The Corrosion of Vulgarity…

Some years ago, David Starr Jordan wrote these widely published words: “The gauntlet of obscene suggestion…” he said, “is one of the most terrible our children have to face. We judge of the wickedness of Pompeii by evil signs and paintings, which the baptism of fire and eighteen centuries of burial have failed to purify. They are still mute witnesses of a personal degeneration toward which they once served to entice. If [our cities] were to be buried today, some future generation would judge us thus severely. The vulgar…suggestions of vice and crime, might be mute witness to the social decay…. They do not tell the whole story…but their testimony is honest so far as it goes. It is the call to unearned pleasures, the call to degradation, and our children as they pass cannot choose but listen [and] grow old before their time…from the corrosion of vulgarity and obscene suggestion…. Its effect is shown in precocious knowledge [and] the loss of the bloom of youth….

“To be vulgar is to do that which is not the best of its kind. It is to do poor things in poor ways, and to be satisfied with that…. It is vulgar to like poor music, to read weak books, to feed on sensational [publications]…to find amusement in trashy novels, to enjoy vulgar theaters, to find pleasures in cheap jokes, to tolerate coarseness and looseness…. We find the corrosion of vulgarity everywhere, and its poison enters every home. The [streets] of our cities are covered with its evidence, our newspapers are redolent with it, our story-books reek with it….

“It is the hope of civilization that [we] may outgrow the toleration of vulgarity, but we have a long struggle before us…. The forces which make for vulgarity tend also toward obscenity, for all vulgarity tends to grow obscene…. This vice is like the pestilence. Wherever it finds lodgment it kills. It fills the mind with vile pictures, which will come up again and again, standing in the way of all healthful effort…by the utter decay…of the habit of obscenity.”

Such were the courageous, forthright words of an eminent educator, concerning a pernicious problem. Profanity, vulgarity, obscenity: if we don’t rid them from our lives they will rob us of some things we can least afford to lose.