The Survey, Volume 30, Number 2, Apr 12, 1913 — John Shaqi
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 2, Apr 12, 1913Various
History
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 2, Apr 12, 1913
Various
Charities -- Periodicals; Social problems -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals
The substitution of this subterfuge in lieu of the morals commission can
be explained in the same way that Chief Justice Harry Olson, of the
Municipal Court of Chicago, accounts for the unexpected closing of the
segregated districts. He traced the sudden change in the attitude of
county and city officials toward segregated vice to the decision of the
Circuit Court which granted a permanent injunction restraining the use
of certain property in the segregated district for immoral purposes.
“This order of the Chancery Court was,” he said, “the Appomattox of the
war upon openly tolerated vice in Chicago.” For this decision served
notice that any citizen, by invoking the aid of the courts, could
restrain vice, if the public officials were unable or unwilling to do
so. “It was thus the beginning of the end,” he declared.
The morals court, he said, would further act as a check upon the second
deputy superintendent of police, because “the records and the statistics
of the court will show the names of the owners of such houses, together
with their proprietors, inmates and frequenters, and will disclose the
business of the promoters of the traffic and others who may profit
therefrom.” So if this feature of the reorganized police department was
intended by the city administration to effect its escape from the morals
commission as one horn of the dilemma presented by the Vice Commission,
Justice Olson clearly shows that the morals courts is the other horn.
Neither the police of the city administration, nor the state’s attorney
of the county, can escape if citizens seek warrants from the morals
court or injunctions from the Circuit Court.
The inquiry into the relation of low wages to the demoralization of
young girls and women, and the propaganda to correct this tendency by
minimum wage laws will bear close watching. It may not only injure the
broader movement to secure minimum wage laws based upon just and safe
economic grounds, but it may also divert attention from the enactment
and enforcement of laws against commercialized vice. For the ensnaring
of victims is accomplished through many more devious ways than can be
charged up to low wages.
WOMEN POLICE
LOUISE de KOVEN BOWEN
In all our large cities thousands of young people, weary from their
monotonous work in shop or factory, seek the streets in the evening
imperiously asserting their right to pleasure. Business enterprise has
taken advantage of this natural desire for recreation, and
commercialized amusements have sprung up on all sides ready to cater to
every taste of this childish multitude. Penny arcades, slot machines,
moving picture shows, cheap theaters, amusements parks and dance halls
are all attempting to lure children with every device known to modern
advertising. Young people are thus without protection and exposed to
temptation at the very moment when they are least able to withstand it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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