ALAN writes:
Government in St. Louis takes pains to make the streets safe for lawbreakers, thugs, and parasites. Not so, you say? My reply: As good as.
Recently, a friend of mine, slightly past retirement age, became a victim. A thug broke into her home, attacked her, and demanded money. There are so few neighbors left that it was unlikely any of them would come to her aid because they, like her, are extremely reluctant to go out after dark.
“…..the older people worry about crime and fear the streets almost as much as they took sustenance from them in the old days. …in the 1950s they considered the streets to be their home, an extension of their property, whereas today the streets are an alien place…”. — Alan Ehrenhalt, The Lost City, Basic Books, 1995, p. 254
What he wrote is true. He was writing about Chicago, but his words apply perfectly to similar neighborhoods in St. Louis.
The chance that victims of such crime will see “The Law” arrest and punish their assailants is roughly equal to their chance of winning the lottery. Fire department sirens are common in her neighborhood, she told me, but she seldom sees police cars go by. Ancient manuscripts tell of policemen “walking the beat” in city neighborhoods to help keep them safe, a common sight in years before citizens elected “Progressives”, Feminists, and other geniuses to take over city government. One man who lived there for 25 years said, “We are prisoners in our own house. My mother can’t walk to the store. We call police and they arrive a day late and a dollar short.” Who has more credibility in matters like that? An ordinary citizen who lived there? Or a city government that manages year after year to keep the neighborhood safe for the riff-raff and deadly for law-abiding citizens?
“Doubtless the modern system of leniency in dealing with offenders is the main reason why crime and criminals seem to increase…” So said an editorial in the St. Louis Police Journal of Jan. 13, 1917. Could truer words be written?
A century later, the decent citizens in St. Louis are still suffering from the consequences of such leniency, proving that those who run city government and the courts refuse to learn from history. My friend and I were fortunate to grow up in intervening years when such leniency was held to a minimum and it was possible to live in safe, civilized neighborhoods. For several decades in the twentieth century, city government gave taxpayers what they were paying for: No-nonsense law enforcement. Today it gives them nonsense in the name of law enforcement.
(Examples: Political Theater, sloganeering, excuses, evasions, vocabulary subject to the approval of Progressives and Feminists, airhead “programs” like “Cure Violence”, prosecutors who protect thugs by refusing to prosecute, city-wide vandalism, “new ideas”, non-objective law, courts that set new standards in leniency, sob stories for killers, Feminist mush instead of masculine authority, Orwellian ready-made phrases like “shootings happen” and “gun violence”, repeated over and over in today’s feminized “journalism'” practiced by youngsters who can’t spell and can’t read maps, and “Progressives” and “Liberals” who are never more “Liberal” than with other people’s lives, property, and rights. Credit where credit is due.)
When they are not busy making up new excuses, city bureaucrats promote technological gimmicks like “traffic calming pots” and “1800 security cameras” in the pretense that such things will help to make the city safer. They are frauds and liars. Such gimmicks are vaudeville diversions. Law-breaking is not a problem in technology. It is a problem in ethics. It can be resolved only by moral-philosophical–not material–countermeasures. But to do that would require a profound change in frame of mind and vocabulary; not a resort to “science”, but the cultivation of moral fiber and moral certitude; not a festival of “new ideas”, but a restoration of the wisdom in old ideas. Even though it would benefit them greatly, St. Louisans are nowhere near that point. The men who wrote the Police Journal would look upon today’s feminized law and feminized journalism as a sweetheart courtesy to criminals and a slap in the face to law-abiding citizens.
What do I mean by “change in frame of mind”? A newspaper article provides a case in point: “Woman Breaks Broom on Thief” reads the headline, followed by a richly-detailed account. When a burglar entered her house in south St. Louis late one evening, she chased him with a baseball bat, but he managed to get away. He tried again a few nights later, and she responded by bopping him on his head with a broomstick that was left in three pieces. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 23, 1906, p. 3)
Her frame of mind was the same shared by nearly all Americans in those years, central to which was the judgment that lawbreakers and rule-breakers are not “sick”, are not “victims”, and are not “misunderstood”, but that they are cheaters. The only way to respond to such people, they decided, was by strict and consistent rule-enforcement and punishment, not by accommodating sob stories or claims that poverty causes crime.
But the time came when most Americans, drunk on the illusions fostered by modern “science”, threw that understanding out the window. In its place, they accepted a bill of goods peddled by racketeers in the medical and pharmaceutical rackets and in government, the biggest racket of all. The latest variation of such racketeering is the claim that “behavioral science” will help government to make cities safer. The frame of mind implicit therein is the claim that lawbreakers are poor, helpless, sick, disadvantaged, uneducated “victims”. The way to deal with such people, they claim, is by lovey-dovey “caring” and by accommodating every sob story, excuse, and evasion their apologists will concoct. In other words, law-abiding citizens should be forced not only to pay for that lovey-dovey “caring” for the criminal scum who assault them, but to be “compassionate” in what they say about them in order not to hurt the sensitive feelings of killers and other thugs. (It is so insensitive to call a thug a thug.) Such arguments prove that their proponents are morally and philosophically bankrupt, as are people who swallow the barrage of propaganda in favor of a “partnership” of “The Law” with medical-pharmaceutical racketeers.
There are no reasons to believe that the modern “enlightened” frame of mind has, or can have, the slightest moral or political justification. Those who promote that frame of mind will never make cities safe; they–aided by an army of technocrats — will make cities into the equivalent of “The Village” in Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner”.
By contrast, there is every reason to believe that the old, traditional frame of mind provides the best practical and only morally-valid way of dealing with cheaters. People who would not tolerate cheating in golf or baseball nevertheless permit their government to evade punishing thugs and parasites who make a career of cheating in the rules of civilized life.
My friend never hurt anyone in her life. She lived, by choice, in the house where she grew up. Like me, she grew up being taught that government is there to protect law-abiding citizens, not those who attack them. In St. Louis today, wouldn’t that be a novelty?
Her house is a modest one in what once was a densely populated, Irish Catholic neighborhood, close to German neighborhoods. Her grandmother lived across the street. A brick house nearby was built in 1845 and became the home of six generations of doctors. She and her siblings walked to and from parochial school. In 1965, its 460 pupils were taught by 8 Sisters of St. Joseph and 3 Lay teachers. The school and parish were closed 30 years ago because of declining membership–because families moved away–because criminals overran their neighborhood–because “The Law” did nothing to suppress them and keep the neighborhood livable.
Reader James H. remarked on the many beautiful old churches he saw during a drive through north St. Louis in 2017. (“In the Graveyards of St. Louis”, The Thinking Housewife, March 22, 2017). Some of them are gone now, but my friend remembers them all.
When she was young, neighborhood residents could walk to a movie theater, grocery stores, beauty and barber shops, an ice cream store, a dry goods store, a diner, a cigar store with a wooden Indian in front, and other little shops and offices. In the center of them all was the city’s oldest water tower, built in 1871. Streetcars would make a loop around the tower. In 1901, a neighborhood resident walked up 225 steps in a circular staircase inside the tower and, risking his life, out on to a ledge at the top of the tower to rescue a cat who lived in a neighborhood barber shop. Today, you need not climb a tower to risk your life. Being there is the risk. If a private security company proved itself as ineffectual and incompetent as municipal government, would its customers be stupid enough to continue paying its bills?
In 2020, a group of citizens got tired of looking at the wear and tear on the old water tower and gave it a sparkling new paint job. That is to their credit. The cruel irony is that it stands in the midst of abandoned houses, boarded-up buildings, empty lots, and streets controlled by thugs. A large building that was once an old folks’ home was condemned in 2012 because of repeated vandalism. Its ruins are still there today in plain sight. Outsiders drive into the neighborhood to dump trash in the alleys.
My friend and I have exchanged cards and letters — on paper. Her handwriting is so neat that it reminds me of the good penmanship illustrations that we saw on blackboards in the parochial schools that we attended. Like me, she remembers the rows of desks, the blackboards, the nuns in their traditional Catholic habits, the open windows, and the radiators that were then common features in Catholic school classrooms. Like me, she and her siblings grew up in the 1950s-’60s, when city neighborhoods had a very different tone and texture of everyday life.
“Family–that’s the important thing. If a man has a family, he’s a multimillionaire…”, said Ed Wynn’s character in the 1957 motion picture “Marjorie Morningstar”. In that sense, residents of her neighborhood were wealthy in those years–because many intact families and strong Catholic parishes helped to stabilize the neighborhood. Today, with all their pretentious gadgets, amusements, coded locks, passwords, and home alarm systems, the few remaining residents are poor by comparison.
Her house is filled with heirlooms and memories of her family and that neighborhood. For people her age and mine, the past is never past. Such homes and memories acquire more value with each passing year. She and I and others our age owe much of the happiness we have known to parents and grandparents whose code of morality was never up for negotiation. Those who have gone before us are never “past”. They are forever here in our memories and awareness. They are the ones with whom we speak silently in gratitude, sorrow, or despair.
She is writing a history of her house. She told me how, when she was young, older folks would walk through alleys looking for discarded glass objects that might still have some life in them. Her photo albums include snapshots showing the children in their parochial school uniforms or during a day cruise aboard the S.S. Admiral excursion boat. She recalls how her mother would take the children downtown to dine in cafeterias and shop at department stores and candy stores, memories parallel to my own. We talked about the virtues of a cold bottle of “Whistle Orange” soda on summer days when we were young.
She remembers hearing older folks talk about going to the Casa Loma Ballroom in south St. Louis, a popular destination for dancers. When she was young and friends came to visit her family, it was common for everyone to sit and talk in the kitchen, seldom in the living room, a practice that I, too, remember from the 1950s.
She and I remember a time when cities like St. Louis, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco were centers of civilization and inspired civic loyalty and beautiful songs with uplifting melodies and words.
She told me that old neighbors or residents came back to their neighborhood years afterward, saw the vandalism, and expressed astonishment, as if the causes of that decay were shrouded in mystery. When they asked her “What happened?”, she told them, “You moved away”.
Decent citizens like my friend want nothing more than to live responsibly, maintain their homes, and be left unmolested by thugs and do-gooders alike. But they cannot do that if local government betrays them by permitting lowlifes to take over their neighborhoods and leave them looking like Germany after World War Ii. And the destruction of strong Catholic parishes was not an act of God but was engineered by conniving scoundrels in government acting behind innocent-sounding slogans like “urban renewal”.
“….People will move out of the cities to escape the degradation the Communists have planned for them,” Kent Steffgen wrote in his brilliant analysis of the 1960s’ “civil rights” revolution, The Bondage of the Free: A Critical Examination of the Misnamed ‘Civil Rights’ Cause from the Civil War Through the Cold War (Vanguard Books, 1966), p. 316.
And indeed they did — instead of standing firm, defending the homes and neighborhoods their ancestors built and they inherited, and demanding strict law enforcement from local government.
I know how my friend feels about the decay and loss of what was once a decent neighborhood. Two weeks ago, five people were shot at a corner where my mother and I walked on Saturdays in the 1950s on our weekly shopping trip to Cherokee Street. The house where my girlfriend Mary Ann lived in 1956 is now abandoned with windows shattered. A dead body was found behind a house in the block where we lived in 1959. Murders are perpetrated across the street from the Catholic high school I attended in 1964.
All those things would have been unimaginable to us and our neighbors in the 1950s-’60s. The frame of mind in which those things are done is entirely alien to–and incompatible with–the frame of mind of people who lived there in those years. It is the same frame of mind that sanctions sob stories. The riff-raff brought that frame of mind into those neighborhoods and was wholly unopposed by municipal government, as it still is today. If you think that that change in frame of mind represents the difference between white and black, you are right.
By his choice, my father lived close to the neighborhood where he grew up. Most of it was flattened in the early 1960s as part of the fraud called “urban renewal”. But he lived nearby for 25 years afterward because he always thought of that neighborhood as his home. It was home to him in the way the word “home” is intended in the lyric of the beautiful 1931 song “Home (When Shadows Fall)”. He and I enjoyed listening to that song on quiet evenings in the 1980s, and it thus became one of my favorites.
Janet Graham Stockwell was born in St. Louis when Lincoln was president. She grew up and lived in a neighborhood of south St. Louis in which mining for coal and clay was carried on for decades. As the years went by, large portions of that neighborhood were modernized and older features faded into history. Late in her life, she wrote some jottings in her notebook “in a mood of keen homesickness for the place where she had been born and reared and still thought of as home.” Her daughter, Mary Joan Boyer, was inspired by those notes to write a book about that neighborhood. “To some who remembered that part of St. Louis as home, it seemed like the desecration of something sacred.” (Mary Joan Boyer, The Old Gravois Coal Diggings, 1952, pp. 1, 34). That area “was a fine place to call home in those days–and it will always be home, sweet home, to me,” she wrote. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 16, 1948, p. 20)
I imagine my friend might say much the same thing about the desecration of the neighborhood where she lived through so many happy years and still thinks of as home. The difference is that material changes to the landscape and cultural changes in living resulted in the loss of the neighborhood recalled by those two women, whereas the desecration of my friend’s neighborhood was caused by thugs, vandals, and minimal law enforcement. And it goes without saying that corrupt officials in municipal government and corrupt courts will sooner perform backflips than acknowledge their treason to law-abiding citizens like my friend.
Laura writes:
Thank you for these insights and poignant memories.
I would just like to note that if the police, city government or law-abiding citizens in St. Louis were to decide to become tough on crime, the full force of the federal government and the mainstream media would come crashing down on them. They would be subject to major lawsuits and to protests; mobs would very possibly destroy much of what remains. They would be vilified as “racist” and crime would get worse, not better. While it’s true, as you say, that law-breaking is not a problem in technology, but a problem in ethics, the most serious ethical problem is at the top of our government and media.
