Pearls and Swine

Hull-House Women's Club

This is probably not a very good topic for an inaugural blog post on my dissertation, but I figured I'd start small and these document excerpts are just too funny not to share. 

I have developed a love-hate relationship with Progressives. (And by "Progressives," of course, I am simply referring to college-educated, reformers who tried to solve a mess of urban problems between the years 1890-1920. A more complicated definition may be the subject of a subsequent muse but, to be honest, writing something like that bores me just thinking about it so I probably won't.) 

The fact is I cannot get away from them. It is one of the occupational hazards of researching a topic that falls between 1890 and 1920. Progressive reformers were a diverse lot, to be sure. But there are a few characteristics many of them shared, I've noticed. For one, they had an unbounded optimism in the prospects of "civilization" and a future based on their carefully reasoned prescriptions. That optimism could also easily translate into arrogance as they purported to layout a problem and its solution. 

Progressives also wrote many reports on the ills of modern society. Many, many reports. Usually they were obnoxiously self-congratulatory in all of the good work they performed. Their reports also had a dramatic flair in the descriptions of the problem they organized around to solve. (Oftentimes, “problem” meant one group of people or another–working women, immigrants, tramps, and so forth.) But, this is one of the reasons why they can be interesting to read.

To wit, I was reading a 1917 report by Louise de Koven Bowen, a wealthy, influential, educated, and well-intentioned Progressive reformer in Chicago, explaining the "problem" of public dance halls when I encountered this: (you have to picture in your mind an uptight, sixty-year old grandma writing an official account for the Juvenile Protective Association, she is one of the women in the picture above, if that helps)

Decency Often Abandoned Where Liquor is Sold at Dances
"In many of the halls the crowd is so great and the space for dancing so limited, that the dancers are obliged to stand almost still and go through the motions of dancing only. Couples stand very close together, the girl with her hands around the man's neck, the man with both his arms around the girl or on her hips; their cheeks are pressed close together, their bodies touch each other; the liquor which has been consumed is like setting a match to a flame; they throw aside all restraint and give themselves to unbridled license and indecency.” 

Not bad, right? Who wouldn't want to be at that club? The way it is written I suspect even Bowen was feeling the heat. It is really well-written, too, if you ask me. That is part of what strikes me about it. Progressives often wrote in such clinical or academic terms that they could suck the life out of anything. But the passion one could find in a Chicago dance hall was not to be denied by anyone. You may have to be a historian of the Progressives to get as worked up about this as I am, but at the very least, you'll probably want to move your hips to the beat a little bit. 

Another hallmark of Progressives that both cracks me up and chaps my hide was how condescending they could be towards their objects of reform. One of my all time favorites was a statement from a reformer on behalf of the San Francisco Center of the California Civic League describing their efforts to help employ “dance hall girls” that had recently lost their jobs due to the attempts by reformers to “clean up” the Coast and shut down “dens of vice,” including places where women worked on commission to sell liquor and dance with male patrons. These women made good wages and frequently rejected the efforts of middle-class do-gooders to find them work as domestic servants. In frustration, the unnamed author wrote:

“Poor deluded creatures, their mentality is so stunted with sensuality, drink and sin, they do not realize the awful bondage they are subject to…I only hope and pray that some of our efforts, which seemingly failed, were not pearls cast before swine.” 

“Pearls cast before swine.” Hard to find a better example of class condescension than that I imagine. Gotta love the Progressives.

Sources: [Image] Univeristy of Illinois at Chicago, The University Library, Jane Addams Memorial Collection, Wallace Kirkland Papers, JAMC, neg. 1354 [click image for web page]; Louise de Koven Bowen, The Public Dance Halls of Chicago. Revised Edition. Chicago: The Juvenile Protective Association, 1917; Typed Report, Dance Halls Closing, Efforts to Employ Displaced Workers, League of Women Voters Records, “Public Dance Halls, 1912” folder, page 5. No date [1915?]. California Historical Society, North Baker Research Library.