must be of a new order. There is already a general teaching of morality
in the country churches. The temperance reform is a moral propaganda
born of the farmer economy. The expulsion of the saloon from country
places has been in obedience to the farmer's conscience. The temperance
reform exhibits the transformation from individual ethics which were
advocated in 1880 to communal ethics which are represented in the local
option aspects of this reform. In 1880 the individual was asked to sign
the pledge of total abstinence. In those days it was as important that
innocent children sign the pledge as that drunkards sign it. The lists
of pledge signers were padded with the names of persons who had never
tasted strong drink. In 1893 the Anti-Saloon League began its agitation,
which has proceeded among country people with increasing influence. The
individual is ignored and the pledge is signed now by the community, by
the county or by the state. The attack is not upon the individual
drunkard, but upon the community institution, the saloon. This is a
great gain in the direction of social ethics. It illustrates the
transformation from the pioneer whose impact was upon the individual to
the standards of the exploiter period in which the impact is upon the
commercial institution. The local option movement has had its growth in
the period of exploitation dated by Prof. Ross from 1890. In this
movement the country churches have been distributing centers, the places
of discussion and nuclei of moral energy.
If the general moral standards of country people are to be transformed
from the pioneer formulae to those of the modern world economy, the
country churches must be led by men trained in economics and reinforced
by a thorough knowledge of social processes. The temperance movement
already begins to show the deficiencies of a propaganda purely negative.
Its leaders have shown no conspicuous sympathy with the play-ground
movement, which is an essential part of the same ethical process. If the
saloon is expelled something must be put in its place, but the
temperance reformers have not been wise enough for substitution: they
have only been skilful in expulsion. Country life, in its representative
communities, suffers today from monotony and emptiness.
The ministers, teachers and other rural leaders need the training which
will equip them in positive and aggressive social construction. As the
economy of the exploiter comes in to transform the country community it
is necessary for the preacher and the teacher to train the population in
the ethical standards of the new time. Naturally new contractual
relations will prevail in business, and trusts will be committed to the
leading men in the farming community, for which they need definite moral
preparation. There is many a farmer in the United States who may be
safely entrusted with the honor of a woman, but cannot be entrusted with
a million dollars to spend in the interest of the community. In many a
country community it is perfectly safe to leave the door unlocked, but
it is not safe to purchase a quart of milk for a child. There is many a
farmer from whom it is morally safe to purchase an acre of ground, but
one cannot be sure in purchasing a cow from him that she will not be
tuberculous. These are new standards not required by the old economy and
not taught in the old meeting-house.
One defect of the country church at the present time is that it has for
the countryman no message appropriate to the struggle in which he is
actually attempting to do right. Many churches in the country teach only
the standards of right and wrong to which the farmers already conform.
For a short time a new minister is popular with them because his new
voice and his fresh elocution contain a subtle flattery. He denounces
the sins to which they are not inclined and praises the virtues which
they have learned to practise from their fathers. But after about six
months of such preaching the farmer wearies of a preacher with no new
message. Indeed the countryman is puzzled and perplexed by modern
situations about which the minister has no knowledge. The farmer is
forced to be an economist, but the minister has never studied economics.
The farmer is face to face with problems of exploitation. The values
not merely of land but of money are in his thought. But the preacher has
had no training in finance and he cannot speak wisely or surely upon the
marginal problems with which the farmer is perplexed.
The household economy of the farm is no longer sufficient. The sins are
not merely those of adultery and disobedience and disloyalty. They are
the sins of the world market and the world economy. In these moral
situations the minister is silent. He knows nothing about them. He is
inclined merely to object if the farmer purchases an automobile. He does
not see what the automobile is to do for the agriculturist. Sunday
observance, total abstinence, family purity, honesty as to personal
property, these are his stock in trade and these alone. It requires,
therefore, a genius to preach in the country, because only the most
brilliant preaching can render traditional moral standards interesting
among country people.
It is proverbial among ministers that "the best preachers are needed in
the country." The reason for this is that none of the preachers has any
but an outworn standard to preach. They must reinforce it with
extraordinary eloquence in order to keep it attractive. Very ordinary
men, however, if they understand the modern spirit, can hold the
attention of country people. The grange has ministered to the farmer's
conscience. Yet its leaders have been commonplace men, unknown to the
nation at large. The great movements which have influenced the farmer
in the past twenty years have most of them been pushed to success by men
unknown to any but farmers. What orator has come into national
prominence out of the enterprises of agricultural life in the past two
decades? The farmer does not need great eloquence, but he does need a
thorough understanding of the moral and spiritual situations arising out
of the exploiter process in which he is immersed. He needs moral
teachers for the era of husbandry which is dawning in the country.
"There is an actual and most conspicuous dearth of leadership of a high
order in rural life. This is evident when we consider the economic and
social importance of the agriculturists. The agriculturists constitute
about half of our population, they owned over 21 per cent of the total
wealth in 1900, and in 1909 their products had a value of $8,760,000, or
just about one-third that of the entire nation for that year. Yet this
vast and fundamental element of our nation elects no farmer presidents,
has scarcely any of its members in congress, but few in state
legislatures as compared with other classes; it has no governors nor
judges. In fact, this class is almost without leadership in the sphere
of political life and must depend on representatives of other classes to
secure justice. Economically it is relatively powerless likewise,
possessing practically no control over markets and prices through
organization in an age when organization dominates all economic lines,
accepting interest rates and freight rates offered it without the
ability to check or regulate them, and buying its goods at whatever
prices the industrial producers set. Its leadership up to the present
time has been of the sporadic and discontinuous sort. It has been
individualistic, lacking social outlook and vision. Consequently for
community purposes its significance has been slight."[34]
FOOTNOTE:
[Footnote 34: Prof. John M. Gillette, in American Journal of Sociology,
March, 1910.]
XIII
RECREATION
The time has passed in which the amusements of the community can be
neglected or dismissed with mere condemnation. In the husbandry of the
country every factor must be counted. We are dealing no longer with a
fatalistic country life, but with the economy of all resources.
Therefore the neglecting of the play life and ignoring the leisure
occupations of a country people are inconsistent with the new economy.
Moreover the ancient method of condemning all recreations passed away
with the austere economy of earlier days. The churches in the country no
longer discipline their members for "going to frolics." The country
community no longer is of one mind as to the standard by which
recreation shall be governed. Yet every event of this sort is closely
inspected by the general attention.
The experience of the cities, in which social control has gone much
farther than in the country under the deliberate harmonizing of life
with economic principles, has much to contribute for the building up of
rural society through various means, among which is recreation.
The need of recreative activities in the country is shown by recent
surveys undertaken in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and
Kentucky by the Presbyterian Department of Church and Country Life.
Generally, throughout the farming population, it was discovered that no
common occasions and no common experiences fell to the lot of the
country community. In the course of the round year there is, in
thousands of farming communities in Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois,
no single meeting that brings all the people together. The small town
has its fireman's parade, to the small city comes once a year the circus
and to the great city comes an anniversary or an exposition. Every year
there is some common experience which welds the population, increases
acquaintance and intensifies social unity. The tillage of the soil in
those farming communities from which the blacksmith, the storekeeper,
the peddler and the shoemaker have departed, is very lonely.
The telephone is the new system of nerves for the rural organism, but
the telephone is a cold, steel wire instead of the warm and cordial
personal meetings with which the countryside was once enlivened. In
eighty country towns in Pennsylvania, of which fifty are purely
agricultural, we found in our survey only three that had a common
leadership and a common assembling. The life of the people in these
communities is so solitary as to be almost repellent. Their social
habits are those of aggressive loneliness. This isolation in the
pioneer days made the country people cordial to the visitor: but in the
coming of the new economy the farmer shrinks from strangers, because he
has become accustomed to social divisions and classifications in which
he feels himself inferior; so that the loneliness of country life has
become not merely geographical, but sociological. The farmer is shut in
not merely by distances in miles, but by distances of social aversion
and suspicion. Difference has become a more hostile influence in the
country than distance.
Organized industry necessitates organized recreation. The subjection of
mind and body to machine labor requires a reaction in the form of play.
All factory and industrial populations, without exception, provide
themselves with play-grounds of some sort. In the city where no public
provision is made the streets are used by the boys for their games, even
at the risk of injury or death from the passing traffic. Jane Addams has
shown, in a fine literary appeal in her "The Spirit of Youth and the
City Streets," the necessity of some provision for the recreations of
the young and of working people in a great city.
This necessity is not primarily due to congestion of the population. Its
real sources are in the system and organization by which modern work is
done. This necessity is as characteristic of the rural community as it
is of the city, for on the farms as well as in the factory towns labor
is performed by machinery. This means that through the working hours of
the day, from eight to twelve in number, the attention of the worker
must be concentrated upon one task, patiently and steadfastly pursued.
The machine worker exerts himself in the control of great powers, horse
power or steam power, committed to his charge. He has no opportunity for
languor or rest. He has no choice. His job drives him. His movements are
fixed and regulated by the nature of the machine with which he is
working, and of the task to be accomplished. At the end of the day he
has acted involuntarily and mechanically until his own powers of will
and choice are accumulated. Being repressed through long hours of
prescribed labor he is ready for a rebound. His nature demands
self-expression. This self-expression takes the form of play.
The recreation which results is organized. The laborer in a factory or
on a railroad is conscious of organization by the very nature of his
work. He labors with a machine driven by powers unseen but of whose
operation he is aware, in a great plant wherein his own labor is
co-ordinated with that of other workers like unto himself. The hours of
self-devotion and prescribed attention leave him free for sympathy with
the other workers, whose action and whose toil are organized with his
own, and on whose skill and devotion his life and limb and the
continuance of his job are dependent. When he turns to recreation he
naturally seeks to continue the silent communion with his
fellow-workers. The repressed personal energies are already prepared
for team work. He comes out of the factory bubbling over with good
fellowship and seeking for comradeship in the self-expression which the
long hours of the day have denied him.
The result is that in every factory town the open spaces are devoted to
playground uses. Vacant lots, unoccupied fields, and the open street are
used by men and boys for their games.
Exactly the same experience results from school and college organization
of education work. The student in the common schools does not choose his
course; it is prescribed for him by his family and by society. He does
not go to school because he is mentally ambitious, but because the
standards of universal education require it of him. Especially in the
colleges which inherit a great name and attract young men and women for
social advantage, the students are characterized by an involuntary
subjection to the routine of modern pedagogy. Educational discipline is
imposed upon them through the long hours of lectures and laboratory and
recitations. The students in high school and college are accumulating a
rebound of voluntary action. This organized self-expression takes the
form of school and college athletics, which has long since been adopted
as a part of the educational routine. No considerable number of
educators are in favor of abolishing it, and only a few venture to
believe in restricting college athletics. Its moral value is everywhere
tacitly recognized, and pretty generally it is consciously accepted by
college and school faculties.
Play of this sort has great moral value. We are hired to work, and we do
it without choice or enthusiasm, but in play the natural forces and the
personal choice are at their maximum. Every action is chosen and is
saturated with the pleasure of self-expression. The result is that play
has high ethical value.
Especially has organized recreation great moral power, because it
involves team work, and the subjection of the individual to the success
of the team. Organized recreation teaches self-denial in a multitude of
experiences which are all the more powerful because they are not
prescribed by any teacher or preacher, but are the free natural
expression of the human spirit under the government of chosen associates
working out together a common purpose.
Therefore it is necessary to use play for the recreation of country
life. The word is literal, not figurative. It is not a problem merely of
games, nor the question of gymnasium, but a profound ethical enterprise
of disciplining the whole population through the use of the play spirit.
This question must be approached on the high plane of the teaching of
modern theorists, and the experience of such practical organizations as
the Young Men's Christian Association.
The Christian Associations began their work in the lifetime of present
generations and for accomplishing certain purposes they have used
recreation. They provided a gymnasium, at first, in order to get men
into the prayer-meeting. They offered social parlors in which young men
could always hear the sound of sacred song. But the Young Men's
Christian Association has traveled far from its crude and early use of
recreation. Some of the early Association leaders are still living and
still leading. They have steadily advanced with care and wisdom in the
use of recreation. Within very recent years the leaders of the
Associations have countenanced the use of billiard tables. No longer is
the gymnasium an annex to the prayer-meeting. It has values of its own.
Without moralizing, these practical men have discovered that the social
parlors were good for ends of their own and not merely as a place for
hearing the distant sound of hymns. In other words, recreation is a form
of ethical culture.
Rev. C. O. Gill, who was captain of the Yale football team in 1890, has
had an extended experience among farmers. He says, "The reason why
farmers cannot co-operate is in the fact that they did not play when
they were boys. They never learned team work. They cannot yield to one
another, or surrender themselves to the common purpose." The writer,
observing Mr. Gill coaching a university team, commented upon the good
spirits with which a player yielded his place on the team just before
the victory. Mr. Gill had removed him, as he explained to him, not
because he played poorly, but because a new formation required a
rearrangement of the team. In reply to comment upon the player's
self-forgetfulness, Mr. Gill said, "Football is the greatest school of
morals in the country. I learned more ethics from the coaches when I was
an undergraduate in Yale, than from all other sources combined."
It is this high ethical value of recreation which causes the working man
to defend his amateur baseball team, and makes it so hard to repress
Sunday games. The working man admits the high value of the Sabbath, but
he sets a value also upon recreation, and without analysis of the
philosophy either of the Sabbath or of the play-ground, stoutly
maintains the goodness of recreation and its necessity for those who
have labored all the week. "I work six days in the week, and I must have
some time for recreation," is the working man's answer to all Sunday
reformers. Waiving for a moment the question of the Sabbath, the human
process to which the working man testifies is exactly as he describes
it. Organized labor and systematic industry will react on any population
in the form of systematic recreation.
The Play-ground Movement, therefore, is extending itself throughout the
country by the very influence of modern industry. Given intelligence to
interpret it, and one understands at once the desire of philanthropic
and public spirited men and women to provide "a playground beside every
school building, open for all the people."
Dr. Luther H. Gulick, who was born of missionary parents, was trained in
religious schools, graduated as a physician, employed for years in the
Young Men's Christian Association, and then made Play-Ground Director in
the New York Public Schools, has become legitimately the heir of the
experiences of the modern social conscience. He has summed up the
philosophy of working men, students, and of the people whose lives are
systematized, in a sentence: "There is a higher morality in the
reactions of play than in the experiences of labor."
The tradition of the church has been opposed to amusement and
recreation. The church of our fathers recognized the moral possibilities
of play by calling all play immoral. The early Quakers filled their
records in the eighteenth century with denunciations of "frollicks."
Consciously they denounced amusement, acting no doubt in a wise
understanding of the rude, boisterous character of the pioneer's social
gatherings. Only unconsciously did the Quakers cultivate the spirit of
recreation in their social gatherings. It was permitted to have but few
and repressed opportunities. The decadence of the Quaker church is
probably due, in a considerable measure, to their stubborn unwillingness
to see both sides of this question. They saw that recreation was
immoral. They refused to see that its possible moral value was as great
as its moral danger.
Extensive correspondence with working pastors, by means of a system of
questions sent out from a New York office, has brought this result. In
answer to the question, "What amusements of moral value are there in the
community?" the answer, "Baseball, boating, tennis, golf, bicycling,
etc." A smaller number of recreations was named in answer to the inquiry
for immoral sports. The subsequent question, "What is your position
before the community?" brought from the minister very often this answer:
"I am known to be opposed to all sports." Few ministers realize the
inconsistency of this position. They stand before the community as the
professed advocates of public and private morality, and they stand also
before the community as the professed and violent opponents, often, of
the public sports which are known to the young men and workingmen
generally as promoters of ethical culture and moral training. Is it any
wonder that the churches, in these communities, are often deserted by
the common people?
In Lewistown, Pa., the old Presbyterian Church there, seeing the
congested character of the town population and the need of
breathing-places for the young people and working people, looked about
for a recreation field. The only available ground is the old cemetery,
in which the earlier members of the congregation have buried their dead.
This, the only open spot in the center of the town, it has been proposed
to turn into a playground, the bodies of the dead to be disinterred and
laid reverently away in a quieter place, and the ground newly
consecrated to the needs of the living, and of the young. The action
contemplated by this fine old church is emblematic of the modern spirit.
Christianity is no longer a mere reverence for death and the other
world. But it is an energetic service to the young, and the working
people, in this present world. It is no longer a solemn reverence for
the salvation of the individual soul in a heaven unseen, but it is a
social service, no less serious, unto the living and unto the young and
the employed.
Certain modern sports, such as baseball, are free from the corruption
which has attached itself to horse-racing and pugilism. This corruption
is not in racing a horse, or punching an opponent. It is in the
dishonesty of the race, for horsemen believe that "there never was an
honest horse-race," and the followers of the prize ring are constantly
suspicious that the fight will be "fixed." The first question they ask
after the decision of the referee is generally, "Was it a frame-up?" The
moral power of baseball, tennis, football and the other most popular
sports, is in the confidence that the game is fairly played. This
fairness of the game is the widest extended school of ethical culture
that the American and British population know. Honorable recreation
trains in courage, manliness, co-operation, obedience, self-control,
presence of mind, and in every other of the general social virtues. It
makes men citizens and good soldiers when need comes. This was the
meaning of the remark of the Duke of Wellington, when, after the
conquest of Napoleon, he returned to view the playground at Eton, and
said, "Here the Battle of Waterloo was won."
For the building up of a community, therefore, the promotion of
recreation is an essential. Just as necessary as the providing of common
schools for all the people, is the provision of public play-grounds for
all the people. As many as are the school houses so many, generally
speaking, should be the play-grounds accessible to all, under the care
of trained and responsible leaders, in which, without too much
government, the free movements of the young and the abounding
self-expression of the great mass of the employed shall have opportunity
to work out their own education through play, into public righteousness.
The training of citizens for days to come demands exactly the qualities
which are imparted on the play-ground. Morality is not taught and
ethical culture is not imparted by precept, though precept and
exhortation have their due place in the analysis of moral and spiritual
matters, for the thoughtful. But the great number of people are not
ethically thoughtful, and in the acquirement of righteousness all people
are unconscious. The desired action in moral growth is universally
spontaneous. The most sober and intellectual of men must be caught off
his guard and must be lured into voluntary actions before any moral
habits can be formed in him. Mere analysis of truth or self-examination
makes no man good. But men become good by doing things first, and
thinking of them afterward. They can be just as good if they never think
about them, though thinking about ethical matters renders a service to
the community as a whole.