THE CITY
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
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NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LIMITED
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THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON
The MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA
TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAI
THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY
SHANGHAI
THE CITY
BY
ROBERT E. PARK
ERNEST W. BURGESS
RODERICK D. McKENZIE
WITH A BIBLIOGRAPHY BY
LOUIS WIRTH
[Illustration: [Logo]]
THE
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO·ILLINOIS
COPYRIGHT 1925 BY
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
All Rights Reserved
Published December 1925
Composed and Printed By
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
PREFACE
Some years ago I was asked to outline a program of studies of human
nature and social life under modern city conditions. The first paper in
this volume was written in response to that request. The other chapters
are by-products of the more detailed monographic studies suggested in
that paper and already measurably carried to completion. They have
arisen naturally as a commentary upon and interpretation of these larger
studies, exploring and delimiting the field of observation and research
in which these subjects lie. It has seemed, therefore, that although
they were written at different times and by different hands, they might
serve as a general introduction to further studies in the field. Some of
the larger monographs referred to above are nearly ready for the press
and when published will constitute, with this volume, a series in the
sociology of urban life.
Most of the papers in this volume have already found their way into
print, in whole or in part, either in the _Proceedings of the American
Sociological Society_ or in the pages of other sociological
publications.
The chapter “The City,” which gives the title to this volume, was first
published in the _American Journal of Sociology_ for March, 1915. It has
been revised and to some extent rewritten for publication in this
volume. No attempt has been made, however, to redefine the point of view
or the project as originally outlined.
The chapter “The Growth of the City” was presented first as a paper at
the meeting of the Sociological Society in Washington, in 1923. It was
subsequently printed in the _Proceedings_ of the Society for that year.
It is intended to sketch a point of view for the study of the expansion
of the urban area and the growth of the urban community, particularly as
they are related to the recognized problems, communal and personal, of
the city.
Professor McKenzie’s paper, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the
Human Community,” was first published in the _American Journal of
Sociology_ for November, 1925. It is intended to emphasize the fact that
the conceptions and methods of study of plant and animal ecology may be
profitably applied to the analysis and description of certain aspects of
human society. These three papers, with the classified bibliography by
Louis Wirth, represent whatever is novel in the point of view and the
methods of study of the urban community, to which this volume is
intended as an introduction.
Certain of the remaining chapters, including the paper “The Natural
History of the Newspaper,” first published in the _American Journal of
Sociology_, November, 1923; the paper “Magic, Mentality, and City Life,”
presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Society, in
Washington, D.C., December, 1923; and the brief paper on the “Mind of
the Hobo,” first printed under the title “The Mind of the Rover,” in the
_World Tomorrow_, September, 1923, will no doubt seem rather remote from
the theme of this volume. The justification for including them here is
that they suggest lines of observation in a field that students are just
now beginning to explore. It seems evident that there is a very definite
relation between human intelligence and community organization. Although
no specific studies have been made in this field, they should be
included, at least prospectively, in the list of problems for further
study.
The substance of the chapter “Community Organization and Juvenile
Delinquency” was presented at the annual meeting of the Recreation
Congress, in Springfield, Illinois, October 8–12, 1923, but has not been
previously published. The paper “Community Organization and the Romantic
Temper” was read at the meeting of the American Sociological Society in
Washington, D.C., in 1923, in the section on Community Organization. It
was published in the _Journal of Social Forces_, May, 1925.
Professor Burgess’ paper, “Can Neighborhood Work Have a Scientific
Basis?” was presented at the annual meeting of the National Conference
of Social Work, in Toronto, May 1924. An abstract of this paper was
published in the _Proceedings_ of the conference for that year.
In conclusion, the authors wish to take this occasion to acknowledge
their indebtedness to the publishers for using here the papers in the
journals mentioned.
ROBERT E. PARK
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
November 2, 1925
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE CITY: SUGGESTIONS FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF HUMAN
BEHAVIOR IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT. _Robert E. Park_ 1
II. THE GROWTH OF THE CITY: AN INTRODUCTION TO A RESEARCH
PROJECT. _Ernest W. Burgess_ 47
III. THE ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF THE HUMAN
COMMUNITY. _R. D. McKenzie_ 63
IV. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE NEWSPAPER. _Robert E. Park_ 80
V. COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY. _Robert
E. Park_ 99
VI. COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND THE ROMANTIC TEMPER. _Robert E.
Park_ 113
VII. MAGIC, MENTALITY, AND CITY LIFE. _Robert E. Park_ 123
VIII. CAN NEIGHBORHOOD WORK HAVE A SCIENTIFIC BASIS? _Ernest W.
Burgess_ 142
IX. THE MIND OF THE HOBO: REFLECTIONS UPON THE RELATION
BETWEEN MENTALITY AND LOCOMOTION. _Robert E. Park_ 156
X. A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE URBAN COMMUNITY. _Louis Wirth_ 161
INDEXES 229
CHAPTER I
THE CITY: SUGGESTIONS FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN THE
URBAN ENVIRONMENT
The city, from the point of view of this paper, is something more than a
congeries of individual men and of social conveniences—streets,
buildings, electric lights, tramways, and telephones, etc.; something
more, also, than a mere constellation of institutions and administrative
devices—courts, hospitals, schools, police, and civil functionaries of
various sorts. The city is, rather, a state of mind, a body of customs
and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that
inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. The
city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an
artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the
people who compose it; it is a product of nature, and particularly of
human nature.
The city has, as Oswald Spengler has recently pointed out, its own
culture: “What his house is to the peasant, the city is to civilized
man. As the house has its household gods, so has the city its protecting
Deity, its local saint. The city also, like the peasant’s hut, has its
roots in the soil.”[1]
The city has been studied, in recent times, from the point of view of
its geography, and still more recently from the point of view of its
ecology. There are forces at work within the limits of the urban
community—within the limits of any natural area of human habitation, in
fact—which tend to bring about an orderly and typical grouping of its
population and institutions. The science which seeks to isolate these
factors and to describe the typical constellations of persons and
institutions which the co-operation of these forces produce, is what we
call human, as distinguished from plant and animal, ecology.
Transportation and communication, tramways and telephones, newspapers
and advertising, steel construction and elevators—all things, in fact,
which tend to bring about at once a greater mobility and a greater
concentration of the urban populations—are primary factors in the
ecological organization of the city.
The city is not, however, merely a geographical and ecological unit; it
is at the same time an economic unit. The economic organization of the
city is based on the division of labor. The multiplication of
occupations and professions within the limits of the urban population is
one of the most striking and least understood aspects of modern city
life. From this point of view, we may, if we choose, think of the city,
that is to say, the place and the people, with all the machinery and
administrative devices that go with them, as organically related; a kind
of psychophysical mechanism in and through which private and political
interests find not merely a collective but a corporate expression.
Much of what we ordinarily regard as the city—its charters, formal
organization, buildings, street railways, and so forth—is, or seems to
be, mere artifact. But these things in themselves are utilities,
adventitious devices which become part of the living city only when, and
in so far as, through use and wont they connect themselves, like a tool
in the hand of man, with the vital forces resident in individuals and in
the community.
The city is, finally, the natural habitat of civilized man. It is for
that reason a cultural area characterized by its own peculiar cultural
type:
“It is a quite certain, but never fully recognized, fact,” says
Spengler, “that all great cultures are city-born. The outstanding man of
the second generation is a city-building animal. This is the actual
criterion of world-history, as distinguished from the history of
mankind: world-history is the history of city men. Nations, governments,
politics, and religions—all rest on the basic phenomenon of human
existence, the city.”[2]
Anthropology, the science of man, has been mainly concerned up to the
present with the study of primitive peoples. But civilized man is quite
as interesting an object of investigation, and at the same time his life
is more open to observation and study. Urban life and culture are more
varied, subtle, and complicated, but the fundamental motives are in both
instances the same. The same patient methods of observation which
anthropologists like Boas and Lowie have expended on the study of the
life and manners of the North American Indian might be even more
fruitfully employed in the investigation of the customs, beliefs, social
practices, and general conceptions of life prevalent in Little Italy on
the lower North Side in Chicago, or in recording the more sophisticated
folkways of the inhabitants of Greenwich Village and the neighborhood of
Washington Square, New York.
We are mainly indebted to writers of fiction for our more intimate
knowledge of contemporary urban life. But the life of our cities demands
a more searching and disinterested study than even Émile Zola has given
us in his “experimental” novels and the annals of the Rougon-Macquart
family.
We need such studies, if for no other reason than to enable us to read
the newspapers intelligently. The reason that the daily chronicle of the
newspaper is so shocking, and at the same time so fascinating, to the
average reader is because the average reader knows so little about the
life of which the newspaper is the record.
The observations which follow are intended to define a point of view and
to indicate a program for the study of urban life: its physical
organization, its occupations, and its culture.
I. THE CITY PLAN AND LOCAL ORGANIZATION
The city, particularly the modern American city, strikes one at first
blush as so little a product of the artless processes of nature and
growth, that it is difficult to recognize it as a living entity. The
ground plan of most American cities, for example, is a checkerboard. The
unit of distance is the block. This geometrical form suggests that the
city is a purely artificial construction which might conceivably be
taken apart and put together again, like a house of blocks.
The fact is, however, that the city is rooted in the habits and customs
of the people who inhabit it. The consequence is that the city possesses
a moral as well as a physical organization, and these two mutually
interact in characteristic ways to mold and modify one another. It is
the structure of the city which first impresses us by its visible
vastness and complexity. But this structure has its basis, nevertheless,
in human nature, of which it is an expression. On the other hand, this
vast organization which has arisen in response to the needs of its
inhabitants, once formed, imposes itself upon them as a crude external
fact, and forms them, in turn, in accordance with the design and
interests which it incorporates. Structure and tradition are but
different aspects of a single cultural complex which determines what is
characteristic and peculiar to city, as distinguished from village, life
and the life of the open fields.
_The city plan._—It is because the city has a life quite its own that
there is a limit to the arbitrary modifications which it is possible to
make (1) in its physical structure and (2) in its moral order.
The city plan, for example, establishes metes and bounds, fixes in a
general way the location and character of the city’s constructions, and
imposes an orderly arrangement, within the city area, upon the buildings
which are erected by private initiative as well as by public authority.
Within the limitations prescribed, however, the inevitable processes of
human nature proceed to give these regions and these buildings a
character which it is less easy to control. Under our system of
individual ownership, for instance, it is not possible to determine in
advance the extent of concentration of population which is likely to
occur in any given area. The city cannot fix land values, and we leave
to private enterprise, for the most part, the task of determining the
city’s limits and the location of its residential and industrial
districts. Personal tastes and convenience, vocational and economic
interests, infallibly tend to segregate and thus to classify the
populations of great cities. In this way the city acquires an
organization and distribution of population which is neither designed
nor controlled.
The Bell Telephone Company is now making, particularly in New York and
Chicago, elaborate investigations, the purpose of which is to determine,
in advance of its actual changes, the probable growth and distribution
of the urban population within the metropolitan areas. The Sage
Foundation, in the course of its city-planning studies, sought to find
mathematical formulae that would enable them to predict future expansion
and limits of population in New York City. The recent development of
chain stores has made the problem of location a matter of concern to
different chain-store corporations. The result has been the rise of a
new profession.
There is now a class of experts whose sole occupation is to discover and
locate, with something like scientific accuracy, taking account of the
changes which present tendencies seem likely to bring about,
restaurants, cigar stores, drug-stores, and other smaller retail
business units whose success depends largely on location. Real-estate
men are not infrequently willing to finance a local business of this
sort in locations which they believe will be profitable, accepting as
their rent a percentage of the profits.
Physical geography, natural advantages and disadvantages, including
means of transportation, determine in advance the general outlines of
the urban plan. As the city increases in population, the subtler
influences of sympathy, rivalry, and economic necessity tend to control
the distribution of population. Business and industry seek advantageous
locations and draw around them certain portions of the population. There
spring up fashionable residence quarters from which the poorer classes
are excluded because of the increased value of the land. Then there grow
up slums which are inhabited by great numbers of the poorer classes who
are unable to defend themselves from association with the derelict and
vicious.
In the course of time every section and quarter of the city takes on
something of the character and qualities of its inhabitants. Each
separate part of the city is inevitably stained with the peculiar
sentiments of its population. The effect of this is to convert what was
at first a mere geographical expression into a neighborhood, that is to
say, a locality with sentiments, traditions, and a history of its own.
Within this neighborhood the continuity of the historical processes is
somehow maintained. The past imposes itself upon the present, and the
life of every locality moves on with a certain momentum of its own, more
or less independent of the larger circle of life and interests about it.
The organization of the city, the character of the urban environment and
of the discipline which it imposes is finally determined by the size of
the population, its concentration and distribution within the city area.
For this reason it is important to study the growth of cities, to
compare the idiosyncrasies in the distribution of city populations. Some
of the first things we want to know about the city, therefore are:
What are the sources of the city’s population?
What part of its population growth is normal, i.e., due to excess of
births over deaths?
What part is due to migration (_a_) of native stocks? (_b_) foreign
stocks?
What are the outstanding “natural” areas, i.e., areas of population
segregation?
How is distribution of population within the city area affected by
(_a_) economic interest, i.e., land values? (_b_) by sentimental
interest, race? vocation, etc.?
Where within the city is the population declining? Where is it
expanding?
Where are population growth and the size of families within the
different natural areas of the city correlated with births and deaths,
with marriages and divorces, with house rents and standards of living?
_The neighborhood._—Proximity and neighborly contact are the basis for
the simplest and most elementary form of association with which we have
to do in the organization of city life. Local interests and associations
breed local sentiment, and, under a system which makes residence the
basis for participation in the government, the neighborhood becomes the
basis of political control. In the social and political organization of
the city it is the smallest local unit.
It is surely one of the most remarkable of all social facts that,
coming down from untold ages, there should be this instinctive
understanding that the man who establishes his home beside yours
begins to have a claim upon your sense of comradeship.... The
neighborhood is a social unit which, by its clear definition of
outline, its inner organic completeness, its hair-trigger reactions,
may be fairly considered as functioning like a social mind.... The
local boss, however autocratic he may be in the larger sphere of the
city with the power he gets from the neighborhood, must always be in
and of the people; and he is very careful not to try to deceive the
local people so far as their local interests are concerned. It is hard
to fool a neighborhood about its own affairs.[3]
The neighborhood exists without formal organization. The local
improvement society is a structure erected on the basis of the
spontaneous neighborhood organization and exists for the purpose of
giving expression to the local sentiment in regard to matters of local
interest.
Under the complex influences of the city life, what may be called the
normal neighborhood sentiment has undergone many curious and interesting
changes, and produced many unusual types of local communities. More than
that, there are nascent neighborhoods and neighborhoods in process of
dissolution. Consider, for example, Fifth Avenue, New York, which
probably never had an improvement association, and compare with it 135th
Street in the Bronx (where the Negro population is probably more
concentrated than in any other single spot in the world), which is
rapidly becoming a very intimate and highly organized community.
In the history of New York the significance of the name Harlem has
changed from Dutch to Irish to Jewish to Negro. Of these changes the
last has come most swiftly. Throughout colored America, from
Massachusetts to Mississippi and across the continent to Los Angeles
and Seattle, its name, which as late as fifteen years ago has scarcely
been heard, now stands for the Negro metropolis. Harlem is, indeed,
the great Mecca for the sight-seer, the pleasure-seeker, the curious,
the adventurous, the enterprising, the ambitious, and the talented of
the Negro world; for the lure of it has reached down to every island
of the Carib Sea and has penetrated even into Africa.[4]
It is important to know what are the forces which tend to break up the
tensions, interests, and sentiments which give neighborhoods their
individual character. In general these may be said to be anything and
everything that tends to render the population unstable, to divide and
concentrate attentions upon widely separated objects of interest.
What part of the population is floating?
Of what elements, i.e., races, classes, etc., is this population
composed?
How many people live in hotels, apartments, and tenements?
How many people own their own homes?
What proportion of the population consists of nomads, hobos, gypsies?
On the other hand, certain urban neighborhoods suffer from isolation.
Efforts have been made at different times to reconstruct and quicken the
life of city neighborhoods and to bring them in touch with the larger
interests of the community. Such is, in part, the purpose of the social
settlements. These organizations and others which are attempting to
reconstruct city life have developed certain methods and a technique for
stimulating and controlling local communities. We should study, in
connection with the investigation of these agencies, these methods and
this technique, since it is just the method by which objects are
practically controlled that reveals their essential nature, that is to
say, their predictable character (_Gesetzmässigkeit_).[5]
In many of the European cities, and to some extent in this country,
reconstruction of city life has gone to the length of building garden
suburbs, or replacing unhealthful and run-down tenements with model
buildings owned and controlled by the municipality.
In American cities the attempt has been made to renovate evil
neighborhoods by the construction of playgrounds and the introduction of
supervised sports of various kinds, including municipal dances in
municipal dance halls. These and other devices which are intended
primarily to elevate the moral tone of the segregated populations of
great cities should be studied in connection with the investigation of
the neighborhood in general. They should be studied, in short, not
merely for their own sake, but for what they can reveal to us of human
behavior and human nature generally.
_Colonies and segregated areas._—In the city environment the
neighborhood tends to lose much of the significance which it possessed
in simpler and more primitive forms of society. The easy means of
communication and of transportation, which enable individuals to
distribute their attention and to live at the same time in several
different worlds, tend to destroy the permanency and intimacy of the
neighborhood. On the other hand, the isolation of the immigrant and
racial colonies of the so-called ghettos and areas of population
segregation tend to preserve and, where there is racial prejudice, to
intensify the intimacies and solidarity of the local and neighborhood
groups. Where individuals of the same race or of the same vocation live
together in segregated groups, neighborhood sentiment tends to fuse
together with racial antagonisms and class interests.
Physical and sentimental distances reinforce each other, and the
influences of local distribution of the population participate with the
influences of class and race in the evolution of the social
organization. Every great city has its racial colonies, like the
Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York, the Little Sicily of Chicago,
and various other less pronounced types. In addition to these, most
cities have their segregated vice districts, like that which until
recently existed in Chicago, their rendezvous for criminals of various
sorts. Every large city has its occupational suburbs, like the
Stockyards in Chicago, and its residential enclaves, like Brookline in
Boston, the so-called “Gold Coast” in Chicago, Greenwich Village in New
York, each of which has the size and the character of a complete
separate town, village, or city, except that its population is a
selected one. Undoubtedly the most remarkable of these cities within
cities, of which the most interesting characteristic is that they are
composed of persons of the same race, or of persons of different races
but of the same social class, is East London, with a population of
2,000,000 laborers.
The people of the original East London have now overflowed and crossed
the Lea, and spread themselves over the marshes and meadows beyond.
This population has created new towns which were formerly rural
villages, West Ham, with a population of nearly 300,000; East Ham,
with 90,000; Stratford, with its “daughters,” 150,000; and other
“hamlets” similarly overgrown. Including these new populations, we
have an aggregate of nearly two millions of people. The population is
greater than that of Berlin or Vienna, or St. Petersburg, or
Philadelphia.
It is a city full of churches and places of worship, yet there are no
cathedrals, either Anglican or Roman; it has a sufficient supply of
elementary schools, but it has no public or high school, and it has no
colleges for the higher education and no university; the people all
read newspapers; yet there is no East London paper except of the
smaller and local kind.... In the streets there are never seen any
private carriages; there is no fashionable quarter ... one meets no
ladies in the principal thoroughfares. People, shops, houses,
conveyances—all together are stamped with the unmistakable seal of the
working class.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all is this: in a city of two millions
of people there are no hotels! That means, of course, that there are
no visitors.[6]
In the older cities of Europe, where the processes of segregation have
gone farther, neighborhood distinctions are likely to be more marked
than they are in America. East London is a city of a single class, but
within the limits of that city the population is segregated again and
again by racial, cultural, and vocational interests. Neighborhood
sentiment, deeply rooted in local tradition and in local custom,
exercises a decisive selective influence upon the populations of the
older European cities and shows itself ultimately in a marked way in the
characteristics of the inhabitants.
What we want to know of these neighborhoods, racial communities, and
segregated city areas, existing within or on the outer rims of great
cities, is what we want to know of all other social groups:
What are the elements of which they are composed?
To what extent are they the product of a selective process?
How do people get in and out of the group thus formed?
What are the relative permanence and stability of their populations?
What about the age, sex, and social condition of the people?
What about the children? How many of them are born, and how many of
them remain?
What is the history of the neighborhood? What is there in the
subconsciousness—in the forgotten or dimly remembered experiences—of
this neighborhood which determines its sentiments and attitudes?
What is there in clear consciousness, i.e., what are its avowed
sentiments, doctrines, etc.?
What does it regard as matter of fact? What is news? What is the
general run of attention? What models does it imitate and are these
within or without the group?
What is the social ritual, i.e., what things must one do in the
neighborhood in order to escape being regarded with suspicion or
looked upon as peculiar?
Who are the leaders? What interests of the neighborhood do they
incorporate in themselves and what is the technique by which they
exercise control?
II. INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION AND THE MORAL ORDER
The ancient city was primarily a fortress, a place of refuge in time of
war. The modern city, on the contrary, is primarily a convenience of
commerce, and owes its existence to the market place around which it
sprang up. Industrial competition and the division of labor, which have
probably done most to develop the latent powers of mankind, are possible
only upon condition of the existence of markets, of money, and other
devices for the facilitation of trade and commerce.
An old German adage declares that “city air makes men free” (_Stadt Luft
macht frei_). This is doubtless a reference to the days when the free
cities of Germany enjoyed the patronage of the emperor, and laws made
the fugitive serf a free man if he succeeded for a year and a day in
breathing city air. Law, of itself, could not, however, have made the
craftsman free. An open market in which he might sell the products of
his labor was a necessary incident of his freedom, and it was the
application of the money economy to the relations of master and man that
completed the emancipation of the serf.
_Vocational classes and vocational types._—The old adage which describes
the city as the natural environment of the free man still holds so far
as the individual man finds in the chances, the diversity of interests
and tasks, and in the vast unconscious co-operation of city life the
opportunity to choose his own vocation and develop his peculiar
individual talents. The city offers a market for the special talents of
individual men. Personal competition tends to select for each special
task the individual who is best suited to perform it.
The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality,
much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which
appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to
maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect
of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar
characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for
example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit,
custom, and education. When they came into the world, and for the
first six or eight years of their existence, they were perhaps very
much alike, and neither their parents nor playfellows could perceive
any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon after, they come to
be employed in different occupations. The difference of talents comes
then to be taken notice of, and widens by degrees, till at last the
vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any
resemblance. But without the disposition to truck, barter, and
exchange, every man must have procured to himself every necessary and
conveniency of life which he wanted. All must have had the same duties
to perform, and the same work to do, and there could have been no such
difference of employment as could alone give occasion to any great
difference of talent....
As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the division
of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by
the extent of that power, or, in other words, by the extent of the
market.... There are some sorts of industry, even of the lowest kind,
which can be carried on nowhere but in a great town.[7]
Success, under conditions of personal competition, depends upon
concentration upon some single task, and this concentration stimulates
the demand for rational methods, technical devices, and exceptional
skill. Exceptional skill, while based on natural talent, requires
special preparation, and it has called into existence the trade and
professional schools, and finally bureaus for vocational guidance. All
of these, either directly or indirectly, serve at once to select and
emphasize individual differences.
Every device which facilitates trade and industry prepares the way for a
further division of labor and so tends further to specialize the tasks
in which men find their vocations.
The outcome of this process is to break down or modify the older social
and economic organization of society, which was based on family ties,
local associations, on culture, caste, and status, and to substitute for
it an organization based on occupation and vocational interests.
In the city every vocation, even that of a beggar, tends to assume the
character of a profession and the discipline which success in any
vocation imposes, together with the associations that it enforces,
emphasizes this tendency—the tendency, namely, not merely to specialize,
but to rationalize one’s occupation and to develop a specific and
conscious technique for carrying it on.
The effect of the vocations and the division of labor is to produce, in
the first instance, not social groups, but vocational types: the actor,
the plumber, and the lumber-jack. The organizations, like the trade and
labor unions which men of the same trade or profession form, are based
on common interests. In this respect they differ from forms of
association like the neighborhood, which are based on contiguity,
personal association, and the common ties of humanity. The different
trades and professions seem disposed to group themselves in classes,
that is to say, the artisan, business, and professional classes. But in
the modern democratic state the classes have as yet attained no
effective organization. Socialism, founded on an effort to create an
organization based on “class consciousness,” has never succeeded,
except, perhaps, in Russia, in creating more than a political party.
The effects of the division of labor as a discipline, i.e., as means of
molding character, may therefore be best studied in the vocational types
it has produced. Among the types which it would be interesting to study
are: the shopgirl, the policeman, the peddler, the cabman, the
nightwatchman, the clairvoyant, the vaudeville performer, the quack
doctor, the bartender, the ward boss, the strike-breaker, the labor
agitator, the school teacher, the reporter, the stockbroker, the
pawnbroker; all of these are characteristic products of the conditions
of city life; each, with its special experience, insight, and point of
view determines for each vocational group and for the city as a whole
its individuality.
To what extent is the grade of intelligence represented in the
different trades and professions dependent upon natural ability?
To what extent is intelligence determined by the character of the
occupation and the conditions under which it is practiced?
To what extent is success in the occupations dependent upon sound
judgment and common sense; to what extent upon technical ability?
Does native ability or special training determine success in the
different vocations?
What prestige and what prejudices attach to different trades and
professions and why?
Is the choice of the occupation determined by temperamental, by
economic, or by sentimental considerations?
In what occupations do men, in what occupations do women, succeed
better, and why?
How far is occupation, rather than association, responsible for the
mental attitude and moral predilections? Do men in the same profession
or trade, but representing different nationalities and different
cultural groups, hold characteristic and identical opinions?
To what extent is the social or political creed, that is, socialism,
anarchism, syndicalism, etc., determined by occupation? by
temperament?
To what extent have social doctrine and social idealism superseded and
taken the place of religious faith in the different occupations, and
why?
Do social classes tend to assume the character of cultural groups?
That is to say, do the classes tend to acquire the exclusiveness and
independence of a caste or nationality; or is each class always
dependent upon the existence of a corresponding class?
To what extent do children follow the vocations of their parents and
why?
To what extent do individuals move from one class to another, and how
does this fact modify the character of class relationships?
_News and the mobility of the social group._—The division of labor, in
making individual success dependent upon concentration upon a special
task, has had the effect of increasing the interdependence of the
different vocations. A social organization is thus created in which the
individual becomes increasingly dependent upon the community of which he
is an integral part. The effect, under conditions of personal
competition, of this increasing interdependence of the parts is to
create in the industrial organization as a whole a certain sort of
social solidarity, but a solidarity based, not on sentiment and habit,
but on community of interests.
In the sense in which the terms are here used, sentiment is the more
concrete, interest the more abstract, term. We may cherish a sentiment
for a person, a place, or any object whatsoever. It may be a sentiment
of aversion, or a sentiment of possession. But to possess or to be
possessed by a sentiment for, or in regard to, anything means that we
are incapable of acting toward it in a thoroughly rational way. It means
that the object of our sentiment corresponds in some special way to some
inherited or acquired disposition. Such a disposition is the affection
of a mother for her child, which is instinctive. Or even the feeling she
may have for the child’s empty cradle, which is acquired.
The existence of a sentimental attitude indicates that there are motives
for action of which the individual who is moved by them is not wholly
conscious; motives over which he has only a partial control. Every
sentiment has a history, either in the experience of the individual, or
in the experience of the race, but the person who acts on that sentiment
may not be aware of the history.
Interests are directed less toward specific objects than toward the ends
which this or that particular object at one time or another embodies.
Interests imply, therefore, the existence of means and a consciousness
of the distinction between means and ends. Our sentiments are related to
our prejudices, and prejudices may attach to anything—persons, races, as
well as inanimate things. Prejudices are related also to taboos, and so
tend to maintain “social distances” and the existing social
organization. Sentiment and prejudice are elementary forms of
conservatism. Our interests are rational and mobile, and make for
change.
Money is the cardinal device by which values have become rationalized
and sentiments have been replaced by interests. It is just because we
feel no personal and no sentimental attitude toward our money, such as
we do toward, for example, our home, that money becomes a valuable means
of exchange. We will be interested in acquiring a certain amount of
money in order to achieve a certain purpose, but provided that purpose
may be achieved in any other way we are likely to be just as well
satisfied. It is only the miser who becomes sentimental about money, and
in that case he is likely to prefer one sort of money, say gold, to
another, irrespective of its value. In this case the value of gold is
determined by personal sentiment rather than by reason.
An organization which is composed of competing individuals and of
competing groups of individuals is in a state of unstable equilibrium,
and this equilibrium can be maintained only by a process of continuous
readjustment. This aspect of social life and this type of social
organization are best represented in the world of business which is the
special object of investigation of political economy.
The extension of industrial organization, which is based on the
impersonal relations defined by money, has gone forward hand in hand
with an increasing mobility of the population. The laboring man and the
artisan fitted to perform a specific task are compelled, under the
conditions created by city life, to move from one region to another in
search of the particular kind of employment which they are fitted to
perform. The tide of immigration which moves back and forth between
Europe and America is to some extent a measure of this same mobility.[8]
On the other hand, the tradesman, the manufacturer, the professional
man, the specialist in every vocation, seeks his clients as the
difficulties of travel and communication decrease over an ever widening
area of territory. This is another way in which the mobility of the
population may be measured. However, mobility in an individual or in a
population is measured, not merely by change of location, but rather by
the number and variety of the stimulations to which the individual or
the population responds. Mobility depends, not merely upon
transportation, but upon communication. Education and the ability to
read, the extension of the money economy to an ever increasing number of
the interests of life, in so far as it has tended to depersonalize
social relations, has at the same time vastly increased the mobility of
modern peoples.
The term “mobility,” like its correlative, “isolation,” covers a wide
range of phenomena. It may represent at the same time a character and
a condition. As isolation may be due to the existence of purely
physical barriers to communication, or to a peculiarity of temperament
and a lack of education, so mobility may be a consequence of the
natural means of communication or of an agreeable manner and a college
education.
It is now clearly recognized that what we ordinarily call a lack of
intelligence in individuals, races, and communities is frequently a
result of isolation. On the other hand, the mobility of a population
is unquestionably a very large factor in its intellectual development.
There is an intimate connection between the immobility of the
primitive man and his so-called inability to use abstract ideas. The
knowledge which a peasant ordinarily possesses, from the very nature
of his occupation is, concrete and personal. He knows individually and
personally every member of the flock he tends. He becomes in the
course of years so attached to the land he tills that the mere
transposition from the strip of soil on which he has grown up to
another with which he is less intimately acquainted is felt by him as
a personal loss. For such a man the neighboring valley, or even the
strip of land at the other end of the village is in a certain sense
alien territory. A large part of the peasant’s efficiency as an
agricultural laborer depends upon this intimate and personal
acquaintance with the idiosyncrasies of a single plot of land to the
care of which he has been bred. It is apparent that, under conditions
like these, very little of the peasant’s practical knowledge will take
the abstract form of scientific generalization. He thinks in concrete
terms because he knows and needs no other.
On the other hand, the intellectual characteristics of the Jew and his
generally recognized interest in abstract and radical ideas are
unquestionably connected with the fact that the Jews are, before all
else, a city folk. The “Wandering Jew” acquires abstract terms with
which to describe the various scenes which he visits. His knowledge of
the world is based upon identities and differences, that is to say, on
analysis and classification. Reared in intimate association with the
bustle and business of the market place, constantly intent on the
shrewd and fascinating game of buying and selling, in which he employs
that most interesting of abstractions, money, he has neither
opportunity nor inclination to cultivate that intimate attachment to
places and persons which is characteristic of the immobile person.[9]
Concentration of populations in cities, the wider markets, the division
of labor, the concentration of individuals and groups on special tasks,
have continually changed the material conditions of life, and in doing
this have made readjustments to novel conditions increasingly necessary.
Out of this necessity there have grown up a number of special
organizations which exist for the special purpose of facilitating these
readjustments. The market which brought the modern city into existence
is one of these devices. More interesting, however, are the exchanges,
particularly the stock exchange and the board of trade, where prices are
constantly being made in response to changes, or rather the reports of
changes, in economic conditions all over the world.
These reports, so far as they are calculated to cause readjustments,
have the character of what we call news. It is the existence of a
critical situation which converts what were otherwise mere information
into news. Where there is an issue at stake, where, in short, there is
crisis, there information which might affect the outcome one way or
another becomes “live matter,” as the newspaper men say. Live matter is
news; dead matter is mere information.
What is the relation of mobility to suggestion, imitation, etc.?
What are the practical devices by which suggestibility and mobility
are increased in a community or in an individual?
Are there pathological conditions in communities corresponding to
hysteria in individuals? If so, how are they produced and how
controlled?
To what extent is fashion an indication of mobility?
What is the difference in the manner in which fashions and customs are
transmitted?
What is social unrest, and what are the conditions under which it
manifests itself?
What are the characteristics of a progressive, what the
characteristics of a static, community in respect to its resistance to
novel suggestions?
What mental characteristics of the gypsy, of the hobo, and of the
nomad generally can be traced to these nomadic habits?
_The stock exchanges and the mob._—The exchanges, upon which we may
watch the fluctuation of prices in response to the news of economic
conditions in different parts of the world, are typical. Similar
readjustments are taking place in every department of social life,
where, however, the devices for making these readjustments are not so
complete and perfect. For example, the professional and trade papers,
which keep the professions and the trades informed in regard to new
methods, experiences, and devices, serve to keep the members of these
trades and professions abreast of the times, which means that they
facilitate readjustments to changing conditions.
There is, however, this important distinction to be made: Competition in
the exchanges is more intense; changes are more rapid and, as far as the
individuals directly concerned, more momentous. In contrast with such a
constellation of forces as we find on the exchanges, where competing
dealers meet to buy and sell, so mobile a form of social organization as
the crowd and the mob exhibits a relative stability.
It is a commonplace that decisive factors in the movements of crowds, as
in the fluctuations of markets, are psychologic. This means that among
the individuals who make up the crowd, or who compose the public which
participates in the movements reflected in the market, a condition of
instability exists which corresponds to what has been defined elsewhere
as crisis. It is true of the exchanges, as it is of crowds, that the
situation they represent is always critical, that is to say, the
tensions are such that a slight cause may precipitate an enormous
effect. The current euphemism, “the psychological moment,” defines such
a critical condition.
Psychological moments may arise in any social situation, but they occur
more frequently in a society which has acquired a high state of
mobility. They occur more frequently in a society where education is
general, where railways, telegraph, and the printing press have become
an indispensable part of the social economy. They occur more frequently
in cities than in smaller communities. In the crowd and the public every
moment may be said to be “psychological.”
Crisis may be said to be the normal condition on the exchanges. What are
called financial crises are merely an extension of this critical
condition to the larger business community. Financial panics which
sometimes follow upon financial crises are a precipitate of this
critical condition.
The fascinating thing about the study of crises, as of crowds, is that
in so far as they are in fact due to psychological causes, that is, in
so far as they are the result of the mobility of the communities in
which they occur, they can be controlled. The evidence for this is the
fact that they can be manipulated, and there is abundant evidence of
manipulation in the transactions of the stock market. The evidence for
the manipulation of crowds is less accessible. Labor organizations have,
however, known how to develop a pretty definite technique for the
instigation and control of strikes. The Salvation Army has worked out a
book of tactics which is very largely devoted to the handling of street
crowds; and professional revivalists, like Billy Sunday, have an
elaborate technique for conducting their revivals.
Under the title of collective psychology much has been written in recent
years in regard to crowds and kindred phenomena of social life. Most
that has been written thus far has been based upon general observation
and almost no systematic methods exist for the study of this type of
social organization. The practical methods which practical men like the
political boss, the labor agitator, the stock-exchange speculator, and
others have worked out for the control and manipulation of the public
and the crowd furnish a body of materials from which it is possible to
make a more detailed, a more intimate study of what may be called, in
order to distinguish it from that of more highly organized groups,
collective behavior.
The city, and particularly the great city, in which more than elsewhere
human relations are likely to be impersonal and rational, defined in
terms of interest and in terms of cash, is in a very real sense a
laboratory for the investigation of collective behavior. Strikes and
minor revolutionary movements are endemic in the urban environment.
Cities, and particularly the great cities, are in unstable equilibrium.
The result is that the vast casual and mobile aggregations which
constitute our urban populations are in a state of perpetual agitation,
swept by every new wind of doctrine, subject to constant alarms, and in
consequence the community is in a chronic condition of crisis.
What has been said suggests first of all the importance of a more
detailed and fundamental study of collective behavior. The questions
which follow will perhaps suggest lines of investigation that could be
followed profitably by students of urban life.
What is the psychology of crisis? What is the cycle of events involved
in the evolution of a crisis, political or economic?
To what extent may the parliamentary system, including the electoral
system, be regarded as an attempt to regularize revolution and to meet
and control crises?
To what extent are mob violence, strikes, and radical political
movements the results of the same general conditions that provoke
financial panics, real estate booms, and mass movements in the
population generally?
To what extent are the existing unstable equilibrium and social
ferment due to the extent and speed of economic changes as reflected
in the stock exchange?
What are the effects of the extension of communication and of news
upon fluctuations in the stock market and economic changes generally?
Does the scale of stocks on the exchanges tend to exaggerate the
fluctuations in the market, or to stabilize them?
Do the reports in the newspapers, so far as they represent the facts,
tend to speed up social changes, or to stabilize a movement already in
progress?
What is the effect of propaganda and rumor, in cases where the sources
of accurate information are cut off?
To what extent can fluctuations of the stock market be controlled by
formal regulation?
To what extent can social changes, strikes, and revolutionary
movements be controlled by the censorship?
To what extent can the scientific forecasting of economic and social
changes exercise a useful control over the trend of prices and of
events?
To what extent can the prices recorded by the stock exchange be
compared with public opinion as recorded by the newspaper?
To what extent can the city, which responds more quickly and more
decisively to changing events, be regarded as nerve centers of the
social organism?
III. SECONDARY RELATIONS AND SOCIAL CONTROL
Modern methods of urban transportation and communication—the electric
railway, the automobile, the telephone, and the radio—have silently and
rapidly changed in recent years the social and industrial organization
of the modern city. They have been the means of concentrating traffic in
the business districts, have changed the whole character of retail
trade, multiplying the residence suburbs and making the department store
possible. These changes in the industrial organization and in the
distribution of population have been accompanied by corresponding
changes in the habits, sentiments, and character of the urban
population.
The general nature of these changes is indicated by the fact that the
growth of cities has been accompanied by the substitution of indirect,
“secondary,” for direct, face-to-face, “primary” relations in the
associations of individuals in the community.
By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face
association and co-operation. They are primary in several senses, but
chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and
ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association,
psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common
whole, so that one’s very self, for many purposes at least, is the
common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of
describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a “we”; it involves
the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which “we” is the
natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds
the chief aims of his will in that feeling....[10]
Touch and sight, physical contact, are the basis for the first and most
elementary human relationships. Mother and child, husband and wife,
father and son, master and servant, kinsman and neighbor, minister,
physician, and teacher—these are the most intimate and real
relationships of life, and in the small community they are practically
inclusive.
The interactions which take place among the members of a community so
constituted are immediate and unreflecting. Intercourse is carried on
largely within the region of instinct and feeling. Social control
arises, for the most part spontaneously, in direct response to personal
influences and public sentiment. It is the result of a personal
accommodation, rather than the formulation of a rational and abstract
principle.
_The church, the school, and the family._—In a great city, where the
population is unstable, where parents and children are employed out of
the house and often in distant parts of the city, where thousands of
people live side by side for years without so much as a bowing
acquaintance, these intimate relationships of the primary group are
weakened and the moral order which rested upon them is gradually
dissolved.
Under the disintegrating influences of city life most of our traditional
institutions, the church, the school, and the family, have been greatly
modified. The school, for example, has taken over some of the functions
of the family. It is around the public school and its solicitude for the
moral and physical welfare of the children that something like a new
neighborhood and community spirit tends to get itself organized.
The church, on the other hand, which has lost much of its influence
since the printed page has so largely taken the place of the pulpit in
the interpretation of life, seems at present to be in process of
readjustment to the new conditions.
It is important that the church, the school, and the family should be
studied from the point of view of this readjustment to the conditions
of city life.
What changes have taken place in recent years in the family
sentiments? in the attitudes of husbands toward wives? of wives toward
husbands? of children toward parents, etc.?
What do the records of the juvenile and morals courts indicate in
regard to this matter?
In what regions of social life have the mores on the subject of the
family life changed most?
To what extent have these changes taken place in response to the
influences of the city environment?
Similarly, investigations might be carried on with reference to the
school and the church. Here, too, there is a changed attitude and
changed policy in response to a changed environment. This is important
because it is, in the last analysis, upon these institutions in which
the immediate and vital interests of life find a corporate expression
that social organization ultimately rests.
It is probably the breaking down of local attachments and the weakening
of the restraints and inhibitions of the primary group, under the
influence of the urban environment, which are largely responsible for
the increase of vice and crime in great cities. It would be interesting
in this connection to determine by investigation how far the increase in
crime keeps pace with the increasing mobility of the population and to
what extent this mobility is a function of the growth of population. It
is from this point of view that we should seek to interpret all those
statistics which register the disintegration of the moral order, for
example, the statistics of divorce, of truancy, and of crime.
What is the effect of ownership of property, particularly of the home,
on truancy, on divorce, and on crime?
In what regions and classes are certain kinds of crime endemic?
In what classes does divorce occur most frequently? What is the
difference in this respect between farmers and, say, actors?
To what extent in any given racial group, for example, the Italians in
New York or the Poles in Chicago, do parents and children live in the
same world, speak the same language, and share the same ideas, and how
far do the conditions found account for juvenile delinquency in that
particular group?
How far are the home mores responsible for criminal manifestations of
an immigrant group?
_Crisis and the courts._—It is characteristic of city life that all
sorts of people meet and mingle together who never fully comprehend one
another. The anarchist and the club man, the priest and the Levite, the
actor and the missionary who touch elbows on the street still live in
totally different worlds. So complete is the segregation of vocational
classes that it is possible within the limits of the city to live in an
isolation almost as complete as that of some remote rural community.
Walter Besant tells the following anecdote of his experience as editor
of the _People’s Palace Journal_:
In that capacity I endeavored to encourage literary effort, in the
hope of lighting upon some unknown and latent genius. The readers of
the _Journal_ were the members of the various classes connected with
the educational side of the place. They were young clerks chiefly—some
of them very good fellows. They had a debating society which I
attended from time to time. Alas! They carried on their debates in an
ignorance the most profound, the most unconscious, and the most
satisfied. I endeavored to persuade them that it was desirable at
least to master the facts of the case before they spoke. In vain. Then
I proposed subjects for essays, and offered prizes for verses. I
discovered, to my amazement, that among all the thousands of these
young people, lads and girls, there was not discoverable the least
rudimentary indication of any literary power whatever. In all other
towns there are young people who nourish literary ambitions, with some
measure of literary ability. How should there be any in this town,
where there were no books, no papers, no journals, and, at that time,
no free libraries?[11]
In the immigrant colonies which are now well established in every large
city, foreign populations live in an isolation which is different from
that of the population of East London, but in some respects more
complete.
The difference is that each one of these little colonies has a more or
less independent political and social organization of its own, and is
the center of a more or less vigorous nationalist propaganda. For
example, each one of these groups has one or more papers printed in its
own language. In New York City there were, a few years ago, 270
publications, most of them supported by the local population, printed in
23 different languages. In Chicago there were 19 daily papers published
in 7 foreign languages with a combined daily circulation of 368,000
papers.
Under these conditions the social ritual and the moral order which these
immigrants brought with them from their native countries have succeeded
in maintaining themselves for a considerable time under the influences
of the American environment. Social control, based on the home mores,
breaks down, however, in the second generation.
We may express the relation of the city to this fact in general terms by
saying that the effect of the urban environment is to intensify all
effects of crisis.
The term “crisis” is not to be understood in a violent sense. It is
involved in any disturbance of habit. There is a crisis in the boy’s
life when he leaves home. The emancipation of the Negro and the
immigration of the European peasant are group crises. Any strain of
crisis involves three possible changes: greater fitness, reduced
efficiency, or death. In biological terms, “survival” means successful
adjustment to crisis, accompanied typically by a modification of
structure. In man it means mental stimulation and greater
intelligence, or mental depression, in case of failure.[12]
Under the conditions imposed by city life in which individuals and
groups of individuals, widely removed in sympathy and understanding,
live together under conditions of interdependence, if not of intimacy,
the conditions of social control are greatly altered and the
difficulties increased.
The problem thus created is usually characterized as one of
“assimilation.” It is assumed that the reason for rapid increase of
crime in our large cities is due to the fact that the foreign element in
our population has not succeeded in assimilating American culture and
does not conform to the American mores. This would be interesting, if
true, but the facts seem to suggest that perhaps the truth must be
sought in the opposite direction.
One of the most important facts established by the investigation
concerns the American-born children of immigrants—the “second
generation.” The records of convictions in the New York Court of
General Sessions during the period from October 1, 1908, to June 30,
1909, and of all commitments to Massachusetts penal institutions,
except those to the state farm, during the year ending September 30,
1909, form the basis of this analysis of the criminal tendencies of
the second generation.
From these records it appears that a clear tendency exists on the part
of the second generation to differ from the first or immigrant
generation in the character of its criminality. It also appears that
this difference is much more frequently in the direction of the
criminality of the American-born of non-immigrant parentage than it is
in the opposite direction. This means that the movement of the
second-generation crime is away from the crimes peculiar to immigrants
and toward those of the American of native parentage. Sometimes this
movement has carried second-generation criminality even beyond that of
the native-born of native parentage. Of the second-generation groups
submitted to this comparison, one maintains a constant adherence to
the general rule above referred to, while all the others at some point
fail to follow it. This unique group is the Irish second
generation.[13]
What we do observe, as a result of the crisis, is that control that was
formerly based on mores was replaced by control based on positive law.
This change runs parallel to the movement by which secondary
relationships have taken the place of primary relationships in the
association of individuals in the city environment.
It is characteristic of the United States that great political changes
should be effected experimentally under the pressure of agitation or
upon the initiative of small but militant minorities. There is probably
no other country in the world in which so many “reforms” are in progress
as at the present time in the United States. Reform has, in fact, become
a kind of popular “indoor sport.” The reforms thus effected, almost
without exception, involve some sort of restriction or governmental
control over activities that were formerly “free” or controlled only by
the mores and public opinion.
The effect of this extension of what is called the police power has been
to produce a change, not merely in the fundamental policy of the law,
but in the character and standing of the courts.
The juvenile and morals courts illustrate a change which is perhaps
taking place elsewhere. In these courts the judges have assumed
something of the functions of administrative officers, their duties
consisting less in the interpretation of law than in prescribing
remedies and administering advice intended to restore delinquents
brought before them to their normal place in society.
A similar tendency to give judges a wide discretion and to impose upon
them a further responsibility is manifest in those courts which have to
deal with the technical affairs of the business world, and in the growth
in popularity of commissions in which judicial and administrative
functions are combined, for example, the Interstate Commerce Commission.
In order to interpret in a fundamental way the facts in regard to social
control it is important to start with a clear conception of the nature
of corporate action.
Corporate action begins when there is some sort of communication between
individuals who constitute a group. Communication may take place at
different levels; that is, suggestions may be given and responded to on
the instinctive, senso-motor, or ideo-motor levels. The mechanism of
communication is very subtle, so subtle, in fact, that it is often
difficult to conceive how suggestions are conveyed from one mind to
another. This does not imply that there is any special form of
consciousness, any special sense of kinship or consciousness of kind,
necessary to explain corporate action.
In fact, it has recently been shown that in the case of certain highly
organized and static societies, like that of the well-known ant,
probably nothing that we would call communication takes place.
It is a well-known fact that if an ant be removed from a nest and
afterward put back it will not be attacked, while almost invariably an
ant belonging to another nest will be attacked. It has been customary
to use the words memory, enmity, friendship, in describing this fact.
Now Bethe made the following experiment. An ant was placed in the
liquids (blood and lymph) squeezed out from the bodies of nest
companions and was then put back into its nest; it was not attacked.
It was then put in the juice taken from the inmates of a “hostile”
nest, and was at once attacked and killed.[14]
A further instance of the manner in which ants communicate will
illustrate how simple and automatic communication may become on the
instinctive level.
An ant, when taking a new direction from the nest for the first time,
always returns by the same path. This shows that some trace must be
left behind which serves as a guide back to the nest. If an ant
returning by this path bears no spoils, Bethe found that no other ants
try this direction. But if it bring back honey or sugar, other ants
are sure to try the path. Hence something of the substances carried
over this path by the ants must remain on the path. These substances
must be strong enough to affect the ants chemically.[15]
The important fact is that by means of this comparatively simple device
corporate action is made possible.
Individuals not only react upon one another in this reflex way, but they
inevitably communicate their sentiments, attitudes, and organic
excitements, and in doing so they necessarily react, not merely to what
each individual actually does, but to what he intends, desires, or hopes
to do. The fact that individuals often betray sentiments and attitudes
to others of which they are themselves only dimly conscious makes it
possible for individual A, for example, to act upon motives and tensions
in B as soon, or even before, B is able to do so. Furthermore, A may act
upon the suggestions that emanate from B without himself being clearly
conscious of the source from which his motives spring. So subtle and
intimate may the reactions be which control individuals who are bound
together in a social-psychological process.
It is upon the basis of this sort of instinctive and spontaneous control
that every more formal sort of control must be based in order to be
effective.
Changes in the form of social control may for the purposes of
investigation be grouped under the general heads:
1. The substitution of positive law for custom, and the extension of
municipal control to activities that were formerly left to individual
initiative and discretion.
2. The disposition of judges in municipal and criminal courts to
assume administrative function so that the administration of the
criminal law ceases to be a mere application of the social ritual and
becomes an application of rational and technical methods, requiring
expert knowledge or advice, in order to restore the individual to
society and repair the injury that his delinquency has caused.
3. Changes and divergencies in the mores among the different isolated
and segregated groups in the city. What are the mores, for example, of
the shopgirl? the immigrant? the politician? and the labor agitator?
It should be the aim of these investigations to distinguish not merely
the causes of these changes, the direction in which they are moving,
but also the forces that are likely to minimize and neutralize them.
For example, it is important to know whether the motives which are at
present multiplying the positive restrictions on the individual will
necessarily go as far in this country as they have already done in
Germany. Will they eventually bring about a condition approaching
socialism?
_Commercialized vice and the liquor traffic._—Social control, under the
conditions of city life, can, perhaps, be best studied in its attempts
to stamp out vice and control the liquor traffic.
The saloon and the vice establishments have come into existence as a
means of exploiting appetites and instincts fundamental to human nature.
This makes the efforts that have been made to regulate and suppress
these forms of exploitation and traffic interesting and important as
subjects of investigation.
Such an investigation should be based upon thorough study: (1) of the
human nature upon which the commerce has been erected, (2) of the social
conditions which tend to convert normal appetites into social vices, (3)
of the practical effects of the efforts to limit, control, and stamp out
the vice traffic and to do away with the use and sale of liquor.
Among the things that we should desire to know are:
To what extent is the appetite for alcoholic stimulus a prenatal
disposition?
To what extent may such an appetite be transferred from one form of
stimulation to another; that is, e.g., from whiskey to cocaine, etc.?
To what extent is it possible to substitute normal and healthful for
pathological and vicious stimulations?
What are the social and moral effects of secret drinking?
Where a taboo is established early in life, does it have the effect of
idealizing the delights of indulgence? Does it do this in some cases
and not in others? If so, what are the contributing circumstances? Do
men suddenly lose the taste for liquor and other stimulants? What are
the conditions under which this happens?
Many of these questions can be answered only by a study of individual
experiences. Vices undoubtedly have their natural history, like
certain forms of disease. They may therefore be regarded as
independent entities which find their habitat in human environment,
are stimulated by certain conditions, inhibited by others, but
invariably exhibit through all changes a character that is typical.
In the early days the temperance movement had something of the character
of a religious revival, and the effects were highly picturesque. In
recent years the leaders have displayed a more deliberate strategy, but
the struggle against the liquor traffic still has all the
characteristics of a big popular movement, a movement which, having
first conquered the rural districts, is now seeking to enforce itself in
the cities.
On the other hand, the vice crusade started with the cities, where, in
fact, commercialized vice is indigenous. The mere discussion of this
subject in public has meant an enormous change in the sex mores. The
fact that this movement is everywhere coincident with the entrance of
women into a greater freedom, into industry, the professions, and party
politics, is significant.
There are conditions peculiar to the life of great cities (referred to
under the heading “Mobility of the Population of Great Cities”) which
make the control of vice especially difficult. For example, crusades and
religious movements generally do not have the same success in the city
environment that they do in the smaller and less heterogeneous
communities. What are the conditions which make this true?
Perhaps the facts most worth studying in connection with the movement
for suppression of vice are those which indicate the changes which have
taken place in fifty years in sex mores, particularly with reference to
what is regarded as modest and immodest in the dress and behavior, and
with reference to the freedom with which sexual matters are now
discussed by young men and young women.
It seems, in fact, as if we were in the presence of two epoch-making
changes, the one which seems destined finally to put intoxicating
liquors in the category of poisonous drugs, and the other to lift the
taboo which, particularly among Anglo-Saxon peoples, has effectually
prevented up to the present time the frank discussion of the facts of
sex.
_Party politics and publicity._—There is everywhere at present a
disposition to increase the power of the executive branch of the
government at the expense of the legislative. The influence of state
legislatures and of city councils has been diminished in some instances
by the introduction of the referendum and the recall. In others they
have been largely superseded by the commission form of government. The
ostensible reason for these changes is that they offer a means for
overthrowing the power of the professional politicians. The real ground
seems to me the recognition of the fact that the form of government
which had its origin in the town meeting and was well suited to the
needs of a small community based on primary relations is not suitable to
the government of the changing and heterogeneous populations of cities
of three or four millions.
Much, of course, depends upon the character and size of the
population. Where it is of American stock, and the number of voting
citizens is not too great for thorough and calm discussion, no better
school of politics can be imagined nor any method of managing affairs
more certain to prevent jobbery and waste, to stimulate vigilance and
breed contentment. When, however, the town meeting has grown to exceed
seven or eight hundred persons, and, still more, when any considerable
section are strangers, such as Irish or French Canadians, who have
latterly poured into New England, the institution works less perfectly
because the multitude is too large for debate, factions are likely to
spring up, and the immigrants, untrained in self-government, become
the prey of wire pullers or petty demagogues.[16]
For one thing, the problems of city government have become, with the
growth and organization of city life, so complicated that it is no
longer desirable to leave them to the control of men whose only
qualification for handling them consists in the fact that they have
succeeded in gaining office through the ordinary machinery of ward
politics.
Another circumstance which has made the selection of city officials by
popular vote impractical under the conditions of city life is the fact
that, except in special cases, the voter knows little or nothing about
the officials he is voting for; knows little or nothing about the
functions of the office to which that official is to be elected; and,
besides all the rest, is too busy elsewhere to inform himself about
conditions and needs of the city as a whole.
At a recent election in Chicago, for example, voters were called upon to
select candidates from a ballot containing 250 names, most of them
unknown to the voters. Under these circumstances the citizen who wishes
to vote intelligently relies on some more or less interested
organization or some more or less interested advisor to tell him how to
vote.
To meet this emergency, created primarily by conditions imposed by city
life, two types of organization have come into existence for controlling
those artificial crises that we call elections. One of these is the
organization represented by the political boss and the political
machine. The other is that represented by the independent voters’
leagues, taxpayers’ associations, and organizations like the bureaus of
municipal research.
It is an indication of the rather primitive conditions in which our
political parties were formed that they sought to govern the country on
the principle that the remedy for all sorts of administrative evils was
to “turn the rascals out,” as the popular phrase expressed it, a change
of government. The political machine and the political boss have come
into existence in the interest of party politics. The parties were
necessarily organized to capture elections. The political machine is
merely a technical device invented for the purpose of achieving this
end. The boss is the expert who runs the machine. He is as necessary to
the winning of an election as a professional coach is necessary to
success at football.
It is characteristic of the two types of organization which have grown
up for the purpose of controlling the popular vote that the first, the
political machine, is based, on the whole, on local, personal, that is
to say, primary, relationships. The second, the good-government
organizations, make their appeal to the public, and the public, as we
ordinarily understand that expression, is a group based on secondary
relationships. Members of a public are not as a rule personally
acquainted.
The political machine is, in fact, an attempt to maintain, inside the
formal administrative organization of the city, the control of a primary
group. The organizations thus built up, of which Tammany Hall is the
classic illustration, appear to be thoroughly feudal in their character.
The relations between the boss and his ward captain seem to be precisely
that, of personal loyalty on one side and personal protection on the
other, which the feudal relation implies. The virtues which such an
organization calls out are the old tribal ones of fidelity, loyalty, and
devotion to the interests of the chief and the clan. The people within
the organization, their friends and supporters, constitute a “we” group,
while the rest of the city is merely the outer world, which is not quite
alive and not quite human in the sense in which the members of the “we”
group are. We have here something approaching the conditions of
primitive society.
The conception of “primitive society” which we ought to form is that
of small groups scattered over a territory. The size of the groups is
determined by the conditions of the struggle for existence. The
internal organization of each group corresponds to its size. A group
of groups may have some relation to each other (kin, neighborhood,
alliance, _connubium_, and _commercium_) which draws them together and
differentiates them from others. Thus a differentiation arises between
ourselves, the we-group or in-group, and everybody else or the
others-groups, out-groups. The insiders in a we-group are in a
relation of peace, order, law, government, and industry, to each
other. Their relation to all outsiders, or others-groups, is one of
war and plunder, except so far as agreements have modified it.
The relation of comradeship and peace in the we-group and that of
hostility and war toward others-groups are correlative to each other.
The exigencies of war with outsiders are what make peace inside, lest
internal discord should weaken the we-group for war. These exigencies
also make government and law in the in-group, in order to prevent
quarrels and enforce discipline.[17]
The politics of most great cities offer abundant materials for the study
of the type represented by the political boss, as well as the social
mechanisms created by and embodied in the political machine. It is
necessary, however, that we study them disinterestedly. Some of the
questions we should seek to answer are:
What, as a matter of fact, is the political organization at any point
within the city? What are the sentiments and attitudes and interests
which find expression through it?
What are the practical devices it employs for mobilizing its forces
and putting them into action?
What is the character of the party appeal in the different moral
regions of which the city is made up?
How much of the interest in politics is practical and how much is mere
sport?
What part of the cost of elections is advertising? How much of it can
be classed as “educational publicity,” and how much is pure graft?
To what extent, under existing conditions, particularly as we find
them in great cities, can elections be practically controlled by
purely technical devices, card catalogues, torch-light processions,
spell binders—machinery?
What effect will the introduction of the referendum and recall have
upon present methods of conducting elections in cities?
_Advertising and social control._—In contrast with the political
machine, which has founded its organized action on the local, personal,
and immediate interests represented by the different neighborhoods and
localities, the good-government organizations, the bureaus of municipal
research, and the like have sought to represent the interests of the
city as a whole and have appealed to a sentiment and opinion neither
local nor personal. These agencies have sought to secure efficiency and
good government by the education of the voter, that is to say, by
investigating and publishing the facts regarding the government.
In this way publicity has come to be a recognized form of social
control, and advertising—“social advertising”—has become a profession
with an elaborate technique supported by a body of special knowledge.
It is one of the characteristic phenomena of city life and of society
founded on secondary relationships that advertising should have come to
occupy so important a place in its economy.
In recent years every individual and organization which has had to deal
with the public, that is to say the public outside the smaller and more
intimate communities of the village and small town, has come to have its
press agent, who is often less an advertising man than a diplomatic man
accredited to the newspapers, and through them to the world at large.
Institutions like the Russell Sage Foundation, and to a less extent, the
General Education Board have sought to influence public opinion directly
through the medium of publicity. The Carnegie Report upon Medical
Education, the Pittsburgh Survey, the Russel Sage Foundation Report on
Comparative Costs of Public-School Education in the several states, are
something more than scientific reports. They are rather a high form of
journalism, dealing with existing conditions critically, and seeking
through the agency of publicity to bring about radical reforms. The work
of the Bureau of Municipal Research in New York has had a similar
practical purpose. To these must be added the work accomplished by the
child-welfare exhibits, by the social surveys undertaken in different
parts of the country, and by similar propaganda in favor of public
health.
As a source of social control public opinion becomes important in
societies founded on secondary relationships, of which great cities are
a type. In the city every social group tends to create its own milieu
and, as these conditions become fixed, the mores tend to accommodate
themselves to the conditions thus created. In secondary groups and in
the city fashion tends to take the place of custom, and public opinion,
rather than the mores, becomes the dominant force in social control.
In any attempt to understand the nature of public opinion and its
relation to social control it is important to investigate first of all
the agencies and devices which have come into practical use in the
effort to control, enlighten, and exploit it.
The first and the most important of these is the press, that is, the
daily newspaper and other forms of current literature, including books
classed as current.[18]
After the newspaper, the bureaus of research which are now springing up
in all the large cities are the most interesting and the most promising
devices for using publicity as a means of control.
The fruits of these investigations do not reach the public directly, but
are disseminated through the medium of the press, the pulpit, and other
sources of popular enlightenment.
In addition to these there are the educational campaigns in the interest
of better health conditions, the child-welfare exhibits, and the
numerous “social advertising” devices which are now employed, sometimes
upon the initiative of private societies, sometimes upon that of popular
magazines or newspapers, in order to educate the public and enlist the
masses of the people in the movement for the improvement of conditions
of community life.
The newspaper is the great medium of communication within the city, and
it is on the basis of the information which it supplies that public
opinion rests. The first function which a newspaper supplies is that
which formerly was performed by the village gossip.
In spite, however, of the industry with which newspapers pursue facts of
personal intelligence and human interest, they cannot compete with the
village gossips as a means of social control. For one thing, the
newspaper maintains some reservations not recognized by gossip, in the
matters of personal intelligence. For example, until they run for office
or commit some other overt act that brings them before the public
conspicuously, the private life of individual men or women is a subject
that is, for the newspaper, taboo. It is not so with gossip, partly
because in a small community no individual is so obscure that his
private affairs escape observation and discussion; partly because the
field is smaller. In small communities there is a perfectly amazing
amount of personal information afloat among the individuals who compose
them.
The absence of this in the city is what, in large part, makes the city
what it is.
Some of the questions that arise in regard to the nature and function
of the newspaper and of publicity generally are:
What is news?
What are the methods and motives of the newspaper man? Are they those
of an artist? a historian? or merely those of a merchant?
To what extent does the newspaper control and to what extent is it
controlled by public sentiment?
What is a “fake” and why?
What is yellow journalism and why is it yellow?
What would be the effect of making the newspaper a municipal monopoly?
What is the difference between advertising and news?
IV. TEMPERAMENT AND THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT
Great cities have always been the melting-pots of races and of cultures.
Out of the vivid and subtle interactions of which they have been the
centers, there have come the newer breeds and the newer social types.
The great cities of the United States, for example, have drawn from the
isolation of their native villages great masses of the rural populations
of Europe and America. Under the shock of the new contacts the latent
energies of these primitive peoples have been released, and the subtler
processes of interaction have brought into existence not merely
vocational, but temperamental, types.
_Mobilization of the individual man._—Transportation and communication
have effected, among many other silent but far-reaching changes, what I
have called the “mobilization of the individual man.” They have
multiplied the opportunities of the individual man for contact and for
association with his fellows, but they have made these contacts and
associations more transitory and less stable. A very large part of the
populations of great cities, including those who make their homes in
tenements and apartment houses, live much as people do in some great
hotel, meeting but not knowing one another. The effect of this is to
substitute fortuitous and casual relationship for the more intimate and
permanent associations of the smaller community.
Under these circumstances the individual’s status is determined to a
considerable degree by conventional signs—by fashion and “front”—and the
art of life is largely reduced to skating on thin surfaces and a
scrupulous study of style and manners.
Not only transportation and communication, but the segregation of the
urban population tends to facilitate the mobility of the individual man.
The processes of segregation establish moral distances which make the
city a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do not interpenetrate.
This makes it possible for individuals to pass quickly and easily from
one moral milieu to another, and encourages the fascinating but
dangerous experiment of living at the same time in several different
contiguous, but otherwise widely separated, worlds. All this tends to
give to city life a superficial and adventitious character; it tends to
complicate social relationships and to produce new and divergent
individual types. It introduces, at the same time, an element of chance
and adventure which adds to the stimulus of city life and gives it, for
young and fresh nerves, a peculiar attractiveness. The lure of great
cities is perhaps a consequence of stimulations which act directly upon
the reflexes. As a type of human behavior it may be explained, like the
attraction of the flame for the moth, as a sort of tropism.
The attraction of the metropolis is due in part, however, to the fact
that in the long run every individual finds somewhere among the varied
manifestations of city life the sort of environment in which he expands
and feels at ease; finds, in short, the moral climate in which his
peculiar nature obtains the stimulations that bring his innate
dispositions to full and free expression. It is, I suspect, motives of
this kind which have their basis, not in interest nor even in sentiment,
but in something more fundamental and primitive which draw many, if not
most, of the young men and young women from the security of their homes
in the country into the big, booming confusion and excitement of city
life. In a small community it is the normal man, the man without
eccentricity or genius, who seems most likely to succeed. The small
community often tolerates eccentricity. The city, on the contrary,
rewards it. Neither the criminal, the defective, nor the genius has the
same opportunity to develop his innate disposition in a small town that
he invariably finds in a great city.
Fifty years ago every village had one or two eccentric characters who
were treated ordinarily with a benevolent toleration, but who were
regarded meanwhile as impracticable and queer. These exceptional
individuals lived an isolated existence, cut off by their very
eccentricities, whether of genius or of defect, from genuinely intimate
intercourse with their fellows. If they had the making of criminals, the
restraints and inhibitions of the small community rendered them
harmless. If they had the stuff of genius in them, they remained sterile
for lack of appreciation or opportunity. Mark Twain’s story of _Pudd’n
Head Wilson_ is a description of one such obscure and unappreciated
genius. It is not so true as it was that
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its fragrance on the desert air.
Gray wrote the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” before the rise of the
modern metropolis.
In the city many of these divergent types now find a milieu in which,
for good or for ill, their dispositions and talents parturiate and bear
fruit.
In the investigation of those exceptional and temperamental types
which the city has produced we should seek to distinguish, as far as
possible, between those abstract mental qualities upon which technical
excellence is based and those more fundamental native characteristics
which find expression in temperament. We may therefore ask:
To what extent are the moral qualities of individuals based on native
character? To what extent are they conventionalized habits imposed
upon by them or taken over by them from the group?
What are the native qualities and characteristics upon which the moral
or immoral character accepted and conventionalized by the group are
based?
What connection or what divorce appears to exist between mental and
moral qualities in the groups and in the individuals composing them?
Are criminals as a rule of a lower order of intelligence than
non-criminals? If so, what types of intelligence are associated with
different types of crime? For example, do professional burglars and
professional confidence men represent different mental types?
What are the effects upon these different types of isolation and of
mobility, of stimulus and of repression?
To what extent can playgrounds and other forms of recreation supply
the stimulation which is otherwise sought for in vicious pleasures?
To what extent can vocational guidance assist individuals in finding
vocations in which they will be able to obtain a free expression of
their temperamental qualities?
_The moral region._—It is inevitable that individuals who seek the same
forms of excitement, whether that excitement be furnished by a horse
race or by grand opera, should find themselves from time to time in the
same places. The result of this is that in the organization which city
life spontaneously assumes the population tends to segregate itself, not
merely in accordance with its interests, but in accordance with its
tastes or its temperaments. The resulting distribution of the population
is likely to be quite different from that brought about by occupational
interests or economic conditions.
Every neighborhood, under the influences which tend to distribute and
segregate city populations, may assume the character of a “moral
region.” Such, for example, are the vice districts, which are found in
most cities. A moral region is not necessarily a place of abode. It may
be a mere rendezvous, a place of resort.
In order to understand the forces which in every large city tend to
develop these detached milieus in which vagrant and suppressed impulses,
passions, and ideals emancipate themselves from the dominant moral
order, it is necessary to refer to the fact or theory of latent impulses
of men.
The fact seems to be that men are brought into the world with all the
passions, instincts, and appetites, uncontrolled and undisciplined.
Civilization, in the interests of the common welfare, demands the
suppression sometimes, and the control always, of these wild, natural
dispositions. In the process of imposing its discipline upon the
individual, in making over the individual in accordance with the
accepted community model, much is suppressed altogether, and much more
finds a vicarious expression in forms that are socially valuable, or at
least innocuous. It is at this point that sport, play, and art function.
They permit the individual to purge himself by means of symbolic
expression of these wild and suppressed impulses. This is the catharsis
of which Aristotle wrote in his _Poetic_, and which has been given new
and more positive significance by the investigations of Sigmund Freud
and the psychoanalysts.
No doubt many other social phenomena such as strikes, wars, popular
elections, and religious revivals perform a similar function in
releasing the subconscious tensions. But within smaller communities,
where social relations are more intimate and inhibitions more
imperative, there are many exceptional individuals who find within the
limits of the communal activity no normal and healthful expression of
their individual aptitudes and temperaments.
The causes which give rise to what are here described as “moral regions”
are due in part to the restrictions which urban life imposes; in part to
the license which these same conditions offer. We have, until very
recently, given much consideration to the temptations of city life, but
we have not given the same consideration to the effects of inhibitions
and suppressions of natural impulses and instincts under the changed
conditions of metropolitan life. For one thing, children, which in the
country are counted as an asset, become in the city a liability. Aside
from this fact it is very much more difficult to rear a family in the
city than on the farm. Marriage takes place later in the city, and
sometimes it doesn’t take place at all. These facts have consequences
the significance of which we are as yet wholly unable to estimate.
Investigation of the problems involved might well begin by a study and
comparison of the characteristic types of social organization which
exist in the regions referred to.
What are the external facts in regard to the life in Bohemia, the
half-world, the red-light district, and other “moral regions” less
pronounced in character?
What is the nature of the vocations which connect themselves with the
ordinary life of these regions? What are the characteristic mental
types which are attracted by the freedom which they offer?
How do individuals find their way into these regions? How do they
escape from them?
To what extent are the regions referred to the product of the license;
to what extent are they due to the restrictions imposed by city life
on the natural man?
_Temperament and social contagion._—What lends special importance to the
segregation of the poor, the vicious, the criminal, and exceptional
persons generally, which is so characteristic a feature of city life, is
the fact that social contagion tends to stimulate in divergent types the
common temperamental differences, and to suppress characters which unite
them with the normal types about them. Association with others of their
own ilk provides also not merely a stimulus, but a moral support for the
traits they have in common which they would not find in a less select
society. In the great city the poor, the vicious, and the delinquent,
crushed together in an unhealthful and contagious intimacy, breed in and
in, soul and body, so that it has often occurred to me that those long
genealogies of the Jukes and the tribes of Ishmael would not show such a
persistent and distressing uniformity of vice, crime, and poverty unless
they were peculiarly fit for the environment in which they are condemned
to exist.
We must then accept these “moral regions” and the more or less eccentric
and exceptional people who inhabit them, in a sense, at least, as part
of the natural, if not the normal, life of a city.
It is not necessary to understand by the expression “moral region” a
place or a society that is either necessarily criminal or abnormal. It
is intended rather to apply to regions in which a divergent moral code
prevails, because it is a region in which the people who inhabit it are
dominated, as people are ordinarily not dominated, by a taste or by a
passion or by some interest which has its roots directly in the original
nature of the individual. It may be an art, like music, or a sport, like
horse-racing. Such a region would differ from other social groups by the
fact that its interests are more immediate and more fundamental. For
this reason its differences are likely to be due to moral, rather than
intellectual, isolation.
Because of the opportunity it offers, particularly to the exceptional
and abnormal types of man, a great city tends to spread out and lay bare
to the public view in a massive manner all the human characters and
traits which are ordinarily obscured and suppressed in smaller
communities. The city, in short, shows the good and evil in human nature
in excess. It is this fact, perhaps, more than any other, which
justifies the view that would make of the city a laboratory or clinic in
which human nature and social processes may be conveniently and
profitably studied.
ROBERT E. PARK.