The Family and its Members Part 17

8. Head "The Socially Inadequate; How Shall We Designate and Sort Them?" by Harry H. Laughlin, Carnegie Inst.i.tution, Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, in _American Journal of Sociology_, July, 1921. This is an attempt to introduce a blanket term under which feeble-minded; insane; criminalistic, including delinquent and wayward; epileptic; inebriate, including drug habitues; diseased, including tuberculous, lepers, and others with chronic infectious diseases; blind, including all of seriously impaired vision; deaf, including those with seriously impaired hearing; deformed, including the crippled; and dependent, including orphans, old folks, soldiers and sailors in "homes," chronic charity-aided folk, paupers, and ne'er-do-wells, may be listed. This article attempts to make a cla.s.sification inclusive, yet subject to minute subheading, which may make reports more definite in listing human beings.

Is such an attempt wise, and if so, how would each member of this group cla.s.sify the "socially inadequate?"

FOOTNOTES:

[15] See a valuable study by Dr. Bernard Glueck, Director Psychiatric Clinic at Sing Sing Prison, ent.i.tled, "Concerning Prisoners," and published in _Mental Hygiene_ for April, 1918, showing the need for mental examination of all convicted persons as an indispensable basis for right understanding and treatment of prisoners.

CHAPTER XII

THE BROKEN FAMILY

"Every social ill involves the enslavement of individuals. Freedom is that phase of the social ideal which emphasizes individuality.--All mankind acknowledges kindness as the law of right intercourse within a social group.--The ideal of service goes with the sense of unity.--A likeness of spirit and principle is essential to moral unity. The creation of a moral order on an ever-growing scale is the great historical task of mankind, and the magnitude of it explains all shortcomings."--CHARLES H.

COOLEY, in _Social Organization_.

"The sanct.i.ty of oaths Lies not in lightning that avenges them, But in the injury wrought by broken bonds And in the garnered good of human trust.

'Tis a compulsion of the higher sort, Whose fetters are the net invisible That holds all life together.

'Tis faithfulness that makes the life we choose Breathe high and see a full-arched firmament.

We may see ill But over all belief is faithfulness Which fulfils vision with obedience.

No good is certain, but the steadfast mind, The undivided will to seek the good; 'Tis that compels the elements, and wrings A human music from the indifferent air."

--GEORGE ELIOT.

"Genuine government is but the expression of a nation Good or less good; even as all society Is but the expression of men's single lives-- The loud sum of the silent units."--E.B. BROWNING.

"There is no other genuine enthusiasm than one which has travelled the common highway--the life of the good man and woman, the good neighbor, the good citizen."--THOMAS GREEN HILL.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no; it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests, and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compa.s.s come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom."

--SHAKESPEARE.

=The Problems of Divorce.=--Having treated in some detail the subject of "Problems of Marriage and Divorce" in a former book, _Woman's Share in Social Culture_, and also in articles published in _The International Journal of Ethics_, _The Harvard Theological Review_, _Harper's Weekly_, and other magazines, this chapter, to avoid repet.i.tion, will simply rehea.r.s.e in brief outline the points of view previously expressed.

In the valuable and suggestive treatment of the family by Professor Ellwood in his book, _Sociology and Modern Social Problems_, he says that "divorce is but a symptom of more serious evils that in certain cla.s.ses of American society have apparently undermined the very virtues upon which the family life subsists." If that be so, then no tinkering with the laws which aim at preventing divorces will reach the seat of the difficulty. The treatment must be more radical, and the character of individuals be made more n.o.ble and strong, if the family is to be made more stable and marriage more successful.

=Frequency of Divorce in the United States.=--The first point to be noted in any discussion of the broken family is the frequency of that social tragedy in the United States. The pioneer study by Professor W.P. Willc.o.x, made in 1885 and reported in his volume ent.i.tled _The Divorce Problem_, showed the fact that we had in this country at that time more divorces per year than were recorded in all the other so-called Christian countries put together. For 1905, statistics show nearly 68,000 divorces in the United States as against the highest number from Germany, which is only a trifle above 11,000, and from France, 10,860, and running down rapidly to the number of 33 in Canada. In England, in 1905, there was but one divorce to 400 marriages. In the United States, in the same year, one divorce to every 12 marriages. Since that count was taken, there has been no evidence of a halt in the tendency of the United States to lead the rest of the Christian world in this matter of separation of those once joined together by marriage vows. In some of the States, the showing is more p.r.o.nounced on the side of free divorce than in other States, since in Washington, Oregon, and Montana one divorce to every five marriages is reported, in Colorado and Indiana one to every six, and in Oklahoma, California, and Maine one to every seven marriages. We need not accept the doleful suggestion of Professor Willc.o.x that if we go on this way, "by 1950 one-fourth of all marriages will be terminated by divorce, and by 1990 one-half so terminated," for it is not necessary or likely that we shall "go on" in this particular.

Already, movements toward the strengthening of family ties and the better training of youth to responsibility, movements that tend to make marriage less brittle, are inaugurated.

=Cannot Now Make Family an Autocracy.=--There are several points that all must agree upon if we are to stay the rush to the divorce courts and yet not attempt the futile task of turning the family order back to the patriarchal or the monarchical types. In those types there was little or no legal divorce, it is true, but in them inhered social evils that often killed the spirit of marriage, and doomed the children of enforced unions to physical weakness, mental defectiveness, moral taint, and affectional suffering.

First of all, it should be noted that, although the divorce statistics are serious indictments of American life and bode ill to American society, they are not wholly a testimony to bad conditions. They are also a testimony that he who runs may read, to the determination of men, and especially of women, to exact a higher reality of mutual love, mutual respect, mutual service, and mutual cooperation within the marriage bond.

=New Standards of Marriage Success.=--When it was decided to investigate the causes for the backwardness of school children, why so many "failed to pa.s.s" and were "r.e.t.a.r.ded" in the march from grade to grade in the elementary cla.s.ses, the first inquiry took no note of the exactions of the grade standards. All who failed to move on at the scheduled moment for "promotion," in any school examined, were listed as "backward." Later, it occurred to the investigators, that the first thing to find out was whether or not a given grade standard was one that true pedagogy would approve, and second, whether there was a serious discrepancy in that grade standard between the different schools from which the children came for examination.

In much the same way the first inquiries as to the evil of frequent divorce seemed to take for granted that all who sought divorce were in circ.u.mstances that might have been socially and usefully continued within the marriage bond. We know better now. We know that the first question to ask about a broken family is: What was its condition before the break? Did justice, and a fair estimate of the quality of the union and its effects upon the man and the woman involved, and their children, demand that the family hold or be held together, or was there a condition that made society more interested in the ending than in the continuance of that union?

If, as is beginning to be understood, it is not for the interest of society that men and women should marry who are so physically diseased, or mentally defective, or morally perverted as to make them injurious members of a family circle, is it not as clear that in many cases such persons when married are not helpful members of any family; and if so, again, is it not clear that there is justification in social need itself for the removal of such persons from the family circle they have already polluted or injured in vital ways, to prevent their doing more harm to family life?

Whatever may be thought by many who view all divorce with horror, there is a tendency within that movement toward free divorce, toward the freeing of the currents of generative life from evil influence, from despotism, from degenerative tendencies, and from the worst forms of social wrong-doing. There is, also, of course, in that movement, a testimony which should make all earnest lovers of their kind learn how to urge socially therapeutic treatment, a testimony to human weakness, to a lack of the sense of responsibility, to a love of personal pleasure at any cost to moral obligation, and to a need for social control of the whole family relation.

The causes, in our country, for which more than 90 per cent, of the divorces are granted, are the serious ones of adultery, cruelty, imprisonment for crime, habitual drunkenness, desertion, and neglect to provide for the family. This indicates that in most cases there has been a failure on the score of basic family requirements from husbands and wives, and from fathers and mothers, before the court was called in to break the legal bond. Does this also indicate that such failure of character has increased among our people to the extent of its increased legal recognition in divorce? We can not think so. There are special reasons why all bonds of intimate a.s.sociation are strained in modern life, with its separate industrial, social, and educational affiliations for each individual. But that all of us are going downward, or most of us, is not a provable contention and should not be an undemonstrated inference.

=Dangers of Extreme Individualism in Marriage.=--The primary fact is that we have allowed individualism in marriage to go beyond limits which are socially safe, just as in the economic order and in the administration of political affairs, we have supposed that the "let-alone-policy" would work social good. No other civilization has been able to secure successful family life without some support, supervision, control, and aid to the married couple and their children, from without. We cannot return to the collective family of other days. We must learn how to make society in general work toward the ends of stability and social order in the family, as in other social inst.i.tutions, and by methods that reverence and secure personal freedom and fit well into a democratic state.

=Free Love Not Admissible.=--Professor Ellwood says that "while material civilization is mainly a control of the food process, moral civilization involves a control of the reproductive process, that is, over the birth and rearing of children." He argues from this that social organization "precludes anything like the toleration of promiscuity or even of free love." Most students of social history will agree with this statement. We may, therefore, say that the att.i.tude of law, of custom, and of social standards, must be that of demanding legalization of permitted s.e.x-relationship, and the effort to make legal s.e.x-relationship permanent where possible without sacrifice of the substance of family life to its outward form.

=Must Work Toward Desired Permanency in Marriage.=--This means a quite new approach to the problems of marriage and divorce. It means the inauguration of legal and educational mechanisms in the interest of making people want to stay married, rather than toward an effort to make people stay wedded when they wish to separate. In this, more, even than in any other field of social effort, we should take heed to and obey the advice of Dr. Lester Ward "to use attractive rather than compulsory methods of reform."

=Needed Changes in Legal and Social Approach to Divorce.=--What are the main points of change in our legal and social approach to the divorce situation, which the modern need for social control through democratic measures demands most clearly and strongly? They are, first, a longer period of delay between reception and granting of the request of a man and a woman for a license to marry. Several State legislatures are now considering statutes which require an "interval of three days" between the application for and the granting of marriage licenses. This is certainly a short enough time in which to find out if either of the parties is likely to commit bigamy if the license is granted, if both of the parties are really of adult age claimed, if either of the parties is afflicted with an infectious disease that would make marriage dangerous to the other party, if either of the parties has been a resident of a criminal or pauper inst.i.tution, if either or both of the parties are competent to financial support of the twain, if there is any "just cause or impediment" against the legal union. We may find it wise to return to the old "three weeks publishing of the banns" in order to know what the state is about in granting and what two people are about in demanding a marriage license. In the second place, there are limits outside of which society should not allow legal marriage to receive its sanction. During the legal interval required there may develop knowledge of facts that make it a social crime for one or the other or both parties to be allowed to start a new family. This is matter for serious and long-continued study, and the experimentation of our different Commonwealths in determining the useful or necessary restrictions upon legal marriage is not without value. The main thing, however, is for society to recognize that there are just restrictions upon marriage and that this is proved by the actual social burden which unfit persons place upon their fellows when marrying and bringing forth after their kind. The third point, which must be emphasized more strongly than has been the case heretofore, is the need of making the state, through its courts, the ally, not the enemy, of marriage permanency. As it is now, the Divorce Court exists to secure divorces. Its very existence invites to its use. The court procedure in all cases of marital unhappiness which has become acute enough for legal freedom to be sought should be a court procedure that aims at arbitration, at "trying again," at winning harmony by just concessions from either or both the parties, a court procedure consciously and definitely set to the task of making more marriages successful even when they have developed difficulty of adjustment, rather than one allowed to act as a means of easy separation of even fickle, selfish, and childish people on grounds of superficial difference.

=Prohibition of Paid Attorneys in Divorce.=--_The absolute abolition of any paid service of any attorney in the interest of getting anyone a divorce, is a primary social demand._ The establishment of a "Divorce Proctor" service in a Domestic Relations Court, with sole jurisdiction over applications for divorce, is a second vital social demand. Some form of legal provision which would make judges of a special and honored cla.s.s the paid representatives of society's demand for marriage to be as permanent as individual justice will allow is essential to any genuine divorce reform. The often highly-feed advocate of personal wish of two dissatisfied people, the agent that deals with divorce problems as a lucrative trade, is one cause of the prevalence of divorce among the idle and pampered rich. Those who have greater social opportunity than they have brains or conscience to use them aright, and who can pay lawyers so extravagantly, give us a heavy total of marital separations and of remarriage of divorced persons in the United States.

Judges, the best and the wisest, must sit on all cases where the breaking up of a family is the issue, and all privately paid attorneys (in other kinds of social arrangement and difficulty also a hindrance rather than an aid to justice) must be banished from every divorce court and from every divorce proceeding, both of the richer and of the poorer cla.s.ses.

=Divorce Proceedings Should be Heard in Secret.=--Newspapers should not be tempted or allowed to gain advantage from the weakness, the folly, or the vice of any member of any family which may be revealed in such divorce proceedings. The fact of whether or not a divorce applied for is granted, the fact of whether one or the other party or both have received freedom, the fact of whether one or another was p.r.o.nounced guilty of treason to the marriage bond--these are all subjects for news. The reasons for these decisions of wise and good judges should not be given to the public in detail. The main objections to the present publicity of divorce proceedings is, first, that publicity is generally in proportion to the wealth of the parties, as is also the prolongation of the proceedings; and second, that such reports are generally of a demoralizing nature for the public to read; and third, and not least, that few if any couples seeking a divorce are without fathers or mothers or relatives, children, or near friends, to whom the public revelation of the marital unhappiness or the personal wrong-doing of the parties involved is a pain and a shame.

=Earlier and Better Use of Domestic Relations Court.=--Another way by which society should undertake to supply in newer and more democratic forms the supervision, the control, and the support to the individual married couple and their children, which the older collective family organization sought to supply, is an earlier and a better use of the Domestic Relations Court, or of some advisory agency to prevent the breaking up of families. There should be something a.n.a.logous to the old "family council," some body of advisers well known and well equipped for actual service, to help the bewildered and the unhappy.

The religious ministry should be able to supply such help. It often does do so. The circle of friends may sometimes contain those of wisdom and understanding who give needed aid toward a resumption of broken relations on a higher and more enduring plane. There is needed, however, something between the court to which people go for relief from bonds, and the solitary struggle with difficulties before that relief is sought, something which, if related officially to the Domestic Relations Court, would be of a more flexible and private nature than most of its proceedings. We need more an aid to avoidance of marital rocks than a rescue, as from a life-boat, after the shipwreck.

There are many forms of advice and help which the teachers and medical pract.i.tioners in mental hygiene are now developing and offering which may be used later on, when we are wiser, in this work of preventing families from breaking up. Regularly const.i.tuted "social doctoring"

for the prevention, even more than for the treatment of social disease as it manifests itself in family life, is surely called for.

=The Children to be Affected Society's Chief Care.=--Above all, we must place the children affected by any decision that gives society a broken family in the front rank of interest and of protective care. If the paid attorney were eliminated, divorces would certainly be lessened in number. If publicity were avoided in all divorce proceedings, much of the harm to children arising from separation of married couples would be avoided. If, in addition, there were advisory aid to the confused and unhappy, many now drifting to complete division of interest and affection would be enabled to start on again toward better realization of married opportunity. If, in further addition, the Domestic Relations Courts were changed with the supervisory care of all children whose parents were legally separated, and the well-being of those children made the chief legal concern even if it required the complete separation from both father and mother, more fathers and mothers would hesitate to place themselves where their parental control and their parental influence would be so minimized. Yet who doubts that among the rich as well as among the poor such judicial protection and care of the children, whom the broken family leaves without true parental care, is needed? To give children into the hands of either parent alone is in many such cases no fitting subst.i.tute for the normal home influence. In any case, there should be an external conscience and an external solicitude enlisted in the interest of every child whose parents have made such a failure of marriage and the home that the divorce court is the only refuge.

This does not ignore the fact that many couples separate to the advantage of the children, that many parents are quite innocent of any cause for the broken family, that many times there is a rehabilitation of the family life on other lines that means full nurture and development for the children. The fact remains, however, that the average child of divorced parents has to meet difficulties and face disadvantages in life which the child of permanently united fathers and mothers does not suffer, and, for such, some exterior protection and supervision should be provided.

=A Uniform or Federal Divorce Law.=--Many persons deeply interested in lessening the number of divorces in the United States place much dependence upon a "Uniform Divorce Law" for the whole country, as giving a basis for wise legislation. Recently, Senator Jones, of the State of Washington, introduced in the Senate a resolution proposing a new amendment to the Federal Const.i.tution by which, if it pa.s.sed, Congress would have power "to establish and enforce by appropriate legislation uniform laws as to marriage and divorce." The fact that a couple may be legally married in one state of our Union and illegally practicing bigamy or adultery in another state gives a plausible reason for such a Const.i.tutional Amendment. And perhaps the searching investigation and discussion which would precede such a definite change in our national law, if such change were made, would be of great use in clarifying the public mind, and securing a consensus of opinion as to what should and what should not be allowed in this matter. Yet it is doubtful if such a law would, in itself, bring down the number of divorces, now estimated by those advocating the law as "one in every eight to ten marriages," or prevent the ratio of increase in divorces to increase in population (now estimated "as increase in population in a given period, 60 per cent., and increase in divorces in the same period, 160 per cent."), or really mend our family ills. The dependency upon Const.i.tutional amendments and upon legislation of every kind has, many believe, reached the utmost limit of social serviceability in this country. The deeper question in all such propositions is this: What, under the Const.i.tution as first affirmed and later amended, is proper subject for Federal legislation, and what should be left to state and local action? We have not reached a political unity as to the basic elements of just and effective political method in the division of social control between the nation and the various states. The habit of rushing to the National Congress for Federal legislation with no plan or logical aim in relation to such division, is one that may well be curbed.

=Education Our Chief Reliance.=--Meanwhile, all must insist that education, character-training for strong, unselfish, n.o.ble personalities, is our main dependence, and must ever be in the effort to make family life more stable, and more socially helpful. Men and women must be made competent to self-control, and steadied with a sense of obligation to others, and animated by an ideal of faithfulness to contract, and of devotion to securing mutual rights in a mutual plan of life together. Such education for character, must be our chief dependence in efforts to lessen divorces, as in the effort to do away with all social evils. There is no magic in marriage, there is no magic even in parenthood, to make weak, and selfish and superficial and ignorant and stupid and despotic people into guardians of the best interests of home. A man or a woman is successful in the family order, only on the same basis as is demanded in all other relations of life, the basis of justice, good sense, right feeling, and an honest effort to realize high ideals.

=Helps Toward Family Unity.=--What remains for society to do, after general moral training has worked its full service of individual preparation for good intent and wise choices and competent mastery of family arrangements, must be done or attempted on the basis rather of helps toward permanence, than of prohibition of release from marriage mistakes and wrongs.

We have left undone much we should have done to make it easier for young people to find their true mates, to start right in married life, and to bear the burdens of parenthood without stumbling on the way.

Let us not add mistakenly to the duties left undone the attempt to do things we should not, namely, to overbear instead of aiding the personal life.

There is nothing that works more tragedy of suffering than broken vows in marriage, whether the fact of the actual separation be publicly acknowledged or not. How many a disillusioned man or woman has felt with the poet:

"To look upon the face of a dead friend Is hard; but there is deeper woe-- To look upon our friendship lying dead While we live on, and eat, and sleep-- Mere bodies from which all the soul has fled, And that dead thing year after year to keep Locked in cold silence on its dreamless bed."

=Shall Society Favor the Remarriage of Divorced Persons?=--Now that the moral sense of most people allows another trial on Love's Rialto, there are many individuals who can leave "that dead thing" to find its own grave, and in the light of some new and dearer affection go on to a renewed promise and joy of life. Can we think that wrong? Who shall dare to say that alone of all mistakes of youth, a mistaken choice in marriage shall be for all life a sentence of doom? Who shall dare to limit the power of rehabilitation of the family order, even when what has failed is the central heart of married love? Our gospel of hope and courage, and renewal of opportunity, and rebirth of affection must know no limits if we would rightly trust the spirit within our being.

But for the shallow, and the selfish, and the pleasure-seeker without reverence for the right way of life, and for the scoffer at all high moods of feeling and of ideal aim, there can be little to justify his flitting about on the very outmost limits of true love. For such, some check must be had in ordered rules and legal bonds, in order that the race-life shall go on in safety and in social health. Meanwhile, although there is much to give us pause and to demand serious study and earnest and wise social work in the situation revealed by the divorce court statistics, there is nothing that need give hysterical alarm lest the home is being destroyed and the family abolished. On the contrary, there probably was never a time when so many people were really happy, each and every member of the family, in the home relation; and hence never a time when it was clearer that to keep the home stable and permanent, and make marriage successful in the vast majority of cases, we have only to get better and wiser people in larger proportion.

To understand the real reason for marital unhappiness and for family instability, to know that such reason inheres primarily in personal character and not in any statute, is to begin work for the real cure and prevention of such unhappiness and instability. The broken family may be a sad necessity, alike for individuals concerned, and for the well-being of society. To prevent that tragedy is a social duty than which none is more pressing or more open to social effort.