COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION AND THE ROMANTIC TEMPER
I. THE PROBLEM STATED
Recent local studies in Chicago seem to show that the number of
competent persons in the community is frequently no real measure of the
competency—if one may use that expression in this connection—of the
community itself. A high communal intelligence quotient does not always,
it seems, insure communal efficiency.
The explanation that at once suggests itself is that competent persons
presumably are specialists deeply concerned in the little area of human
experience in which they have chosen to operate, but profoundly
indifferent to the interests of the particular geographical area in
which they may happen to reside.
It is the incompetent persons, apparently, who still maintain an
interest that could in any sense be called lively in the local
communities of our great cities. Women, particularly women without
professional training, and immigrants who are locally segregated and
immured within the invisible walls of an alien language are bound to
have some sort of interest in their neighbors. Children in great cities,
who necessarily live close to the ground, however, are the real
neighbors. Boys’ gangs are neighborhood institutions. Politicians are
professional neighbors. When the boys’ gangs are graduated, as they
frequently are, into local politics, the local political boss assumes
toward them the rôle of patron, and they assume toward him the rôle of
clients.
The competent people—that is to say, the professional people—are, on the
other hand, either physically or in imagination, abroad most of the
time. They live in the city—in their offices and in their clubs. They go
home to sleep. Most of our residential suburbs tend to assume, as far as
the professional classes are concerned, the character of dormitories. It
is seldom that anyone who is sufficiently eminent or sufficiently
competent to find a place in _Who’s Who_ has time for anything more than
a benevolent interest in his local community.
On the other hand, the competent people are keenly alive to the
interests of their professions, and if we could organize our politics,
as the Russians have sought to organize theirs, on the basis of
occupations, that is, in soviets, it might be possible to awaken in our
intelligenzia a more than dilettante and sporting interest in local
politics and the problems of the local community. But the actual
situation is different.
Our political system is founded on the presumption that the local
community is the local political unit. If the local community is
organized, knows its own local interests, and has a mind of its own,
democracy prospers. It is said that 50 per cent of the qualified voters
in this country do not exercise the franchise. So far as this is an
index of their indifference to local community interests, it is at the
same time a measure of the efficiency or inefficiency of the local
community.
The National Community Center Association represents one of many efforts
in recent years to alter the situation of which non-voting is perhaps
one evidence. Community organizations aim, for one thing, to discover,
to organize, and to make available for the local community the local
community’s resources, particularly its human resources. The extent to
which it succeeds is the measure of its efficiency. How to assess these
resources, how to use them: these are problems.
II. THE COMMUNITY DEFINED
But what is a community and what is community organization? Before
assessing the communal efficiency one should at least be able to
describe a community. The simplest possible description of a community
is this: a collection of people occupying a more or less clearly defined
area. But a community is more than that. A community is not only a
collection of people, but it is a collection of institutions. Not
people, but institutions, are final and decisive in distinguishing the
community from other social constellations.
Among the institutions of the community there will always be homes and
something more: churches, schools, playgrounds, a communal hall, a local
theater, perhaps, and, of course, business and industrial enterprises of
some sort. Communities might well be classified by the number and
variety of the institutions—cultural, political, and occupational—which
they possess. This would indicate the extent to which they were
autonomous or, conversely, the extent to which their communal functions
were mediatized, so to speak, and incorporated into the larger
community.
There is always a larger community. Every single community is always a
part of some larger and more inclusive one. There are no longer any
communities wholly detached and isolated; all are interdependent
economically and politically upon one another. The ultimate community is
the wide world.
_a_) _The ecological organization._—Within the limits of any community
the communal institutions—economic, political, and cultural—will tend to
assume a more or less clearly defined and characteristic distribution.
For example, the community will always have a center and a
circumference, defining the position of each single community to every
other. Within the area so defined the local populations and the local
institutions will tend to group themselves in some characteristic
pattern, dependent upon geography, lines of communication, and land
values. This distribution of population and institutions we may call the
ecological organization of the community.
Town-planning is an attempt to direct and control the ecological
organization. Town-planning is probably not so simple as it seems.
Cities, even those like the city of Washington, D.C., that have been
most elaborately planned, are always getting out of hand. The actual
plan of a city is never a mere artifact, it is always quite as much a
product of nature as of design. But a plan is one factor in communal
efficiency.
_b_) _The economic organization._—Within the limits of the ecological
organization, so far as a free exchange of goods and services exists,
there inevitably grows up another type of community organization based
on the division of labor. This is what we may call the occupational
organization of the community.
The occupational organization, like the ecological, is a product of
competition. Eventually every individual member of the community is
driven, as a result of competition with every other, to do the thing he
_can do_ rather than the thing he _would like to do_. Our secret
ambitions are seldom realized in our actual occupations. The struggle to
live determines finally not only where we shall live within the limits
of the community, but what we shall do.
The number and variety of professions and occupations carried on within
the limits of a community would seem to be one measure of its
competency, since in the wider division of labor and the greater
specialization—in the diversities of interests and tasks—and in the vast
unconscious co-operation of city life, the individual man has not only
the opportunity, but the necessity, to choose his vocation and develop
his individual talents.
Nevertheless, in the struggle to find his place in a changing world
there are enormous wastes. Vocational training is one attempt to meet
the situation; the proposed national organization of employment is
another. But until a more rational organization of industry has somehow
been achieved, little progress may be expected or hoped for.
_c_) _The cultural and political organization._—Competition is never
unlimited in human society. Always there is custom and law which sets
some bounds and imposes some restraints upon the wild and wilful
impulses of the individual man. The cultural and political organization
of the community rests upon the occupational organization, just as the
latter, in turn, grows up in, and rests upon, the ecological
organization.
It is this final division or segment of the communal organization with
which community-center associations are mainly concerned. Politics,
religion, and community welfare, like golf, bridge, and other forms of
recreation, are leisure-time activities, and it is the leisure time of
the community that we are seeking to organize.
Aristotle, who described man as a political animal, lived a long time
ago, and his description was more true of man then than it is today.
Aristotle lived in a world in which art, religion, and politics were the
main concerns of life, and public life was the natural vocation of every
citizen.
Under modern conditions of life, where the division of labor has gone so
far that—to cite a notorious instance—it takes 150 separate operations
to make a suit of clothes, the situation is totally different. Most of
us now, during the major portion of our waking hours, are so busy on
some minute detail of the common task that we frequently lose sight
altogether of the community in which we live.
On the other hand, our leisure is now mainly a restless search for
excitement. It is the romantic impulse, the desire to escape the dull
routine of life at home and in the local community, that drives us
abroad in search of adventure. This romantic quest, which finds its most
outrageous expression in the dance halls and jazz parlors, is
characteristic of almost every other expression of modern life.
Political revolution and social reform are themselves often merely
expressions of this same romantic impulse. Millennialism in religion,
the missionary enterprises, particularly those that are limited to
“regions beyond,” are manifestations of this same wish to escape
reality.
We are everywhere hunting the bluebird of romance, and we are hunting it
with automobiles and flying machines. The new devices of locomotion have
permitted millions of people to realize, in actual life, flights of
which they had only dreamed previously. But this physical mobility is
but the reflection of a corresponding mental instability.
This restlessness and thirst for adventure is, for the most part, barren
and illusory, because it is uncreative. We are seeking to escape from a
dull world instead of turning back upon it to transform it.
Art, religion, and politics are still the means through which we
participate in the common life, but they have ceased to be our chief
concern. As leisure-time activities they must now compete for attention
with livelier forms of recreation. It is in the improvident use of our
leisure, I suspect, that the greatest wastes in American life occur.
III. THE MEASUREMENT OF COMMUNAL EFFICIENCY
This, then, is our community. How are we to measure its efficiency?
Here, I am bound to confess, we have still much to learn.
The simplest and most elementary way of estimating the competency and
efficiency of a community, as something different from the competency
and efficiency of the individual men and women who compose it, is by a
comparative study of that community’s social statistics. Poverty,
disease, and delinquency have frequently been called social diseases.
They may be said to measure the extent to which the community has been
able to provide an environment in which the individuals which compose it
are able to live, or, to state it from the opposite point of view, they
measure the extent to which the individuals who compose the community
have been able to adapt themselves to the environment which the
community provided.
The immigrant community manifestly exists to enable the immigrant to
live. By life, however, we mean something more than mere physical
existence. Man is a creature such that when he lives at all he lives in
society, lives in his hopes, in his dreams, and in the minds of other
men. In some way or another, man is bound to realize all his fundamental
wishes, and these wishes, according to Dr. W. I. Thomas, are four:
He must have (1) security, that is, a home; some place to go out from
and return to.
He must have (2) new experience, recreation, adventure, new
sensations.
He must have (3) recognition, i.e., he must belong to some society in
which he has status, some group in which he is somebody; somewhere or
other, in short, he must be a person, rather than a mere cog in the
economic or social machine.
Finally (4) he must have affection, intimate association with someone
or something, even though it be merely a cat or a dog, for which he
feels affection and knows that affection is returned. All special
human wishes reduce finally to these four categories, and no human
creature is likely to be wholesome and happy unless, in some form or
manner, all four of these wishes are more or less adequately
realized.[62]
While I was on the Pacific Coast a few months ago, studying what we have
called “race relations,” I was impressed by the marked differences, as
between immigrant groups, with respect to their ability to accommodate
themselves to the American environment and, within the limitations
imposed upon them by our customs and our laws, to provide for all the
interests of life.
Immigrant communities are likely to include within the circle of their
interests and their organizations all the interests of life. Every
immigrant community will have a religious organization—a synagogue, a
temple, or a church—with its related, often dependent, mutual aid and
welfare organizations. It will have also its own business enterprises,
its clubs, lodges, coffee houses, restaurants and gathering places, and
a press. Every immigrant community is likely to have its press in
America even if it did not have one in the home country. The immigrant
colony is frequently nothing more than a transplanted village, for
America actually has been colonized not by races or by nationalities,
but by villages.
As to the competence of these immigrant communities to provide an
environment in which immigrants can live, Raymond Pearl’s paper, “The
Racial Origin of Almshouse Paupers in the United States,” published in
_Science_ (October 31, 1924), throws some light.
One paragraph in that paper states the situation as between the nation
and the foreign-born. It says:
While on January 1, 1923, there were in almshouses 59.8 native-born
white persons per 100,000 of the same class in the population, the
corresponding figure for the foreign-born was 173.6. This is by some
regarded as a fact of dread significance. Perhaps it is. To me it
seems possibly only an interesting expression of the difficulties
which the human organism finds in adapting itself to a new
environment.
If these figures may be regarded, as Dr. Pearl suggests that they
should, as an index of the difficulties which the human organism finds
in adapting itself to a new environment, the more detailed study of the
various racial groups exhibits some surprising results.
They show, in the first place, wide divergencies in the capacity of
different immigrant groups to adapt themselves to American life; they
show, in the second place, that the races and nationalities that have
lived here longest are the least able to meet the demands of the new
environment. Dr. Pearl states it in this way:
With a few trifling exceptions, all the countries from which the
present law _encourages_ immigration contributed to almshouse
pauperism in 1923 in _excess_ of their representation in the
population in 1920. On the other hand, again with a few trifling
exceptions, those countries from which the present immigration law was
especially framed to _discourage_ immigration appear in the lower part
of the diagram, because they contribute a _smaller_ proportion to
almshouse pauperism in 1923 than their representation in the general
population in 1920.
Two things strike me as significant in this connection: (1) It is the
recent immigrants who contribute least to the almshouse population; (2)
among these recent immigrants it is, apparently, those who for one
reason or another are least willing or able to participate in American
life who contribute the least to our almshouse population.
Why is this true? My own inference is that the decisive factors are not
biological, but sociological. The explanation of the almshouse
statistics, in other words, is less a matter of racial temperament than
of social tradition. It is the immigrants who have maintained in this
country their simple village religions and mutual aid organizations who
have been most able to withstand the shock of the new environment.
The whole subject needs to be investigated further. What would a
comparative study of different racial and language groups with reference
to disease, delinquency, and family disorganization show? What would a
comparison of the Japanese, Chinese, and Mexicans show with reference to
crime? I mention these three groups because they are living and working
side by side on the Pacific Coast.
The census of 1910 showed the Mexicans to have the highest crime rate of
any immigrant group in the United States. My conviction is that when we
obtain the facts we shall find that the Japanese have the lowest crime
rate, at least the lowest of any immigrant group on the Coast.
The explanation is that the Japanese—and the same is true of the
Chinese—have organized what we may call “control organizations” to deal
at once with disputes arising among themselves and with the larger
community outside.
The Japanese Association, like the Chinese Six Companies, is organized
to keep their nationals out of the courts. But the Japanese Association
is more than a court of arbitration and conciliation. Its function is
not merely to settle disputes, but to maintain the morale of the local
Japanese community and to promote in every practical way, mainly by
education, the efforts of the Japanese people to make their way in the
communities in which they live. With the possible exception of the Jews,
the Japanese are better informed than any other group about the
condition of their own people in America.
One thing that has sensibly raised the morale of the Japanese, as it
has, indeed of the Jews, is its struggle to maintain its racial status
in the United States. Nothing, as Sumner observed, so easily establishes
solidarity within the group as an attack from without. Nothing so
contributes to the discipline of a racial or national minority as the
opposition of the racial or national majority.
The peoples who are making, or have made in recent years, the most
progress in America today are, I suspect, the Jews, the Negroes, and the
Japanese. There is, of course, no comparison to be made between the Jew,
the Japanese, and the Negro as to their racial competence. Of all the
immigrant peoples in the United States, the Jews are the most able and
the most progressive; the Negro, on the other hand, is just emerging,
and is still a little afraid of the consequences of his newly acquired
race-consciousness.
What is alike in the case of the Jew, the Negro, and the Japanese is
that their conflict with America has been grave enough to create in each
a new sense of racial identity, and to give the sort of solidarity that
grows out of a common cause. It is the existence in a people of the
sense of a cause which finally determines their group efficiency.
In some sense these communities in which our immigrants live their
smaller lives may be regarded as models for our own. We are seeking to
do, through the medium of our local community organizations, such things
as will get attention and interest for the little world of the locality.
We are encouraging a new parochialism, seeking to initiate a movement
that will run counter to the current romanticism with its eye always on
the horizon, one which will recognize limits and work within them.
Our problem is to encourage men to seek God in their own village and to
see the social problem in their own neighborhood. These immigrant
communities deserve further study.
ROBERT E. PARK