Cabaret Girls Tell of Songs and Dances: Sensual, Improper

Chicago, 1913

CABARET GIRLS TELL OF SONGS AND DANCES

They Admit That Songs Are Improper and That Dances Are Sensual

Chicago, April 12. — Agents of the Illinois vice commission late last night and early today brought consternation to the fashionable guests of the two down-town restaurants — Rector's and the States — against whose reputations there rested, no question except the nature of their cabaret entertainments.

While the cabaret was in full blast investigators entered the down-town restaurants and a wine room in the tenderloin at midnight and brought performers, managers and guests to a hotel for interrogation. The inquiry lasted until 2 o'clock this morning.

From some of them the senators drew reluctant admissions that a few of the songs and dances "might be" suggestive and "perhaps had been a bad effect on the diners."

"In My Harem."

A girl singer, crying as she testified asserted she never would sing "In My Harem," a song Lieutenant Governor O'Hara was particularly inquisitive about.

The manager of a well known restaurant said the restaurant business had degenerated into a vaudeville show, and he did not know when it would stop. After investigators and members of a "slumming" party said they had heard an improper song in a place in Twenty-first street, the commission voted to recommend to Mayor Harrison that the cafe's license he revoked. The commission will call the attention of the state's attorney to the testimony of the manager, who said nothing indecent went on.

Senator Beall said he saw girls not more than 15 or 16 years imbibing mixed drinks in the cafe, and some at them were more or less intoxicated.

Mrs. Maud Joseph told of the singing and dances at a downtown restaurant. She said in one dance the performer "might just as well have had no skirts at all."

She stated that a girl did an Oriental dance, wearing pink tights and a "sort of a skirt of black chiffon." She thought the dance was suggestive. She said a couple did a fancy dance, a combination between the "Tango" and the "Apache."

"Was it art or suggestion?" asked the lieutenant-governor.

"There was no art in it."

Free For All Dance.

The performers led a free for all dance on a space made by clearing away tables.

The professional who led the dance said they had tried to eliminate anything which might appear sensual in their act, but admitted they might not have been entirely successful.

"Don't you think that where you see art others might see vice?" asked Mr. O'Hara. "I guess it appeals differently, but I do not see anything obscene about it," was a reply.

O. B. Stimpson, manager of another down-town restaurant, asserted the business had drifted into a show, but he was compelled to put up a first class cabaret to get the trade. He was of opinion that some popular songs have gone too far. He said guests did the "bear" dance in the aisles, between the tables, but that they never got "raw." An entertainer in this restaurant said there was nothing out of the way in the song "All Night Long." "It's all in the way you sing it," she stated. "Some people are so weak minded that they will take up anything."

Time to Revoke.

When the vice commissioners reassembled they received a telephone message from Mayor Harrison saying, "This looks like a good day to revoke some licenses."

The mayor referred to unsavory restaurants which survived when the old segregated district on the south side was closed several months ago. He said he had made up his mind to close two places as a result of testimony at the night session of the commission and would investigate others.

Frank Benent, manager of "Dream Land," where the dancers number from 500 to 1,000 a night, testified that no liquor was sold there, and that "dummy" dancers hired by the management mingled with the crowds to prevent suggestive dancing.

"We couldn't make money if we sold liquor or permitted lewd action," said the witness. "If the dance halls of Chicago want to make money they should work in harmony with this commission." Girls at previous sessions have testified that it was at "Dream Land" they made acquaintances who led them on their first steps downward.

—The Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta, Georgia, April 13, 1913, page 1B.

Wineroom 'Rags' Source of Evil

Indianapolis, 1913

Scientist Dissects Festive Syncopations and Finds They Spur Lower Emotions

EFFECTS ON MORALS LURING

Beware of "Portamento" and Chromatic Slides if You Want to Be Good

A few months ago, when Superintendent Hyland of the police started war on winerooms, he found most of his efforts futile until he struck at what appeared to him to be the heart of the evil — the wineroom music.

Raids had been made repeatedly upon places of doubtful moral character. Persons caught there were arrested wholesale. Some convictions were obtained against proprietors for violation of the Nicholson law. But such fines were promptly paid and offenses repeated. Persons arrested in the places, it appeared, had a right under the state and city laws to go there as much as they liked. If nothing further than being there was proved against them, City Court ignored the charge.

They went back. Then the ukase against music was issued. It caused consternation in the places aimed at, as well as in the first-class cafes and hotel dining rooms, but it necessarily had to include all to reach the ones desired. And it proved effective.

Now comes the question, "Where is the psychological point to the superintendent's order?"

WHAT IS THE LURE?

And again, "What is the mystic lure of music that, in the verbiage of the legal lights, aids and abets the evils that thrive in winerooms?"

Music hath charms to sooth the savage breast, but does it have some of the quality of an affinity, to attract those of evil intent?

More to the point, is music bad?

Or is there merely bad music that is bad?

Or do bad persons like music?

Or what?

And if so, what is bad about music — the melody, the rhythm, the words of the song, or all of them, or none?

There are different views. Not long since a minister was quoted as saying that if composers would only disassociate suggestive words from some of their more lively compositions of ragtime, or, at the least, nonsensical words, and set religious rhymes to their music, their names would go down in history.

There are two attitudes of the day toward the rag from different angles.

HERE'S HOW SCIENCE SEES IT.

A scientific study of the effect of music has been made by Henry W. Stratton, a writer in the Arena, who discusses his observations under the title of "Music and Crime."

He has found by experiment in one of the state prisons that many criminals are exceptionally good musicians. They are of two classes.

First, those whose knowledge of music extends no farther than the popular songs of the day and whose associations with such songs have always been of questionable character. They absorb the sensuous quality of music and can not be morally improved by it because the quality does not contain the necessary musical ingredients to lift them to a higher plane of emotion.

In such songs, this writer says, it frequently happens that where the melody is good and would of itself awaken refining impulses the words produce the opposite effect.

"Again, popular song rhythms are calculated to spur only the lower emotions," he says.

"If a tune is catchy the charm lies largely in its rhythm; the unusual syncopations act upon the listener at unexpected and unnatural parts of the measure and excite unhealthy, unmoral tendencies."

The second class of criminal musicians are scheduled as "darlings of society" who have learned to be musically voluptuous. They yield easily without question to all kinds of music and are unable to resist its enervating influences, They are mastered by their musical sensation.

Mr. Stratton has analyzed ragtime — picked it to pieces — to determine what about it is bad. He finds that a deleterious effect upon the moral nature of a listener is produced by voluptuous slides from one tone to another, called portamento.

"It induces languor and suggests to the mind a relapse from moral discipline," he says. Chromatic passages also tend to promote immorality, he thinks.

RAGTIME GETS THE HOOK.

All this is rather a condemnation of music which is abnormally syncopated, Which contains too frequent repetitions of the portamento and which brings chromatics into frequent play. No class of music quite answers the description so well, perhaps, as the rag.

But one might want to know what makes syncopations, chromatics and slides act so upon the human organisms.

Under the head of "Emotion," an encyclopedia says:

"Unconsciously the spectator, after hearing a musical concert sings and acts cerebrally, and a tenseness of the vocal cords and the whole muscular apparatus of the body results from the imitative effort to make the necessary sounds and to reproduce the necessary movements."

Music, itself, one might deduce, may entice the hearer to attempt an action of the emotion it contains.

But there probably are other conditions to be noted in a consideration of the effect of music in winerooms. Some kinds of music, per se, it is agreed, have bad effects.

A combination of this kind of music and of intoxicating liquors may have a worse effect; then, again, in an open room, it adds privacy to conversations over tables usually located too near one another to otherwise afford privacy. Again, it seems to be a lure for patrons, and, if patronized alone in winerooms and heard there frequently, would tend each time to recall other similar associations.

Altogether one might draw the conclusion that bad music in bad places is bad for good and bad people; bad music in good places is little better for either; good music in bad places has all odds against it; and good music in good places is better for both.

—The Indianapolis Star, Indianapolis, November 23, 1913, page 14.