The Fraternity and the Undergraduate (collection)/Photo Plays and Vaudeville
There are many influences in and about college which in one way or another affect undergraduate life and undergraduate morals and scholarship. Training, environment, tradition, example, extra-curriculum activities, all play a part, but in these modern times I believe that at least so far as the colleges which are situated in small cities or country towns are concerned, there are few influences which have done more to discourage and vitiate scholarship and to soften character than cheap photo plays and vaudeville. The effect is a subtle one. The habit of patronizing these performances grows on one imperceptibly but surely.
I do not wish to minimize the good effects of these two classes of amusements. I have only recently heard much commendation of them from people who ought to know what they are talking about. I have no doubt but that moving pictures have their place in education and that they will come to have a wider and a more general use. One can, without doubt, gain admirable effects by the use of pictures which could be obtained in no other way. These points have been discussed and are being discussed by people whose education and whose experience fit them far better than I am fitted to discuss these matters. No doubt these modern and cheap methods of presenting dramatic compositions to the public have opened up new fields of amusement to classes of people who could not previously afford them.
Working people who live in unattractive houses, who are busy all day, and whose evenings are free to spend them as they please, should have amusement, and, if they find it at all, they must get it from an inexpensive source. For them photo plays furnish a means of recreation and some little education, perhaps, and vaudeville adds a touch of humor and romance which they are quite to be excused if they do not resist. With them I have no fault to find. The college student is in a somewhat different class. His evenings may with propriety and profit be spent in study; he can not afford, if he would be more than commonplace, to spend them regularly in cheap moving picture and vaudeville theatres. Moreover, we have a right to expect that his tastes be somewhat higher than those of the average man. Anyone who attends these plays in a college town or who simply watches the crowds as they pour out of the play houses, however, may well be astonished at the numbers of students who regularly attend. Even mature students fall into the habit. Only a short time ago I had reason to inquire into the daily life of a graduate student whose work was coming along badly. He had been reported ill, and I interrogated one of his fraternity brothers as to the condition of health of the supposed invalid. "I don't think he is dangerously sick," the man replied, "for he hasn't missed going to a picture show any day that I remember." I was quite sure I was getting the truth, for the undergraduate who made the statement, so far as I could learn, had missed none himself.
There is every reason, however, why boys should come to college with the cheap show habit, or at least there is every reason why those who come from communities outside of the big cities should do so. They are trained to it at home. With four performances a day and half rates to all those who attend the graded schools and the high schools, there is a strong tendency for all such children to develop early a decided picture show or vaudeville taste. It is an allurement which they can not resist. I know boys in the graded schools and in the high schools who go to these shows practically every day or twice a day, and who are under the spell of the habit as one might be enslaved by a narcotic. No wonder, then, when these boys enter college they should continue the practice and should consider Charlie Chaplin's as the highest type of humor.
The temptation is like the temptation of cigarettes—the plays are cheap and easy of access.
In the end, however, the cost piles up higher than most boys will admit unless they keep a daily expense account, for very often there is the streetcar fare going and coming and soft drinks before starting home. Next to a student opera, there is no greater time waster than these same plays. If one goes in the day time the whole afternoon is wasted; if one goes at night the evening is gone, for if in the evening one selects the first show it is past ten before he can settle down to any real work, and if he goes to the second it is midnight before he can get himself into anything like a studious frame of mind, and then he is too sleepy to do anything and decides to get up early the next morning and do his studying. There is no need, to tell anyone who has ever been to college that the studying is not done at all.
The fraternity freshman perhaps more than freshmen in general is started off on a congested menu of picture plays and vaudeville. It is a daily part of the routine of rushing that after a couple of hours of rag time on the piano following dinner everyone starts for the "Princess" or the "Orpheum" or the "Park" or whatever the name of the particular show house may be. Started out in this way the freshman comes naturally to look upon vaudeville if not as a regular and required part of the college curriculum, at least as a very worthy adjunct to it. I think I did not visit a fraternity house during the rushing season last fall without finding that at one time or another during the evening most of the active chapter and all of the prospective pledges formed themselves into a party and raced off to a cheap show of some sort. What else could they do, they asked. It is because of this early start with vaudeville and the "movies" that the fraternity undergraduate is more addicted to these time and money wasters than are other college students.
Even after the rushing season was over when I have been at one or another of the houses for dinner, or when previous to show time I have been down town on the car, I could see crowds of undergraduates starting out for the "Orpheum." "Anyone going to the show?" is as familiar a cry at a fraternity or rooming house almost every evening as "rags and old iron" on a city street. Down town nearly every afternoon and evening when photo-play houses and vaudeville theatres disgorge, the streets are filled with undergraduates. One who gives any attention to it also is impressed with the fact that it is often the same undergraduates whom one can see in these show places every day.
I was speaking only a few days ago with a young fellow who for many months played the piano in one of the picture houses for all four performances each day, and he was saying that he used to break the monotony of his every day routine by looking for familiar faces in the crowd which gathered for each performance. He was constantly impressed, he said, with the frequency with which he could pick out the faces of the same undergraduates in the same places. How they could afford the time was more than he could see. As I have had a chance at the end of the semester to glance at their scholastic records, I was convinced that they could not afford to do it.
It is primarily as a time waster that I have objected to this variety of amusement, but the character of the shows themselves might well be objected to. Even viewed purely as recreation they do not rank high. The jokes and the pictures are often coarse, the comedy is often wretchedly low, and there is almost inevitably mixed up in each bill constantly recurring and objectionable sex complications. I do not myself very often attend these plays but get my impressions from what I hear the fellows say who are regular patrons of the show houses. During the last few weeks, however, I have seen two of what were advertised as the better class of picture plays. The leading rôle in each case was taken by a well-known actress, and I expected to see an excellent play. The setting of both was beautiful and the acting good, but in each play the heroine after a fierce hand-to-hand struggle with the heavy villain barely escaped public rape upon the stage.
The effect of such scenes upon growing boys and young men can not at best be very wholesome. The mother of one of our freshmen said to me only a few days ago that in company with her son she recently attended one of the so-called better class plays of this sort. "If these are the best," she said, "I shudder at the thought of what the worst is, for the whole thing was so vulgarly suggestive and so common that I wondered how boys of any refinement could sit through such a performance." And, sad to relate, the boys do not make an effort to choose the best, but the raciest.
The actual and ultimate effect upon the morals of those who frequent these plays is bad, but, perhaps, is not so great as one might at first think. A few, no doubt, fall under the baneful influences of the vulgar suggestions which are bandied about. We hear more often than we would wish of the irregular relations which are carried on or which are attempted to be carried on between undergraduates and the performers in the vaudeville cast, but these experiences are relatively infrequent, I am sure. The large influence upon character comes from the decreased sensitiveness of those who form the play going habit, the thickening, as it were, of the moral skin. Their ideals are lowered; they are coarsened and made more common by the experience. Even the thickest-skinned boy could scarcely help but have his point of view changed by a constant contact with such representations of life. It seems to me, also, that the forces of evil which are present in every town, or at least in every one in which I have lived, recognize the fact that vaudeville and coarse picture shows help to prepare those who frequent them for lower things, for, with us at least, these forces have gradually begun to gather near, so that the fellows making their exit from the vaudeville and picture shows may have an easier and more direct backdoor entrance to the houses where intoxicants and evil women are to be found. How widely this influence extends, I can only guess; and though I cannot believe that it is far reaching, it must at least be taken into account and reckoned with.
The effect of these dramatic influences on a young fellow's studies is not infrequently disastrous. The habit of attendance once begun grows. Each new bill as it is advertised must be discussed and analyzed, and seen. The bill at the vaudeville theatres and the plays that are being shown at the "movies" furnish a regular and time worn topic of conversation wherever the undergraduate loafers gather. It is like the talk about automobiles in a country town. The sum total of energy expended upon the various vaudeville bills that appear weekly in the average town if turned into intellectual directions would revolutionize scientific discoveries, and if converted into physical force might soon have ended the recent European war. Unless they have had their attention drawn specifically to this matter I am sure that few undergraduates realize how much of their time and thought are given to these trifling histrionic matters. The boy who comes under the spell of such an influence can with difficulty resist when the invitation comes to see the show; he finds it difficult or impossible to spend an evening or an afternoon in study, and as for reading a book for pleasure at one sitting as we used to do when I was a boy, that is unthinkable. He becomes restless, he lacks concentration, if he studies an hour and a half he is in such a state of mind and body that he grows desperate for the relaxation of the picture show. The call comes, and his studies are forgotten and his scholarship not strengthened.
With us the interest in vaudeville and moving pictures has gone so far that very few student gatherings are thought to show the finishing touch of refinement unless there is introduced some "cabaret stuff" or a few moving pictures. If a class party is planned in the armory some bright youth with an original mind at once suggests that the management brings over an act from the local vaudeville theatre to entertain the guests while they are eating. Class smokers and house dances and formal parties are not infrequently given a touch of spice by introducing, when interest wanes, a few snappy stunts from the local vaudeville stage or a reel of two of moving pictures. We are going vaudeville mad it seems to me and are growing to think only in moving pictures. The University of Illinois has recently tried in some small measure to inhibit this tendency by stipulating in a number of instances when a request for a student gathering or a class party is granted that such entertainment as might be furnished should come from the members of the class or organization giving the function and not from the local vaudeville stage.
"But what can a fellow do?" an undergraduate interrogated not long ago when I protested against this debauchery in vaudeville. "One must have some recreation; he can't study all the time." I grant this willingly; but there are good plays occasionally coming to town, and though they cost more than the commonplace and often vulgar stuff which is daily presented to the public, it is better in the long run to see a few good plays than to sit through all the worthless exhibitions which appear uninterruptedly throughout the four years of an undergraduate course. I can conceive of a young fellow seeing a few of the low comedies which for the most part hold the weekly boards of our vaudeville and photo-play theatres merely to satisfy his curiosity, but how an educated, refined man can develop a taste for such things, which can be satisfied only by daily indulgence, is to me more difficult to understand. But there are other sources of relaxation and amusement than comedy open to undergraduates. Men can go into athletic sports of which we are developing a constantly greater variety. No man is now so fat or thin or short or tall or light or heavy but that he can find some form of athletic activity to which he is adapted and in which, if he has persistence and develops interest, he may excel. This sort of recreation has the advantage over vaudeville in that, if it is not carried to excess, it really does recreate and so tend better to prepare the participant for the real work of college—that is, the pursuit of his studies.
The student is not unknown, though I am forced to admit that he is rare, who has found recreation in reading an interesting book. Nor do I mean by this the latest romantic novel, though some undergraduates do once in a while read such a book; I mean that the student who has been rightly trained, who has been made to like books as every student should, will find pleasure and recreation and delight in spending an evening with such old stand-bys as Dickens, and Thackeray, and Stevenson, and George Eliot. There is more romance and real life in an hour or two with one of these authors than in a whole cycle of the ordinary cheap photo-play and vaudeville. I was surprised though pleased not long ago to have a junior engineer tell me that he always kept an interesting book at hand to read when he was tired or had a little leisure. He has covered a range of literature from Arnold Bennett to Robert Burns and has developed a habit which will bring him pleasure and profit as long as he lives. Our college daily mentioned not long ago the case of a man who when wishing to withdraw regularly from college was directed to take his withdrawal permit to the library to have the official in charge of the loan desk certify that all books which he had drawn out had been properly returned. The student was confused for a moment, and then recovering himself said with a gleam of something akin to intelligence, "Oh, yes, that's the building across from the Arcade, isn't it?" He knew the bench where the loafers gather, but he did not know where the books are kept.
I am not so old fashioned nor so far removed from youth as to expect or desire that young people in college will give up these dramatic delights of which I have been speaking. All I wish to show is that they are becoming too absorbing, that they are exercising too great a domination over the lives of undergraduates. There are other relaxations and recreations which will better prepare students for their work and which are in themselves more helpful and more fully recreating. Vaudeville and photo-plays as they are in the great majority of cases presented today are suggestive of unhealthy relationships; they are often coarse, vulgar, and must tend to weaken morals and to lower ideals. Those undergraduates who make a habit of attending, waste time recklessly, squander more money than they think, and injure the real work for which they come to college. Few people whom I have seen come away from these shows happier, cleaner minded, or in any way better prepared to take up their daily work. Their scholarship and their ideals would be strengthened, I believe, if they saw fewer of such performances. The danger to the fraternity man is perhaps greater than to other men because his social relationships are closer, it is easier for him to find companionship, to pick up someone whom he likes who has the inclination and who thinks he has time to go to these plays. Recognizing the danger he should take the warning.