Volume 31 — EDITORIALS

THE PEASANT SALOON-KEEPER—RULER OF AMERICAN CITIES

The great wave of temperance which is now sweeping Europe and America has its chief impulse, no doubt, in ethical and religious sentiment. But a new force is operative—the force of an exact knowledge of the evil physical effects of alcohol. It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of this new element in temperance reform.

The story of the modern series of scientific experiments with alcohol, begun about twenty-five years ago and still in progress, is given by Dr. Henry Smith Williams in this number of McClure's Magazine. These investigations, largely conducted in Continental Europe, include experiments on the senses, upon the muscles, and upon the different human intellectual activities, from the simplest to the most complex. Without exception they show that every function of the normal human body is injured by the use of alcohol—even the moderate use; and that the injury is both serious and permanent.

This knowledge is of concern to all the world. But there is in America a particular and special concern over a condition which may be believed to be unparalleled in human history—certainly in modern civilization: the power of the saloon in American government, especially the government of cities.

The fact is notorious; yet the condition is not clearly understood. Sixty years ago, with the first flood of European immigration, the character of American city governments changed suddenly and entirely. A great proportion of the peasantry who arrived here from the farms of Europe stopped in our cities. They were isolated from the rest of the population; their one great social center was the saloon. And out of this social center came their political leaders and the manipulators of their votes. The European peasant saloon-keeper, for more than half a century, has been the ruler of a great proportion of American cities.

The case of Tammany Hall, for so many years the real governing body of New York, is most familiar. Its politicians for half a century have graduated into public affairs through the common school of the saloon. Its leaders at the present time are perfect examples of the European peasant saloon-keeper type, which has come to govern us. The same condition exists to a large extent in nearly every one of the larger cities in the country. An analysis of the member-ship of the boards of aldermen in these cities for the past few decades shows a percentage of saloon-keepers with foreign names which is astonishing.

A government necessarily takes the character of those conducting it. The business of saloon-keeping, which produced the present management of our cities, involves, from the conditions which surround it, a disregard for both law and proper moral ideals. Ordinary commercial motives urge the proprietors, as a class, to increase the sale of a commodity which the State everywhere endeavors to restrict; and a savage condition of competition drives them still further—till a great proportion break the provisions of the law in some way; while a considerable number ally themselves with the most degraded and dangerous forms of vice.

The government by this class has been exactly what might have been expected. A body of men—drawn from an ancestry which has never possessed any knowledge or traditions of free government; educated in a business whose financial successes are made through the disregard of law—are elevated to the control of the machinery of law and order in the great cities. Another type of citizen—men of force and enterprise unsurpassed in the history of the world—by adapting the discoveries of the most inventive century of the world to the uses of commerce, have massed together in the past half century a chain of great cities upon the face of a half savage continent, and left them to the government of such people as these. The commercial enterprise of these cities has been the marvel of the world; their government has reached a point of moral degradation and inefficiency scarcely less than Oriental.

The debauching of our city life by this kind of government has been frequently pictured in this magazine. A government by saloon-keepers, and by dealers in flagrant immorality, finds both its power and profit in the establishment of vice by its official position. The progress of such a government is shown in George Kennan's description of the former régime in San Francisco, published in McClure's Magazine of September, 1907:

"Instead of protecting the public by enforcing the laws, it devoted itself mainly to making money by allowing gamblers, policy-sellers, brothel keepers, and prostitutes to break the laws. Its honest officers and men tried, at first, to do their duty; but the police commissioners, under the influence or direction of Ruef, interfered with their efforts to close illegal and immoral resorts; the police court judges, allowing themselves to be swayed by selfish political considerations, released the prisoners whom they arrested."

Conditions similar to this have been shown in this magazine to exist in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburg, and other great cities of America. The results have been a general disintegration in the moral fiber of cities. Life itself is much more unsafe than under the well-ordered governments of European cities. The murder rate in Chicago and New York is six or eight times as great as in London and Berlin. Even such a primary necessity of civilization as the safety of women is lost sight of. A leading Chicago newspaper said in 1906:

"It has ever been our proudest boast as a people that in this country woman is respected and protected as she is in no other. That boast is becoming an empty one in Chicago. Women have not only been annoyed and insulted in great numbers on the street within a very short time, but not a few have been murdered. In the year before the Hollister tragedy, there were seventeen murders of women in Chicago, which attracted the attention of the city."

The system of government which produces this result was well described some years ago by the late Bishop Potter, speaking of conditions in New York.

"A corrupt system," he said, "whose infamous details have been steadily uncovered, to our increasing horror and humiliation, was brazenly ignored by those who were fattening on its spoils, and the world was presented with the astounding spectacle of a great municipality, whose civic mechanism was largely employed in trading in the bodies and souls of the defenseless."

Aside from giving direct encouragement and propagation to the more terrible forms of vice, the European peasant saloon-keeper government of our cities furnishes a fitting field for so-called respectable men—but really criminals of the worst type—who help organize and perpetuate saloon government for the purpose of securing, by bribery, franchises for public utilities without paying therefor. Thus American cities have been robbed as well as badly governed.

There are signs of amelioration of these conditions in most of the great cities of the country. But every advance is made against the fierce antagonism of just such systems as Bishop Potter described; and those systems exist in every large American city to-day—either in direct control or ready to take control at the slightest sign of relaxation by the forces which are opposing them. And the foundation of this evil structure is the European peasant saloon-keeper.

McClure's Magazine, in the next year, will consider the horrible influence of the saloon on American life. Dr. Williams will follow his article in the present number by studies of the influence of alcohol upon society at large, upon racial development, and upon the State. The author is especially equipped for his work. He is in the first place perhaps the greatest living popularizer of national science and history in America; and he has himself made life-long observations upon the influence of alcohol—both physical and social—first as a medical practitioner in the treatment of the insane at the great asylums at Bloomingdale and Randalls Island, and later by study and observation in the chief capitals of Europe, where he has lived the greater part of the last ten years. The sound judgment and impartial temper which have characterized his work in other fields will be found in his treatment of this great subject.