Etiquette Needed for Outdoors

The girl who leaves the scene of a picnic littered with papers and tin cans should feel the same embarrassment that paralyzed the young woman who wanted to order lobster but didn't dare.

A campaign to make people behave more like human beings has been observable recently in the press throughout the country. Its purpose is highly praiseworthy, but its execution indicates a failure to understand how to get results. Despite widespread and earnest condemnation of certain human faults, they persist like dandelions. People still pull wild flowers and throw them away wilted before they leave the woods. They continue to drive their cars homeward loaded with branches of dogwood or redbud. They throw lighted matches and cigarettes into dry leaves and grass. They still contaminate springs and streams, and kill useful birds and harm less small animals. They are unmoved by threats, by emotional pleas and by ridicule.

There is a way to penetrate such thick skins. It is not by sermons or radio talks or reproachful writings in the daily papers. Even Ding's cartoon of the mob fervently digging in the pleasant green fields, making the wild flowers wild, carries no satiric point to their dull souls. They see only that it’s a funny picture. So, too, with W. C. FIELDS's sharply ironic skit, in which his little picnic party knock down fences, break windows, destroy gardens and ravage the landscape. They perceive in this mocking picture only a merry duplicate of good times, they have had. Laws to protect private property in the country and to conserve certain of the rarer wild flowers exist, but are sadly disregarded.

The appeal to judgment and self-control must come by some more subtle path. Direct methods have failed. Why not try the system advocated by the ladies who know all about manners indoors? The problem is essentially one of manners, but the habit of being polite and kind and considerate of others outdoors has not yet fastened on people as it should and as it can be made to do. More can be accomplished by books of outdoor etiquette than by the police. 

The youth who uses the wrong fork knows that every eye is turned contemptuously on him. The same unhappy feeling should be induced in the man who pulls boughs off flowering trees. He must be made to feel that such depredation is a social error which, if discovered, may prevent his success. The girl who leaves the scene of a picnic littered with papers and tin cans should feel the same embarrassment that paralyzed the young woman who wanted to order lobster but didn't dare.

The campaigners for decent treatment of the out-of-doors will do well to save their breath. Instead of shouting that there ought to be a law they would better commission one of the authorities on good manners indoors to write a book for the same purpose outdoors. Such an arbiter elegantiarum might make the stupid despoilers of nature feel as uncouth and rude as the boor who is miserable because he doesn't know how to remove a fish bone from his mouth. —The New York Times, May 16, 1926

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia