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18 there a class offended to such a degree by the destructive criticisms men of science make on the religious tenets they regard as essential, that they have acquired a strong prejudice against Science in general. They are not prepared with any avowed reasons for their dislike. They have simply a remembrance of the rude shakes which Science has given to many of their cherished convictions, and a suspicion that it may perhaps eventually uproot all they regard as sacred; and hence it produces in them a certain inarticulate dread.

What is Science? To see the absurdity of the prejudice against it, we need only remark that Science is simply a higher development of common knowledge; and that if Science is repudiated, all knowledge must be repudiated along with it. The extremest bigot will not suspect any harm in the observation that the sun rises earlier and sets later in the summer than in the winter; but will rather consider such an observation as a useful aid in fulfilling the duties of life. Well, Astronomy is an organized body of similar observations, made with greater nicety, extended to a larger number of objects, and so analyzed as to disclose the real arrangements of the heavens, and to dispel our false conceptions of them. That iron will rust in water, that wood will burn, that long kept viands become putrid, the most timid sectarian will teach without alarm, as things useful to be known: But these are chemical truths: Chemistry is a systematized collection of such facts, ascertained with precision, and so classified and generalized as to enable us to say with certainty, concerning each simple or compound substance, what change will occur in it under given conditions. And thus is it with all the sciences. They severally germinate out of the experiences of daily life; insensibly as they grow they draw in remoter, more numerous, and more complex experiences; and among these, they ascertain laws of dependence like those which make up our knowledge of the most familiar objects. Nowhere is it possible to draw a line and say — here Science begins. And as it is the function of

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19 common. observation to serve for the guidance of conduct; so too, is the guidance of conduct the office of the most recondite and abstract inquiries of Science. Through the countless industrial processes and the various modes of locomotion which it has given to us, Physics regulates more completely our social life than does his acquaintance with the properties of surrounding bodies regulate the life of the savage. Anatomy and Physiology, through their effects on the practice of medicine and hygiene, modify our actions almost as much as does our acquaintance with the evils and benefits which common environing agencies may produce on our bodies. All Science is prevision; and all prevision ultimately aids us in greater or less degree to achieve the good and avoid the bad. As certainly as the perception of an object lying in our path warns us against stumbling over it; so certainly do those more complicated and subtle perceptions which constitute Science, warn us against stumbling over intervening obstacles in the pursuit of our distant ends. Thus being one in origin and function, the simplest forms of cognition and the most complex must be dealt with alike. We are bound in consistency to receive the widest knowledge which our faculties can reach, or to reject along with it that narrow knowledge possessed by all. There is no logical alternative between accepting our intelligence in its entirety, or repudiating even that lowest intelligence which we possess In common with brutes.

To ask the question which more immediately concerns our argument — whether Science is substantially true? — is much like asking whether the sun gives light. And it is because they are conscious how undeniably valid are most of its propositions, that the theological party regard Science with so much secret alarm. They know that during the two thousand years of its growth, some of its larger divisions — mathematics, physics, astronomy — have been subject to the rigorous criticism of successive generations ; and have notwithstanding become ever more firmly established. They know

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20 that, unlike many of their own doctrines, which were once universally received but have age by age been more frequently called in question, the doctrines of Science, at first confined to a few scattered inquirers, have been slowly growing into general acceptance, and are now in great part admitted as beyond dispute. They know that men of science throughout the world subject each other’s results to the most searching examination ; and that error is mercilessly exposed. and rejected as soon as discovered. And, finally, they know that still more conclusive testimony is to be found in the daily verification of scientific predictions, and in the never-ceasing triumphs of those arts which Science guides.

To regard with alienation that which has such high credentials is a folly. Though in the tone which many of the scientific adopt towards them, the defenders of Religion may find some excuse for this alienation; yet the excuse is a very insufficient one. On the side of Science, as on their own side, they must admit that short-comings in the advocates do not tell essentially against that which is advocated. Science must be judged by itself: and so judged, only the most perverted intellect can fail to see that it is worthy of all reverence. Be there or be there not any other revelation, we have a veritable revelation in Science — a continuous disclosure, through the intelligence with which we are endowed, of the established order of the Universe. This disclosure it is the duty of every one to verify as far as in him lies; and having verified, to receive with all humility.

§6. On both sides of this great controversy, then, truth must exist. An unbiassed consideration of its general aspects forces us to conclude that Religion, everywhere present as a weft running through the warp of human history, expresses some eternal fact; while it is almost a truism to say of Science that it is an organised mass of facts, ever growing, and ever being more completely purified from errors. And if both have bases in the reality of things, then between them there

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§9., on the sea-shore, we note how the hulls of distant vessels are hidden below the horizon, and how, of still remoter vessels, only the uppermost sails are visible, we realize with tolerable clearness the slight curvature of that portion of the sea’s surface which lies before us. But when we seek in imagination to follow out this curved surface as it actually exists, slowly bending round until all its meridians meet in a point eight thousand miles below our feet, we find ourselves utterly baffled. We cannot conceive in its real form and magnitude even that small segment of our globe which extends a hundred miles on every side of us; much less the globe as a whole. The piece of rock on which we stand can be mentally represented with something like completeness: we find ourselves able to think of its top, its sides, and its under surface at the same time; or so nearly at the same time that they seem all present in consciousness together; and so we can form what we call a conception of the rock. But to do the like with the Earth we find impossible. If even to imagine the antipodes as at that distant place in space which it actually occupies, is beyond our power; much more beyond our power must it be at the same time to imagine all other remote points on the Earth’s surface as in their actual places. Yet we habitually speak as though we had an idea of the Earth — as though we could think of it in the same way that we think of minor objects.

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46 an examination of the solutions they severally propound, shows them to be uniformly invalid. The analysis of every possible hypothesis proves, not simply that no hypothesis is sufficient, but that no hypothesis is even thinkable. And thus the mystery which all religions recognize, turns out to be a far more transcendent mystery than any of them suspect — not a relative, but an absolute mystery.

Here, then, is an ultimate religious truth of the highest possible certainty — a truth in which religions in general are at one with each other, and with a philosophy antagonistic to their special dogmas. And this truth, respecting which there is a latent agreement among all mankind from the fetish-worshipper to the most stoical critic of human creeds, must be the one we seek. If Religion and Science are to be reconciled, the basis of reconciliation must be this deepest, widest, and most certain of all facts — that the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable.

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21 must be a fundamental harmony. It is an incredible hypothesis that there are two orders of truth, in absolute and everlasting opposition. Only on some Manichean theory, which among ourselves no one dares openly avow however much his beliefs may be tainted by it, is such a supposition even conceivable. That Religion is divine and Science diabolical, is a proposition which, though implied in many a clerical declamation, not the most vehement fanatic can bring himself distinctly to assert. And whoever does not assert this, must admit that under their seeming antagonism lies hidden an entire agreement.

Each side, therefore, has to recognize the claims of the other as standing for truths that are not to be ignored. He who contemplates the Universe from the religious point of view, must learn to see that this which we call Science is one constituent of the great whole; and as such ought to be regarded with a sentiment like that which the remainder excites. While he who contemplates the universe from the scientific point of view, must learn to see that this which we call Religion is similarly a constituent of the great whole; and being such, must be treated as a subject of science with no more prejudice than any other reality. It behoves each party to strive to understand the other, with the conviction that the other has something worthy to be understood; and with the. conviction that when mutually recognized this something will be the basis of a complete reconciliation.

How to find this something — how to reconcile them, thus becomes the problem which we should perseveringly try to solve. Not to reconcile them in any makeshift way — not to find one of those compromises we hear from time to time proposed, which their proposers must secretly feel are artificial and temporary; but to arrive at the terms of a real and permanent peace between them. The thing we have to seek out, is that ultimate truth which both will avow with absolute sincerity — with not the remotest mental reservation. There shall be no concession — no yielding on either side cf

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22 something that will by and by be reasserted; but the common ground on which they meet shall be one which each will maintain for itself. We have to discover some fundamental verity which Religion will assert, with all possible emphasis, in the absence of Science; and which Science, with all possible emphasis, will assert in the absence of Religion — some fundamental verity in the defence of which each will find the other its ally.

Or, changing the point of view, our aim must be to co-ordinate the seemingly opposed convictions which Religion and Science embody. From the coalescence of antagonist ideas, each containing its portion of truth, there always arises a higher development. As in Geology when the igneous and aqueous hypotheses were united, a rapid advance took place; as in Biology we are beginning to progress through the fusion of the doctrine of types with the doctrine of adaptations; as in Psychology the arrested growth recommences now that the disciples of Kant and those of Locke have both their views recognized in the theory that organized experiences produce forms of thought; as in Sociology, now that it is beginning to assume a positive character, we find a recognition of both the party of progress and the party of order, as each holding a truth which forms a needful complement to that held by the other; so must it be on a grander scale with Religion and Science. Here too we must look for a conception which combines the conclusions of both; and here too we may expect important results from their combination. To understand. how Science and Religion express opposite sides of the same fact — the one its near or visible side, and the other its remote or invisible side — this it is which we must attempt; and to achieve this must profoundly modify our general Theory of Things.

Already in the foregoing pages the method of secking such a reconciliation has been vaguely foreshadowed. Before proceeding further, however, it will be well to treat the question of method more definitely. To find that truth in which

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23 Religion and Science coalesce, we must know in what direction to look for it, and what kind of truth it is likely to be.

§7. We have found à priori reason for believing that in all religions, even the rudest, there lies hidden a fundamental verity, We have inferred that this fundamental verity is that element common to all religions, which remains after their discordant peculiarities have been mutually cancelled, And we have further inferred that this element is almost certain to be more abstract than any current religious doctrine. Now it is manifest that only in some highly abstract proposition, can Religion and Science find a common ground. Neither such dogmas as those of the trinitarian and unitarian, nor any such idea as that of propitiation, common though it may be to all religions, can serve as the desired basis of agreement; for Science cannot recognize beliefs like these: they lie beyond its sphere. Hence we see not only that, judging by analogy, the essential truth contained in Religion is that most abstract element pervading all its forms; but also that this most abstract element is the only one in which Religion is likely to agree with Science.

Similarly if we begin at the other end, and inquire what scientific truth can unite Science and Religion. It is at once manifest that Religion can take no cognizance of special scientific doctrines; any more than Science can take cognizance of special religious doctrines. The truth which Science asserts and Religion indorses cannot be one furnished by mathematics; nor can it be a physical truth; nor can it be a truth in chemistry: it cannot be a truth belonging to any particular science. No generalization of the phenomena of space, of time, of matter, or of force, can become a Religious conception. Such a conception, if it anywhere exists in Science, must be more general than any of these — must be one underlying all of them. If there be a fact which Science recognizes in common with Religion, it must be that

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 :i. Plaintiffs’ Claim that McDonalds’ Products Are More Dangerous Than the Average Hamburger, Fries and Shake

For the first time in their opposition papers, the plaintiffs attempt to show that over-consumption of McDonalds is different in kind from, for instance, over-consumption of alcoholic beverages or butter because the processing of McDonalds’ food has created an entirely different—and more dangerous—food than one would expect from a hamburger, chicken finger or french fry cooked at home or at any restaurant other that McDonalds. They thus argue that McDonalds’ food is “dangerous to an extent beyond that which would be contemplated by the ordinary consumer who purchases it, with the ordinary knowledge common to the community as to its characteristics.” Restatement (Second) Tortsof Torts [sic] § 402A, cmt. i. If true, consumers who eat at McDonalds have not been given a free choice, and thus liability may attach.

The argument is akin to one that might be used in a products liability case regarding genetically engineered food, Genetic engineering is the process by which scientists make modifications of the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) of an organism by uniting it with plant or animal genes with particular traits. Heather N. Ellison, Genetically Modified Organisms: Does the Current Regulatory System Compromise Consumer Health?, 10 Penn. St. Envtl. L.Rev. 345, 346 (Summer 2002). Recombinant DNA (rDNA) techniques permit a scientist to identify and copy a specific gene and introduce the gene copies into recipient organisms, such as a food crop. Id.; see also Lara Beth Winn, Special Labeling Requirements for Genetically Engineered Food: How Sound Are the Analytical Frameworks Used by FDA and Food Producers?, 54 Food & Drug L.J. 667, 668 (1999). This is done to introduce attributes of the transferor organism into the transferee organism. Id. Genetic engineering has resulted, for example, in a tomato that delays softening, an insect-protected potato and a virus-resistant squash. Jeffrey K. Francer, Frankenstein Foods or Flavor Savers?: Regulating Agricultural Biotechnology in the United States and European Union, 7 Va. J. Soc. Pol’y & L. 257, 262 (Winter 2000). In the year 2000, genetically modified seeds supplied approximately 38 percent of the United States corn crop, 57 percent of the soybean crop and 70 percent of the canola crop. Kelly A. Leggio, Limitations on the Consumer’s Right to Know: Settling the Debate Over Labeling of Genetically Modified Foods in the United States, 38 San Diego L.Rev. 893, 905 (Summer 2001). Although genetic engineering thus far has apparently only been beneficial, there are concerns that genetically modified foods could have far-reaching health effects that have not been accounted for, such as causing allergic reactions and creating antibiotic resistance in consumers. Francer, supra, at 292–294; Leggio, supra, at 903. should any injuries result from the excessive consumption thereof. The genetically modified soybean, potato and ear of corn look exactly like the organically grown soybean, spud and corn. Yet those plants have been substantively, if subtly, modified into something else. Any dangers from eating a genetically modified plant are latent—and thus not commonly well known—in the absence of a label revealing that the object that looks like a soybean is actually a soybean carrying a brazil nut protein.


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 from the beating rains, and nearly every bean came up nicely, while those covered with earth were almost a total failure. The Large White Lima is generally considered difficult to grow, but I cannot say so, as I have grown it without much difficulty, and had beans to perfection by the pailful throughout the summer. Mine were planted in very rich soil and the rows were about four feet apart, three plants to a hill, and the hills two feet apart. If supported by a trollis, beans should be placed one foot apart in the row. The above applies to all pole beans, whether Limas or string beans. Of the latter class of beans I have found White Creaseback a variety of great mcrit. Southern Prolific and Dutch Case Knife are also good. At the North, where the seasons are too short for the Large Lima, the Small Lima or Sieva, as it is also called, should be planted.

and seed as early in spring as possible. Sow in drills and thin beets to five inches and carrots to three inches apart in the drill. To have Boots early we sometimes sow seed of an extra early variety in the hotbed and transplant to the garden when plants are a few inches high. The same may be done with early carrots. Sow Early Scarlet Horn Carrot for early use and Long Red Coreless for


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 What conception, then, do we form of it? the reader may ask. That its name calls up in us some state of consciousness is unquestionable ; and if this state of consciousness is not a conception, properly so called, what is it? The answer seems to be this: — We have learnt by indirect methods that the Earth is a sphere; we have formed models approximately representing its shape and the distribution of its parts; generally when the Earth is referred to, we either think of an indefinitely extended mass beneath our feet, or else, leaving out the actual Earth, we think of a body like a terrestrial globe; but when we seek to imagine the Earth as it really is, we join these two ideas as well as we can — such perception as our eyes give us of the Earth’s surface we couple with the conception. of a sphere. And thus we form of the Earth, not a conception properly so called, but only a symbolic conception.

A large proportion of our conceptions, including all those of much generality, are of this order. Great magnitudes, great durations, great numbers, are none of them actually conceived, but are all of them conceived more or less symbolically; and so, too, are all those classes of objects of which we predicate some common fact. When mention is made of any individual man, a tolerably complete idea of him is formed. If the family he belongs to be spoken of, probably but a part of it will be represented in thought: under the necessity of attending to that which is said about the family, we realize in imagination only its most important or familiar members, and pass over the rest with a nascent consciousness which we know could, if requisite, be made complete. Should something be remarked of the class, say farmers, to which this family belongs, we neither enumerate in thought all the individuals contained in the class, nor believe that we could do so if required; but we are content with taking some few samples

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 of it, and remembering that these could be indefinitely multiplied. Supposing the subject of which something is predicated be Englishmen, the answering state of consciousness is a still more inadequate representative of the reality. Yet more remote is the likeness of the thought to the thing, if reference be made to Europeans or to human beings. And when we come to propositions concerning the mammalia, or concerning the whole of the vertebrata, or concerning animals in general, or concerning all organic beings, the unlikeness of our conceptions to the objects named reaches its extreme. Throughout which series of instances we see, that as the number of objects grouped together in thought increases, the concept, formed of a few typical samples joined with the notion of multiplicity, becomes more and more a mere symbol; not only because it gradually ceases to represent the size of the group, but also because as the group grows more heterogeneous, the typical samples thought of are less like the average objects which the group contains.

This formation of symbolic conceptions, which inevitably arises as we pass from small and concrete objects to large and to discrete ones, is mostly a very useful, and indeed necessary, process. When, instead of things whose attributes can be tolerably well united in a single state of consciousness, we have to deal with things whose attributes are too vast or numerous to be so united, we must either drop in thought part of their attributes, or else not think of them at all — either form a more or less symbolic conception, or no conception. "We must predicate nothing of objects too great or too multitudinous to be mentally represented; or we must make our predications by the help of extremely inadequate representations of such objects — mere symbols of them.

But while by this process alone we are enabled to form general propositions, and so to reach general conclusions, we are by this process perpetually led into danger, and very often into error. We habitually mistake our symbolic conceptions for real ones; and so are betrayed into countless false infer-

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 their substance and genesis. In all directions his investigations eventually bring him face to face with an insoluble enigma; and he ever more clearly perceives it to be an insoluble enigma. He learns at once the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect — its power in dealing with all that comes within the range of experience; its impotence in dealing with all that transcends experience. He realizes with a special vividness the utter incomprehensibleness of the simplest fact, considered in itself. He, more than any other, truly knows that in its ultimate essence nothing can be known.

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 or Absolute be postulated, the Relative itself becomes absolute; and so brings the argument to a contradiction. And on contemplating the process of thought, we have equally seen how impossible it is to get rid of the consciousness of an actuality lying behind appearances; and how, from this impossibility, results our indestructible belief in that actuality.

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64 Then leaned against his sword with all his weight

And drove full half the blade into his side;

Then conscious still he in his faint

Embrace the maiden folded, gasping, while

A perfect stream of blood on her white cheek

Shot forth and dyed it to a crimson hue.

A corpse enclosing corpse he lies, his bride

And he united—in the halls of Death;

And he has shown to all the world, no ill

That man is heir to transcends thoughtlessness.

[Eurydice exit through palace door C.

What can this mean? The lady has gone back

Into the house without a single word.

I, too, am all amaze; yet cherish I

The hope that, hearing of her son’s sad fate,

She deems it quite unseemly to parade

Her grief before the people, but retired

Within the house, will make loud lamentation,

With handmaids following in mournful strain.

By judgment taught, she’s too discreet to err.

Perhaps; excessive silence though to me

Seems perilous, as well as loud lament.

Well, we shall soon discover whether we

Are justified in fearing that concealed

In her afflicted heart she aught restrains,

For I shall go and see—yes, you are right—

Excessive silence, too, is perilous.

[Exit through side door L. into palace.

Lo, yonder the monarch himself draws near,

A memorial bearing all too clear

Of the sin of his own infatuate mind:

His own, not another’s misdeed, here I find.

Woe is me! Woe!

Oh, the sins of my misguided mind,

Stubborn, teeming with death and pain!


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 able seedsmen who have their supplies grown in the North. Such northern grown seeds retain their instinct to hurry up and mature in a short season, while in one’s own saving they begin even in the first year to grow more leisurely and to accommodate themselves to the longer season. In the case of peas, those grown in Northern New York and Canada, such as are sold by all our leading seedsmen, will mature from one to two weeks earlier than those saved in our own neighborhood. The northern peas are also generally free from the weevil or striped bug, which bores the large round hole in all the home-saved peas and destroys their germinating power. So it is with almost every known variety of vegetable; each has some special locality in which it reaches a higher degree of perfection than in others less favorably situated. While, of course, these facts are of interest to the gardener, they are only learned after years of experience, and it is the seedsman’s business to know the peculiarities of the different varieties, and to raise or procure his stock from the best strains grown in the most favorable localities. It is for the gardener to purchase from a seedsman whom he knows to be thoroughly reliable, and whose interest it will be to serve him with prompt shipments and carefully-selected strains of the vegetables desired. All this is equally


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 Similarly, plaintiffs argue that McDonalds’ products have been so altered that their unhealthy attributes are now outside the ken of the average reasonable consumer. They point to McDonalds’ ingredient lists to show that McDonalds’ customers worldwide are getting much more than what is commonly considered to be a chicken finger, a hamburger, or a french fry. Schlosser, supra, at 7 (“Foods that may look familiar have in fact been completely reformulated.”).

For instance, Chicken McNuggets, rather than being merely chicken fried in a pan, are a McFrankenstein creation of various elements not utilized by the home cook. A Chicken McNugget is comprised of, in addition to chicken: "water, salt, modified corn starch, sodium phosphates, chicken broth powder (chicken broth, salt and natural flavoring (chicken source)), seasoning (vegetable oil, extracts of rosemary, mono, di- and triglycerides, lecithin). Battered and breaded with water, enriched bleached wheat flour (niacin, iron, thiamine, mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yellow corn flour, bleached wheat flour, modified corn starch, salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium lactate), spices, wheat starch, dried whey, corn starch. Batter set in vegetable shortening. Cooked in partially hydrogenated oils, (may contain partially hydrogenated soybean oil and/or partially hydrogenated corn oil and/or partially hydrogenated canola oil and/or cottonseed oil and/or corn oil). TBHQ and citric acid added to help preserve freshness. Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an anti-foaming agent."

Pls.’ Mem. at 23 (citing McDonalds ingredient list). In addition, Chicken McNuggets, while seemingly a healthier option than McDonalds hamburgers because they have “chicken” in their names, actually contain twice the fact per ounce as a hamburger. Schlosser, supra, at 140. It is at least a question of fact as to whether a reasonable consumer would know—without recourse to the McDonalds’ website—that a Chicken McNugget contained so many ingredients other than chicken and provided twice the fat of a hamburger.

Similarly, it is hardly common knowledge that McDonalds’ french fries are comprised, in addition to potatoes, of: "partially hydrogenated soybean oil, natural flavor (beef source), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (to preserve natural color). Cooked in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, (may contain partially hydrogenated soybean oil and/or partially hydrogenated corn oil and/or partially hydrogenated canola oil and/or cottonseed oil and/or corn oil). TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness. Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an anti-foaming agent."


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SOPHOCLES. Oh, the son, and the sire, rash, blind,

Behold! The slayer and slain!

Woe! Woe is me!

What have I won

By my stern decree?

O, my dear son!

Here in thy youth

Thou hast died,

And now of a truth,

Since life is denied,

Thee to death I consign.

Alas, Alas!

Now thou art gone,

Thou art dead!

Thy spirit has fled,

And slain, O my son,

By my folly, not thine!

Ah me, how all too late thou seest the right!

Ah me!

I have the bitter lesson fully learned.

Yet a god, methinks, fair boy

Downsmote me then, smote me full on the head

With crushing force—

Oh, the remorse!—

And thrust me in paths that to cruelty led,

O’erturning, downtrampling my joy.

Woe! Woe for mortals who pain for their actions have earned.

(from the house). My lord, in hand, in store, abundant woes

Hast thou—this burden thou dost bear with thee,

And more within the house thou ’rt soon to see.

What worser ill is now to follow this?

The queen is dead, true mother of the dead,

Death dealt the blow but now—her soul has fled.


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 {| Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius ||
 * LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO.
 * LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO.
 * }


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 {| Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius ||
 * LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO.
 * LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO.
 * }

A Lively Picture of a Popular and Interesting Section

Wallace Thurman

HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS GIRARD, KANSAS


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66

Oh, Woe!

Oh, haven of Hades insatiate,

Art thou merciless, merciless still?

No means to atone, to ingratiate—

Thou must kill, and kill, and kill?

Can this be so,

As thou hast said?

Such a tale of woe!

My wife is dead?

Bitter the news,

Bitter the woe!

No mercy wilt choose

Me ever to show,

But wilt slay once more?

What sayest my son?

Still more to repent?

O, my heart is rent!

Wife, also gone?

My wife now, my son before!

Creon. Alas!

Alas, what stroke of fate awaits me yet?

Another, a new woe is here.

Is there aught left of ill? I had scarcely upraised

My poor dead child,

Frantic and wild

As I was with grief, when again I am dazed

By the sight of another bier.

Alas, poor mother, poor. child, what a fate have you met!

Messenger.

There at the altar she with whetted knife

Relaxing eyes to darkness, closed her life;

First loud bewailed Megareus’ fate,

Then Hæmon’s here, and last on thee breathed hate

And curses, still invoking evils dire

For her slain children on their murderous sire.


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Harlem has been called the Mecca of the New Negro, the center of black America's cultural renaissance, Nigger Heaven, Pickaninny Paradise, Capitol of Black America, and various other things. It has been surveyed and interpreted, explored and exploited. It has had its day in literature, in the drama, even in the tabloid press. It is considered the most popular and interesting section of contemporary New York. Its fame is international; its personality individual and inimitable. There is no Negro settlement anywhere comparable to Harlem, just as there is no other metropolis comparable to New York. As the great south side black belt of Chicago spreads and smells with the same industrial clumsiness and stockyardish vigor of Chicago, so does the black belt of New York teem and rhyme with the cosmopolitan cross currents of the world's greatest city. Harlem is Harlem because it is part and parcel of


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6 greater New York. Its rhythms are the lackadaisical rhythms of a transplanted minority group caught up and rendered half mad by the more speedy rhythms of the subway, Fifth Avenue and the Great White Way.

Negro Harlem is located on one of the choice sites of Manhattan Island. It covers the greater portion of the northwestern end, and is more free from grime, smoke and oceanic dampness than the lower eastside where most of the hyphenated American groups live. Harlem is a great black city. There are no shanty-filled, mean streets. No antiquated cobble-stoned pavement; no flimsy frame fire-traps. Little Africa has fortressed itself behind brick and stone on wide important streets where the air is plentiful and sunshine can be appreciated.

There are six main north and south thoroughfares streaming through Negro Harlem—Fifth Avenue, Lenox Avenue, Seventh Avenue, Eighth Avenue, Edgecombe and St. Nicholas. Fifth Avenue begins prosperously at 125th Street, becomes a slum district above 131st Street, and finally slithers off into a warehouse-lined, dingy alleyway above 139th Street. The people seen on Fifth Avenue are either sad or nasty looking. The women seem to be drudges or drunkards, the men pugnacious and loud—petty


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 thieves and vicious parasites. The children are pitiful specimens of ugliness and dirt.

The tenement houses in this vicinity are darkened dungheaps, festering with poverty-stricken and crime-ridden step-children of nature. This is the edge of Harlem's slum district; Fifth Avenue is its board-walk. Push carts line the curbstone, dirty push carts manned by dirtier hucksters, selling fly-specked vegetables and other cheap commodities. Evil faces leer at you from doorways and windows. Brutish men elbow you out of their way, dreary looking women scowl at and curse children playing on the sidewalk. That is Harlem's Fifth Avenue.

Lenox Avenue knows the rumble of the subway and the rattle of the crosstown street car. It is always crowded, crowded with pedestrians seeking the subway or the street car, crowded with idlers from the many pool halls and dives along its line of march, crowded with men and women from the slum district which it borders on the west and Fifth Avenue borders on the east. Lenox Avenue is Harlem's Bowery. It is dirty and noisy; its buildings ill-used, and made shaky by the subway underneath. At 140th Street it makes its one bid for respectability. On one corner there is Tabb's Restaurant and Grill, one of Harlem's most de-


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 lightful and respectable eating houses; across the street is the Savoy building, housing a first-class dance hall, a motion picture theater and many small business establishments behind its stucco front. But above 141st Street Lenox Avenue gets mean and squalid, deprived of even its crowds of people, and finally peters—out into a dirt pile, before leading to a car-barn at 147th St.

Seventh Avenue—Black Broadway—Harlem's main street, a place to promenade, a place to loiter, an avenue spacious and sleek with wide pavement, modern well-kept buildings, theaters, drug stores and other businesses. Seventh Avenue, down which no Negro dared walk twenty years ago unless he was prepared to fight belligerent Irishmen. Seventh Avenue, teeming with life and ablaze with color, the most interesting and important street in one of the most interesting and important city sections of greater New York.

Negro Harlem is best represented Seventh Avenue. It is not, like Fifth Avenue filthy and stark, nor like Lenox, squalid and dirty. It is a grand thoroughfare into which every element of Harlem population ventures either for reasons of pleasure or of business. From 125th Street to 145th Street, Seventh Avenue


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 is a stream of dark people going to churches, theaters, restaurants, billiard halls, business offices, food markets, barber shops and apartment houses. Seventh Avenue is majestic yet warm, and it reflects both the sordid chaos and the rhythmic splendor of Harlem.

From five o'clock in the evening until way past midnight, Seventh Avenue is one electric-lit line of brilliance and activity, especially during the spring, summer and early fall months. Dwelling houses are close, overcrowded and dark. Seventh Avenue is the place to seek relief. People everywhere. Lines of people in front of the box offices of the Lafayette Theater at 132d Street, the Renaissance motion picture theater at 138th Street and the Roosevelt Theater at 145th Street. Knots of people in front of the Metropolitan Baptist Church at 129th Street and Salem M. E. Church, which dominates the corner at 129th Street.

People going into the cabarets. People going into speak-easies and saloons. Groups of boisterous men and boys, congregated on corners and in the middle of the blocks, making remarks about individuals in the passing parade. Adolescent boys and girls flaunting their youth. Street speakers on every corner. A Hindoo faker here, a loud-voiced Socialist there, a


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 medicine doctor ballyhooing, a corn doctor, a blind musician, serious people, gay people, philanderers and preachers. Seventh Avenue is filled with deep rhythmic laughter. It is a civilized lane with primitive traits, Harlem's most representative street.

Eighth Avenue supports the elevated lines. It is noticeably negroid only from 135th Street to 145th Street. It is packed with dingy, cheap shops owned by Jews. Above 139th Street the curbstone is lined with push-cart merchants selling everything from underwear to foodstuffs. Eighth Avenue is dark and noisy. The elevated trestle and its shadows dominate the street. Few people linger along its sidewalks. Eighth Avenue is a street for business, a street for people who live west of it to cross hurriedly in order to reach places located east of it.

Edgecombe, Brandhurst and St. Nicholas Avenues are strictly residential thoroughfares of the better variety. Expensive modern apartment houses line these streets. They were once occupied by well-to-do white people who now live on Riverside Drive, West End Avenue, and in Washington Heights. They are luxuriously appointed with imposing entrances, elevator service, disappearing garbage cans, and all the other appurtenances that make a


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 modern apartment house convenient. The Negroes who live in these places are either high-salaried workingmen or professional folk.

Most of the cross streets in Harlem, lying between the main north and south thoroughfares, are monotonous and overcrowded. There is little difference between any of them save that some are more dirty and more squalid than others. They are lined with ordinary, unextinguished tenement and apartment houses. Some are well kept, others are run down. There are only four streets that are noticeably different, 136th Street, 137th Street, 138th Street and 139th Street west of Seventh Avenue and these are the only blocks in Harlem that can boast of having shade trees. An improvement association organized by people living in these streets, strives to keep them looking respectable.

Between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, is 139th Street, known among Harlemites as "strivers' row." It is the most artistocratic street in Harlem. Stanford White designed the houses for a wealthy white clientele. Moneyed negroes now own and inhabit them. When one lives on "strivers' row" one has supposedly arrived. Harry Wills resides there, as do a number of the leading Babbitts and professional folk of Harlem.


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There are approximately 200,000 Negroes in Harlem. Two hundred thousand Negroes drawn from all sections of America, from Europe, the West Indies, Africa, Asia, or where you will. Two hundred thousand Negroes living, loving, laughing, crying, procreating and dying in the segregated city section of Greater New York, about twenty-five blocks long and seven blocks wide. Like all of New York, Harlem is overcrowded. There are as many as 5,000 persons living in some single blocks; living in dark, mephitic tenements, jammed together, brownstone fronts, dingy elevator flats and modern apartment houses.

Living conditions are ribald and ridiculous. Rents are high and sleeping quarters at a premium. Landlords profiteer and accept bribes, putting out one tenant in order to house another willing to pay more rent. Tenants, in turn, sublet and profiteer on roomers. People rent a five-room apartment, originally planned for a small family, and crowd two over-sized families into it. Others lease or buy a private house and partition off spacious front and back


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 rooms into two or three parts. Hallways are curtained off and lined with cots. Living rooms become triplex apartments. Clothes closets and washrooms become kitchenettes. Dining rooms, parlors, libraries, drawing rooms are all profaned by cots, day beds and snoring sleepers.

There is little privacy, little unused space. The man in the front room of a railroad flat, so called because each room opens into the other like coaches on a train, must pass through three other bedrooms in order to reach the bathroom stuck on the end of the kitchen. He who Works nights will sleep by day in the bed of one who works days, and vice versa. Mother and father sleep in a three-quarter bed. Two adolescent children sleep on a portable cot set up in the parents' bedroom. Other cots are dragged by night from closets and corners to be set up in the dining room, in the parlor, or even in the kitchen to accommodate the remaining members of the family. It is all disconcerting, mad. There must be expansion. There is expansion, but it is not rapid enough or continuous enough to keep pace with the ever-growing population of Negro Harlem.

The first place in New York where Negroes had a segregated community was in Greenwich


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 Village, but as the years passed and their numbers increased they soon moved northward into the twenties and lower thirties west of Sixth Avenue until they finally made one big jump and centered around west Fifty-third Street. About 1900, looking for better housing conditions, a few Negroes moved to Harlem. The Lenox Avenue subway had not yet been built and white landlords were having difficulty in keeping white tenants east of Seventh Avenue because of the poor transportation facilities. Being good businessmen they eagerly accepted the suggestion of a Negro real estate agent that these properties be opened to colored tenants. Then it was discovered that the few houses available would not be sufficient to accommodate the sudden influx. Negroes began to creep west of Lenox Avenue. White property owners and residents began to protest and tried to find means of checking or evicting unwelcome black neighbors. Negroes kept pouring in. Negro capital, belligerently organized, began to buy all available properties.

Then, to quote James Johnson, "the whole movement, in the eyes of the whites, took on the aspect of an 'invasion'; they became panic stricken and began fleeing as from a plague.


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  third, lettuce, radishes, etc.; the fourth, with a dozen plants of parsley, and the balance of the row in endive and parsnips. When the two middle rows have been cut out, the cultivator can be used to work the beets, parsnips, etc., in the outside rows.

Row No. 9. This row is three feet distant from the parsnips, and is planted with early cauliflower and early cabbage, with two plants of lettuce between each of the other plants, which are set 1½ feet apart.

Rows No. 10. These are four rows of peas, different plantings, two kinds, early and medium, in each row, in equal quantities, rows three feet apart. These are to be pulled out as soon as the crop is gathered, and two rows of celery planted six feet apart.

Rows No. 11. Here are four rows of early sweet corn, in four plantings of successive kinds, to be cleared off and followed by turnips, drilled in rows one foot apart, and worked with the wheel hoe; or the seed may he broadcasted after a thorough cultivating, when the ears of corn are well set, without clearing the ground. This is not nearly so satisfactory a plan as to wait until the ground can be cleared and drilled. The rows of corn should be four feet apart.

Rows No. 12. Two rows, 4½ feet apart, of Lima beans, with the poles about 2½ feet apart in the row.

Row No. 13. This row should have six feet clear on each side for the vines to run, and is to be planted with cucumbers and squashes. The space between the hills can be occupied with pepper plants or sweet corn.

Rows No. 14. Two rows of tomatoes, four feet apart.

Rows No. 15. Four rows of late sweet corn, four feet apart.

Rows No. 16. Two rows of sweet potatoes, five feet apart and five feet from the corn and pole beans on either side.

Row No. 17. One row of pole snap beans. About three kinds should be planted, that they may be had in succession.

Rows No. 18. Five rows early potatoes, three feet apart, plowed in when the ground is plowed in the spring. When cultivated for the last time, plant a row of late cabbage between each row of potatoes; when the latter are ripe, dig with a fork, clear the ground of vines and cultivate the cabbage thoroughly. each season almost all the seeds needed from some reliable seedsman, rather than to depend on those of my own saving. For instance, such as peas, sweet corn and other vegetables, where the earlier the crop is ready to market the greater the profit; these mature much earlier if the seed is procured from reli-


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 The presence of one colored family in a block, no matter how well-bred and orderly, was sufficient to precipitate a flight. House after house and block after block was actually deserted. It was a great demonstration of human beings running amuck. None of them stopped to reason why they were doing it or what would happen if they didn't. The banks and the lending companies holding mortgages on these deserted houses were compelled to take them over. For some time they held these houses vacant, preferring to do that and carry the charges than to rent or sell them to colored people. But values dropped and continued to drop until at the outbreak of the war in Europe property in the northern part of Harlem had reached the nadir."

With the war came a critical shortage of common labor and the introducing of thousands of southern Negroes into northern industrial and civic centers. A great migration took place. Negroes were in search of a holy grail. Southern Negroes, tired of moral and financial blue days, struck out for the promised land, to seek adventure among factories, subways and skyscrapers. New York, of course, has always been a magnet for ambitious and adventurous Americans and foreigners. New York to the


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 Negro meant Harlem, and the great influx included not only thousands of Negroes from every state in the Union, but also over thirty thousand immigrants from the West Indian Islands and the Carribean regions. Harlem was the promised land.

Thanks to New York's many and varied industries, Harlem Negroes have been able to demand and find much work. There is a welcome and profitable diversity of employment. Unlike Negroes in Chicago, or in Pittsburgh, or in Detroit, no one industry is called upon to employ the greater part of their population. Negroes have made money in New York; Negroes have brought money to New York with them, and with this money they have fought property, built certain civic institutions and increased their business activities until their real estate holdings are now valued at more than sixty million dollars.


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The social life of Harlem is both complex and diversified. Here you have two hundred thousand people collectively known as Negroes. You have pure-blooded Africans, British Negroes, Spanish Negroes, Portuguese Negroes, Dutch Negroes, Danish Negroes, Cubans, Porto Ricans, Arabians, East Indians and black Abyssinian Jews in addition to the racially well-mixed American Negro. You have persons of every conceivable shade and color. Persons speaking all languages, persons representative of many cultures and civilizations. Harlem is a magic melting pot, a modern Babel mocking the gods with its cosmopolitan uniqueness.

The American Negro predominates and, having adopted all of white America's prejudices and manners, is inclined to look askance at his little dark-skinned brothers from across the sea. The Spanish Negro, i. e., those Negroes hailing from Spanish possessions, stays to himself and has little traffic with the other racial groups in his environment. The other foreigners, with the exception of the British West Indians are not large enough to form a sepa-


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18 rate social group and generally become quickly identified with the regulation social life of the community.

It is the Negro from the British West Indies who creates and has to face a disagreeable problem. Being the second largest Negro Group in Harlem, and being less susceptible to American manners and customs than others, he is frowned upon and berated by the American Negro. This intraracial prejudice is an amazing though natural thing. Imagine a community made up of people universally known as oppressed, wasting time and energy trying to oppress others of their kind, more recently transplanted from a foreign clime. It is easy to explain. All people seem subject to prejudice, even those who suffer from it most, and all people seem inherently to dislike other folk who are characterized by cultural and lingual differences. It is a failing of man, a curse of humanity, and if these differences are accompanied, as they usually are, by quarrels concerning economic matters, there is bound to be an intensifying of the bitter antagonism existent between the two groups. Such has been the case with the British West Indian in Harlem. Because of his numerical strength, because of his cockney English inflections and


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 accent, because of his unwillingness to submit to certain American do's and don'ts, and because he, like most foreigners, has seemed willing to work for low wages, he has been hated and abused by his fellow-Harlemites. And as a matter of protection, he has learned to fight back.

It has been said that West Indians are comparable to Jews in that they are "both ambitious, eager for education, willing to engage in business, argumentative, aggressive, and possess a great proselytizing zeal for any cause they espouse." Most of the retail business in Harlem is owned and controlled by West Indians. They are also well represented and often officiate as provocative agents and leaders in radical movements among Harlem Negroes. And it is obvious that the average American Negro, in manifesting a dislike for the West Indian Negro, is being victimized by that same delusion which he claims blinds the American white man; namely, that all Negroes are alike. There are some West Indians who are distasteful; there are some of all people about whom one could easily say the same thing.

It is to be seen then that all this widely diversified population would erect an elaborate


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 social structure. For instance, there are thousands of Negroes in New York from Georgia. These have organized themselves into many clubs, such as the Georgia Circle or the Sons of Georgia. People from Virginia, South Carolina, Florida and other states do likewise. The foreign contingents also seem to have a mania for social organization. Social clubs and secret lodges are legion. And all of them vie with one another in giving dances, parties, entertainments and benefits in addition to public turnouts and parades.

Speaking of parades, one must mention Marcus Garvey. Garvey, a Jamaican, is one of the most widely known Negroes in contemporary life. He became notorious because of his Back-to-Africa campaign. With the West Indian population of Harlem as a nucleus, he enlisted the aid of thousands of Negroes all over America in launching the Black Star Line, the purpose of which was to establish a trade and travel route between America and Africa by and for Negroes. He also planned to establish a black empire in Africa of which he was to be emperor. The man's imagination and influence were colossal; his manifestations of these qualities often ridiculous and adolescent, though they seldom lacked color and interest.


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 Garvey added much to the gaiety and life of Harlem with his parades. Garmented in a royal purple robe with crimson trimmings and an elaborate headdress, he would ride in state down Seventh Avenue in an open limousine, surrounded and followed by his personal cabinet of high chieftains, ladies in waiting and protective legion. Since his incarceration in Atlanta Federal prison on a charge of having used the mails to defraud, Harlem knows no more such spectacles. The street parades held now are uninteresting and pallid when compared to the Garvey turnouts, brilliantly primitive as they were.

In addition to the racial and territorial divisions of the social structure there are also minor divisions determined by color and wealth. First there are the "dictys," that class of Negroes who constitute themselves as the upper strata and have lately done much wailing in the public places because white and black writers have seemingly overlooked them in their delineations of Negro life in Harlem. This upper strata is composed of the more successful and more socially inclined professional folk—lawyers, doctors, dentists, druggists, politicians, beauty parlor proprietors and real estate dealers. They are for the most part


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 mulattoes of light brown skin and have succeeded in absorbing all the social mannerisms of the white American middle class. They live in the stately rows of houses on 138th and 139th Streets betwenbetween [sic] Seventh and Eighth Avenues or else in the "high-tone" apartment houses on Edgecombe and St. Nicholas. They are both stupid and snobbish as is their class in any race. Their most compelling if sometimes unconscious ambition is to be as near white as possible, and their greatest expenditure of energy is concentrated on eradicating any trait or characteristic commonly known as negroid.

Their homes are expensively appointed and comfortable. Most of them are furnished in good taste, thanks to the interior decorator who was hired to do the job. Their existence is one of smug complacence. They are well satisfied with themselves and with their class. They are without a doubt the basic element from which the Negro aristocracy of the future will evolve. They are also good illustrations, mentally, sartorially and socially, of what the American standardizing machine can do to susceptible material.

These people have a social life of their own. They attend formal dinners and dances, re-


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 splendent in chic expensive replicas of Fifth Avenue finery. They arrange suitable inter-coterie weddings, preside luxuriously at announcement dinners, pre-nuptial showers, wedding breakfasts and the like. They attend church socials, fraternity dances and sorority gatherings. They frequent the downtown theaters, and occasionally, quite occasionally, drop into one of the Harlem night clubs which certain of their lower caste brethren frequent and white downtown excursionists make wealthy.

Despite this upper strata which is quite small, social barriers among Negroes are not as strict and well regulated in Harlem as they are in other Negro communities. Like all cosmopolitan centers Harlem is democratic. People associate with all types should chance happen to throw them together. There are a few aristocrats, a plethora of striving bourgeoisie, a few artistic spirits and a great proletarian mass, which constitutes the most interesting and important element in Harlem, for it is this latter class and their institutions that gives the community its color and fascination.


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Much has been written and said about night life in Harlem. It has become the leit motif of sophisticated conversation and shop girl intimacies. To call yourself a New Yorker you must have been to Harlem at least once. Every up-to-date person knows Harlem, and knowing Harlem generally means that one has visited a night club or two. These night clubs are now enjoying much publicity along with the New Negro and Negro art. They are the shrines to which white sophisticates, Greenwich Village artists, Broadway revellers and provincial commuters make eager pilgrimage. Jn fact, the white patronage is so profitable anfl so abundant that Negroes find themselves crowded out and even segregated in their own places of jazz.

There are, at the present time, about one dozen of these night clubs in Harlem—Bamville, Connie's Inn, Baron Wilkins, The Nest, Small's Paradise, The Capitol, The Cotton Club, The Green Cat, The Sugar Cane Club, Happy Rhones, The Hoofers Club and the Little Savoy. Most of these generally have from two to ten


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 whife persons for every black one. Only The Hoofers, The Little Savoy, and The Sugar Cane Club seem to cater almost exclusively to Negro trade.

At the Bamville and at Small's Paradise, one finds smart white patrons, the type that reads the ultrasophisticated New Yorker. Indeed, that journal says in its catalogue of places to go—"Small's and Bamville are the show places of Harlem for downtowners on their first excursion. Go late. Better not to dress." And so the younger generation of Broadway, Park Avenue, Riverside Drive, Third Avenue and the Bronx go late, take their own gin, applaud the raucous vulgarity of the entertainers, dance with abandon and go home with a headache. They have seen Harlem.

The Cotton Club and Connie's Inn make a bid for theatrical performers and well-to-do folk around town. The Nest and Happy Rhones attract traveling salesmen, store clerks and commuters from Jersey and Yonkers. The Green Cat has a large Latin clientele. Baron Wilkins draws glittering ladies from Broadway with their sleek gentlemen friends. Because of these conditions of invasion, Harlem's far-famed night clubs have become merely side shows staged sensation-seeking whites.


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 Nevertheless, they are still an egregious something to experience. Their smoking cavernous depths are eerie and ecstatic. Patrons enter, shiver involuntarily, then settle down to be shoved about and scared by the intangible rhythms thai surge all around them. White night clubs are noisy. White night clubs affect weird music, soft light, Negro entertainers and dancing waiters, but, even with all these contributing elements, they cannot approximate the infectious rhythm and joy always found in a Negro cabaret.

Take the Sugar Cane Club on Fifth Avenue near 135th Street, located on the border of the most "" section of Harlem. This place is visited by few whites or few "dicty" Negroes. Its customers are the rough-and-ready, happy-go-lucky more primitive type—street walkers, petty gamblers and pimps, with an occasional adventurer from other strata of society.

The Sugar Cane Club is a narrow subterranean passageway about twenty-five feet wide and 125 feet long. Rough wooden tables, surrounded by rough wooden chairs, and the orchestra stands, jammed into the right wall center, use up about three-quarters of the space. The remaining rectangular area is bared for


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 dancing. With a capacity for seating about one hundred people, it usually finds room on gala nights for twice that many. The orchestra weeps and moans and groans as only an unsophisticated Negro jazz orchestra can. A blues singer croons vulgar ditties over the tables to individual parties or else wah-wahs husky syncopated, blues songs from the center of the floor. Her act over, the white lights are extinguished, red and blue spot lights are centered on the diminutive dancing space, couples push back their chairs, squeeze out from behind the tables and from against the wall, then finding one another's bodies, sweat gloriously together, with shoulders hunched, limbs obscenely intertwined and hips wiggling; animal beings urged on by liquor and music and physical contact.

Small's Paradise, on Seventh Avenue near 135th Street, is just the opposite of the Sugar Cane Club. It caters almost exclusively to white trade with just enough Negroes present to give the necessary atmosphere and "difference." Yet even in Small's with its symphonic orchestra, full-dress appearance and dignified onlookers, there is a great deal of that unexplainable, intangible rhythmic presence so characteristic of a Negro cabaret.


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 In addition to the well-known cabarets, which, are largely show places to curious whites, there are innumerable places—really speak-easies—which are open only to the initiate. These places are far more colorful and more full of spontaneous joy than the larger places to which one has ready access. They also furnish more thrills to the spectator. This is possible because the crowd is more select, the liquor more fiery, the atmosphere more intimate and the activities of the patrons not subject to be watched by open-mouthed white people from downtown and the Bronx.

One particular place known as the Glory Hole is hidden in a musty damp basement behind an express and trucking office. It is a single room about ten feet square and remains an unembellished basement except for a planed down plank floor, a piano, three chairs and a library table. The Glory Hole is typical of its class. It is a social club, commonly called a dive, convenient for the high times of a certain group. The men are unskilled laborers during the day, and in the evenings they round up their girls or else meet them at the rendezvous in order to have what they consider and enjoy as a good time. The women, like the men, swear, drink and dance as much and as vul-


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 garly as they please. Yet they do not strike the observer as being vulgar. They are merely being and doing what their environment and their desire for pleasure suggest.

Such places as the Glory Hole can be found all over the so-called "bad lands" of Harlem. They are not always confined to basement rooms. They can be found in apartment flats, in the rear of barber shops, lunch counters, pool halls, and other such conveniently blind places. Each one has its regular quota of customers with just enough new patrons introduced from time to time to keep the place alive and prosperous. These intimate, civic centers are occasionally misjudged. Social service reports damn them with the phrase "breeding places of vice and crime." They may be. They are also good training grounds for prospective pugilists. Fights are staged with regularity and with vigor. And most of the regular customers have some mark on their faces or bodies that can be displayed as having been received during a battle in one of the glory holes.

The other extreme of amusement places in Harlem is exemplified by the Bamboo Inn, a Chinese-American restaurant that features Oriental cuisine, a jazz band and dancing. It


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 is the place for select Negro Harlem's night life, the place where debutantes have their coming out parties, where college lads take their co-eds and society sweethearts and where dignified matrons entertain. It is a beautifully decorated establishment, glorified by a balcony with booths, and a large gyroflector, suspending from the center of the ceiling, on which colored spotlights play, fleeting the room with triangular bits of vari-colored light. The Bamboo Inn is the place to see "high Harlem," just like the Glory Hole is the place to see "low Harlem." Well-dressed men escorting expensively garbed women and girls; models from Vanity Fair with brown, yellow and black skins. Doctors and lawyers, Babbitts and their ladies with fine manners (not necessarily learned through Emily Post), fine clothes and fine homes to return to when the night's fun has ended.

The music plays. The gyroflector revolves. The well-bred, polite dancers mingle on the dance floor. There are a few silver hip flasks. There is an occasional burst of too-spontaneous-for-the-environment laughter. The Chinese waiters slip around, quiet and bored. A big black-face bouncer, arrayed in tuxedo, watches eagerly for some too boisterous, too unconven-


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 tional person to put out. The Bamboo Inn has only one blemishing feature. It is also the rendezvous for a set of oriental men who favor white women, and who, with their pale face partners, mingle with Harlem's four hundred.

When Harlem people wish to dance, without attending a cabaret, they go to the Renaissance Casino or to the Savoy, Harlem's two most famous public dance halls. The Savoy is the pioneer in the field of giving dance-loving Harlemites some place to gather nightly. It is an elaborate ensemble with a Chinese garden (Negroes seem to have a penchant for Chinese food—there are innumerable Chinese restaurants all over Harlem), two orchestras that work in relays, and hostesses provided at twenty-five cents per dance for partnerless young men. The Savoy opens at three in the afternoon and closes at three in the morning. One can spend twelve hours in this jazz palace for sixty-five cents, and the price of a dinner or an occasional sustaining sandwich and drink. The music is good, the dancers are gay, and the setting is conducive to Joy.

The Renaissance Casino was formerly a dance hall, rented out only for social affairs, but when the Savoy began to flourish, the Renaissance, after closing a while for redecora-


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 tions, changed its policy and reopened as a public dance hall. It has no lounging room or Chinese garden, but it stages a basket ball game every Sunday night that is one of the most popular amusement institutions in Harlem, and it has an exceptionally good orchestra, comfortable sitting-out places and a packed dance floor nightly.

Then, when any social club wishes to give a dance at the Renaissance, the name of the organization is flashed from the electric signboard that hangs above the entrance and in return for the additional and assured crowd, some division of the door receipts is made. The Renaissance is, I believe, in good Harlemese, considered more "dicty" than the Savoy. It has a more regulated and more dignified clientele, and almost every night in the week the dances are sponsored by some well-known social group.

In addition to the above two places, the Manhattan Casino, an elaborate dance palace, is always available for the more de luxe gatherings. It is at the Manhattan Casino that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has its yearly whist tournament and dance, that Harlem society folk have their charity balls, and select formals, and that the


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 notorious Hamilton Lodge holds its spectacular masquerade each year.

All of the dances held in this Casino are occasions never to be forgotten. Hundreds of well-dressed couples dancing on the floor. Hundreds of Negroes of all types and colors, mingling together on the dance floor, gathering in the boxes, meeting and conversing on the promenade. And here and there an occasional white person, or is it a Negro who can "pass"?

Negroes love to dance, and in Harlem where the struggle to live is so intensely complex, the dance serves as a welcome and feverish outlet. Yet it is strange that none of these dance palaces are owned or operated by Negroes. The Renaissance Casino was formerly owned by a syndicate of West Indians, but has now fallen into the hands of a Jewish group. And despite the thousands of dollars Negroes spend in order to dance, the only monetary returns in their own community are the salaries paid to the Negro musicians, ushers, janitors and door-men. The rest of the profits are spent and exploited outside of Harlem.

This is true of most Harlem establishments. The Negro in Harlem is not, like the Negro in Chicago and other metropolitan centers, in charge of the commercial enterprises located


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 in his community. South State Street in Chicago's great Black belt, is studded with Negro banks, Negro office buildings, housing Negro insurance companies, manufacturing concerns, and other major enterprises. There are no Negro controlled banks in Harlem. There are only branches of downtown Manhattan's financial institutions, manned solely by whites and patronized almost exclusively by Negroes. Harlem has no outstanding manufacturing concern like the Overton enterprises in Chicago, the Poro school and factory in St. Louis, or the Madame Walker combine in Indianapolis. Harlem Negroes own over sixty million dollars worth of real estate, but they neither own nor operate one first-class grocery store, butchershop, dance hall, theater, clothing gtore or saloon. They do invest their money in barber shops, beauty parlors, pool halls, tailor shops, restaurants and lunch counters.


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Like most good American communities the movies hold a primary position in the amusement life of Harlem. There are seven neighborhood motion picture houses in Negro Harlem proper, and about six big time cinema palaces on 125th Street that have more white patronage than black, yet whose audiences are swelled by movie fans from downtown.

The picture emporiums of Harlem are comparable to those in any residential neighborhood. They present second and third run features with supporting bills of comedies, novelties, and an occasional special performance when the management presents a bathing beauties contest, a plantation jubilee, an amateur ensemble and other vaudeville stunts. The Renaissance Theater, in the same building with the Renaissance Casino, is the cream of Harlem motion picture houses. It, too, was formerly owned and operated by Negroes, the only one of its kind in Harlem. Now Negroes only operate it. The Renaissance attracts the more select movie audiences; it has a reputable symphony orchestra, a Wurlitzer organ, and


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 presents straight movies without vaudeville flapdoodle. It is spacious and clean and free from disagreeable odors.

The Roosevelt Theater, the New Douglas, and the Savoy are less aristocratic competitors. They show the same pictures as the Renaissance, but seem to be patronized by an entirely different set of people, and, although their interiors are more spacious, they are not as well decorated or as clean as the Renaissance. They attract a set of fresh youngsters, smart aleck youths and lecherous adult males who attend, not so much to see the picture as to pick up a susceptible female or to spoon with some girl they have picked up elsewhere. The places are also frequented by family groups, poor but honest folk, who cannot afford other forms or places of amusement.

The Franklin and the Gem are the social outcasts of the group. Their audiences are composed almost entirely of loafers from the lowgrade pool rooms and dives in their vicinity, and tenement-trained drudges from the slums. The stench in these two places is nauseating. The Board of Health rules are posted conspicuously, admonishing patrons not to spit on the floor or to smoke in the auditorium, but the aisle is slippery with tobacco spew and


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 cigarette smoke adds to the density of the foul air. The movies flicker on the screen, some wild west picture three or four years old, dirty babies cry in time with the electric piano that furnishes the music, men talk out loud, smoke, spit, and drop empty gin or whiskey bottles on the floor when emptied.

All of these places from the Renaissance to the Gem are open daily from two in the afternoon until eleven at night, and save for a lean audience during the supper hour are usually filled to capacity. Saturdays, Sundays and holidays are harvest times, and the Jewish representatives of the chain to which a theater belongs walk around excitedly and are exceedingly gracious, thinking no doubt of the quarters that are being deposited at the box office.

The Lafayette and Lincoln theaters are three-a-day combination movie and musical comedy revue houses. The Lafayette used to house a local stock company composed of all Negro players, but it has now fallen into less dignified hands. Each week it presents a new revue. These revues are generally weak-kneed, watery variations on downtown productions. If Earl Carroll is presenting Artists and Models on Broadway, the Lafayette presents Brown Skin Models in Harlem soon afterwards. Week after


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 week one sees same type of "high yaller" chorus, hears the same blues songs, and applauds different dancers doing the same dance steps. There is little originality on the part of the performers, and seldom any change of fare. Cheap imitations of Broadway successes, nudity, vulgar dances and vulgar jokes are the box office attractions.

On Friday nights there is a midnight show. Which is one of the most interesting spectacles in Harlem. The performance begins some time after midnight and lasts until four or four-thirty the next morning. The audience is as much if not more interesting and amusing than the performers on the stage. Gin bottles are carried and passed among groups of friends. Cat calls and hisses attend any dull bit. Outspoken comments punctuate the lines, songs and dances of the performers. Impromptu acts are staged in the orchestra and in the gallery. The performers themselves are at their best and leave the stage to make the audience a part of their act. There are no conventions considered, no reserve is manifested. Everyone has a jolly good time, and after the theater there are parties or work according to the wealth and inclinations of the individual.

The Lincoln theater is smaller and more


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 smelly than the Lafayette, and most people who attend the latter will turn up their noses at the Lincoln. It too has revues and movies, and its only distinguishing feature is that its shows are even worse than those staged at the Lafayette. They are so bad that they are ludicrously funny. The audience is comparable to that found in the Lafayette on Friday nights at the midnight jamboree. Performers are razzed. Chorus girls are openly courted or damned, and the spontaneous utterances of the patrons are far more funny than any joke the comedians ever tell. If one can stand the stench, one can have a good time for three hours or more just by watching the unpredictable and surprising reactions of the audience to what is being presented on the stage.


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The Harlem institutions that intrigue the imagination and stimulate the most interest on the part of an investigator are House Rent Parties, Numbers and Hot Men. House Rent parties are the result of high rents. Private houses containing nine or ten or twelve rooms rent from $185 up to $250 per month. Apartments are rated at $20 per room or more, according to the newness of the building and the conveniences therein. Five-room flats, located in walk-up tenements, with inside rooms, dark hallways and dirty stairs rent for $10 per room or more. It can be seen then that when the average Negro workingman's salary is considered (he is often paid less for his labors than a white man engaged in the same sort of work), and when it is also considered that he and his family must eat, dress and have some amusements and petty luxuries, these rents assume a criminal enormity. And even though every available bit of unused space is sub-let at exorbitant rates to roomers, some other source of revenue is needed when the time comes to meet the landlord.


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 Hence we have hundreds of people opening their apartments and houses to the public, their only stipulation being that the public pay twenty-five cents admission fee and buy plentifully of the food and drinks offered for sale. Although one of these parties can be found any time during the week, Saturday night is favored. The reasons are obvious; folk don't have to get up early on Sunday morning and most of them have had a pay day.

Of course, this commercialization of spontaneous pleasure in order to pay the landlord has been abused, and now there are folk who make their living altogether by giving alleged House Rent Parties. This is possible because there are in Harlem thousands of people with no place to go, thousands of people lonesome, unattached and cramped, who stroll the streets eager for a chance to form momentary contacts, to dance, to drink and make merry. They willingly part with more of the week's pay than they should just to enjoy an oasis in the desert of their existence and a joyful intimate party, open to the public yet held in a private home, is, as they say, "their meat."

So elaborate has the technique of these parties and their promotion become that great competition has sprung up between prospective


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 party givers. Private advertising stunts are resorted to, and done quietly so as not to attract too much attention from the police, who might want to collect a license fee or else drop in and search for liquor. Cards are passed out in pool halls, subway stations, cigar stores, and on the street.

This is an example:

Saturday night comes. There may be only piano music, there may be a piano and drum, or a three or four-piece ensemble. Red lights, dim and suggestive, are in order. The parlor and the dining room are cleared for the dance, and one bedroom is utilized for hats and coats. In the kitchen will be found toiled pigs feet, ham hock and cabbage, hopping John (a combination of peas and rice), and other proletarian dishes.

The music will be barbarous and slow. The dancers will use their bodies and the bodies of their partners without regard to the conventions. There will be little restraint. Happy in-


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 dividuals will do solo specialties, will sing, dance—have Charleston and Black Bottom contests and breakdowns. Hard little tenement girls will flirt and make dates with Pool Hall Johnnies and drug store cowboys. Prostitutes will drop in and slink out. And in addition to the liquor sold by the house, flasks of gin, and corn and rye will be passed around and emptied. Here "low" Harlem is in its glory, primitive and unashamed.

I have counted as many as twelve such parties in one block, five in one apartment house containing forty flats. They are held all over Harlem with the possible exception of 137th, 138th and 139th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues where the bulk of Harlem's upper class lives. Yet the house rent party is not on the whole a vicious institution. It serves a real and vital purpose, and is as essential to "low Harlem" as the cultured receptions and soirees held on "strivers' row" are to "high Harlem."

House rent parties have their evils; it is an economic evil and a social evil that makes them necessary, but they also have their virtues. Like all other institutions of man it depends upon what perspective you view them from. But regardless abstract matters, house rent


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 parties do provide a source of revenue to those in difficult financial straits, and they also give lonesome Harlemites, caged in by intangible bars, some place to have their fun and forget problems of color, civilization and economics.

Numbers, unlike house rent parties, is not an institution confined to any one class of Harlem folk. Almost everybody plays the numbers, a universal and illegal gambling pastime, which has become Harlem's favorite indoor sport.

Numbers is one of the most elaborate, big-scale lottery games in America. It is based on the digits listed in the daily reports of the New York stock exchange. A person wishing to play the game places a certain sum of money, from one penny up, on a number composed of three digits. This number must be placed in the hands of a runner before ten o'clock in the morning as the reports are printed in the early editions of the afternoon papers. The clearing house reports are like this:

The winning number is composed from the second and third digits in the millionth figures opposite exchanges and from the third figure in the millionth place opposite the balances. Thus


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 if the report is like the example above, the winning number for that day will be 238.

An elaborate system of placement and paying off has grown around this game. Hundreds of persons known as runners make their rounds daily, collecting number slips and cash placements from their clients. These runners are the middle men between the public and the banker, who pays the runner a commission on all collections, reimburses winners, if there are any, and also gives the runner a percentage of his client's winnings.

These bankers and runners can well afford to be and often are rogues. Since numbers is an illegal pastime, they can easily disappear when the receipts are heavy or a number of people have chosen the correct three digits and wish their winnings. The police are supposed to make some effort to enforce the law and check the game. Occasionally a runner or a banker is arrested, but this generally occurs only when some irate player notifies the police that he "aintain't [sic] been done right by." Numbers can be placed in innumerable ways, the grocer, the butcher, the confectioner, the waitress at the lunch counter, the soda clerk, and the choir leader all collect slips for the number bankers.

People look everywhere for a number to play.


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 The postman passes, some addict notes the number on his cap and puts ten cents on it for that day. A hymn is announced by the pastor in church and all the members in the congregation will note the number for future reference. People dream, each dream is a symbol for a number that can be ascertained by looking in a dream book for sale at all Harlem news-stands. Street car numbers, house numbers, street numbers, chance calculations—anything that has figures on it or connected with it will give some player a good number, and inspire him to place much money on it.

There is slight chance to win, it is a thousand to one shot, and yet this game and its possible awards have such a hold on the community that it is often the cause for divorce, murder, scanty meals, dispossess notices and other misfortunes. Some player makes a "hit" for one dollar, and receives five hundred and forty dollars. Immediately his acquaintances and neighbors are in a frenzy and begin staking large sums on any number their winning friend happens to suggest.

It is all a game of chance. There is no way to figure out scientifically or otherwise what digits will be listed in the clearing house reports. Few people placing fifty cents on No.


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 238 stop to realize now many other combinations of three digits are liable to win. One can become familiar with the market's slump days and fat days, but even then the digits which determine the winning number could be almost anything.

People who are moral in every other respect, church going folk, who damn drinking, dancing, or gambling in any other form, will play the numbers. For some vague reason this game is not considered as gambling, and its illegality gives little concern to any one—even to the Harlem police, who can be seen slipping into a corner cigar store to place their number for the day with an obliging and secretive clerk.

As I write a friend of mine comes in with a big roll of money, $540. He has made a "hit." I guess I will play fifty cents on the number I found stamped inside the band of my last year's straw hat.

Scroll down Seventh Avenue on a spring Sunday afternoon. Everybody seems to be well dressed. The latest fashions prevail, and though there are the usual number of folk attired in outlandish color combinations and queer styles, the majority of the promenaders are dressed in good taste. In the winter, expensive fur coats swathe the women of Har-


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 lem's Seventh Avenue as they swathe the pale face fashion plates on Fifth Avenue down town, while the men escorting them are usually sartorially perfect.

How is all this well-ordered finery possible? Most of these people are employed as menials—dish washers, elevator operators, porters, waiters, red caps, longshoremen, and factory hands. Their salaries are notoriously low, not many men picked at random on Seventh Avenue can truthfully say that they regularly earn more than $100 per month, and from this salary must come room rent, food and other of life's necessities and luxuries. How can they dress so well?

There are, of course, the installment houses, considered by many authorities one of the main economic curses of our present day civilization, and there are numerous people who run accounts at such places just to keep up a front, but these folk have little money to jingle in their pockets. All of it must be dribbled out to the installment collectors. There was even one chap I knew, who had to pawn a suit he had bought on the installment plan in order to make the final ten dollar payment and prevent the credit house collector from garnisheeing his wages. And it will be found that the majority


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 of the Harlemites, who must dress well on a small salary, shun the installment house leechers and patronize the "hot men."

"Hot men" sell "hot stuff," which when, translated from Harlemese into English, mean? merchandise supposedly obtained illegally and sold on the q. t. far below par. "Hot men" do a big business in Harlem. Some have apartments fitted out as showrooms, but the majority peddle their goods piece by piece from person to person.

"Hot stuff" is supposedly stolen by shoplifters or by store employes or by organ gangs, who raid warehouses and freight yartfs. Actually, most of the "hot stuff" sold in Harlem originally comes from bankrupt stores. Some ingenious group of people make a practice of attending bankruptcy sales and by buying blocks of merchandise get a great deal for a small sum of money. This merchandise is then given in small lots to various agents in Harlem, who secretly dispose of it.

There is a certain glamour about buying stolen goods aside from their cheapness. Realizing this, "hot men" and their agents maintain that their goods are stolen whether they are or not. People like to feel that they are breaking the law and when they are getting


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 undeniable bargains at the same time, the temptation becomes twofold. Of course, one never really knows whether what they are buying has been stolen from a neighbor next door bought from a defunct merchant. There been many instances when a gentleman, strolling down the avenue in a newly acquired coat, has had it recognized by a former owner, and found himself either beaten up or behind the bars. However, such happenings are rare, for the experienced Harlemite will buy only that "hot stuff" which is obviously not.

One evening I happened to be sitting in one of the private reception rooms of the Harlem Y. W. C. A. There was a great commotion in the adjoining room, a great coming in and going it seemed as if every girl in the Y. W. C. A. was trying to crowd into that little room. Finally the young lady I was visiting went to investigate. She was gone for about fifteen minutes. When she returned she had on a new hat, which she informed me, between laughs at the bewildered expressions on my face, she had obtained from a "hot man" for two dollars. This same hat, according to her, would cost $10 downtown and $12 on 125th Street.

I placed my chair near the door and watched


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SOPHOCLES.

Woe! Woe!

I am thrilled with fright,

O, the horrible sight!

Is there none

To lay me low—

Alas! Undone!

To give a blow

Full in the breast

With a two-edged glaive?

Ill-starred, no rest,

None, but the grave

For the miserable wretch to share,

Now plunged in the depths of despair!

Ay, at thy door the death of both was laid

By her thou seest here in death arrayed.

And what the manner of her violent taking off?

Her own hand struck the blow, full in the heart,

When for her son she felt of grief the smart.

Woe is me!

Oh! the fault is mine!

No other of mortal kind

Can bear the guilt

For the cruel blow!

Thy blood I spilt,

Laid thee low!

I own it again!

Now, servants, convey—

O the pain!—

The miserable wretch away!

Take me away with all speed,

I am nothing, nothing indeed!


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 the procession of young women entering the room bareheaded and leaving with new head gear. Finally the supply was exhausted and a perspiring little Jew emerged, his pockets filled with dollar bills. I discovered later that thin man was a store keeper in Harlem, who had picked up a large supply of spring hats at a bankruptcy sale and stating that it was "hot stuff" had proceeded to sell it not openly in his store, but sub rosa in private places.

There is no limit to the "hot man's" supply or the variety of goods he offers. One can, if one knows the ropes, buy any article of wearing apparel from him. And in addition to the professional "hot man" there are always the shoplifters and thieving store clerks, who accost you secretly and eagerly place at your disposal what they have stolen.

Hence low salaried folk in Harlem dress well, and Seventh Avenue is a fashionable street crowded with expensively dressed people, parading around in all their "hot" finery. A cartoonist in a recent issue of one of the Negro monthlies depicted the following scene: A number of people at a fashionable dance are informed that the police have come to search for some individual known to be wearing stolen goods. Immediately there is a confused and hurried


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 exodus from the room because all of the dancers present were arrayed in "hot stuff."

This, of course, is exaggerated. There are thousands, of well-dressed people in Harlem able to be well-dressed not because they patronize a "hot man," but because their incomes make it possible. But there are a mass of people, working for small wages, who make good use of the "hot man," for not only can they buy their much wanted finery cheaply, but, thanks to the obliging "hot man," can buy it on the installment plan. Under the circumstances, who cares about breaking the law?


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The Negro in America has always supported his religious institutions even though he would not support his schools or business enterprises. Migrating to the city has not lessened his devotion to religious institutions even if it has lessened his religious fervor. He still donates a portion of his income to the church, and the church is still a major social center in all Negro communities.

Harlem is no exception to this rule, and its finest buildings are the churches. Their attendance is large, their prosperity amazing. Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, Catholic, Presbyterian, Seventh Day Adventist, Spiritualist, Holy Roller and Abyssinian Jew—every sect and every creed with all their innumerable subdivisions can be found in Harlem.

The Baptist and the Methodist churches have the largest membership. There are more than a score of each. St. Phillips Episcopal Church is the most wealthy as well as one of the oldest Negro churches in New York. It owns a great deal of Harlem real estate and was one of lie


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 leading factors in urging Negroes to buy property in Harlem.

There are few new church buildings, most of them having been bought from white congregations when the Negro invaded Harlem and claimed it for his own. The most notable of the churches are the Metropolitan Baptist Church at 128th Street and mih Avenue, Salem M. E. Church at 129th Street and Seventh Avenue, and Mt. Olive Baptist Church at 120th Street and Lenox Avenue. This latter church has had a varied career. It was first a synagogue, then it was? I'd to white Seventh Day Adventists and finally fell into its present hands.

The most notable churches are the Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138th Street, Mother Zion on 137th Street, and St. Marks. The latter church has just recently been finished. It is a dignified and colossal structure ipying a triangular block on Edgecombe and St. Nicholas Avenues between 137th and 138th Streets. It is the latest thing in churches, with many modern attachments—gymnasium, swimming pool, club rooms, Sunday school quarters, and other sub-auditoriums. When it was formally opened there was a gala dedication week to celebrate the occasion. Each


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 night services were held by the various secret societies, the Elks, the Masons, the Knights of Pythias, the Odd Fellows, and others. The members of every local chapter of the various orders turned out to do homage to the new fice. The collection proceeds were donated to the church.

St. Marks goes in for elaborate ceremony quite reminiscent of the Episcopal or Roman Catholic service. The choir is regaled in flowing robes and chants hymns by Handel. The pulpit is a triumph of carving and wood decoration. There is more ceremony than sermon.

The better class of Harlemites attends the larger churches. Most of the so-called "dictys" are registered as "Episcopalians at St. Phillips, whichPhillips," which [sic] is the religious sanctum of the socially elect and wealthy Negroes of Harlem. The congregation at St. Phillips is largely mulatto. This church has a Parish House that serves as one of the most ambitious and important social centers in Harlem. It supports a gymnasium that produces annually a first-class basket ball team, an art sketch class that is both large and promising, and other activities of interest and benefit to the community.

Every Sunday all of the churches are packed, and were they run entirely on the theatrical