There was a time when Americans had spoken of prostitution as the “Social Evil.” Just so, capitalized and with the definite article—the Social Evil—as if all the ills of modern life were reducible to a single Satan. By 1914, such generalities seemed antiquated: Wickedness had specialized. The Social Evil was disaggregated into its constitutive elements: the prostitution evil, the industrial evil, the political evil, the tenement evil, the smoke evil, the divorce evil, the automobile evil, the gang evil, the moving-pictures evil, the cigarette evil, the pushcart evil, the tango evil, “the whiskey evil, the slavery evil, the gambling evil, the living for pleasure evil, and the capital and labor war evil.”
Traditionally, curbing vice had been church business. But the calamitous conditions of the cities now sprawled beyond the pulpit’s reach. All the best elements rallied, forming a “wave of moral house cleaning,” an “organized militia of philanthropy” as various and diversified as sin itself. Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Little Rock: Between 1910 and 1914, each of them sponsored vice investigations of their own. Colorado had a Denver Morals Commission. In Pittsburgh, there was a Moral Efficiency Commission. In Syracuse, the Moral Survey Committee. The trend was ubiquitous. “Everything is being reformed these days,” an editor marveled. “Not to reform is out of date.”
For someone seeking to “catalogue the eighty-seven or eight thousand and seven societies that have been organized to do New York good,” a columnist for the World suggested, the place to start was the Charities Directory. The 1896 edition ran to 517 pages; by 1911, the volume was nearly twice as thick, its leaves crowded with handy entries for the New York Cremation Society, the Clean Streets League, the Country Home for Convalescent Babies, the International Pure Milk League, the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, the Committee on the Congestion of Population, the Union of Religious and Humanitarian Societies for Concerted Moral Effort, the Society for the Prevention of Useless Noises.
Whereas previous generations had practiced social reform, the catchword for the twentieth century was “social hygiene.” While the former was messy and moralistic, the new discipline was systematized and professional. “Social hygiene is at once more radical and more scientific than the old conception of social reform,” Havelock Ellis, one of its leading practitioners, explained. “It attempts not merely a haphazard amelioration of the conditions of life, but a scientific improvement in the quality of life itself.”
A geography of uplift overlay the city. Trained agents of sanitary prophylaxis and capable experts in concerted moral effort toiled together within the skyscrapers of the United Charities Building and the Russell Sage Foundation, both on East Twenty-second Street, as well as the Hebrew Charities Building around the corner and the Central Civic Hall a few blocks away. The Presbyterian Building on Fifth Avenue housed the Anti-Cigarette League, the Anti-Saloon League, “and half a dozen other anti-leagues” as well. Down in the Village, Theodore Dreiser watched a breadline grow “from a few applicants to many,” until it had become “an institution, like a cathedral or a monument.” One hundred and nineteen settlement houses operated among the immigrant neighborhoods. Concerned wardens patrolled the corridors of the Home for Friendless Girls, the Home for Intemperate Men, and the Reformatory of Misdemeanants. Young humanitarians led classes at the Institute for Atypical Persons, the School for Stammering, the School to Discipline Wayward Boys, the West Side Day Nursery Industrial School and Kindergarten.
A collage in a contemporary guidebook illustrates the baffling proliferation of charitable institutions.
In such a congested field, it was necessary to advertise. Yearly reports and solemn tracts no longer sufficed. “The charity that never is in the newspapers stands a good chance of being forgotten,” an executive noted. “A wise board of directors always keeps things on hand to announce in the papers.” Full-page proclamations routinely touted organizational accomplishments, while the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor stumbled on the best gimmick of all: Its list of “New York’s 100 Neediest Cases,” published around the holidays, brought in thousands of dollars each year.
These business methods sapped philanthropy’s credibility as a spiritual, altruistic enterprise. Critics began to discuss the “charities trust,” a monopoly of the best-endowed organizations, which—like Standard Oil—would destroy competitors, dictate terms, and wield untrammeled power. An old couplet rose to the lips of more than one disgruntled sufferer:
The organized charity, scrimped and iced
In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.
The proliferation of unions and associations was baffling. Most contemporaries would have known that the Help-Myself Society promoted temperance, that the Short Ballot Organization favored an easy-to-understand voting system, that the International Sunshine Society offered aid to blind children, and the Simple Spellers advocated typographical reform. But then the various cliques began to blend together. The Union for Practical Progress, the Purity Alliance, the American Vigilance Association: All these did valuable work, no doubt, but of which variety? And what—besides discretion—distinguished the Secret Law and Order League from the Law and Order Union, or the New York Sabbath Committee from the New York Sabbath Alliance? In churches, the pastors were so “distracted” by the various groups jostling for time during Sunday services that they began insisting on “a union of all these societies, which more or less overlap.”
The Suppression of Vice was the aim of the Committee for the Suppression of Vice, and it was a laudable aim—in moderation. But others would brook no closure of saloons on Sundays, and any “lot of high toned men” who sought to “make rules and laws for the great masses” would find the German-American Reform Union standing in their way. The Committee of Seventy had to be replaced by the Committee of Fifty, which, proving unwieldy, was pared down to a Committee of Fifteen and then a Committee of Three. Denouncing all these bodies as tools for the four hundred was the Committee of One Hundred, which claimed to speak for the multitudes.
Down that road lay madness, at least in the considered opinion of experts. When a Times survey asked leading psychologists, “Is ‘Reform’ Sensationalism Responsible for the Apparent Increase of Insanity?” the answer was: Yes, oh yes. “There have been Bryanism and free silver, municipal ownership, Socialism, and other insane doctrines,” a neurologist complained, “and many persons of weak minds have been so confused by the clashing of opinions that they have become insane.”
Before long, many citizens decided: Enough. Too much. Murmured protests against the “pestering and hectoring of the people by flap-mouthed reformers” grew louder and more caustic. “The noble company of the half-baked,” complained a Tribune editor, “have established themselves as our most active experts on all matters of political and business policy.” Walter Lippmann declaimed against “the panacea habit of mind,” whereby engineers wanted to reconstruct society, sanitation experts would scour it clean, and lawyers planned to argue it into submission. “No one who undertook to be the Balzac of reform,” Lippmann would write, “could afford to miss the way in which the reformer in each profession tends to make his specialty an analogy for the whole of life.”
But the social-reform craze had suffered its cruelest setback in the autumn season of 1912, when The Charity Girl premiered at the Globe Theatre, on Broadway and Forty-sixth Street. Billed as a “sociological document in musical comedy form,” the play opened with a scene in the tenements, peopled with slummers, social reformers, white slavers, and a young girl teetering on the precipice of vice. Over the course of three acts, as many evils as could fit came bustling across the stage while the heroine progressed from the East Side to Fifth Avenue, via an airship and the timely advice of a clairvoyant. Yet despite the antics, as well as vaudeville and snatches of ragtime, critics feared that The Charity Girl was “both too long and too loosely constructed for New York.”
The Social Evil had relapsed into Human Comedy, and it was a flop.