A Tortoise Shell Home

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Title:     A Tortoise Shell Home
Author: Heywood Broun [More Titles by Broun]

Every once in so often somebody gets up in a pulpit or on a platform and declares that home life in America is being destroyed. The agent of devastation varies. According to the mood of the man with forebodings, it is the motion pictures, the new dances, bridge, or the comic supplements in the Sunday newspapers. It seems to us that these defenders of the home are themselves offensively solicitous. If we happened to be a home, we rather think that we would resent the overeagerness of our champions. They act as if the thing they seek to preserve were so weak and pitiful that it must go down before the gust of any new enthusiasm.

After all, the home is much older than these dragons which are said to be capable of devouring it. Least of all are we disposed to worry over deadly effects from the new dances. This fear has recently been put into vivid form by Hartley Manners in a play called "The National Anthem," in which Laurette Taylor, his wife, was starred. Jazz, according to Mr. Manners, is our anthem. The hero and the heroine of his play dance themselves to the brink of perdition. The end is tragic, for the husband dies and the wife narrowly escapes from the effects of poison which she has taken by mistake while dazed from drink and dancing.

This seems to us special and exceptional. A vice must be easy to be universally dangerous. All the moralists assure us that descent by the primrose path is facile. Skill in the new dances argues to us a certain strength of character. We do not understand how any person of flabby will can become proficient. In our own case we must confess that it is not our strength and uprightness which has kept us from jazz, but such traits as timidity and lack of application. As a boy we painstakingly learned the two-step. For this we deserve no great credit. It was not our wish, and only the vigorous application of parental influence carried us through. After we broke away from the home ties we began to back-slide. The dances changed from month to month and we lacked the hardihood to keep up. Cravenly we quit and slumped into a job.

None of our excuses can be made persuasive enough for exoneration. All there is to be said for work as opposed to dancing is that it is so much easier. Of course, our respect is infinite for the sturdy ones who have gone through the flames of cleansing and perfecting fire and have earned the right to step out upon the waxed floor. Few of them escape the marks of their time of tribulation. Every close observer of American dancing must have noted the set expression upon the face of all participants. There is hardly one who might not serve as a model for General Grant exclaiming: "I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."

No form of national activity begins to be so conscientious as dancing. Up-to-date physicians, we understand, are beginning to prescribe it as tonic and penance for patients growing slack in their attitude toward life. At a cabaret recently a man pointed out a dancer in the middle of the floor and said: "That woman in the bright red dress is fifty-six years old." We were properly surprised, and he went on: "Her story is interesting. Two years ago she went to a neurologist because of a general physical and nervous breakdown. He said to her: 'Madam, the trouble is that you are growing old, and, worse than that, you are ready to admit it. You must fight against it. You must hold on to youth as if it were a horizontal bar and chin yourself.'"

We looked at the woman more closely and saw that she was obeying the doctor's orders literally. Her fight was a gallant one. Dancing had served to keep down her weight and improve her blood pressure, but there was not the slightest suggestion that she was enjoying herself. She had bought advice and she was intent upon using it. And as we looked over the entire floor we could see no one who seemed to be dancing for the fun of it. A few took a pardonable pride in their perfection of fancy steps, but that emotion is not quite akin to joy. They were dancing for exercise or prestige, or to fulfill social obligations.

All this is admirable in its way, but we have not sufficient faith in the persistence of human gallantry to believe that it can last forever. The home will get every last one of the dancers yet because it is so much easier to loaf in an easy-chair than to keep up the continual bickering against old age, indolence, and the selfishness of comfort.

Motion pictures may be more dangerous because we are informed that they are still in their infancy. But perhaps the home is also. In spite of the length of time during which it has been going on, its possibilities of development are enormous. Within the memory of living man a home was generally supposed to be a place where people sat and stared at each other. Sometimes they visited neighbors, but these trips were traditionally restricted to occasions upon which the friends were ill and too helpless to carry on a conversation. If any one doubts that talk is a recent development in home life, let him consider the musical instruments of a generation which is gone. Take the spinnet, for instance, and note that even the most carefully modulated whisper would have drowned out its feeble tinkle.

To be sure, our ancestors had books and a few magazines, but they were not of a sort to promote general conversation. Only the grown-ups were capable of exchanging their views on Mr. Thackeray's latest novel. But now, when the group returns from an evening at the motion-picture theater where "The Kid" or "Shoulder Arms" is being shown, it is impossible to keep anybody out of the discussion on account of his lack of years. Little Ferdinand has just as much right to an opinion about the prowess of Charlie Chaplin as grandpa, and, according to our observation, it is a right almost certain to be exercised.

Of course, before we began this discussion of the decay of home life we should have set about coming to some definition acceptable to both sides of the controversy. Now, when it is too late to do anything about it, we are struck by the fact that we are probably talking at cross purposes. It is our contention that man is not less than the turtle. We think it is entirely possible for him to carry his home life around with him. It would not seem to us, for instance, that home life was impaired if the family took in the movies now and again or even very frequently. Nor are we willing to accept a bridge party down the street as something alien and outside. In other words, a man's home (and, of course, we mean a woman's home as well) ought not to be defined by the walls of his house or even by the fences of the front yard. The anti-suffragists once had the slogan "Woman's place is in the home," but what they really meant was "in the house," since they used to insist that the business of voting would take her out of it. It seems to us that the woman of to-day should have a home with limits at least as spacious as those of the whole world. And so naturally she ought to have her share in all the concerns of life.

[The end]
Heywood Broun's essay: Tortoise Shell Home

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