Upton Sinclair

(Discusses prostitution, the extent of its prevalence, and the diseases which result from it.)

It is manifest that the rich cannot indulge in vices, without drawing the poor after them; and in addition to this, the poor have their own evil instincts, which fester in neglect. There were several hundred thousand dark rooms, that is rooms without light or ventilation, in New York City before the war. Now the country is reported to be short a million homes, and in New York City working girls are sleeping six or eight in a room. In the homes of the poor in the slums, parents and children and boarders all sleep in one room indiscriminately, and the world moves back to that primitive communism, in which incest is an everyday affair, and little children learn all the vices there are. I have in my hand a pamphlet by a physician, in charge of a hospital in New York, who in fifteen years has examined nine hundred children who have been raped, and the age of the youngest was eight months! I have another pamphlet by a settlement worker, who discusses the problem of the thousands of deserted wives, most of them with children, many with children yet unborn. As I write, there are millions of men out of work in our country, and these men are desperate, and they quit and take to the road. They join the army of the casual workers, the "blanket stiffs"; and, of course, the more there are of these men, the more prostitutes there have to be, and the more homosexuality there will inevitably be.

Also the girls are out of work, and are on the streets. Many years ago I visited the mill towns of New England, "she-towns" they are called, and one of the young fellows said to me that you could buy a girl there for the price of a sandwich. Read "The Long Day," to which I have previously referred, and see how our working girls live. Dorothy Richardson describes her room-mate, who read cheap novels which she found in the gutter weeklies. She read them over and over; when she had got to the bottom of the pile, she began again, because her mind was so weak that she had forgotten everything. And then one day Miss Richardson happened to be groping in a corner of a closet, and came upon a great pile of bottles, and examined them, and was made sick with horror—abortion mixtures.

Dr. William J. Robinson, an authority on the subject, estimates that there are one million abortions in the United States every year. Some of these are accidental, caused by venereal disease, but the vast majority are deliberate acts, crimes under the law, murder of human life. Dr. Robinson also estimates, from the many thousands of cases which come to him, that ninety-five per cent of all men have at some time practiced self-abuse. He is a strenuous opponent of what he calls "hysteria" on the subject of venereal disease, and insists that its prevalence is exaggerated; that instead of one person in ten being syphilitic, as is commonly stated, the proportion is only one in twenty. He insists that the percentage of persons having had gonorrhea is only twenty-five per cent, instead of seventy-five or eighty-five. I find that other authorities generally agree in the statement that fifty per cent of young men become infected with some venereal disease before they reach the age of thirty. The Committee of Seven in New York estimated in 1903 that there were two hundred thousand cases of syphilis in the city, and eight hundred thousand of gonorrhea. There were villages in France before the war in which twenty-five per cent of the inhabitants were syphilitic, and in Russia there were towns in which it was said that every person was syphilitic. We may safely say that these latter are the only towns in Europe in which there was not an enormous increase of this disease during and since the war.

What are the consequences of these diseases? The consequences are frightful suffering, not merely to persons guilty of immorality, but to innocent persons. Dr. Morrow, generally recognized as the leading authority on this subject, estimates that ten per cent of all wives are infected with venereal disease by their husbands; he estimates that thirty per cent of all the infected women in New York were wives who had got the disease from their husbands. It is estimated that thirty per cent of all the births, where either parent has syphilis, result in abortions. It is estimated that fifty per cent of childlessness in marriage is caused by gonorrhea, and twenty-five per cent of all existing blindness. In Germany, before the war, there were thirty thousand persons born blind from this cause. It is estimated that ninety-five per cent of all abdominal operations performed upon women are due to gonorrhea. And any of these horrors may fall upon persons who lead lives of the strictest chastity. There was a case reported in Germany of 236 children who contracted venereal disease from swimming in a public bath.

All these things are products of our system of marriage-plus-prostitution. They are all part of that system, and no study of the system is complete without them. Everywhere throughout modern civilization prostitution is an enormous and lucrative industry. In New York it is estimated to give employment to two hundred thousand women, to say nothing of the managers, and the runners, and the men who live off the women. There are thousands of resorts, large and small, high-priced and cheap, and the police know all about it, and derive a handsome income from it. And you find it the same in every great city of the world; in every port where sailors land, or every place where crowds of men are expected. If there is to be a football game, or a political convention, the managers of the industry know about it, and while they may never have heard the libel that Socialism preaches sexual license, they all know that capitalism practices it, and they provide the necessary means. In the United States there are estimated to be a half a million prostitutes, counting the inmates of houses alone.

During the late war, at the army bases in France, the British government maintained official brothels; but if you published anything about this in England, you ran a chance of having your paper suppressed. During the occupation of the Rhine country, the French sent in negro troops, savages from the heart of Africa, whose custom it is to cut off the ears of their enemies in battle; and the French army compelled the German population to supply white women for these troops. I have quoted in "The Brass Check" a pious editorial from the Los Angeles Times, bidding the mothers of America be happy, because "our boys in France" were safe in the protecting arms of the Y. M. C. A. and the Knights of Columbus. I dared not publish at this time a passage which I had clipped from the London Clarion, in which A. M. Thompson told how he watched the "doughboys" in the cafÉs of Paris, with a girl on each knee, and a glass of wine in each hand.

I will add one little anecdote, giving you a glimpse of the sex conventions of war. The American army made desperate efforts to keep down venereal disease, and required all men to report to their regimental surgeon immediately after having had sex relations. Our army moved into Coblentz, and the regulations strictly forbade any fraternizing with the inhabitants. But immediately it was discovered that there was an increase of disease, and investigation was made, and revealed that men had been ceasing to report to the surgeons, because they were afraid of being punished for having "fraternized with the enemy." So a new order was issued, providing that having sexual intercourse would not be considered as "fraternizing." I do not know any better way to distinguish my ideal of morality from the military ideal, than to say that according to my understanding of it, the sex relationship should always and everywhere imply and include "fraternizing."

Finally, in concluding this picture of our present-day sex arrangements, there is a brief word to be said about divorce. In the year 1916, the last statistics available as I write, there were just over a million marriages in the United States, and there were over one hundred and twelve thousand divorces. This would indicate that one marriage in every nine resulted in shipwreck. But as a matter of fact the proportion is greater, because the marriages necessarily precede the divorces, and the proportion of divorces in 1916 should be calculated upon the number of marriages which took place some five or ten years previously. Of the one million marriages in 1916, we may say that one in seven or one in eight will end in the divorce courts. Let this suffice for a glimpse of the system of marriage-plus-prostitution—a field of weeds which we have somehow to plow up and prepare for a harvest of rational and honest love!