GARTERS AND AMEN GROANS.
ON one page of the Houston Post for
Sunday, December 12, I find several columns devoted to
“Our Boys and Girls,” on the next the following
advertisement prominently displayed by a Houston
haberdasher:
“Our Ladies' Garter Department: We
can give you an All-Silk Garter for 50c. with nice buckles
with such reading on them as `Private Grounds,' `Stop,
Mamma is Coming,' `Look Quick,' `Good Night, Call
Again,' `I Am a Warm Baby,' `Take Off Your Things,'
etc.”
The paper contains the usual Sunday morning
quota of church notices, religious news and editorial
moralizing—constituting a delectable olla-podrida
calculated to turn the stomach of a self-respecting yaller
dog. Doubtless many purveyors of garters keep in stock
those peculiarly
adapted to the trade of the “tenderloin”; but
this is the first time that I have seen such truck
advertised in any paper permitted to pass through the
mails or enter the homes of respectable people. Imagine
a Houston parson rising from family prayers on Sunday
morning and placing in the hands of his young daughter a
“great moral daily” which sets forth in display
type that, for the small sum of fifty cents, she can secure
a pair of silken garters that warn the great he-world that
she's “a warm baby,” and bid it “look
quick” at her shapely legs! Think of a modest old
mother in Israel watching the face of her youthful son as
he learns for the first time of garters that invite him to
“take off your things”! Fine Sabbath morning
reading that for the so-called Christian people of Harris
county! Such an “ad.” would forever damn
even the Nashville
Banner, or show in the
feculent columns of the Kansas City
Star like a
splotch of soot on the marble face of Raphael's
Madonna. The
Police Gazette and
Sunday
Sun are debarred from the mails, yet neither ever
contained aught one-half so horrible. We keep the
“Decameron” and Daudet's eroticisms under
lock and key; yet they are only “suggestive,”
while this is frankly feculent, a brazen bid for bawdry.
Should the ICONOCLAST publish such a thing it would
be promptly denounced from ten thousand pulpits as a
pander to pruriency; yet against the iniquity of the
Daily Chippie Chaser, alias the Houston
Post, not one preacher has raised his voice in
protest! Why? Because the dirty rag does not attack
their religious dogma—does not strike at their bread and
butter! The shortest route to the heart of the average
parson is through his pocket—hit him there and you raise
a howl that startles high Heaven. Print his church
notices, report his foolish little sermons, kneel with him
in prayer, slander agnostics and atheists, serve the
ICONOCLAST as the foul
yahoos did Gulliver, flip a plugged nickel into the
contribution box, and you may safely flaunt the patois of
the
nymph du pave in the fair face of every
honest girl between Cape Cod and the Golden Gate. And
as it is with the average preacher so it is with the bulk of
his parishioners. The
Post introduces the
language of the prostitute into the parlors of its patrons.
It boasts a boys' and: girls' club—“The
Happyhammers”—of more than six-hundred
members, and to these children it carries the first
knowledge of sexual perversity, gives them their initial
lesson in social sin. Were this the paper's first offense
we might attribute it to the carelessness or stupidity of a
clerk in its counting-room and the incompetence of its
business; manager; but it is an old, a shameless, a
persistent sinner against all life's decencies and
proprieties. Its “personal column” was for
years the most revolting thing known to yaller journalism.
Its counting-room was an assignation post-office. The
paper was the recognized organ of “Happy
Hollow,” the Hell's Half Acre of Houston. It was a
pander to all the worst passions that run riot in the
“tenderloin,” a procurer of young girls to glut
the lust of godless libertines. Its sign was the ligniyoni,
its ideal the almighty dollar. Through its feculent
columns Muckle-mouthed Meg and Doll Tearsheet made
assignations with forks-of-the-creeks fools, while blear-eyed bummers and rotten-livered rounders requested
respectable women to meet them at unfrequented places
and wear camp-meeting lingerie. The ICONOCLAST
compelled its unrespected contemporary to purify its
“personal column”—and this service to society
has never been forgiven by the bench-legged
hydrocephalous grand panjandrum of that paper. The
Post next proceeded to publish a directory of
Houston's red-light district, giving names and addresses
of the “madames,” the number of their
“boarders” and the
condition of the merchandise thrown upon the market.
All that was necessary to make the
Post's
Bawdy-house Guide complete was the addition of rate-cards. On that little bit of journalistic
“enterprise” the ICONOCLAST put a kibosh
also, much to the satisfaction of every decent family in
Harris county. Now the fecular sheet has found a new
road to infamy—is advertising garters fit only to adorn the
crummy underpinning of negro prostitutes. It does seem
that the
Post will do anything for a dollar—
except be decent. Owing to the mental perversity of its
management, respectability is for it impossible. It is a
social leper, a journalistic pariah. It is devoid of political
principle as a thieving tomcat of conscience. It has no
more stability than a bad smell in a simoon. It has deified
and damned every statesman by turn. It has been on
every possible side of every public question, and wept
bitter tears of regret because further change of policy
were impossible. It is a perfect maelstrom of
misinformation, the avatar of impudence, the incarnation
of infamy—a social cesspool whose malodor spreads
contagion like the rank breath of the gila-monster or the
shade of a upas tree. Yet its editor, I am told, aspires to
the lieutenant-governorship of Texas. Verily, he's
“got his gall.” He will indeed be “a warm
baby” if elevated to that inconsiderable office and
permitted to monkey with the scepter while the governor
is doing the elegant elsewhere. Texas may certainly
consider herself fortunate if he does not pawn the fasces of
power and blow in the proceeds of the erstwhile John
Bell's variety joint. Should he do so, he will probably be
permitted to “take off his things.” The
Post “ad.” is worse than that of holy
John Wanamaker, who once announced in the
Philadelphia papers that “Parisian thoughts are sewn
in our underwear.” With such lingerie I should
imagine that “call again” garters would be the
proper
caper. Such a combination would suggest the patent
medicine certificate of the happy husband who joyfully
testified that “My wife was so nervous that I could
not sleep with her, but after taking two bottles of your
remarkable, etc., she has so far recovered that anybody
can sleep with her.” Just what effect the
“Parisian thought” underwear of holy John
Wanamaker had upon the preeminently respectable
people of Philadelphia I shall not assume to say, but I
should consider such goods contraband of war when
found on a Sunday-school bargain counter. Imagine the
result of introducing “Parisian thoughts” into
the unbleached muslin lingerie of a lot of single-standard-of-morals old maids! There's really no telling for what
Harrison's professional Sunday school superintendent is
responsible. He's a rank conspirator against the Seventh
Commandment. The
Post should be abated as
an incorrigible nuisance—it is a standing menace to the
morality of the community. It has never been a
legitimate journal. Its chief sources of revenue have been
fake voting contests and unclean “ads.” that
range in sphacelation from abortion pills to garters for
prostitutes. What this country seems to need is a press
censorship. The second-rate newspapers are mistaking
liberty for license. The dogma that public opinion can be
depended upon to correct the evil is an “iridescent
dream”—the public will stand almost anything so
long as its religious theses and political confessions of
faith are let alone. Men claiming to be quasi-decent, if
not altogether respectable, will carry home day after day
and suffer to be read by their young daughters such a
paper as the Houston
Post—with its “w. y.
o. d.,” and “take off your things”
advertisements, its puffs of abortion pills and syphilitic
panaceas—who would have a conniption fit and fall in it
should a copy of Bob Ingersoll's eloquent lecture on
Abraham Lincoln creep into their
library. The stench of such a paper creeps abroad like
the malodor of a cloaca, beslimes the senses like the
noxious exhalations of an open sewer. How in God's
name men can be found so debased as to work on such
a sheet is beyond my comprehension. I once undertook
to hold down its editorial page; but soon “got sore
at myself,” cursed everything connected therewith,
from the pink-haired president of the company to the
peewee business manager, got out, purified myself and
have been sick at the stomach ever since. Should a man
lay a copy of the foul sheet on my parlor table, I'd blow
his head off with a shotgun. All that I now see of the
paper is the clippings sent me by disgusted Houstonians,
and I take those out behind the barn to read—then bury
them lest they poison the hogs. I regard my temporary
connection with the sheet much as Jean Valjean must his
tramp through the Parisian sewers. It is a ten-legged
nightmare, an infamy that I can never outlive. I strove
manfully to make the foul thing respectable, but the
Augean stables proved too much for my pitchfork. I
managed to occasionally inject into the sphacelated sheet
a quasi-intelligent idea, to disguise its feculence with a
breath of sentiment that by contrast seemed an air from
Araby the blest; but the stupid ignorance and dollar-worshiping of the management soon dragged it back into
the noisome depths of hopeless nescience and subter-brutish degradation. Poor old Houston! A morning
newspaper should be a city's crown of glory, an
intellectual Aurora ushering in the new-born day; but in
Houston's case her chief newspaper is a sorrow's crown
of sorrow, her inexpungeable badge of shame.
