 | CHAPTER XV The art of the moving picture, |  |
CHAPTER XV
THE SUBSTITUTE FOR THE SALOON
This is a special commentary on chapter
five, The Picture of Crowd Splendor. It refers
as well to every other type of moving picture
that gets into the slum. But the masses have
an extraordinary affinity for the Crowd Photoplay.
As has been said before, the mob comes
nightly to behold its natural face in the
glass. Politicians on the platform have swayed
the mass below them. But now, to speak in
an Irish way, the crowd takes the platform, and
looking down, sees itself swaying. The slums
are an astonishing assembly of cave-men crawling
out of their shelters to exhibit for the
first time in history a common interest on a
tremendous scale in an art form. Below the
cliff caves were bar rooms in endless lines.
There are almost as many bar rooms to-day,
yet this new thing breaks the lines as nothing
else ever did. Often when a moving picture
house is set up, the saloon on the right hand or
the left declares bankruptcy.
Why do men prefer the photoplay to the
drinking place? For no pious reason, surely.
Now they have fire pouring into their eyes
instead of into their bellies. Blood is drawn
from the guts to the brain. Though the picture
be the veriest mess, the light and movement
cause the beholder to do a little reptilian
thinking. After a day's work a street-sweeper
enters the place, heavy as King Log. A
ditch-digger goes in, sick and surly. It is the
state of the body when many men drink themselves
into insensibility. But here the light
is as strong in the eye as whiskey in the throat.
Along with the flare, shadow, and mystery, they
face the existence of people, places, costumes,
utterly novel. Immigrants are prodded by
these swords of darkness and light to guess at
the meaning of the catch-phrases and headlines
that punctuate the play. They strain to hear
their neighbors whisper or spell them out.
The photoplays have done something to reunite
the lower-class families. No longer is
the fire-escape the only summer resort for big
and little folks. Here is more fancy and whim
than ever before blessed a hot night. Here,
under the wind of an electric fan, they witness
everything, from a burial in Westminster to the
Swat.
The usual saloon equipment to delight the
eye is one so-called "leg" picture of a woman,
a photograph of a prize-fighter, and some
colored portraits of goats to advertise various
brands of beer. Many times, no doubt, these
boys and young men have found visions of a
sordid kind while gazing on the actress, the
fighter, or the goats. But what poor material
they had in the wardrobes of memory for the
trimmings and habiliments of vision, to make
this lady into Freya, this prize-fighter into
Thor, these goats into the harnessed steeds
that drew his chariot! Man's dreams are rearranged
and glorified memories. How could
these people reconstruct the torn carpets and
tin cans and waste-paper of their lives into mythology?
How could memories of Ladies' Entrance
squalor be made into Castles in Granada
or Carcassonne? The things they drank to see,
and saw but grotesquely, and paid for terribly,
now roll before them with no after pain or punishment.
The mumbled conversation, the sociability
for which they leaned over the tables, they
have here in the same manner with far more
to talk about. They come, they go home, men
as the men alone ever entered a drinking-place,
but discoursing now of far-off mountains and
star-crossed lovers. As Padraic Colum says in
his poem on the herdsman: —
And the King of Spain's Daughter."
on the left in the slum is apt to move out when
the photoplay moves in.
But let us go to the other end of the temperance
argument. I beg to be allowed to relate a
personal matter. For some time I was a fieldworker
for the Anti-Saloon League of Illinois,
being sent every Sunday to a new region to
make the yearly visit on behalf of the league.
Such a visitor is apt to speak to one church in a
village, and two in the country, on each excursion,
being met at the station by some leading
farmer-citizen of the section, and driven to these
points by him. The talk with this man was
worth it all to me.
The agricultural territory of the United States
is naturally dry. This is because the cross-roads
church is the only communal institution, and
the voice of the cross-roads pastor is for teetotalism.
no means ideal in other respects, keeps him from
craving drink as intensely as other toilers do.
A day's work in the open air fills his veins at
nightfall with an opiate of weariness instead of a
high-strung nervousness. The strong men of
the community are church elders, not through
fanaticism, but by right of leadership. Through
their office they are committed to prohibition.
So opposition to the temperance movement is
scattering. The Anti-Saloon League has organized
these leaders into a nation-wide machine.
It sees that they get their weekly paper, instructing
them in the tactics whereby local fights have
been won. A subscription financing the State
League is taken once a year. It counts on the
regular list of church benevolences. The state
officers come in to help on the critical local
fights. Any country politician fears their
non-partisan denunciation as he does political
death. The local machines thus backed are
incurable mugwumps, hold the balance of
power, work in both parties, and have voted
dry the agricultural territory of the United
States everywhere, by the township, county,
or state unit.
The only institutions that touch the same
in the prosperous agricultural centres. These,
too, by the same sign are emphatically antisaloon
in their propaganda, serving to intellectualize
and secularize the dry sentiment without
taking it out of the agricultural caste.
There is a definite line between our farm-civilization
and the rest. When a county
goes dry, it is generally in spite of the county-seat.
Such temperance people as are in the
court-house town represent the church-vote,
which is even then in goodly proportion a
retired-farmer vote. The larger the county-seat,
the larger the non-church-going population
and the more stubborn the fight. The
majority of miners and factory workers are on
the wet side everywhere. The irritation caused
by the gases in the mines, by the dirty work
in the blackness, by the squalor in which the
company houses are built, turns men to drink
for reaction and lamplight and comradeship.
The similar fevers and exasperations of factory
life lead the workers to unstring their tense
nerves with liquor. The habit of snuggling up
close in factories, conversing often, bench by
bench, machine by machine, inclines them to
get together for their pleasures at the bar.
minority in moral sympathy with the temperance
wave brought in by the farmers. But
they are outstanding groups. Their leadership
seldom dries up a factory town or a mining region,
with all the help the Anti-Saloon League
can give.
In the big cities the temperance movement
is scarcely understood. The choice residential
districts are voted dry for real estate reasons.
The men who do this, drink freely at their own
clubs or parties. The temperance question
would be fruitlessly argued to the end of time
were it not for the massive agricultural vote
rolling and roaring round each metropolis,
reawakening the town churches whose vote is
a pitiful minority but whose spokesmen are
occasionally strident.
There is a prophecy abroad that prohibition
will be the issue of a national election. If
the question is squarely put, there are enough
farmers and church-people to drive the saloon
out of legal existence. The women's vote, a
little more puritanical than the men's vote,
will make the result sure. As one anxious for
this victory, I have often speculated on the
situation when all America is nominally dry,
American preacher, and the American woman.
When the use of alcohol is treason, what will
become of those all but unbroken lines of slum
saloons? No lesser force than regular troops
could dislodge them, with yesterday's intrenchment.
The entrance of the motion picture house
into the arena is indeed striking, the first enemy
of King Alcohol with real power where that king
has deepest hold. If every one of those saloon
doors is nailed up by the Chautauqua orators,
the photoplay archway will remain open. The
people will have a shelter where they can readjust
themselves, that offers a substitute for
many of the lines of pleasure in the groggery.
And a whole evening costs but a dime apiece.
Several rounds of drinks are expensive, but the
people can sit through as many repetitions of
this programme as they desire, for one entrance
fee. The dominant genius of the moving picture
place is not a gentleman with a red nose
and an eye like a dead fish, but some producer
who, with all his faults, has given every person
in the audience a seven-leagued angel-and-demon
telescope.
Since I have announced myself a farmer and
yet recorded in this chapter. They are separate
from the catalogue of the individualistic woes of
the drunkard that are given in the Scripture.
The shame of the American drinking place
is the bar-tender who dominates its thinking.
His cynical and hardened soul wipes out a
portion of the influence of the public school,
the library, the self-respecting newspaper. A
stream rises no higher than its source, and
through his dead-fish eye and dead-fish brain
the group of tired men look upon all the statesmen
and wise ones of the land. Though he
says worse than nothing, his furry tongue, by
endless reiteration, is the American slum oracle.
At the present the bar-tender handles the
neighborhood group, the ultimate unit in city
politics.
So, good citizen, welcome the coming of the
moving picture man as a local social force.
Whatever his private character, the mere
formula of his activities makes him a better
type. He may not at first sway his group
in a directly political way, but he will make
himself the centre of more social ideals than
the bar-tender ever entertained. And he is
beginning to have as intimate a relation to
stands under his arch in the sheltered lobby and
is on conversing terms with his habitual customers,
the length of the afternoon and evening.
Voting the saloon out of the slums by voting
America dry, does not, as of old, promise to be
a successful operation that kills the patient.
In the past some of the photoplay magazines
have contained denunciations of the temperance
people for refusing to say anything in
behalf of the greatest practical enemy of the
saloon. But it is not too late for the dry forces
to repent. The Anti-Saloon League officers
and the photoplay men should ask each other
to dinner. More moving picture theatres in
doubtful territory will help make dry voters.
And wet territory voted dry will bring about
a greatly accelerated patronage of the photoplay
houses. There is every strategic reason
why these two forces should patch up a truce.
Meanwhile, the cave-man, reader of picture-writing,
is given a chance to admit light into
his mind, whatever he puts to his lips. Let
us look for the day, be it a puritan triumph or
not, when the sons and the daughters of the
slums shall prophesy, the young men shall see
visions, the old men dream dreams.
| CHAPTER XV The art of the moving picture, | |