The Missing Rooms

I

WE are passing through a social revolution so gradual as to be almost unsuspected, so profound as to modify every aspect of life and to affect every member of the community — the revolution of the rents. Quietly, unobtrusively, but steadily, rents have soared, — carrying commodity prices with them, — until they are nearly double what they were before the war. We stopped building houses in order to beat the Germans. Had the Germans beaten us, the worst we might have faced was slavery; but we won, and find ourselves threatened with social disintegration. For the war left the housing shortage so acute that we now pay for two rooms what would formerly have obtained a home adequate to house a family, and so we are dispensing with the family.

The rise in rents sliced two rooms off the average post-war city home. A case in point is handily provided by an advertisement which appeared in the New York Times for September 19, last: —

Two-room kitchenette apartment, $65; 6 rooms, skylight studio, $120; 4th floor, lease.

Its significance lies not so much in the specific rentals demanded as in the fact that the rent paid for space adequate to raise or shelter a family is nearly double that required for space sufficient for a childless couple. Rentals vary from one street to another, from one city to the next, but the ratio abides. The consequence is that at least two rooms go into the discard, and these two rooms are, spiritually and socially, the most important in the home — the guest chamber and the nursery.

Barely a week after this dynamic little announcement, the papers carried an account of a nation-wide survey of the rent situation. Rents are still 75 per cent higher than in 1914, and though the rates for the country as a whole have declined 6 per cent since July 1924, the majority of Eastern cities show no drop, and in some cases the rates are even higher than in 1924.

The cause of this devastating situation is so simple and so obvious that it requires little comment. On the average, in this country there are a million marriages a year and an excess of nearly a million births over deaths. But while the demands for homes thus increase by a million a year, the construction has been not nearly large enough to meet the demand. Thus, as stated, during the war there was very little building; in 1920 there were seventy thousand houses built and a million marriages; even in 1925, six years after the housing shortage had become apparent, there were only half a million houses to meet twice that many marriages. A situation has been created in which families are steadily multiplying and homes are becoming relatively scarcer. In fact, the census of 1920 showed that there were only twenty million dwellings for the twenty-four million families in the United States; a similar survey for 1926 should indicate that there are at least seven million families without homes. At present this stringency is sharpest in the East, where in cities such as New York there is one dwelling for every three families; but it is spreading westward, and now Chicago stands on the same footing with Boston, with two families to every house. In due time, unless energetic measures are adopted, the scandal of inadequate housing for the richest people in the world will be nation-wide.

The result of high rents is inevitable, so long as it is impossible to spend more than you receive: one house does double or triple duty, and the economy is effected in such a way that hospitality and the rearing of a family become practically impossible. A friend writes me from Boston: ‘Forty years ago the house in which I now live on Beacon Hill sheltered a single family. Now it supplies homes for six, and of all that number my daughter is the only child.’

This is the revolution, and one far more disastrous to the welfare of the country than anything an enemy might have done to us. Statisticians may labor from now until doomsday in trying to estimate the damage done our national economy through the restricted size of families; such a discussion as this may dismiss this aspect of the business with the observation that in the last ten years the city birth rate has fallen 3.5 per 1000, as compared with a drop of 1.3 in the rural birth rate. What is more important than the loss in physical and numerical values is the loss to the country in spiritual and cultural values. Pedagogues and clergy alike have been bewailing the decline of home influence; they have blamed everything from the automobile to evolution, from jazz bands to Bolshevism. They have failed to see that what was disappearing was not so much home influence as the home itself, that the dimensions of the domestic establishment had shrunk so drastically that there was no longer room for home influence to develop.

Only in terms of a comparison can one measure the loss American society has inflicted on itself through its suicidal failure to provide adequate housing. This comparison will differ for every reader, but in its main features it will be the same — the typical middle-class home of the last generation. For purposes of illustration a personal recollection is permissible. It is a roomy, slightly oldish, un-interiordecorated building in a pretty New England town. It stands pleasantly back from the street on an acre and a half of ground, with a barn, an apple orchard, and a truck garden. The town is a microcosm of New England: a college, two factories, a Boston and Maine ‘deepo,’ and the regular collection of churches, — Episcopalian, ‘Congo,’ Baptist, Methodist, French Catholic, and Roman Catholic, — a community of about three thousand people. There are seven children in the family, and four or five servants — cook, waitress, chambermaid, nurse, and sometimes a governess, not to mention the handy man who looks after the furnace, the barn, and the grounds. With a little doubling up there is room for everybody, and for the guests who frequently visit for a night or a month. Money is never discussed and, though the family is by no means poor, luxuries are rare enough to be what their name implies.

But there is a piano and there is a good library. The mother reads Scott and Dickens and Stevenson aloud in the evening. All the children have had a chance to study music, and one or two play really well. Chopin and Beethoven are as familiar friends as Pickwick Papers or Anne of Geierstein. In the evening the children have supper in the nursery, or as they grow up are allowed to come to the dinner table and listen, with outward respect at least, to the conversation of their elders. There are morning prayers for the entire household and church twice on Sundays. In this atmosphere the children grow up to feel that life is a system to which they belong. When they travel they nearly always stay with friends, even if only for the night, just as their friends visit with them. They come to feel that theirs is a country with a skin to it, a sort of freemasonry of a common culture that begins in the nursery and lasts through college. Wherever they go they meet the same nice, wellbred people, with the same ideas of decency, the same way of life, and the same habit of speech.

Then comes the war, and, as the confusion clears and they have found their work, they turn to try to build up the same sort of home for their own children, only to find that they can’t afford it.

II

Looking back on their home, they may begin to feel, as so many of the rebels do, that it was all perhaps a little stuffy, that tea and Chopin were not enough to prepare one for the stormy life of the twentieth century. It was a bit padded and soft, too much of the comfortable sofa and the wood fire, not enough ‘mixing’ or roughing it. It was more than a little — to use that doleful word — bourgeois. But it had its standards, too; nor were they enervating standards. Bullying was cowardice, a lie was not Freudian, gluttony was not self-expression, and infractions of this code were dealt with, not à la Montessori, but with a ruler in father’s study.

Looking back, again, in the cold light of the post-Armistice years, one can see that this old-fashioned home was poised, like a bubble, on the fact of cheap labor. Our grandfathers had made money by the sale of lands and through investments in railroads and factories, for both of which immigrants were required. From the proceeds of this sale of our birthright, our fathers gave us the culture which we now miss. It is three generations between shirt sleeves, and we are the shirt-sleeve generation, but we find no longer the opportunities for manual labor. The immigrant has moved in and is still moving, and we are derelict. To-day in New England only a third of the people are of the old stock, and the soil is going to the Pole, the Italian, and the French Canadian. We could have done with a bit less culture, a few less railway shares in the safe-deposit box, and a bit more land. It took the war to teach us the meaning of physical toil and suffering; it would have been better if we had learned some of that lesson before and had had a heritage to return to when the war was over.

However, that chance is lost irrevocably. The home built on the sands of immigrant labor has tumbled as precipitously as did the Roman villa after the Antonines. The new home which we have found is in the city, for the roots of our old home did not strike into the soil on which it stood, but into the banking system, and to strike out roots of our own we must first find the money and feed it to the banks. Our opportunities lie in the city, and it is to the city, with its agony of insufficient housing, that we have been driven. We have turned from a nation of landowners to a nation of job-holders; severed from the city which provides our job, we are without resource Here the statistics of our predicament come into play again. In New York City, where the standards of wages and prices are as high as anywhere in the United States, less than a tenth of the heads of families submitting incometax returns have incomes over $5000 a year and only a quarter receive between $2500 and $5000.

Even assuming that one is a member of the emerged tenth, the cost of city living strikes the prospective family like an icy blast. Take alone the simple and inevitable matters of birth, marriage, and death. These are the central events of human life and they come to city dweller and farmer alike. In the code in which we have been educated, the woman and child are entitled to the care and protection of the husband and father. Yet the cost of being born — aside from the inevitable physical travail of the mother and the future economic handicap of the father — has made it one of the most expensive of financial investments. The minimum maternity cost in the average city hospital comes to $150; care described as ‘adequate’ costs $250; a specialist of any variety costs at least $200 more; and well-to-do people must pay at least $1000 for the privilege of doing their social duty. If the child is born in a clinic, it has the lofty satisfaction of knowing that the room its mother occupies costs more a day than the same space in the best hotel in town and that its nurses are paid $16 a day. The city bride must pay anything up to $1500 for what her mother paid $25 for. No wonder, as Grace Fletcher observed, that in 1923 there were 3,637,216 automobiles made in America to 1,792,646 babies.

The cost of a city wedding can hardly be computed; a very ordinary sort of affair, with decorations in the church and a reception afterward, can run to $10,000 without the slightest difficulty. And as for the business of dying, the total the traffic will bear is the guiding principle of the undertaking tribe — ‘morticians,’ they call themselves. One current practice is to trade in the funeral for the full amount of the deceased’s life insurance, if he is poor; where the family is not entirely desperate, they are distracted and in no mood to haggle over terms. This is the mortician’s opportunity, and that he makes the most of it is evidenced by the growth of the gruesome business of burial into a major industry, of nation-wide dimensions, yielding its practitioners more, far more than 6 per cent.

Rents, as we have seen, are nearly double what they were before we went to war. The housing shortage has, as usual, brought out the meaner traits in our society. Padded costs of building material, achieved through collusive bidding; padded construction costs, achieved through union labor ‘tsars’ and ‘wild-cat strikes’; expanding municipal budgets; and the ever-increasing demand for housing, have brought it about that all houses, old as well as new, are letting at rates which represent earnings far in excess of the original investments. Worst of all, the incidence of rent falls most heavily on newly married couples who are setting up their homes. Older people are already settled on long leases, so the greatest expense falls on those who can least stand it. Not only is the rent problem an added penalty to marriage, but it adds to the cost of every commodity — food, clothing, and entertainment — which can conceivably be required by the family; rent is, in fact, the basic item in the cost of living.

Hence there begins that appalling series of economies of which the missing nursery and guestroom are the symbols. The size of the city flat has shrunk until now buildings are being put up with apartments consisting of only one room, with the corners partitioned off to provide closet and sleeping space, kitchenette, and bath. Service of any sort is incredibly dear, for servants are compelled to ask wages sufficient to pay their own rent elsewhere. A house worker costs at least $15 a week, a cook $18, and so on. Now, while a couple can scrape along by themselves, — it is probably salutary that they should learn to wait on themselves and work for themselves, — when any sort of family is involved, ‘help’ (in the homely New England sense) is a social necessity. During illness or the infancy of a child, in the old days one could count on Cousin Jane or a neighbor’s wife at the very least. But in the cubicles of the city there is no place for Cousin Jane to sleep, nor are there any neighbors — only people living in the same house whose interests, connections, and activities are in no way connected with the people across the hall.

III

And so it goes, jobs and rents, food and service, with the walls of the home steadily pressing in and a general uprooting each October. Gas and heat, telephone and electricity, insurance, entertainment, savings, clothes, carfare, medical attention, charity — everywhere the rise of rents has caused the cost of living to expand, subtly, steadily, irrevocably, a cent here, a nickel there, a couple of dollars for this, fifty dollars for that, until every phase of living has become integrated in terms of cash, until the radio (paid for in easy installments) replaces the piano for which there would be no space, until the moving picture replaces the works of Messrs. Dickens, Scott, and Stevenson, and the delicatessen insinuates its convenient blight into the kitchen, and five thousand dollars a year does not begin to provide the simplest and most ordinary amenities of life.

Whether or not the substitution of the Happiness Boys for Chopin’s polonaises, or of Harold Lloyd for Mr. Pickwick, is a positive loss is a matter of opinion. Certainly there can be no two opinions about the state of mind engendered by the unthinking acceptance in toto of all the hand-me-down culture which is invoked to make city life tolerable for the masses. A recent communication in the Contributors’ Column of this magazine put the situation succinctly: —

Not only adults, but even the youngest children of to-day know nothing about leisure, to say nothing of solitude. They are rarely brought into any contact with the elemental forces. They turn up thermostats instead of cutting wood for fuel; they turn electric buttons instead of filling lamps with oil; and they drive through our beautiful north-country mountains at forty miles an hour instead of climbing the slopes or walking along the crests of the Y——

Range. The result is that when somebody asks them for an opinion they look for a button or a switch or an accelerator pedal to manipulate instead of falling back on any realization of the fact that they have been given minds and that these are presumably for occasional use. The pleasantest memories of my childhood are the memories of the quiet evenings about the dining-room table, in the centre of which sat a large lamp and about which were ranged the parents and children, all with books and all quiet. It was something to be looked forward to through all the day, and it was an influence the value of which I shall never be able sufficiently to appreciate.

The fact is that the old-fashioned, cultured home has passed away. The push-buttons themselves are not to blame; they are only the lesser of two evils. The choice no longer lies between the thermostat and chopping wood, but between the thermostat and no heat. Similarly, the choice no longer stands between the push-button family and the circle around that lamp on the dining-room table, but between the push-button family and no family at all.

There is neither space nor opportunity to explore all the branches of this dilemma, for their meanderings only bring one back to the same hard choice. The suburbs, with their illusion of escape, lead only to a wilderness of toy-town cottages, perambulators, and golfing talk, with neither the intimacy of the village nor the indifference of a city. Worse still, suburban society consists principally of young married couples and their infant offspring. It lacks the savor and stability of a society of all ages; it vacillates between the foci of the railway station and the country club, not — as in a real community — between the church and the town meeting. Petty gossip, talk about golf, drinking, and business, round out its intellectual horizon, and the cost of living is higher than in the near-by town from which it pretends to be a reprieve. For all that it suggests release, its roots are not in the soil on which it stands, but in the omnipotent city job which governs the greater part of our population. Suburb or city, it is all the same: two rooms are missing, or, if they are there, are rarely filled.

IV

The price paid for including these two vital rooms is too high for the average city family; what of the price paid for omitting them? The price is paid in terms of social well-being, at the expense of the two oldest social traditions, the family and the art of hospitality. It is these which distinguish man from the animals, these upon which have been reared the towering edifice of Church and State, clan, tribe, and nation, courtesy and chivalry, decency. Subtract the guest chamber from the home and all that you have left is a cocktail shaker. The age of synthetic gin in which we now live is evidence of this fact. Prohibitionists and the professional enthusiasts for law enforcement might well bear this in mind before castigating the recalcitrant cities for their bibulous unorthodoxy. The cocktail shaker, and what goes in it, have become the sacraments of the rite of hospitality. One can no longer give a friend lodging; one can scarcely feed him in the limited space of the city home; but one can mix him a drink, and one does. There is no doubt that this instinctive clinging to the last vestiges of conviviality is responsible for the matter-of-fact manner in which all classes of the city cling to their bootleggers.

The second effect is the one already mentioned. With rents, service, and food all valued in terms of the enormous demand for housing, it is impossible to raise, shelter, feed, clothe, and educate a family in the city, save at the expense of our prejudice against that huggermugger promiscuity which we have hitherto confined to the barnyard. For culture in our sense demands a minimum of privacy, in which the home becomes a refuge, not only from the world without, but from the other members of the family. No doubt it is physically possible to rear a family of five in two small rooms, but it cannot be done save at the expense of privacy and through the imposition of that enforced intimacy of the tenements which drives the slum children out to swell the ominously mounting tide of juvenile delinquency.

The third effect of this situation is the decline of culture to the measure of money and money only. A twoor three-room flat has little space for books, and few opportunities for quiet. The circle around the lighted table is impossible, if only because there is not room for a large enough table. Similarly, amusements must be sought outside. None of the old-fashioned parties with favors, the charades, the games of twenty questions, and the innocent diversions of the latter Victorian era are conceivable in a kitchenette apartment. Outside there are the night clubs and dance halls, if anything like that is desired. Music declines to the radio and phonograph; and the art of rendering Beethoven’s sonatas or of singing Schumann’s songs, no matter how inartistically, is stilled. City neighbors do not look kindly on piano practice, and determined voice culture provokes reprisals. Even the theatre, which is proper to the city, costs too much for the average citizen. With seats at $3.30 in the orchestra, and all the problems of dressing, dining, and transportation to be overcome, a theatre party for four can cost thirty dollars — half a week’s salary—without any difficulty. Instead there are the movies.

Every feature of living — birth, marriage, and death, hospitality, culture, and healthy recreation — is rapidly being integrated to terms of cash by the push-button substitutes which are the best the city can offer the greater part of us. In the city, where the job is, nothing can be done without cash. The dollar mark is being stamped on every facet of urban society, and it is there to stay. Our cities are being converted into ingenious hives where there is room for everything but parks, and where even swimming in the universal ocean can be achieved only by paying some concessionnaire for the use of a bathhouse.

What wonder that the American abroad goes into raptures over London with its ‘pubs’ and parks, and is willing to dispense with a little open plumbing so long as he is treated like a human being and not like an automaton with a nickel in its hand! What wonder that the boulevards and cafés of Paris, the German municipal beerhalls, and the churches and cheap trattorie of Rome strike an overwhelming chord of nostalgia in the touring American! What he experiences is not a spiritual expatriation, but a homesickness for the amenities of life.

The worst of all these cumulative penalties on decent living in this country is that they have made us an uprooted nation. In the city one cannot strike one’s roots down very deep. We are becoming a nation of nomads, living from one moving day to the next, existing from lease to lease. Our friends are not those of our vicinity, but those of our office. Our life centres around the job, which may fail us at any time; and the home which we might fall back on can be terminated the moment we fail to pay rent. This has produced in us a deep malaise, the demoralization of the déraciné, the unrest of the uprooted. We are heirs to an inestimable investment in terms of social effort; we are ourselves the product of a considerable outlay in human and cultural energies; and we find that we can do nothing with either but push bigger and better buttons.

Even if we make a lot of money, what can we do with it? Buy a home? Where? Investments fail and purchasing power decreases and taxes rise. Have lots of children? What if our business goes on the rocks or is reorganized by Mr. Dillon? What if our professional skill becomes outmoded? We are now completely at the mercy of the buttons we push. Our young men can no longer go West or South with profit — they will only find the same system. No longer are our feet on the solid ground of husbandry, nor is our income derived even indirectly from the soil. What we sell is ‘service,’ and as soon as our services cease to have value there is no place to which we can retire.

We are facing one of the most serious debacles since the decline of the Roman Empire, and possibly for the same reason. Somehow, somewhere, we have set forces in motion which are driving us to the cities, and once there we remain slaves to that precarious freedom which permits us to work or starve. The immigrant is on the land which was once ours, and — unhampered by notions of privacy, Victorian culture, or by the sanctity of drawing interest — is making it pay in localities where the Yankee gave up in despair. Whether this will mean the slow extinction of the American race is still problematical; certainly it means the abandonment of a large part of our racial heritage. The most hopeful sign — for us — is the fact that the immigrant himself is socially demoralized even more rapidly than we were. What meant hard money for us means easy money for him. By applying his oldworld notions of thrift and industry he can thrive on our racial leavings; but his sons and daughters have little stomach for the toil involved. They turn to the ‘easy jobs,’ the fixed hours and fixed pay of the mills and cities, and fill our slums with the opportunist swarm of casual laborers which is the feature of our greater cities. They are inclined to be insubordinate and inefficient, where their alien parents were inflexibly ambitious and hard-working. Now that the immigration tide is shut off, the curse of American life — the desire to get something for nothing — may give the old stock something they have not deserved: a second chance. Stripped of our lands, our ways, and our ideals, we may yet emerge from the city as the immigrant’s children rush in to get at the push-buttons, and so return to our land a humbler and a harder people.