, 
the bravado and the horror which have stained our records in Chicago. An 
adult with the most sordid experience of life and the most rudimentary 
notion of prudence, could not possibly have committed them. Only a 
utilization of that sudden burst of energy belonging partly to the future 
could have achieved them, only a capture of the imagination and of the 
deepest emotions of youth could have prevented them!

Possibly these fifteen thousand youths were brought to grief because the 
adult population assumed that the young would be able to grasp only that 
which is presented in the form of sensation; as if they believed that 
youth could thus early become absorbed in a hand to mouth existence, and 
so entangled in materialism that there would be no reaction against it. It 
is as though we were deaf to the appeal of these young creatures, claiming 
their share of the joy of life, flinging out into the dingy city their 
desires and aspirations after unknown realities, their unutterable 
longings for companionship and pleasure. Their very demand for excitement 
is a protest against the dulness of life, to which we ourselves 
instinctively respond.



CHAPTER IV.
THE HOUSE OF DREAMS.

To the preoccupied adult who is prone to use the city street as a mere 
passageway from one hurried duty to another, nothing is more touching than 
his encounter with a group of children and young people who are emerging 
from a theater with the magic of the play still thick upon them. They look 
up and down the familiar street scarcely recognizing it and quite unable 
to determine the direction of home. From a tangle of "make believe" they 
gravely scrutinize the real world which they are so reluctant to reenter, 
reminding one of the absorbed gaze of a child who is groping his way back 
from fairy-land whither the story has completely transported him.

"Going to the show" for thousands of young people in every industrial city 
is the only possible road to the realms of mystery and romance; the 
theater is the only place where they can satisfy that craving for a 
conception of life higher than that which the actual world offers them. In 
a very real sense the drama and the drama alone performs for them the 
office of art as is clearly revealed in their blundering demand stated in 
many forms for "a play unlike life." The theater becomes to them a 
"veritable house of dreams" infinitely more real than the noisy streets 
and the crowded factories.

This first simple demand upon the theater for romance is closely allied to 
one more complex which might be described as a search for solace and 
distraction in those moments of first awakening from the glamour of a 
youth's interpretation of life to the sterner realities which are thrust 
upon his consciousness. These perceptions which inevitably "close around" 
and imprison the spirit of youth are perhaps never so grim as in the case 
of the wage-earning child. We can all recall our own moments of revolt 
against life's actualities, our reluctance to admit that all life was to 
be as unheroic and uneventful as that which we saw about us, it was too 
unbearable that "this was all there was" and we tried every possible 
avenue of escape. As we made an effort to believe, in spite of what we 
saw, that life was noble and harmonious, as we stubbornly clung to poesy 
in contradiction to the testimony of our senses, so we see thousands of 
young people thronging the theaters bent in their turn upon the same 
quest. The drama provides a transition between the romantic conceptions 
which they vainly struggle to keep intact and life's cruelties and 
trivialities which they refuse to admit. A child whose imagination has 
been cultivated is able to do this for himself through reading and 
reverie, but for the overworked city youth of meager education, perhaps 
nothing but the theater is able to perform this important office.

The theater also has a strange power to forecast life for the youth. Each 
boy comes from our ancestral past not "in entire forgetfulness," and quite 
as he unconsciously uses ancient war-cries in his street play, so he longs 
to reproduce and to see set before him the valors and vengeances of a 
society embodying a much more primitive state of morality than that in 
which he finds himself. Mr. Patten has pointed out that the elemental 
action which the stage presents, the old emotions of love and jealousy, of 
revenge and daring take the thoughts of the spectator back into deep and 
well worn channels in which his mind runs with a sense of rest afforded by 
nothing else. The cheap drama brings cause and effect, will power and 
action, once more into relation and gives a man the thrilling conviction 
that he may yet be master of his fate. The youth of course, quite 
unconscious of this psychology, views the deeds of the hero simply as a 
forecast of his own future and it is this fascinating view of his own 
career which draws the boy to "shows" of all sorts. They can scarcely be 
too improbable for him, portraying, as they do, his belief in his own 
prowess. A series of slides which has lately been very popular in the five-
cent theaters of Chicago, portrayed five masked men breaking into a humble 
dwelling, killing the father of the family and carrying away the family 
treasure. The golden-haired son of the house, aged seven, vows eternal 
vengeance on the spot, and follows one villain after another to his doom. 
The execution of each is shown in lurid detail, and the last slide of the 
series depicts the hero, aged ten, kneeling upon his father's grave 
counting on the fingers of one hand the number of men that he has killed, 
and thanking God that he has been permitted to be an instrument of 
vengeance.

In another series of slides, a poor woman is wearily bending over some 
sewing, a baby is crying in the cradle, and two little boys of nine and 
ten are asking for food. In despair the mother sends them out into the 
street to beg, but instead they steal a revolver from a pawn shop and with 
it kill a Chinese laundryman, robbing him of $200. They rush home with the 
treasure which is found by the mother in the baby's cradle, whereupon she 
and her sons fall upon their knees and send up a prayer of thankfulness 
for this timely and heaven-sent assistance.

Is it not astounding that a city allows thousands of its youth to fill 
their impressionable minds with these absurdities which certainly will 
become the foundation for their working moral codes and the data from 
which they will judge the proprieties of life?

It is as if a child, starved at home, should be forced to go out and 
search for food, selecting, quite naturally, not that which is nourishing 
but that which is exciting and appealing to his outward sense, often in 
his ignorance and foolishness blundering into substances which are filthy 
and poisonous.

Out of my twenty years' experience at Hull-House I can recall all sorts of 
pilferings, petty larcenies, and even burglaries, due to that never 
ceasing effort on the part of boys to procure theater tickets. I can also 
recall indirect efforts towards the same end which are most pitiful. I 
remember the remorse of a young girl of fifteen who was brought into the 
Juvenile Court after a night spent weeping in the cellar of her home 
because she had stolen a mass of artificial flowers with which to trim a 
hat. She stated that she had taken the flowers because she was afraid of 
losing the attention of a young man whom she had heard say that "a girl 
has to be dressy if she expects to be seen." This young man was the only 
one who had ever taken her to the theater and if he failed her, she was 
sure that she would never go again, and she sobbed out incoherently that 
she "couldn't live at all without it." Apparently the blankness and 
grayness of life itself had been broken for her only by the portrayal of a 
different world.

One boy whom I had known from babyhood began to take money from his mother 
from the time he was seven years old, and after he was ten she regularly 
gave him money for the play Saturday evening. However, the Saturday 
performance, "starting him off like," he always went twice again on 
Sunday, procuring the money in all sorts of illicit ways. Practically all 
of his earnings after he was fourteen were spent in this way to satisfy 
the insatiable desire, to know of the great adventures of the wide world 
which the more fortunate boy takes out in reading Homer and Stevenson.

In talking with his mother, I was reminded of my experience one Sunday 
afternoon in Russia when the employees of a large factory were seated in 
an open-air theater, watching with breathless interest the presentation of 
folk stories. I was told that troupes of actors went from one 
manufacturing establishment to another presenting the simple elements of 
history and literature to the illiterate employees. This tendency to slake 
the thirst for adventure by viewing the drama is, of course, but a blind 
and primitive effort in the direction of culture, for "he who makes 
himself its vessel and bearer thereby acquires a freedom from the 
blindness and soul poverty of daily existence."

It is partly in response to this need that more sophisticated young people 
often go to the theater, hoping to find a clue to life's perplexities. 
Many times the bewildered hero reminds one of Emerson's description of 
Margaret Fuller, "I don't know where I am going, follow me"; nevertheless, 
the stage is dealing with the moral themes in which the public is most 
interested.

And while many young people go to the theater if only to see represented, 
and to hear discussed, the themes which seem to them so tragically 
important, there is no doubt that what they hear there, flimsy and poor as 
it often is, easily becomes their actual moral guide. In moments of moral 
crisis they turn to the sayings of the hero who found himself in a similar 
plight. The sayings may not be profound, but at least they are applicable 
to conduct. In the last few years scores of plays have been put upon the 
stage whose titles might be easily translated into proper headings for 
sociological lectures or sermons, without including the plays of Ibsen, 
Shaw and Hauptmann, which deal so directly with moral issues that the 
moralists themselves wince under their teachings and declare them brutal. 
But it is this very brutality which the over-refined and complicated city 
dwellers often crave. Moral teaching has become so intricate, creeds so 
metaphysical, that in a state of absolute reaction they demand definite 
instruction for daily living. Their whole-hearted acceptance of the 
teaching corroborates the statement recently made by an English playwright 
that "The theater is literally making the minds of our urban populations 
today. It is a huge factory of sentiment, of character, of points of 
honor, of conceptions of conduct, of everything that finally determines 
the destiny of a nation. The theater is not only a place of amusement, it 
is a place of culture, a place where people learn how to think, act, and 
feel." Seldom, however, do we associate the theater with our plans for 
civic righteousness, although it has become so important a factor in city 
life.

One Sunday evening last winter an investigation was made of four hundred 
and sixty six theaters in the city of Chicago, and it was discovered that 
in the majority of them the leading theme was revenge; the lover following 
his rival; the outraged husband seeking his wife's paramour; or the wiping 
out by death of a blot on a hitherto unstained honor. It was estimated 
that one sixth of the entire population of the city had attended the 
theaters on that day. At that same moment the churches throughout the city 
were preaching the gospel of good will. Is not this a striking commentary 
upon the contradictory influences to which the city youth is constantly 
subjected?

This discrepancy between the church and the stage is at times apparently 
recognized by the five-cent theater itself, and a blundering attempt is 
made to suffuse the songs and moving pictures with piety. Nothing could 
more absurdly demonstrate this attempt than a song, illustrated by 
pictures, describing the adventures of a young man who follows a pretty 
girl through street after street in the hope of "snatching a kiss from her 
ruby lips." The young man is overjoyed when a sudden wind storm drives the 
girl to shelter under an archway, and he is about to succeed in his 
attempt when the good Lord, "ever watchful over innocence," makes the same 
wind "blow a cloud of dust into the eyes of the rubberneck," and "his foul 
purpose is foiled." This attempt at piety is also shown in a series of 
films depicting Bible stories and the Passion Play at Oberammergau, 
forecasting the time when the moving film will be viewed as a mere 
mechanical device for the use of the church, the school and the library, 
as well as for the theater.

At present, however, most improbable tales hold the attention of the youth 
of the city night after night, and feed his starved imagination as nothing 
else succeeds in doing. In addition to these fascinations, the five-cent 
theater is also fast becoming the general social center and club house in 
many crowded neighborhoods. It is easy of access from the street, the 
entire family of parents and children can attend for a comparatively small 
sum of money, and the performance lasts for at least an hour; and, in some 
of the humbler theaters, the spectators are not disturbed for a second 
hour.

The room which contains the mimic stage is small and cozy, and less formal 
than the regular theater, and there is much more gossip and social life as 
if the foyer and pit were mingled. The very darkness of the room, 
necessary for an exhibition of the films, is an added attraction to many 
young people, for whom the space is filled with the glamour of love making.

Hundreds of young people attend these five-cent theaters every evening in 
the week, including Sunday, and what is seen and heard there becomes the 
sole topic of conversation, forming the ground pattern of their social 
life. That mutual understanding which in another social circle is provided 
by books, travel and all the arts, is here compressed into the topics 
suggested by the play.

The young people attend the five-cent theaters in groups, with something 
of the "gang" instinct, boasting of the films and stunts in "our theater." 
They find a certain advantage in attending one theater regularly, for the 
habitués are often invited to come upon the stage on "amateur nights," 
which occur at least once a week in all the theaters. This is, of course, 
a most exciting experience. If the "stunt" does not meet with the approval 
of the audience, the performer is greeted with jeers and a long hook pulls 
him off the stage; if, on the other hand, he succeeds in pleasing the 
audience, he may be paid for his performance and later register with a 
booking agency, the address of which is supplied by the obliging manager, 
and thus he fancies that a lucrative and exciting career is opening before 
him. Almost every night at six o'clock a long line of children may be seen 
waiting at the entrance of these booking agencies, of which there are 
fifteen that are well known in Chicago.

Thus, the only art which is constantly placed before the eyes of "the 
temperamental youth" is a debased form of dramatic art, and a vulgar type 
of music, for the success of a song in these theaters depends not so much 
upon its musical rendition as upon the vulgarity of its appeal. In a song 
which held the stage of a cheap theater in Chicago for weeks, the young 
singer was helped out by a bit of mirror from which she threw a flash of 
light into the faces of successive boys whom she selected from the 
audience as she sang the refrain, "You are my Affinity." Many popular 
songs relate the vulgar experiences of a city man wandering from amusement 
park to bathing beach in search of flirtations. It may be that these 
"stunts" and recitals of city adventure contain the nucleus of coming 
poesy and romance, as the songs and recitals of the early minstrels sprang 
directly from the life of the people, but all the more does the effort 
need help and direction, both in the development of its technique and the 
material of its themes.

The few attempts which have been made in this direction are astonishingly 
rewarding to those who regard the power of self-expression as one of the 
most precious boons of education. The Children's Theater in New York is 
the most successful example, but every settlement in which dramatics have 
been systematically fostered can also testify to a surprisingly quick 
response to this form of art on the part of young people. The Hull-House 
Theater is constantly besieged by children clamoring to "take part" in the 
plays of Schiller, Shakespeare, and Molière, although they know it means 
weeks of rehearsal and the complete memorizing of "stiff" lines. The 
audiences sit enthralled by the final rendition and other children whose 
tastes have supposedly been debased by constant vaudeville, are 
pathetically eager to come again and again. Even when still more is 
required from the young actors, research into the special historic period, 
copying costumes from old plates, hours of labor that the "th" may be 
restored to its proper place in English speech, their enthusiasm is 
unquenched. But quite aside from its educational possibilities one never 
ceases to marvel at the power of even a mimic stage to afford to the young 
a magic space in which life may be lived in efflorescence, where manners 
may be courtly and elaborate without exciting ridicule, where the sequence 
of events is impressive and comprehensible. Order and beauty of life is 
what the adolescent youth craves above all else as the younger child 
indefatigably demands his story. "Is this where the most beautiful 
princess in the world lives" asks a little girl peering into the door of 
the Hull-House Theater, or "Does Alice in Wonderland always stay here?" It 
is much easier for her to put her feeling into words than it is for the 
youth who has enchantingly rendered the gentle poetry of Ben Jonson's "Sad 
Shepherd," or for him who has walked the boards as Southey's Wat Tyler. 
His association, however, is quite as clinging and magical as is the 
child's although he can only say, "Gee, I wish I could always feel the way 
I did that night. Something would be doing then." Nothing of the artist's 
pleasure, nor of the revelation of that larger world which surrounds and 
completes our own, is lost to him because a careful technique has been 
exacted, -- on the contrary this has only dignified and enhanced it. It 
would also be easy to illustrate youth's eagerness for artistic expression 
from the recitals given by the pupils of the New York Music School 
Settlement, or by those of the Hull-House Music School. These attempts 
also combine social life with the training of the artistic sense and in 
this approximate the fascinations of the five-cent theater.

This spring a group of young girls accustomed to the life of a five-cent 
theater, reluctantly refused an invitation to go to the country for a 
day's outing because the return on a late train would compel them to miss 
one evening's performance. They found it impossible to tear themselves 
away not only from the excitements of the theater itself but from the 
gaiety of the crowd of young men and girls invariably gathered outside 
discussing the sensational posters.

A steady English shopkeeper lately complained that unless he provided his 
four daughters with the money for the five-cent theaters every evening 
they would steal it from his till, and he feared that they might be driven 
to procure it in even more illicit ways. Because his entire family life 
had been thus disrupted he gloomily asserted that "this cheap show had 
ruined his 'ome and was the curse of America." This father was able to 
formulate the anxiety of many immigrant parents who are absolutely 
bewildered by the keen absorption of their children in the cheap theater. 
This anxiety is not, indeed, without foundation. An eminent alienist of 
Chicago states that he has had a number of patients among neurotic 
children whose emotional natures have been so over-wrought by the crude 
appeal to which they had been so constantly subjected in the theaters, 
that they have become victims of hallucination and mental disorder. The 
statement of this physician may be the first note of alarm which will 
awaken the city to its duty in regard to the theater, so that it shall at 
least be made safe and sane for the city child whose senses are already so 
abnormally developed.

This testimony of a physician that the conditions are actually 
pathological, may at last induce us to bestir ourselves in regard to 
procuring a more wholesome form of public recreation. Many efforts in 
social amelioration have been undertaken only after such exposures; in the 
meantime, while the occasional child is driven distraught, a hundred 
children permanently injure their eyes watching the moving films, and 
hundreds more seriously model their conduct upon the standards set before 
them on this mimic stage.

Three boys, aged nine, eleven and thirteen years, who had recently seen 
depicted the adventures of frontier life including the holding up of a 
stage coach and the lassoing of the driver, spent weeks planning to lasso, 
murder, and rob a neighborhood milkman, who started on his route at four 
o'clock in the morning. They made their headquarters in a barn and saved 
enough money to buy a revolver, adopting as their watchword the phrase 
"Dead Men Tell no Tales." One spring morning the conspirators, with their 
faces covered with black cloth, lay "in ambush" for the milkman. 
Fortunately for him, as the lariat was thrown the horse shied, and, 
although the shot was appropriately fired, the milkman's life was saved. 
Such a direct influence of the theater is by no means rare, even among 
older boys. Thirteen young lads were brought into the Municipal Court in 
Chicago during the first week that "Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman" was 
upon the stage, each one with an outfit of burglar's tools in his 
possession, and each one shamefacedly admitting that the gentlemanly 
burglar in the play had suggested to him a career of similar adventure.

In so far as the illusions of the theater succeed in giving youth the rest 
and recreation which comes from following a more primitive code of 
morality, it has a close relation to the function performed by public 
games. It is, of course, less valuable because the sense of participation 
is largely confined to the emotions and the imagination, and does not 
involve the entire nature.

We might illustrate by the "Wild West Show" in which the onlooking boy 
imagines himself an active participant. The scouts, the Indians, the 
bucking ponies, are his real intimate companions and occupy his entire 
mind. In contrast with this we have the omnipresent game of tag which is, 
doubtless, also founded upon the chase. It gives the boy exercise and 
momentary echoes of the old excitement, but it is barren of suggestion and 
quickly degenerates into horse-play.

Well considered public games easily carried out in a park or athletic 
field, might both fill the mind with the imaginative material constantly 
supplied by the theater, and also afford the activity which the cramped 
muscles of the town dweller so sorely need. Even the unquestioned ability 
which the theater possesses to bring men together into a common mood and 
to afford them a mutual topic of conversation, is better accomplished with 
the one national game which we already possess, and might be infinitely 
extended through the organization of other public games.

The theater even now by no means competes with the baseball league games 
which are attended by thousands of men and boys who, during the entire 
summer, discuss the respective standing of each nine and the relative 
merits of every player. During the noon hour all the employees of a city 
factory gather in the nearest vacant lot to cheer their own home team in 
its practice for the next game with the nine of a neighboring 
manufacturing establishment and on a Saturday afternoon the entire male 
population of the city betakes itself to the baseball field; the ordinary 
means of transportation are supplemented by gay stage-coaches and huge 
automobiles, noisy with blowing horns and decked with gay pennants. The 
enormous crowd of cheering men and boys are talkative, good-natured; full 
of the holiday spirit, and absolutely released from the grind of life. 
They are lifted out of their individual affairs and so fused together that 
a man cannot tell whether it is his own shout or another's that fills his 
ears; whether it is his own coat or another's that he is wildly waving to 
celebrate a victory. He does not call the stranger who sits next to him 
his "brother" but he unconsciously embraces him in an overwhelming 
outburst of kindly feeling when the favorite player makes a home run. Does 
not this contain a suggestion of the undoubted power of public recreation 
to bring together all classes of a community in the modern city unhappily 
so full of devices for keeping men apart?

Already some American cities are making a beginning toward more adequate 
public recreation. Boston has its municipal gymnasiums, cricket fields, 
and golf grounds. Chicago has seventeen parks with playing fields, 
gymnasiums and baths, which at present enroll thousands of young people. 
These same parks are provided with beautiful halls which are used for many 
purposes, rent free, and are given over to any group of young people who 
wish to conduct dancing parties subject to city supervision and 
chaperonage. Many social clubs have deserted neighboring saloon halls for 
these municipal drawing rooms beautifully decorated with growing plants 
supplied by the park greenhouses, and flooded with electric lights 
supplied by the park power house. In the saloon halls the young people 
were obliged to "pass money freely over the bar," and in order to make the 
most of the occasion they usually stayed until morning. At such times the 
economic necessity itself would override the counsels of the more 
temperate, and the thrifty door keeper would not insist upon invitations 
but would take in any one who had the "price of a ticket." The free rent 
in the park hall, the good food in the park restaurant, supplied at cost, 
have made three parties closing at eleven o'clock no more expensive than 
one party breaking up at daylight, too often in disorder.

Is not this an argument that the drinking, the late hours, the lack of 
decorum, are directly traceable to the commercial enterprise which 
ministers to pleasure in order to drag it into excess because excess is 
more profitable? To thus commercialize pleasure is as monstrous as it is 
to commercialize art. It is intolerable that the city does not take over 
this function of making provision for pleasure, as wise communities in 
Sweden and South Carolina have taken the sale of alcohol out of the hands 
of enterprising publicans.

We are only beginning to understand what might be done through the 
festival, the street procession, the band of marching musicians, 
orchestral music in public squares or parks, with the magic power they all 
possess to formulate the sense of companionship and solidarity. The 
experiments which are being made in public schools to celebrate the 
national holidays, the changing seasons, the birthdays of heroes, the 
planting of trees, are slowly developing little ceremonials which may in 
time work out into pageants of genuine beauty and significance. No other 
nation has so unparalleled an opportunity to do this through its schools 
as we have, for no other nation has so wide-spreading a school system, 
while the enthusiasm of children and their natural ability to express 
their emotions through symbols, gives the securest possible foundation to 
this growing effort.

The city schools of New York have effected the organization of high school 
girls into groups for folk dancing. These old forms of dancing which have 
been worked out in many lands and through long experiences, safeguard 
unwary and dangerous expression and yet afford a vehicle through which the 
gaiety of youth may flow. Their forms are indeed those which lie at the 
basis of all good breeding, forms which at once express and restrain, urge 
forward and set limits.

One may also see another center of growth for public recreation and the 
beginning of a pageantry for the people in the many small parks and 
athletic fields which almost every American city is hastening to provide 
for its young. These small parks have innumerable athletic teams, each 
with its distinctive uniform, with track meets and match games arranged 
with the teams from other parks and from the public schools; choruses of 
trade unionists or of patriotic societies fill the park halls with eager 
listeners. Labor Day processions are yearly becoming more carefully 
planned and more picturesque in character, as the desire to make an 
overwhelming impression with mere size gives way to a growing ambition to 
set forth the significance of the craft and the skill of the workman. At 
moments they almost rival the dignified showing of the processions of the 
German Turn Vereins which are also often seen in our city streets.

The many foreign colonies which are found in all American cities afford an 
enormous reserve of material for public recreation and street festival. 
They not only celebrate the feasts and holidays of the fatherland, but 
have each their own public expression for their mutual benefit societies 
and for the observance of American anniversaries. From the gay celebration 
of the Scandinavians when war was averted and two neighboring nations were 
united, to the equally gay celebration of the centenary of Garibaldi's 
birth; from the Chinese dragon cleverly trailing its way through the 
streets, to the Greek banners flung out in honor of immortal heroes, there 
is an infinite variety of suggestions and possibilities for public 
recreation and for the corporate expression of stirring emotions. After 
all, what is the function of art but to preserve in permanent and 
beautiful form those emotions and solaces which cheer life and make it 
kindlier, more heroic and easier to comprehend; which lift the mind of the 
worker from the harshness and loneliness of his task, and, by connecting 
him with what has gone before, free him from a sense of isolation and 
hardship?

Were American cities really eager for municipal art, they would cherish as 
genuine beginnings the tarentella danced so interminably at Italian 
weddings; the primitive Greek pipe played throughout the long summer 
nights; the Bohemian theaters crowded with eager Slavophiles; the 
Hungarian musicians strolling from street to street; the fervid oratory of 
the young Russian preaching social righteousness in the open square.

Many Chicago citizens who attended the first annual meeting of the 
National Playground Association of America, will never forget the long 
summer day in the large playing field filled during the morning with 
hundreds of little children romping through the kindergarten games, in the 
afternoon with the young men and girls contending in athletic sports; and 
the evening light made gay by the bright colored garments of Italians, 
Lithuanians, Norwegians, and a dozen other nationalities, reproducing 
their old dances and festivals for the pleasure of the more stolid 
Americans. Was this a forecast of what we may yet see accomplished through 
a dozen agencies promoting public recreation which are springing up in 
every city of America, as they already are found in the large towns of 
Scotland and England?

Let us cherish these experiments as the most precious beginnings of an 
attempt to supply the recreational needs of our industrial cities. To fail 
to provide for the recreation of youth, is not only to deprive all of them 
of their natural form of expression, but is certain to subject some of 
them to the overwhelming temptation of illicit and soul-destroying 
pleasures. To insist that young people shall forecast their rose-colored 
future only in a house of dreams, is to deprive the real world of that 
warmth and reassurance which it so sorely needs and to which it is justly 
entitled; furthermore, we are left outside with a sense of dreariness, in 
company with that shadow which already lurks only around the corner for 
most of us -- a skepticism of life's value.