it makes possible the association of neighbors, which means fuller
acquaintance and a more real understanding. The task of creation from
elektrons up is putting self in relation. Is man the only one who
refuses this task? I do not know my next-door neighbor! One of the most
unfortunate circumstances of our large towns is that we expect concerted
action from people who are strangers to one another. So mere
acquaintance is the first essential. This will lead inevitably to
friendly feeling. The story is told of some American official who begged
not to be introduced to a political enemy, for he said he could not hate
any one with whom he became acquainted. We certainly do feel more kindly
to the people we actually see. It is what has been called “the pungent
sense of effective reality.” Neighborhood organization will substitute
confidence for suspicion—a great gain.
Moreover, neighborhood organization gives opportunity for constant and
regular intercourse. We are indeed far more interested in humanity than
ever before. Look at what we are studying: social psychology, social
economics, social medicine and hygiene, social ethics etc. But people
must socialize their lives by practice, not by study. Until we begin to
acquire the habit of a social life no theory of a social life will do us
any good. It is a mistake to think that such abstractions as unity,
brotherhood etc. are as self-evident to our wills as to our intellect. I
learn my duty to my friends not by reading essays on friendship, but by
living my life with my friends and learning by experience the
obligations friendship demands. Just so must I learn my relation to
society by coming into contact with a wide range of experiences, of
people, by cultivating and deepening my sympathy and whole understanding
of life.
When we have come together and got acquainted with one another, then we
shall have an opportunity for learning the rules of the game—the game of
association which is the game of life. Certain organizations have sprung
up since 1914 with the avowed object of fighting war with love. If only
we knew how to love! I am ready to say to you this minute, “I love my
neighbors.” But all that I mean by it is that I have a vague feeling of
kindliness towards them. I have no idea how to do the actual deed. I
shall offend against the law of love within an hour. The love of our
fellow-men to be effective must be the love evolved from some actual
group relation. We talk of fellowship; we, puny separatists bristling
with a thousand unharmonized traits, with our assertive particularist
consciousness, think that all we have to do is to _decide_ on fellowship
as a delightful idea. But fellowship will be the slowest thing on earth
to create. An eager longing for it may help, but it can come into being
as a genuine part of our life only through a deep understanding of what
it really means.
Yet association is the impulse at the core of our being. The whole
social process is that of association, individual with individual, group
with group. Progress from one point of view is a continuously widening
of the area of association. Our modern civilization has simply overlaid
and falsified this primary instinct of life. But this is rapidly
changing. The most striking characteristic of the present day is that
people are doing more things together: they are coming together as never
before in labor organizations, in coöperative societies, in consumers’
leagues, in associations of employers and employed, in municipal
movements, for national purposes, etc. etc. We have the Men’s City Club,
the Women’s City Club; professional societies are multiplying over
night. The explanation sometimes given for this present tendency towards
union is that we are beginning to see the material advantages of
coöperation, but the root of the thing is far from utilitarian
advantage. Our happiness, our sense of living at all, is directly
dependent on our joining with others. We are lost, exiled, imprisoned
until we feel the joy of union.
I believe that the realization of oneness which will come to us with a
fuller sense of democracy, with a deeper sense of our common life, is
going to be the substitute for what men now get in war. Some
psychologists tell us that fighting is one of the fundamental instincts,
and that if we do not have war we shall have all the dangers of thwarted
instinct. But the lure of war is neither the instinct of hate nor the
love of fighting; it is the joining of one with another in a common
purpose. “And the heart of a people beat with one desire.” Many men have
gone joyfully to war because it gave them fellowship. I said to some one
that I thought the reason war was still popular in spite of all its
horrors was because of our lack of imagination, we simply could not
realize war. “No,” said the man I spoke to, “I know war, I know its
horrors, and the reason that in spite of it all men like war is because
there we are doing something all together. That is its exhilaration and
why we can’t give it up. We come home and each leads his separate life
and it seems tame and uninteresting merely on that account, the deadly
separateness of our ordinary life.”
When we want a substitute for war, therefore, we need not seek for a
substitute for fighting or for hating; we must find some way of making
ourselves feel at one with some portion of our fellow-creatures. If the
essential characteristic of war is doing things together, let us begin
to do things together in peace. Yet not an artificial doing things
together, we could so easily fall into that, but an entire
reorganization of life so that the doing things together shall be the
natural way—the way we shall all want to do things.
But mere association is not enough. We need more than the “collective
life,” the mere “getting-together,” so much talked of in these days; our
getting together must be made effective, must exercise our minds and
wills as well as our emotions, must serve the great ends of a great
life. Neighborhood organization gives all an opportunity to learn the
technique of association.
A further advantage of neighborhood organization is that as a member of
a neighborhood group we get a fuller and more varied life than as a
member of any other kind of a group we can find, no matter how big our
city or how complex or comprehensive its interests. This statement
sounds paradoxical—it will seem to many like saying that the smaller is
greater than the larger. Let us examine this statement therefore and see
if perhaps in this case the smaller is not greater than the larger. Why
is the neighborhood group better for us than the selected group? Why are
provincial people more interesting than cosmopolitan, that is, if
provincial people have taken advantage of _their_ opportunities? Because
cosmopolitan people are all alike—that has been the aim of their
existence and they have accomplished it. The man who knows the “best”
society of Petrograd, Paris, London and New York, and that only, is a
narrow man because the ideals and standards of the “best” society of
London, Paris and New York are the same. He knows life across but not
down—it is a horizontal civilization instead of a vertical one, with all
the lack of depth and height of everything horizontal. This man has
always been among the same kind of people, his life has not been
enlarged and enriched by the friction of ideas and ideals which comes
from the meeting of people of different opportunities and different
tastes and different standards. But this is just what we may have in a
neighborhood group—different education, different interests, different
standards. Think of the doctor, the man who runs the factory, the
organist and choir leader, the grocer, the minister, the watch-maker,
the school-teacher, all living within a few blocks of one another.
On the other hand consider how different it is when we _choose_ the
constituents of our group—then we choose those who are the same as
ourselves in some particular. We have the authors’ club, the social
workers’ club, the artists’ club, the actors’ society, the business
men’s club, the business women’s club, the teachers’ club etc.[80] The
satisfaction and contentment that comes with sameness indicates a meagre
personality. I go to the medical association to meet doctors, I go to my
neighborhood club to meet men. It is just because my next door neighbor
has never been to college that he is good for me. The stenographer may
come to see that her life is really richer from getting the factory
girl’s point of view.
In a neighborhood group you have the stimulus and the bracing effect of
many different experiences and ideals. And in this infinite variety
which touches you on every side, you have a life which enriches and
enlarges and fecundates; this is the true soil of human development—just
because you have here a natural and not an artificial group, the members
find all that is necessary in order to grow into that whole which is
true community living.
Many young men and women think as they come to the teeming cities that
there they are to find the fuller life they have longed for, but often
the larger our world the narrower we become, for we cannot face the
vague largeness, and so we join a clique of people as nearly like
ourselves as we can find.
In so far, therefore, as neighborhoods are the result of some selective
process, they are not so good for our purpose. The Italian colony or the
Syrian colony does not give us the best material for group organization,
neither does any occupational segregation like the stockyard district of
Chicago. (This is an argument against the industrial colonies which are
spreading.) In a more or less mixed neighborhood, people of different
nationalities or different classes come together easily and naturally on
the ground of many common interests: the school, recreational
opportunities, the placing of their children in industry, hygiene,
housing etc. Race and class prejudices are broken down by working
together for intimate objects.
Whenever I speak of neighborhood organization to my friends, those who
disagree with me at once become violent on the subject. I have never
understood why it inflames them more easily than other topics. They
immediately take it for granted that I am proposing to shut them up
tight in their neighborhoods and seal them hermetically; they assume
that I mean to substitute the neighborhood for every other contact. They
tell me of the pettiness of neighborhood life, and I have to listen to
stories of neighborhood iniquities ranging from small gossip to
determined boycotting. Intolerance and narrowness thrive in the
neighborhood group they say; in the wider group they do not. But I am
not proposing to substitute the neighborhood group for others, yet even
so I should like to say a word for the neighborhood.
We may like some selected group better than the company of our
neighbors, but such a group is no “broader” necessarily, because it
draws from all over the city, than a local one. You can have narrow
interests as well as narrow spaces. Neighbors may, it is true, discuss
the comings and goings of the family down the street, but I have heard
people who are not neighbors discuss equally trivial subjects. But
supposing that non-neighborhood groups are less petty in the sense of
less personal in their conversation, they are often also less real, and
this is an important point. If I dress in my best clothes and go to
another part of the city and take all my best class of conversation with
me, I don’t know that it does me any good if I am the same person who in
my every-day clothes goes in next door and talks slander. What I mean is
that the only place in the world where we can change ourselves is on
that level where we are real. And what is forgotten by my friends who
think neighborhood life trivial is that (according to their own
argument) it is the same people who talk gossip in their neighborhoods
who are impersonal and noble in another part of the city.
Moreover, if we are happier away from our neighborhood it would be well
for us to analyze the cause—there may be a worthy reason, there may not.
Is it perhaps that one does not get as much consideration there as one
thinks one’s due? Have we perhaps, led by our vanity, been drawn to
those groups where we get the most consideration? My neighbors may not
think much of me because I paint pictures, knowing that my back yard is
dirty, but my artist friends who like my color do not know or care about
my back yard. My neighbors may feel no admiring awe of my scientific
researches knowing that I am not the first in the house of a neighbor in
trouble.
You may reply, “But this is not my case. I am one of the most esteemed
people in my neighborhood and one of the lowest in the City Club, but I
prefer the latter just because of that: there is room for me to aspire
there, but where I am leading what is there for me to grow toward, how
can I expand in such an atmosphere?” But I should say that this also
might be a case of vanity: possibly these people prefer the City Club
because they do not like to think they have found their place in life in
what they consider an inferior group; it flatters them more to think
that they belong to a superior group even if they occupy the lowest
place there. But the final word to be said is I think that this kind of
seeking implies always the attitude of getting, almost as bad as the
attitude of conferring. It is extremely salutary to take our place in a
neighborhood group.
Then, too, that does not always do us most good which we enjoy most, as
we are not always progressing most when thrills go up and down our
spine. We may have a selected group feeling “good,” but that is not
going to make us good. That very homogeneity which we nestle down into
and in which we find all the comfort of a down pillow, does not provide
the differences in which alone we can grow. We must know the finer
enjoyment of recognized diversity.
It must be noted, however, that while it is not proposed that the
neighborhood association be substituted for other forms of
association—trade-union, church societies, fraternal societies, local
improvement leagues, coöperative societies, men’s clubs, women’s clubs
etc.—yet the hope is that it shall not be one more association merely,
but that it shall be the means of coördinating and translating into
community values other local groups. The neighborhood association might
become a very mechanical affair if we were all to go there every evening
and go nowhere else. It must not with its professed attempt to give a
richer life cut off the variety and spontaneity we now have.
But the trouble now is that we have so much unrelated variety, so much
unutilized spontaneity. The small merchant of a neighborhood meets with
the other small dealers for business purposes, he goes to church on
Sundays, he gets his social intercourse at his lodge or club, but where
and when does he consider any possible integration of these into
channels for community life? At his political rally, to be sure, he
meets his neighbors irrespective of business or church or social lines,
but there he comes under party domination. A free, full community life
lived within the sustaining and nourishing power of the community bond,
lived for community ends, is almost unknown now. This will not come by
substituting the neighborhood group for other groups, not even by using
it as a clearing-house, but by using it as a medium for interpretation
and unofficial integration.
There should be as much spontaneous association as the vitality of the
neighborhood makes possible, but other groups may perhaps find their
significance and coördination through the neighborhood association. If a
men’s or women’s club is of no use to the community it should not exist;
if it is of use, it must find out of what use, how related to all other
organizations, how through and with them related to the whole community.
The lawyers’ club, the teachers’ club, the trade association or the
union—these can have little influence on their community until they
discover their relation to the community through and in one another. I
have seen many examples of this. If the neighborhood group is to be the
political unit, it must learn how to gather up into significant
community expression these more partial expressions of individual wants.
It is sometimes said that the force of the neighborhood bond is
lessening now-a-days with the ease of communication, but this is true
only for the wealthy. The poor cannot afford constantly to be paying the
ten-cent carfare necessary to leave and return to their homes, nor the
more well-to-do of the suburbs the twenty or twenty-five cents it costs
them to go to the city and back. The fluctuating population of
neighborhoods may be an argument against getting all we should like out
of the neighborhood bond, but at the same time it makes it all the more
necessary that some organization should be ready at hand to assimilate
the new-comers and give them an opportunity of sharing in civic life as
an integral, responsible part of that life. Moreover a neighborhood has
common traditions and memories which persist and influence even although
the personnel changes.
To sum up: whether we want the exhilaration of a fuller life or whether
we want to find the unities which will make for peace and order, for
justice and for righteousness, it would be wise to turn back to the
neighborhood group and there begin the a b c of a constructive
brotherhood of man. We must recognize that too much congeniality makes
for narrowness, and that the harmonizing, not the ignoring, of our
differences leads us to the truth. Neighborhood organization gives us
the best opportunity we have yet discovered of finding the unity
underneath all our differences, the real bond between them—of living the
consciously creative life.
We can never reform American politics from above, by reform
associations, by charters and schemes of government. Our political forms
will have no vitality unless our political life is so organized that it
shall be based primarily and fundamentally on spontaneous association.
“Government is a social contact,” was found in the examination papers of
a student in a near-by college. He was nearer the truth than he knew.
Political progress must be by local communities. Our municipal life will
be just as strong as the strength of its parts. We shall never know how
to be one of a nation until we are one of a neighborhood. And what
better training for world organization can each man receive than for
neighbors to live together not as detached individuals but as a true
community, for no League of Nations will be successful which regards
France and Germany, England and Russia as separatist units of a
world-union.
Those who are working for particular reforms to be accomplished
immediately will not be interested in neighborhood organization; only
those will be interested who think that it is far more important for us
to find the right method of attacking all our problems than to solve any
one. We who believe in neighborhood organization believe that the
neighborhood group is a more significant unit to identify ourselves with
than any we have hitherto known in cities. People have been getting
together in churches, in fraternal societies, in political parties, in
industrial and commercial associations, but now in addition to these
partial groups communities are to get together as communities.
The neighborhood organization movement is not waiting for ideal
institutions, or perfect men, but is finding whatever creative forces
there are within a community and taking these and building the future
with them. The neighborhood organization movement is a protest against
both utopias on the one hand and a mechanicalized humanity on the other.
It consists of the process of building always with the best we have, and
its chief problem is to discover the methods by which the best we have
can be brought to the surface. Neighborhood organization gives us a
method which will revolutionize politics.
-----
Footnote 80:
This movement to form societies based on our occupations is of course,
although usually unconscious, part of the whole syndicalist movement,
and as such has real advantages which will be taken up later.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXIII
AN INTEGRATED NEIGHBORHOOD
--------------
HOW can an active and fruitful neighborhood life be brought into
existence and fostered and nurtured? How can we unclose the sources
within our own midst from which to draw our inspiration? And then how
can the vision which we learn to see together be actualized? How can
neighborhoods learn to satisfy their own needs through their own
initiative? In other words how can the force generated by our
neighborhood life become part of our whole civic and national life? How
can an integrated neighborhood responsibility become a civic and
national responsibility?
There is no such thing as a neighborhood in its true sense, something
more, that is, than the physical contiguity of people, until you have a
neighborhood consciousness. Rows of houses, rows of streets, do not make
a neighborhood. The place bond must give way to a consciousness of real
union. This neighborhood consciousness can be evolved in five ways:
1. By regular meetings of neighbors for the consideration of
neighborhood and civic problems, not merely sporadic and occasional
meetings for specific objects.
2. By a genuine discussion at these regular meetings.
3. By learning together—through lectures, classes, clubs; by sharing one
another’s experience through social intercourse; by learning forms of
community art expression; in short by leading an actual community life.
4. By taking more and more responsibility for the life of the
neighborhood.
5. By establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and
city, state and national governments.
The most deliberate and conscious movement for neighborhood organization
is the Community Centre movement. This is a movement to mobilize
community forces and to get these forces expressed in our social and
political life. Each community, it is becoming recognized, has its own
desires, its own gifts, its own inherent powers to bring to the life of
the whole city. But these inner forces must be freed and utilized for
public ends. The Community Centre movement is a movement to release the
potential values of neighborhood life, to find a channel for them to
flow in, to help people find and organize their own resources. It is to
provide a means for the self-realization of neighborhoods. In
considering, therefore, the various methods of neighborhood integration,
it must be remembered that many of these methods are being already
actualized in Community Centres, School Centres, Neighborhood
Associations—there are many names for the many forms in which this vital
need is finding expression.
Schoolhouses are being opened all over the country for neighborhood use.
In the larger cities, indeed, where school buildings have auditoriums,
gymnasiums, cooking-rooms, sewing-rooms etc., the School Centre is for
many reasons the best form of community organization. In some cities, as
in Chicago, the field-houses in the parks are used as community centres,
in addition to the schoolhouses. In many smaller towns or villages,
where field-houses are unknown and the schoolhouses unsuitable (although
often we find valuable if not showy results in the little red
schoolhouse at the cross-roads or in a Kansas cyclone cellar underneath
the district school), “community buildings” are being built. Their name
is significant. They have a reading room, library, rest room, club rooms
and usually a small hall with stage for dramatic and musical
entertainments.
And beyond this conscious effort to organize neighborhoods, or rather to
help neighborhoods to organize themselves, much spontaneous initiative
in both rural and urban communities, springing from the daily needs of
the people, is finding neighborhood organization to be the result of
concerted effort. Mothers want to learn more of the care of their homes,
men want to discuss local improvements, young men and women want
recreation, there is a hunger for a wider social intercourse or for some
form of community art-expression, music or drama. Yet whichever of these
motives leads us to the schoolhouse or the community building, the
result is always the same—a closer forging of the neighborhood bond.
Whoever takes the initiative in organizing the Community Centre—a
parents’ association, a men’s civic club, a mothers’ club, a committee
of citizens, the city council, the board of education—the result is
always the same, a closer forging of the community bond.
The Community Centre movement has made rapid progress in the last ten
years. All over the country new Centres are springing up constantly.
That the impulse for their organization is almost as varied as there are
different towns and cities is evidence of their real need. I have had
letters in regard to the organization of Centres from as widely
different sources as the city council of a western city, girls teaching
in rural schools, the mayor of a small city, and young working men in a
big city. Indeed Centres have become so much the fashion that one man
came to me and said, “We want a School Centre in our district—will you
help us to get one—what is a School Centre?”
In the year 1915–16, 463 cities reported over 59,000 occasions in public
school buildings after 6 P.M. in addition to evening school work.[81]
But School or Community Centres do not exist merely for the satisfaction
of neighborhood needs, for the creating of a community bond, for the
expression of that bond in communal action,—they also give the training
necessary to bring that activity to its highest fulfilment. We all need
not merely opportunities to exercise democracy, but opportunity for a
training in democracy. We are not going to take any kind of citizen for
the new state, we intend to grow our own citizens. Through group
activities, through classes and lectures, through university extension,
through actual practice in self government by the management of their
own Centres and the varied activities therein, all, young and old, may
prepare themselves for the new citizenship of the new democracy.[82]
Let us now consider the five ways given above for producing an
integrated and responsible neighborhood. First, the regular meetings of
neighbors in civic clubs. In Boston we have, in connection with the
School Centres, the so-called “East Boston Town-Meeting,” the
“Charlestown Commonwealth,” etc. At such meetings neighborhood needs can
be discussed, and the men and women of those neighborhoods, while
getting to know one another and their local conditions, can be training
themselves to function with government and as government. The first
advantage of such meetings is their regularity.
I am urging _regular_ meetings of small groups of neighbors as a new
method in politics. Neighbors now often meet for one object or two or
three, and then when these are accomplished think that they need not
meet again until there is another definite end to be gained. But in the
meantime there should be the slow building up of the neighborhood
consciousness. A mass-meeting will never do this. But this neighborhood
consciousness is far more important than to get a municipal bath-house
for a certain district. If the bath-house is considered the chief thing,
and no effort made to get the neighborhood group together again until
something else, a playground for instance, is wanted, this time perhaps
not enough cohesion and concentration of purpose can be obtained to
secure the playground. The question, in neighborhood organization is—Is
our object to get a new playground or to create methods by which
playgrounds will become part of the neighborhood consciousness, methods
which will above all educate for further concerted effort? If
neighborhood organization is one among many methods of getting things,
then it is not of great value; if, however, it is going to bring about a
different mental life, if it will give us an open mind, a flexible mind,
a coöperative mind, then it is the greatest movement of our time. For
our object is not to get certain things, or to have certain things; our
object is to evolve the kind of life, the way of thinking, within which
these specific things will naturally have place. We shall make no real
progress until we can do this.
Bernard Shaw has said of family life that it is often cut off equally
from the blessings of society and the blessings of solitude. We must see
that our neighborhood associations are so organized that we do get the
advantages of society.
The second way of creating an integrated neighborhood is by learning and
practising a genuine discussion, that is, a discussion which shall
evolve a true collective purpose and bring the group will of the
neighborhood to bear directly on city problems. When I speak of
discussion I mean always the kind of discussion which is called out by a
genuine group. The group idea, not the crowd idea, is to come from
discussion. What is the remedy for a “ruthless majority”? What is the
remedy for an “arrogant minority”? Group discussion. Group discussion
will diminish suggestion as a social force and give place to
interpermeation.
When we advocate discussion as a political method, we are not advocating
the extension of a method already in use. There is little discussion
to-day. Talk to air our grievances or as a steam-valve for the
hot-headed, the avowed intention sometimes in the organization of
so-called “discussion” societies, is not discussion. People often speak
of “self-expression” as if it were a letting off of steam, as if there
were something inside us that must be let out before it explodes. But
this is not the use to which we must put the powers of self-expression;
we must release these powers not to be wasted through a safety valve,
but to be used constructively for the good of society. To change the
metaphor, we must not make a petty effort to stem a stream which cannot
and should not be stemmed but helped to direct itself.
Do we have discussion in debating societies? Never. Their influence is
pernicious and they should be abolished in colleges, schools,
settlements, Young Men’s Christian Associations, or wherever found. In
these societies the men as a rule take either side of the question
allotted to them, but even if they choose their side the process of the
debate is the same. The object is always to win, it is never to discover
the truth. This is excellent training for our present party politics. It
is wretched preparation for the kind of politics we wish to see in
America, because there is no attempt to think together. Some one to whom
I said this replied, “But each side has to think together.” Not in the
least: they simply pool their information and their arguments, they
don’t think together. They don’t even think; that artificial mental
process of maintaining a thesis which is not yours by conviction is not
thinking. In debating you are always trying to find the ideas and facts
which will support your side; you do not look dispassionately at all
ideas and all facts, and try to make out just where the truth lies. You
do not try to see what ideas of your opponent will enrich your own point
of view; you are bound to reject without examination his views, his
ideas, almost I might say his facts. In a discussion you can be
flexible, you can try experiments, you can grow as the group grows, but
in a debate all this is impossible.
One of the great advantages of the forum movement is that here we are
beginning to have discussion.[83]
Let us analyze briefly the advantages of discussion. Genuine discussion
is truth-seeking. First, then, it presses every man to think clearly and
appreciatively and discriminatingly in order to take his part worthily.
What we need above everything else is clear thinking. This need has been
covered over by the demand for “honest” men, but hardly any one would
say to-day, “Give the management of your city over to a group of the
most honest men you can find.” A group of honest men—what a
disconcerting picture the phrase calls up! We want efficient men,
thinking men, as well as honest men. Take care of your thinking and your
morals will take care of themselves—is a present which would have
benefited certain reform campaigns.
The first advantage of discussion then is that it tends to make us think
and to seek accurate information in order to be able to think and to
think clearly. I belong to a civic conference lunch club which meets
once a month to discuss civic questions. On one occasion the program
committee discovered a few days before the luncheon that on the question
to be considered (a certain bill before the legislature), we were all of
the same opinion, and so the discussion did not seem likely to be very
lively. But it happened that our secretary knew some one who was on the
other side, and this woman was therefore invited to be our guest and
present her point of view to us. She accepted with pleasure as she said
she felt strongly on the matter. On the morning of the day of our
meeting, however, she telephoned that she could not come, as she had
just read the bill, thinking it would be wise to do so before she
publicly opposed it, and she found she agreed with it heartily!
Moreover, no one question can be adequately discussed without an
understanding of many more. Remedies for abuses are seldom direct
because every abuse is bound up with our whole political and economic
system. And if discussion induces thinking by the preparation necessary,
it certainly stimulates thinking by the opposition we meet.
But the great advantage of discussion is that thereby we overcome
misunderstanding and conquer prejudice. An Englishman who visited
America last winter said that he had seen in an American newspaper this
advice, “Get acquainted with your neighbor, you might like him,” and was
much struck with the difference between the American and the English way
of looking at the matter. The Englishman, he said, does not get
acquainted with his neighbor for fear he might like him! I sometimes
feel that we refuse to get acquainted with the arguments of our
opponents for fear we might sympathize with them.
Genuine discussion, however, will always and should always bring out
difference, but at the same time it teaches us what to do with
difference. The formative process which takes place in discussion is
that unceasing reciprocal adjustment which brings out and gives form to
truth.
The whole conception of discussion is now changing. Discussion is to be
the sharpest, most effective political tool of the future. The value of
the town-meeting is not in the fact that every one goes, but in what
every one does when he gets there. And discussion will overcome much
indifference, much complacency. We must remember that most people are
not for or against anything; the first object of getting people together
is to make them respond somehow, to overcome inertia. To disagree, as
well as to agree, with people brings you closer to them. I always feel
intimate with my enemies. It is not opposition but indifference which
separates men.
Another advantage of discussion in regular meetings of neighbors is that
men discuss questions there before they come to a political issue, when
there is not the heat of the actual fight and the desire to win.
Through regular meetings then, and a genuine discussion, we help to
forge the neighborhood bond. But this is not enough. A true community
life should be developed. If the multiplicity and complexity of
interrelations of interests and wants and hopes are to be brought to the
surface to form the substance of politics, people must come more and
more to live their lives together. We are ignorant: we should form
classes and learn together. The farmer in Virginia goes to the School
Centre to learn how to test his seed corn. We need social intercourse:
we should meet to exchange experiences and to have a “good time”
together. We need opportunity for bringing old and young together,
parents and children, for boys and girls to meet in a natural, healthy
way. We need true recreation, not the passive looking at the motion
pictures, not the deadening watching of other people’s acting; we want
the real re-creation of active participation. The leisure time of men
and women is being increased by legislation, by vocational efficiency,
by machinery, and by scientific management. One of the most pressing
needs of to-day is the constructive use of leisure. This need can be
largely satisfied in the Neighborhood Centre. Festivals, pageants, the
celebration of holidays can all be used as recreation, as a means of
self-expression, and of building up the neighborhood bond.
Here too the family realizes that its life is embedded in a larger life,
and the richer that larger life the more the family gains. The family
learns its duty to other families, and it finds that its external
relations change all its inner life, as the International League will
change fundamentally the internal history of every nation. I knew two
sisters who were ashamed of their mother until they could say to their
friends, “Mother goes to the lectures every Saturday night at the School
Centre.” I know men and wives who never went out together until they
found an extended home in a School Centre. I know a father, an
intelligent policeman, who never had any real friendship with his four
daughters until he planned dances for them at the School Centre so that
they should not go to the public dance-halls.
Families often need some means of coming to a common understanding; they
are not always capable by themselves of making the necessary adjustment
of points of view brought from so many sources as the different family
outgoings produce. For example, food conservation taught in various ways
in the Neighborhood Centre—by cooking classes for women, by lectures for
both men and women showing the relation of food to the whole present
world problem, by having regular afternoons for meeting with agents from
the Health Department, by comparison between neighbors of the results of
the new feeding—food conservation, that is, taught as a community
problem, is more effective than taught merely to classes of mothers. For
if the mother makes dishes the father and children refuse to eat, the
cooking classes she has attended will have no community value. To give
community value to all our apparently isolated activities is one of the
primary objects of neighborhood organization.
The Neighborhood Centre, therefore, instead of separating families, as
sometimes feared, is uniting them. To live their life in the setting of
the broader life is continuously to interpret and explain one to the
other. And if we have learned that sacred as our family life must always
be, the significance of that sacredness is its power of contributing to
the life around us, the life of our little neighborhood, then we are
ready to understand that the nation too is real, that its tasks are
mighty and that those tasks will not be performed unless every one of us
can find self-expression through the nation’s needs.
We have seen that the regular meeting of neighbors gives an external
integration of neighborhood life. We have seen that group discussion
begins to forge a real neighborhood bond. We have seen that a sharing of
our daily life—its cares and burdens, its pleasures and joys, each with
all—furthers this inner, this spiritual union which is at last to be the
core of a new politics. The fourth way of developing the neighborhood
bond is by citizens taking more and more responsibility for the life of
their community. This will mean a moral integration. We are not to dig
down into our life to find our true needs and then demand that
government satisfy those needs—the satisfaction also must be found in
that fermenting life from which our demands issue. The methods of
neighborhood responsibility will be discussed in chapter XXVI.
The fifth way of developing the neighborhood group is by establishing
some regular connection between the neighborhood and city, state and
national governments. Then shall we have the political integration of
the neighborhood. This will be discussed in chapter XXVII, “From
Neighborhood to Nation.” Party politics are organized, “interests” are
organized, our citizenship is not organized. Our neighborhood life is
starving for lack of any real part in the state. Give us that part and
as inevitably as the wake follows the ship will neighborhood
responsibility follow the integration of neighborhood and state.
-----
Footnote 81:
Since April, 1917, with the rapidly extending use of the schoolhouse
as a centre for war services, these numbers have probably greatly
increased.
Footnote 82:
See Appendix, The Training for the New Democracy.
Footnote 83:
That it is also in many instances leading the way to real community
organization makes it one of the most valuable movements of our time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXIV
NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION VS. PARTY ORGANIZATION
The Will of the People
--------------
MANY of us are feeling strongly at the present moment the importance of
neighborhood life, the importance of the development of a neighborhood
consciousness, the paramount importance of neighborhood organization as
the most effective means of solving our city and national problems. What
our political life needs to-day is to get at the will of the people and
to incorporate it in our government, to substitute a man-governed
country for a machine-governed country. If politics are to be no longer
mysterious and remote, but the warp and woof of our lives, if they are
to be neither a game nor a business, far different methods must be
adopted from any we have hitherto known.
Where do we show political vitality at present? In our government? In
our party organization? In our local communities? We can see nowhere any
clear stream of political life. The vitality of our community life is
frittered away or unused. The muddy stream of party politics is choked
with personal ambition, the desire for personal gain. Neighborhood
organization is, I believe, to be the vital current of our political
life. There is a wide-spread idea that we can do away with the evils of
the party system by attacking the boss. Many think also that all would
be well if we could separate politics and business. But far below the
surface are the forces which have allied business and politics; far
below the surface we must go, therefore, if we would divorce this badly
mated couple.
Neighborhood organization is to accomplish many things. The most
important are: to give a knock-out blow to party organization, to make a
direct and continuous connection between our daily lives and needs and
our government, to diminish race and class prejudices, to create a
responsible citizenship, and to train and discipline the new democracy;
or, to sum up all these things, to break down party organization and to
make a creative citizenship the force of American political life.
An effective neighborhood organization will deal the death blow to
party: (1) by substituting a real unity for the pseudo unity of party,
by creating a genuine public opinion, a true will of the people,[84] (2)
by evolving genuine leaders instead of bosses, (3) by putting a
responsible government in the place of the irresponsible party.
First, there is at present no real unity of the people.
It is clear that party organization has succeeded because it was the
only way we knew of bringing about concerted action. This must be
obtained by the manipulation of other men’s minds or by the evolving of
the common mind; we must choose between the two. In the past the monarch
got his power from the fact that he represented the unity of his
people—the tribal or national consciousness. In the so-called
democracies of England and America we have now no one man who represents
a true collective consciousness. Much of the power of party has come,
therefore, from the fact that it gave expression to a certain kind of
pseudo collective consciousness: we found that it was impossible to get
a common will from a multitude, the only way we could get any unity was
through the party. We have accepted party dictatorship rather than
anarchy. We have felt that any discussion of party organization was
largely doctrinaire because party has given us collective action of a
kind, and what has been offered in its place was a scattered and
irresponsible, and therefore weak and ineffective, particularism. No
“independent” method of voting can ever vie with the organized party
machinery: its loose unintegrated nebulosity will be shattered into
smithereens by the impact of the closely organized machine.
The problem which many men have wrestled with in their lives—whether
they are to adhere to party or to be “independent”—is futile. Personal
honesty exhausts no man’s duty in life; an effective life is what is
demanded of us, and no isolated honesty gives us social effectiveness.
When we go up to the gates of another world and say, “I have been
honest, I have been pure, I have been diligent”—no guardian of those
Heavenly gates will fling them open for us, but we shall be faced with
the counter thrust: “How have you used those qualities for making
blossom the earth which was your inheritance? We want no sterile virtues
here. Have you sold your inheritance for the pottage of personal purity,
personal honesty, personal growth?”
To make our “independence” effective, to vie successfully with party
organization, we must organize genuine groups and learn in those true
collective action. No particularistic theory of politics will ever be
strong enough to take the place of party. The political consciousness of
men must be transferred from the party to the neighborhood group.
We hear discussed from time to time how far public opinion governs the
world, but at present there is no public opinion. Our legislatures are
supposed to enact the will of the people, our courts are supposed to
declare the will of the people, our executive to voice the will of the
people, a will surrounding men like a nimbus apparently from their
births on. But there is no will of the people.[85] We talk glibly about
it but the truth is that it is such a very modern thing that it does not
yet exist. There is, it is true, an overwhelming chaos of ideas on all
the problems which surround us. Is this public opinion? The urge of the
crowd often gets crystallized into a definite policy ardently advocated.
Is this public opinion? Certain interests find a voice; one party or
another, one group or another, expresses itself. Is this public opinion?
Public opinion is that common understanding which is the driving force
of a living whole and shapes the life of that whole.
We believe that the state should be the incarnation of the common will,
but where is the common will? All the proposed new devices for getting
at the will of the people (referendum etc.) assume that we have a will
to express; but our great need at present is not to get a chance to
express our wonderful ideas, but to get some wonderful ideas to express.
A more complete representation is the aim of much of our political
reform, but our first requirement is surely to have something to
represent. It isn’t that we need one kind of government more than
another, as the image-breakers tell us, it isn’t that we need honest
intentions, as the preachers tell us, our essential and vital need is a
people creating a will of its own. In all the sentimental talk of
democracy the will of the people is spoken of tenderly as if it were
there in all its wisdom and all its completeness and we had only to put
it into operation.
The tragic thing about our situation in America is, not merely that we
have no public opinion, but that we think we have. If I have no money in
my pocket and know it, I can go to work and earn some; if I do not know
it I may starve. But I do not want the American people to starve. The
average American citizen says to himself, “It doesn’t matter very much
what I think because American public opinion is sound at the core.” It
is our Great Illusion. There has been much apotheosizing of the
so-called popular will, but not every circle is a halo, and you can’t
put a wreath round “the popular will” and call it democracy. The popular
will to mean democracy must be a properly evolved popular will—the true
will of the people.
Who are the people? Every individual? The majority? A theoretical
average? A compromise group? The reason we go astray about public
opinion is because we have not as yet a clear and adequate definition of
the “people.” We are told that we must elevate the “people.” There are
no “people.” We have to create a people. The people are not an imaginary
average, shorn of genius and power and leadership. You cannot file off
all the points made by talent and efficiency, and call the dead level
that is left the people. The people are the integration of every
development, of every genius, with everything else that our complex and
interacting life brings about. But the method of such integration can
never be through crowd association. We may come to think that vox populi
is vox Dei, but not until it is the group voice, not until it is found
by some more intimate process than listening to the shout of the crowd
or counting the votes in the ballot-box.
The error in regard to public opinion can be traced to that same
sociological error which is the cause of so many confusions in our
political thought: that the social process is the spread of similarities
by suggestion and imitation. Any opinion that is shared, simply because
it is shared, is called public opinion. But if this opinion is shared
because it has spread among large numbers by “unconscious imitation,”
then it is not a genuine public opinion; to be that, the process by
which it has been evolved must be that of intermingling and
interpermeating. Public opinion has been defined as the opinions of all
the men on the “tops of busses,” or the opinion made by “banks,
stock-exchanges and all the wire-pullers of the world,” or the opinion
“imposed on the public by a succession of thinkers.” All this is, no
doubt, true of much of our so-called public opinion at present, for
public opinion to-day is largely crowd opinion. But there is less of
this than formerly. And we must adopt those modes of living by which
there shall be less and less infection of crowds and more and more an
evolving of genuine group thought. When reforms are brought about by
crowds being swept into them, they can be undone just as easily; there
is no real progress here.
Political parties and business interests will continue to dominate us
until we learn new methods of association. Men follow party dictates not
because of any worship of party but simply because they have not yet any
will of their own. Until they have, they will be used and manipulated
and artificially stimulated by those who can command sufficient money to
engage leaders for that purpose. Hypnosis will be our normal state until
we are roused to claim our own creative power. The promise for the
future is the power for working together which lies latent in the great
rank and file of men and women to-day, and which must be brought clearly
to their view and utilized in the right way. If we see no fruitful
future for our political life under the present scheme of party
domination, if we can see no bearable future for our industrial life
under the present class domination, then some plan must be devised for
the will of the people to control the life of the people. Fighting
abuses is not our role, but the full understanding that such fighting is
a tilting at wind-mills. The abuses in themselves amount to nothing. Our
role is to leave them alone and build up our own life with our power of
creative citizenship. We need to-day: (1) an _active_ citizenship, (2) a
_responsible_ citizenship, (3) a _creative_ citizenship—a citizenship
building its own world, creating its own political and social structure,
constructing its own life forever.
Our faith in democracy rests ultimately on the belief that men have this
creative power. Our vital relation to the Infinite consists in our
capacity, as its generating force, to bring forth a group idea, to
create the common life. But we have at present no machinery for a
constructive life. The organization of neighborhood groups will give us
this machinery.
Let us see how neighborhood groups can create a united will, a genuine
public opinion.
First, neighborhood groups will naturally discuss their local, intimate,
personal concerns. The platitudes and insincerities of the party meeting
will give way to the homely realities of the neighborhood meeting. These
common interests will become the political issues. Then, and not till
then, politics, external at no point to any vital need, will represent
the life of our people. Then when we see clearly that the affairs of
city and state are our affairs, we shall no longer be apathetic or
indifferent in regard to politics. We all _are_ interested in our own
affairs. When our daily needs become the basis of politics, then party
will no longer be left in control because politics bore us, because we
feel that they have nothing to do with us.
Already the daily lives of people are passing into the area of
government through the increased social legislation of all our states
during the last few years. In 1912 a national party was organized with
social legislation as part of its platform. The introduction of social
programs into party platforms means that a powerful influence is at work
to change American politics from a machine to a living thing. When the
political questions were chiefly the tariff, the trust, the currency,
closely as these questions affected the lives of people, there was so
little general knowledge in regard to them that most of us could
contribute little to their solution. The social legislation of the last
few years has taken up crime, poverty, disease, which we all know a
great deal about: laws have been passed regarding child labor, workmen’s
compensation, occupational disease, prison reform, tuberculosis,
mothers’ pensions, the liquor question, minimum wage, employment
agencies etc.
Tammany is built up on the most intimate local work: no family, no
child, is unknown to its organization. And it is founded on the long
view: votes are not crudely bought—always; the boy is found a job, the
father is helped through his illness, the worn-out mother is sent for a
holiday to the country. As politics comes to mean state employment
bureaus, sickness and accident insurance, mothers’ pensions, Tammany is
being shorn of much of its power.
We are sometimes told, however, that while it is conceded that campaign
issues should be made up from our intimate, everyday needs, yet it is
feared that on each question a different split would come, and thus
politics would be too confusing and could not be “handled.” Neighborhood
organization is going to help us meet this difficulty. In non-partisan
neighborhood associations we shall have different alignments on every
question. Moreover, we shall have different alignments on the same
question in different years. Thus the rigidity of the party organization
disappears. The party meeting is to the neighborhood meeting what the
victrola is to the human voice: the partisan assembly utters what has
been impressed upon it, you hear the machine beating its own rhythm; the
neighborhood meeting will give the fresh ever-varied voices from the
hearts of men. The party system and the genuine group system is the
difference between machine-made and man-made. And this may be true of a
good government organization as well as of a Tammany organization—it is
true wherever the machine is put above the man. We can get no force
without freshness, and you cannot get freshness from a machine, only
from living men. Just the very thing which costs the party money—keeping
its members together—is its condemnation. Men will make up their minds
on question after question in their neighborhood groups. Then they will
vote according to these conclusions. Party dictation will never cease
until we get group conviction. If our political life is going to show
any greater sensitiveness to our real wants and needs than it has shown
in the past, there must be some provision made for considering and
voting on questions irrespective of party: you can not join a different
party every day, but you can separate political issues from partisanship
and vote for the thing you want. The reason more of our real wants have
not got expressed in our politics is just because people cannot be held
together on many issues.
Again, if neighborhood organization takes the place of party
organization each question can be decided on its own merit: we shall not
have to ask, “How will the management of this affect the power and
prestige of our party?”
Also neighborhood groups can study problems, but the study of problems
is fatal to party organization. The party hands out the ephemeral
comings-to-the-surface of what will help the party, or the
particularistic interests dominating the party. Every question brought
forward at all is brought forward as a campaign issue.
Moreover the group discovers and conserves the individual. A party
gathering is always a crowd. And party methods are stereotyped,
conventional. Under a party system we have no spontaneous political
life. The party system gives no exercise to the judgment, it weakens the
will, it does away with personal responsibility. The party, as the
crowd, blots out the individual. Mass suggestion is dominating our
politics to-day. We shall get rid of mass influence exactly as fast as
we develop the group consciousness. Men who belong to neighborhood
organizations will not be the stuff of which parties are made. The party
has prevented us from having genuine group opinion; or if we do by any
chance get a group opinion now, it can usually speak only in opposition
to party, it cannot get incorporated in our political life.
Every one of us will have an opportunity to learn collective thinking in
the small, local, neighborhood group. No one comes to his neighborhood
group pledged beforehand to any particular way of thinking. The object
of the party system is to stifle all difference of opinion. Moreover, in
partisan discussion you take one of two sides; in neighborhood groups an
infinitely varied number of points of view can be brought out, and thus
the final decision will be richer from what it gains on all sides. The
neighborhood group which makes possible different alignments on every
question, allows ultimate honesty in the expression of our views. If we
get into the habit of suppressing our differences, these differences
atrophy and we lose our sensitiveness to their demands. And we have
found that the expression and the maintenance of difference is the
condition of the full and free development of the race.
But we want not only a genuine public opinion, but a progressive public
opinion. We cannot understand once for all, we must be constantly
understanding anew. At the same time that we see the necessity of
creating the common will and giving voice to it, we must bear in mind
that there should be no crystallizing process by which any particular
expression of the common will should be taken as eternally right because
it is the expression of the common will. It is right for to-day but not
for to-morrow. The flaming fact is our daily life, whatever it is,
leaping forever and ever out of the common will. Democracy is the
ever-increasing volume of power pouring through men and shaping itself
as the moment demands. Constitutional conventions are seeking the
machinery by which the reason and justice which have existed among us
can be utilized in our life. We must go beyond this and unseal the
springs which will reveal the forms for the wisdom and justice of their
day. This is life itself, the direct and aboriginal constructor. We meet
with our neighbors at our civic club not in order to accumulate facts,
but to learn how to release and how to control a constructive force
which will build daily for us the habitation of our needs. Then indeed
will our government be no longer directed by a “body of law,” but by the
self-renewing appearing of the will of the people.
The chief need of society to-day is an enlightened, progressive and
organized public opinion, and the first step towards an enlightened and
organized public opinion is an enlightened and organized group opinion.
When public opinion becomes conscious of itself it will have a justified
confidence in itself. Then the “people,” born of an associated life,
will truly govern. Then shall we at last really have an America.
-----
Footnote 84:
Public opinion in a true democracy is a potential will. Therefore for
practical purposes they are identical and I use them synonymously.
Footnote 85:
Our federal system of checks and balances thwarted the will of the
people. The party system thwarted the will of the people. Our state
governments were never designed to get at the will of the people.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXV
NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION VS. PARTY ORGANIZATION
Leaders or Bosses?
--------------
NEIGHBORHOOD organization will prove fatal to party organization not
only through the creating of a genuine will of the people, but also
through the producing of real leaders to take the place of the bosses.
American democracy has always been afraid of leadership. Our
constitutions of the eighteenth century provided no one department to
lead, no one man in the legislature to lead. Therefore, as we must have
leadership, there has been much undefined, irresponsible leadership.
This has often meant corruption and abuse, bad enough, but worse still
it has meant the creation of machinery for the perpetuation of
corruption, the encouragement of abuse. Under machine politics we choose
for our leaders the men who are most popular for the moment or who have
worked out the most thorough system of patronage, or rather of course we
do not choose at all. We have two kinds of leaders under our party
system, both the wrong kind: we have our actual leaders, the bosses, and
our official leaders who have tended to be men who could be managed by
the party. Our officials in their campaign speeches say that they are
the “servants of the people.” But we do not want “servants” any more
than we want bosses; we want genuine leaders. Now that more and more
direct power is being given to the people it is especially necessary
that we should not be led by machine bosses, but that we should evolve
the kind of leadership which will serve a true democracy, which will be
the expression of a true democracy, and will guide it to democratic ends
by democratic methods.
We hope through local group organization to evolve real leaders. There
should be in a democracy some sort of regular and ceaseless process by
which ability of all sorts should come to the top, and flexibility in
our forms so that new ability can always find its greatest point of
usefulness, and so that service which is no longer useful can be
replaced by that which is. In neighborhood groups where we have
different alignments on different questions, there will be a tendency
for those to lead at any particular moment who are most competent to
lead in the particular matter in hand. Thus a mechanical leadership will
give place to a vital leadership. Suppose the subject is sanitation. The
man who is most interested, who has the clearest view of the need and
who is its most insistent champion, will naturally step forth as the
leader in that. The man who knows most about educational matters will
lead in those, will be chosen eventually for the school committee or for
the educational committee of the state legislature. Thus the different
leaders of a democracy appear. Here in the neighborhood group leaders
are born. Democracy is the breeding-ground of aristocracy. You have all
the chance the world gives. In your neighborhood group show the
clearness of your mind, the strength of your grip, your power to elicit
and to guide coöperative action, and you emerge as the leader of men.
No adequate statement can be made in regard to leadership until it is
studied in relation to group psychology. The leadership of the British
Premier, of President Wilson, will become interesting studies when we
have a better understanding of this subject. Meanwhile let us look
briefly at some of the qualities of leadership.
The leader guides the group and is at the same time himself guided by
the group, is always a part of the group. No one can truly lead except
from within. One danger of conceiving the leader as outside is that then
what ought to be group loyalty will become personal loyalty. When we
have a leader within the group these two loyalties can merge.
The leader must have the instinct to trace every evil to its cause, but,
equally valuable, he must be able to see the relative value of the cause
to each one of his group—in other words, to see the total relativity of
the cause to the group. He must draw out all the varying needs of the
neighborhood as related to the cause and reconcile them in the remedy. A
baby is ill; is the milk perhaps too rich for babies? But probably the
rest of the neighborhood demands rich milk. All the neighborhood needs
in regard to milk must be elicited and reconciled in the remedy for the
sick child. That is, the remedy cannot be thinner milk, but it may be a
demand that the milkman have separate milk for babies.
In other words the leader of our neighborhood group must interpret our
experience to us, must see all the different points of view which
underlie our daily activities and also their connections, must adjust
the varying and often conflicting needs, must lead the group to an
understanding of its needs and to a unification of its purpose. He must
give form to things vague, things latent, to mere tendencies. He must be
able to lead us to wise decisions, not to impose his own wise decisions
upon us. We need leaders, not masters or drivers.
The power of leadership is the power of integrating. This is the power
which creates community. You can see it when two or three strangers or
casual acquaintances are calling upon some one. With some hostesses you
all talk across at one another as entirely separate individuals,
pleasantly and friendlily, to be sure, but still across unbridged
chasms; while other hostesses have the power of making you all feel for
the moment related, as if you were one little community for the time
being. This is a subtle as well as a valuable gift. It is one that
leaders of men must possess. It is thus that the collective will is
evolved from out the chaos of varied personality and complex
circumstance.
The skilful leader then does not rely on personal force; he controls his
group not by dominating but by expressing it. He stimulates what is best
in us; he unifies and concentrates what we feel only gropingly and
scatteringly, but he never gets away from the current of which we and he
are both an integral part. He is a leader who gives form to the inchoate
energy in every man. The person who influences me most is not he who
does great deeds but he who makes me feel I can do great deeds. Many
people tell me what I ought to do and just how I ought to do it, but few
have made me want to do something. Who ever has struck fire out of me,
aroused me to action which I should not otherwise have taken, he has
been my leader. The community leader is he who can liberate the greatest
amount of energy in his community.
Then the neighborhood leader must be a practical politician. He must be
able to interpret a neighborhood not only to itself but to others. He
must know not only the need of every charwoman but how politics can
answer her call. He must know the great movements of the present and
their meaning, and he must know how the smallest needs and the humblest
powers of his neighborhood can be fitted into the progressive movements
of our time. His duty is to shape politics continuously. As the
satisfaction of one need, or the expression of one latent power, reveals
many more, he must be always alert and ever ready to gather up the many
threads into one strand of united endeavor. He is the patient watcher,
the active spokesman, the sincere and ardent exponent of a community
consciousness. His guiding, embracing and dominant thought is to make
that community consciousness articulate in government.
The politician is not a group but a crowd leader. The leader of a crowd
dominates because a crowd wants to be dominated. Politicians do not try
to convince but to dazzle; they do not deal with facts but with formulæ
and vague generalizations, with the flag and the country. If our
politicians and our representatives are not our most competent men, but
those who have the greatest power of suggestion and are most adroit in
using it, the proposal here is that we shall develop methods which will
produce real leaders. We are aiming now in the reorganization of our
state constitutions at responsible official leadership instead of the
irresponsible party boss system which was necessary once because we had
to have leaders of some sort. How far this new movement shall succeed,
will depend on how far it has back of it, or can be made to have back of
it, the kind of organization which will develop group not crowd leaders.
Through neighborhood organization we hope that real leaders instead of
bosses will be evolved. Democracy does not tend to suppress leadership
as is often stated; it is the only organization of society which will
bring out leadership. As soon as we are given opportunities for the
release of the energy there is in us, heroes and leaders will arise
among us. These will draw their stimulus, their passion, their life from
all, and then in their turn increase in all passion and power and
creating force.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXVI
NEIGHBORHOOD ORGANIZATION VS. PARTY ORGANIZATION
A Responsible Neighborhood
--------------
WE have said that neighborhood organization must replace party
organization by evolving a true will of the people, by giving us leaders
instead of bosses, and by making possible a responsible government to
take the place of our irresponsible party government. Let us now
consider the last point: the possibility of an integrated neighborhood
responsibility.
Under our party organization the men who formulate the party platform do
not have the official responsibility of carrying it out. Moreover at
present representative government rests on the fallacy that when you
delegate the job you delegate the responsibility. Most of the abuses
which have crept in, business corruption and political bossism alike,
are due in large measure to this delegating of responsibility. What we
need is a kind of government which will delegate the job but not the
responsibility. The case is somewhat like that of the head of a business
undertaking, who makes the men under him responsible for their own work
and still the final responsibility rests with him. This is not divided
responsibility but shared responsibility—a very different thing.
Consider what happens when I want to get a bill through the legislature.
I may feel sure that the bill is good and also that “the people” want
it, but I can work only through party, and at the state house I have to
face all the special interests bound up with party, all the thousand and
one “political” considerations, whether I succeed or fail. But of course
I recognize the humor of this statement: _I_ ought never to try to get a
bill through the legislature; special and partial groups have to do this
simply because there is at present no other way; there must be some
other way, some recognized way. We do not want to circumvent party but
to replace party.
Our reform associations, while they have fought party, have often
endeavored to substitute their own organization for the party
organization. This has often been the alternative offered to us—do we
want good government or poor government? We have not been asked if we
would like to govern ourselves. This is why Mitchell lost last year in
New York. One of the New York papers during the campaign advised Mr.
Mitchell “to get nearer the people.” But it is not for government to
“get nearer” the people; it must identify itself with the people. It
isn’t enough for the “good” officials to explain to the people what they
are doing; they must take the people into their counsels. If the Gary
system had ever been properly put up to the fathers it is doubtful if
they would have voted against it. Then a good deal of this advice in
regard to city officials “explaining” their plans in all parts of the
city leaves out of account that the local people have a great deal to
give. Some of the most uneducated, so-called, of the fathers and mothers
might have had valuable points of view to offer in regard to the
practical workings of the Gary system.
Tammany won in New York and we heard many people say, “Well, this is
your democracy, the people want bad government, the majority of people
in New York city have voted for it.” Nothing could be more superficial.
What the election in New York meant was that “the people” are cleverer
than was thought; they know that the question should not be of “good”
government or “bad” government, but only of self-government, and the
only way they have of expressing this is to vote against a government
which _seems_ to disregard them.
To say, “We are good men, we are honest officials, we are employing
experts on education, sanitation etc., you must trust us,” will not do;
some way must be devised of connecting the experts and the people—that
is the first thing to be worked out, then some way of taking the people
into the counsels of city administration. All of us criticize things we
don’t know anything about. As soon as we see the difficulties, _as soon
as the responsibility is put upon us_, our whole attitude changes. Take
the popular cry “Boston positions for Boston people.” This seems a
pretty good principle to superficial thinking. But when we know that we
have an appropriation of $200,000 a year for a certain department, and
are looking for a man to administer it, when we go into the matter and
find that there are only two or three experts for this position in the
United States, and that not one of these lives in Boston, the question
takes the concrete form, “Shall we allow $200,000 of our money to be
wasted through inept administration?” It might be said, “But city
governments do have the responsibility and yet this is just what they
are all the time doing.” Certainly, because their position rests on
patronage, but I am proposing that the whole system be changed.
Neighborhood organization must be the method of effective popular
responsibility: first, by giving reality to the political bond;
secondly, by providing the machinery by which a genuine control of the
people can be put into operation. At present nearly all our needs are
satisfied by external agencies, government or institutional. Health
societies offer health to us, recreation associations teach us how to
play, civic art leagues give us more beautiful surroundings, associated
charities give us poor relief. A kind lady leads my girl to the dentist,
a kind young man finds employment for my boy, a stern officer of the
city sees that my children are in their places at school. I am
constantly being acted upon, no one is encouraging me to act. New York
has one hundred municipal welfare divisions and bureaus. Thus am I
robbed of my most precious possession—my responsibilities—for only the
active process of participation can shape me for the social purpose.
But all this is to end. The community itself must grip its own problems,
must fill its needs, must make effective its aspirations. If we want the
latest scientific knowledge in regard to food values, let us get an
expert to come to us, not wait for some society to send an “agent” to
us; if the stores near us are not selling at fair prices, let us make a
coöperative effort to set this right. If we want milk and baby hygiene
organized, our own local doctors should, in proper coöperation with
experts on the one hand and the mothers on the other, organize this
branch of public service. The medical experts may be employees of the
government, but if the plan of their service be worked out by all
three—the experts, the local doctors and the mothers—the results will
be: (1) that the needs of the neighborhood will really be met, (2) much
valuable time of the expert will be saved, (3) a close follow-up will be
possible, (4) the expert can be called in whenever necessary through
local initiative, and (5) the machinery will be in existence by which
the study of that particular problem can be carried on not as a special
investigation but as a regular part of neighborhood life.
Take another example. The Placement Bureau is also a necessary public
service: it needs the work of experts and it needs pooled information
and centralized machinery; a parent cannot find out all the jobs
available in a city for boys of 16 in order to place one boy. But as
long as the secretary of the Placement Bureau appears in the home and
takes this whole burden off the parent, and off the community he is
serving, his work will not be well done. For the boy will suffer
eventually: he cannot be cut off from his community without being hurt;
community incentive is the greatest one we know, and somehow there must
be worked out some community responsibility for that boy, as well as
some responsibility on his part to his community for standing up or
falling down on his job. I say that the boy will eventually suffer; his
community also will suffer, for it also has need of him; moreover, the
community will greatly suffer by the loss of this opportunity of
connecting it, through the parents, with the whole industrial problem of
the city. The expert service of the Placement Bureau, whether it is
administered by city or state, should always be joined to local
initiative, effort and responsibility.
And so for every need. If we want well-managed dances for our daughters,
we, mothers and fathers, must go and manage them. We do not exist on one
side and the government on the other. If you go to a municipal
dance-hall and see it managed by officials appointed from City Hall, you
say, “This is a government affair.” But if you go to a schoolhouse and
see a dance managed by men and women chosen by the district, you say,
“This is a community affair, government has nothing to do with this.”
These two conceptions must mingle before we can have any worthy
political life. It must be clearly seen that we can operate _as_
government as well as _with_ government, that the citizen functions
through government and the government functions through the citizen. It
is not a municipal dance-hall regulated by the city authorities which
expresses the right relation between civics and dancing, but dances
planned and managed by a neighborhood for itself.
It is not the civic theatre which is the last word in the relation of
the drama to the people, it is a community organized theatre. Art and
civics do not meet merely by the state presenting art to its members;
the civic expression of art is illustrated by locally managed festivals,
by community singing, a local orchestra or dramatic club, community
dancing etc. Those of us who are working for civic art are working for
this: for people to express themselves in artistic forms and to organize
themselves for that purpose. The state must give the people every
opportunity for building up their own full, varied, healthful life. It
seems to be often thought that when the state provides schools, parks,
universities etc., there you have the ideal state. But we must go beyond
this and find our ideal state in that which shows its members how to
build up its own life _in_ schools, parks, universities etc.[86]
The question which the state must always be trying to answer is how it
can do more for its members at the same time that it is stimulating them
to do more for themselves. No, more than this, its doing more for them
must take the form of their doing more for themselves. Our modern
problem is not, as one would think from some of the writing on social
legislation, how much the increased activity of the state can do for the
individual, but how the increasing activity of the individual can be
state activity, how the widening of the sphere of state activity can be
a widening of our own activity. The arguments for or against government
action should not take the form of how much or how little government
action we shall have, but entirely of how government action and
self-action can coincide. Our one essential political problem is always
how to be the state, not, putting the state on one side and the
individual on the other, to work out their respective provinces. I have
said in the chapter on “Our Political Dualism” that the state and the
individual are one, yet this is pure theory until we make them one. But
they can never be made one through schemes of representation etc., only
by the intimate daily lives of all becoming the constituents of the life
of the state.
When a Mothers’ Club in one of the Boston School Centres found a united
want—that of keeping their children off the streets on Saturday
afternoon and giving them some wholesome amusement—and decided to meet
this want by asking the city of Boston for permission to use the
moving-picture machine of the Dorchester High School for fairy-story
films, the mothers to manage the undertaking, two significant facts
stand out: (1) they did not ask an outside agency to do something for
them, for the men and women of Dorchester, with all the other men and
women of Boston, _are_ the city of Boston; (2) they were not merely
doing something for their children on those Saturday afternoons, they
were in a sense officials of the city of Boston working for the youth of
Boston. These two conceptions must blend: we do not do for government,
government does not do for us, we should be constantly the hands and
feet, yes and the head and heart of government.[87]
A most successful effort at neighborhood organization is that of the
East Harlem Community Association, which set East Harlem to work on its
own problems: first to investigate conditions, and then to find a way of
meeting these conditions. The most interesting point about the whole
scheme is that the work is not done by “experts” or any one else from
outside; there are no paid visitors, but a committee of twelve
mothers—one colored woman, two Italian, two Jewish, two Irish, three
American, one Polish, and one German—are doing the work well. As a
result of the activities of the East Harlem Community Association there
are now in a public school building of the neighborhood organized
athletic clubs, industrial classes, orchestra, glee, dramatic and art
clubs, concerts, good moving pictures, dances, big brother and big
sister groups, Mothers’ Leagues, Parents’ Associations, physical
examination of school children etc. Of course these community
associations must use expert advice and expert service. Exactly how this
relation will be most satisfactorily worked out we do not yet clearly
see.[88]
I give this merely as one illustration out of many possible ones. The
necessity of neighborhood organization as the basis of future progress
is seen by many people to-day. In New York there is a vigorous movement
for “Neighborhood Associations”; there are four already in active
working order. If the main idea of some of these is services rendered
rather than neighborhood organization; if others see too great a
separation between needs and the satisfaction of the needs, that is, if
the neighborhoods are always to ask the questions and the experts to
find the answers, still these Associations are an interesting and
valuable part of the neighborhood movement.[89]
The acute problem of municipal life is how to make us men and women of
Boston feel that we _are_ the city, directly responsible for everything
concerning it. Neighborhood organization, brought into existence largely
by the growing feeling of each individual that he is responsible for the
life around him, itself then increases and focuses this sense of
responsibility. Neighborhood association is vivid and intimate. Whereas
the individual seems lost in a big city, through his neighborhood he not
only becomes an integral part of the city but becomes keenly conscious
of his citizenship.
In a word, what we hope neighborhood organization will do for the
development of responsibility is this: that men will learn that they are
not to _influence_ politics through their local groups, they are to _be_
politics. This is the error of some of the reform associations: they
want to influence politics. This point of view will never spell progress
for us. When we have the organized neighborhood group, when every man
sees the problems of political and social reorganization not as abstract
matters but as constituting his daily life, when men are so educated in
politics as to feel that they themselves are politics functioning, and
when our organization is such that this functioning recoils on them,
they will so shape their conduct as to change the situation. Then when
they are conscious of themselves as masters of the situation they will
acknowledge their responsibility.
We see many signs around us to-day of an increased sense of
responsibility, of a longing for a self-expression that is not to be an
individual self-expression but community self-expression. Take the
women’s clubs: in their first stage their object was personal
development; in the second they wished to do something for their town;
in the present or third stage women are demanding through some of the
more progressive clubs, through women’s municipal leagues etc., a more
direct share in community life. They are joining together not to benefit
themselves, not to benefit others, as others, but because all together
they wish to express their community—no, they wish to _be_ their
community. They are not satisfied with serving, but gathering up the
service of all in a common consciousness, each feels herself the whole
and seeks to express the whole.
But I do not mean that this greater realization of community is confined
to women. How often in the past we have heard a man say complacently,
“Well, I suppose I must do my duty and go to the polls and vote
to-morrow,” or “I must show myself at that rally to-night.” But a nobler
idea than this is now filling the minds of many men. They go to their
civic club not because it is their duty, but because just there working
together with their fellows for the furtherance of their common aims,
they find their greatest satisfaction. In neighborhood groups men can
find that self-realization which becomes by the most wonderful miracle
life can offer us community realization. That is, I can learn through my
neighborhood group that I am the city, I am the nation, and that fatal
transference of responsibility to an invisible and non-existent “they”
can be blotted out forever. When neighborhood organization begins to
teach that there is no “they,” that it is always we, we, we, that
mothers are responsible and fathers are responsible, and young men are
responsible, and young women are responsible, for their city and their
nation, it will begin to teach its chief lesson.
Do I thrill with the passion of service, of joyful, voluntary surrender
to a mighty cause as I sail for France to serve the great ends of the
Allies? Social and political organization are fatally at fault if they
cannot give me the same elation as I go to my Neighborhood Centre and
know that there too the world has vital need of me, there too am I not
only pouring myself out in world service, but that I am, just in so far,
creating, actually building, a new and fairer world.
This is the finest word that can be said for neighborhood organization,
for my finding my place through my response to every daily need of my
nearest group. For the great word I believe on this subject is not that
I _serve_ my neighborhood, my city, my nation, but that by this service
I _become_ my neighborhood, my city, my nation. Surely at this hour in
our history we can realize this as never before. The soul of America is
being born to-day. The war is binding together class and class, alien
and American, men and women. We rejoice that we are alive at this
moment, but the keenness of my joy is not because I can serve America
but because I am America. I save food in my home not in order that my
family income can meet the strain of the higher prices, not because I
can thereby help to send more food to the Allies, but because I, saving
the food of America for the Allies and the world, am performing
America’s task, _am_ therefore America. This is the deeper thought of
neighborhood organization: that through performing my humblest duties I
am creating the soul of this great democracy.
* * * * *
Neighborhood organization must then take the place of party
organization. The neighborhood group will answer many of the questions
we have put to a party organization which has remained deaf to our
importunities, dumb to all our entreaties. We have asked for bread and
received the stone times without number. The rigid formality of the
party means stultification, annihilation. But group politics, made of
the very stuff of life, of the people of the groups, will express the
inner, intimate, ardent desires of spontaneous human beings, and will
contain within its circumference the possibility of the fullest
satisfaction of those desires. Group organization gives a living,
pulsing unity made up of the minds and hearts and seasoned judgments of
vital men and women. Such organization is capable of unbroken growth.
And when this vine of life, which sends its roots where every two or
three are gathered together, has rooted itself in the neighborhood,
faithful care, sedulous watching, loving ministration will appear with
it, will be the natural way of living. Its impalpable bonds hold us
together, and although we may differ on countless questions, instead of
flying asunder we work out the form in political life which will shelter
us and supply our needs. Faithfulness to the neighborhood bond must take
the place of allegiance to party. Loyalty to a party is loyalty to a
thing—we want a living politics in which loyalty is always intrinsic.
And from the strength of this living bond shall come the power of our
united life. Always the actor, never the spectator, is the rule of the
new democracy. Always the sharer, never the giver or the receiver, is
the order of our new life.
Do you think the neighborhood group too puny to cope with this giant
towering above us, drunk with the blood of its many triumphs? The young
David went out to conquer Goliath, strong in the conviction of his
power. Cannot our cause justify an equal faith?
Is our daily life profane and only so far as we rise out of it do we
approach the sacred life? Then no wonder politics are what they have
become. But this is not the creed of men to-day: we believe in the
sacredness of all our life; we believe that Divinity is forever
incarnating in humanity, and so we believe in Humanity and the common
daily life of all men.
-----
Footnote 86:
The war has shown us that our national agricultural program can best
be done on a coöperative neighborhood basis: through the establishment
of community agricultural conferences, community labor, seed and
implement exchanges, community canning centres, community markets,
etc.
Footnote 87:
I do not mean to imply that I think it is easy to learn how to
identify ourselves with our city, especially for those who live in
large cities. The men of a small town know that if they have a new
town-hall they will have to pay for it. In a large city men ask for a
ward building because they will not have to pay for it, they think. It
is all this which neighborhood organization and the integration of
neighborhoods, of which I shall speak later, must remedy.
Footnote 88:
The plan of Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Phillips for community organization
and for the connection with it of expert service is too comprehensive
to describe here, but based as it is on their actual experience, and
planning as it does for the training of whole neighborhoods and the
arousing of them to responsibility and action, it should be studied by
every one, for such plans are, I believe, the best signs we have that
democracy is yet possible for America.
Footnote 89:
How much we are all indebted to the settlements as the pioneer
neighborhood movement I do not stop to consider here.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXVII
FROM NEIGHBORHOOD TO NATION: THE UNIFYING STATE
--------------
HOW can the will of the people be the sovereign power of the state?
There must be two changes in our state: first, the state must be the
actual integration of living, local groups, thereby finding ways of
dealing directly with its individual members. Secondly, other groups
than neighborhood groups must be represented in the state: the
ever-increasing multiple group life of to-day must be recognized and
given a responsible place in politics.[90]
First, every neighborhood must be organized; the neighborhood groups
must then be integrated, through larger intermediary groups, into a true
state. Neither our cities nor our states can ever be properly
administered until representatives from neighborhood groups meet to
discuss and thereby to correlate the needs of all parts of the city, of
all parts of the state. Social workers and medical experts have a
conference on tuberculosis, social workers and educational experts have
a conference on industrial education. We must now develop the methods by
which the citizens also are represented at these conferences. We must go
beyond this (for certain organizations, as the National Settlement
Conference at least, do already have neighborhood representation), and
develop the methods by which regular meetings of representatives from
neighborhood organizations meet to discuss all city and state problems.
Further still, we must give official recognition to such gatherings, we
must make them a regular part of government. The neighborhood must be
actually, not theoretically, an integral part of city, of state, of
nation.
When Massachusetts is thus organized, the neighborhood groups and
intermediary, or district, groups should send representatives to city
council and state legislature. The Senate might be composed of
experts—experts in education, in housing, in sanitation etc.[91] The
neighborhood and district centres would receive reports from their
representatives to city council and state legislature and take measures
on these reports. They should also be required to send regular reports
up to their representative bodies. We should have a definitely organized
and strongly articulated network of personal interest and representative
reporting. Then the state legislature must devise ways of dealing not
only with the district group but with the neighborhood groups through
the district group, and thus with every individual in the commonwealth.
The nation too must have a real connection with every little
neighborhood centre through state and district bodies.[92]
America at war has found a way of getting word from Washington to the
smallest local units. The Council of National Defense has a “Section of
Coöperation with States.” This is connected with a State Council of
Defense in every state. In most cases the State Council is connected
with County Councils, and these often with councils in cities and towns.
Beyond this the Council of National Defense has recently (February,
1918) recommended the extension of county organization by the creation
of Community Councils in every school district. Its official statement
opens with this sentence: “The first nine months of the war have shown
the vital importance of developing an official nation-wide organization
reaching into the smallest communities to mobilize and make available
the efforts of the whole people for the prosecution of the war.” And it
goes on to say that the government must have such close contact with
small units that personal relation with all the citizens is possible.
President Wilson in endorsing this step, said, “[This is an] advance of
vital significance. It will, I believe, result when thoroughly carried
out in welding the nation together as no nation of great size has ever
been welded before.... It is only by extending your organization to
small communities that every citizen of the state can be reached.”
Thus when the government found that it must provide means to its hands
for keeping constantly in touch with the whole membership of the nation,
it planned to do this by the encouragement and fostering of neighborhood
organization. The nation is now seeking the individual through
neighborhood groups. It is using the School Centres (it recommends the
schoolhouse as the best centre for community organization) for the
teaching of Food and Fuel Conservation, for Liberty Loan and Red Cross
work, for recruiting for the army, for enlisting workers for war
industries, for teaching the necessity and methods of increasing the
food supply, for plans to relieve transportation by coöperative
shipments and deliveries, for patriotic education etc.[93] This
“patriotic education” has an interesting side. In a country which is
even nominally a democracy you cannot win a war without explaining your
aims and your policy and carrying your people with you step by step. If
beyond this the country wishes to be really a democracy, the
neighborhood groups must have a share in forming the aims and the
policy.
Of course one would always prefer this to be a movement from below up
rather than from above down, but it is not impossible for the two
movements to go on at the same time, as they are in fact doing now with
the rapid development of spontaneous local organization. There were
Community Councils in existence in fact if not in name before the
recommendation of the Council of National Defense.[94]
Through these non-partisan councils not only national policy can be
explained and spread throughout the country, but also what one locality
thinks out that is good can be reported to Washington and thus handed on
to other sections of the country. It is a plan for sending the news
backwards and forwards from individual to nation, from nation to
individual, and it is also a plan for correlating the problems of the
local community with the problems of the nation and of coöperating
nations.
But why should we be more efficiently organized for war than for peace?
Is our proverbial carelessness to be pricked into effectiveness only by
emergency calls? Is the only motive you can offer us for efficiency—to
win? Or, if that is an instinctive desire, can we not change the goal
and be as eager to win other things as war?
* * * * *
I speak of the new state as resting upon integrated neighborhood
groups.[95] While the changes necessary to bring this about would have
to be planned and authorized by constitutional conventions, its
psychological basis would be: (1) the fact that we are ready for
membership in a larger group only by experience first in the smaller
group, and (2) the natural tendency for a real group to seek other
groups. Let us look at this second point.
We have seen the process of the single group evolving. But
contemporaneously a thousand other unities are a-making. Every group
once become conscious of itself instinctively seeks other groups with
which to unite to form a larger whole. Alone it cannot be effective. As
individual progress depends upon the degree of interpenetration, so
group progress depends upon the interpenetration of group and group. For
convenience I speak of each group as a whole, but from a philosophical
point of view there is no whole, only an infinite striving for
wholeness, only the _principle_ of wholeness forever leading us on.
This is the social law: the law which connects neighborhood with
neighborhood. The reason we want neighborhood organization is not to
keep people within their neighborhoods but to get them out. The movement
for neighborhood organization is a deliberate effort to get people to
identify themselves actually, not sentimentally, with a larger and
larger collective unit than the neighborhood. We may be able through our
neighborhood group to learn the social process, to learn to evolve the
social will, but the question before us is whether we have enough
political genius to apply this method to city organization, national
organization, and international organization. City must join with city,
state with state, actually, not through party. Finally nation must join
with nation.
The recommendation of the Council of National Defense which has been
mentioned above would repay careful reading for the indications which
one finds in it of the double purpose of neighborhood organization. It
is definitely stated that the importance of the Community Council is in:
(1) initiating work to meet its own war needs; and (2) in making all its
local resources available for the nation. And again it is stated that:
(1) in a democracy local emergencies can best be met by local action;
and (2) that each local district should feel the duty of bearing its
full share of the national burden.
Thus our national government clearly sees and specifically states that
neighborhood organization is both for the neighborhood and for the
nation: that it looks in, it looks out. Thus that which we are coming to
understand as the true social process receives practical recognition in
government policy.
I have said that neighborhood must join with neighborhood to form the
state. This joining of neighborhood and neighborhood can be done neither
directly nor imaginatively. It cannot be done directly: representation
is necessary not only because the numbers would be too great for all
neighborhoods to meet together, but because even if it were physically
possible we should have created a crowd not a society. Theoretically
when you have large numbers you get a big, composite consciousness made
up of infinite kinds of fitting together of infinite kinds of
individuals, but practically this varied and multiplied fitting together
is not possible beyond a certain number. There must be representatives
from the smallest units to the larger and larger, up to the federal
state.
Secondly, neighborhoods cannot join with neighborhoods through the
imagination alone. Various people have asserted that now we have large
cities and solidarity cannot come by actual acquaintance, it must be got
by appropriate appeals to the imagination, by having, for instance,
courses of lectures to tell one part of a city about another part. But
this alone will never be successful. Real solidarity will never be
accomplished except by beginning somewhere the joining of one small
group with another. We are told too that the uneducated man cannot think
beyond his particular section of the universe. We can teach him to think
beyond his particular section of the universe by actually making him
participate in other sections through connecting his section with
others. We are capable of being faithful to large groups as well as
small, to complex groups as well as simple, to our city, to our nation,
but this can be effected only by a certain process, and that process,
while it may begin by a stimulation of the imagination, must, if it is
going to bring forth results in real life, be a matter of actual
experience. Only by actual union, not by appeals to the imagination, can
the various and varied neighborhood groups be made the constituents of a
sound, normal, unpartisan city life. Then being a member of a
neighborhood group will mean at the same time being a member and a
responsible member of the state.
I have spoken of the psychological tendency for group to seek group.
Moreover, it is not possible to isolate yourself in your local group
because few local needs can be met without joining with other
localities, which have these same needs, in order to secure city or
state action. We cannot get municipal regulation for the dance-hall in
our neighborhood without joining with other neighborhoods which want the
same thing and securing municipal regulation for all city dance-halls.
If we want better housing laws, grants for industrial education, we join
with other groups who want these things and become the state. And even
if some need seems purely local, the method of satisfying it ought not
to be for the South End to pull as hard as it can for a new ward
building, say, while the North End is also pulling as hard as it can for
a new ward building, and the winner of such tug-of-war to get the
appropriation. If the South End wants a new ward building it should
understand how much money is available for ward buildings, and if only
enough for one this year, consider where it is most needed. Probably,
whatever the evidence, it will be decided that it is most needed in the
South End, but a step will be taken towards a different kind of decision
in the future.
And we join not only to secure city and state but also federal action.
If we want a river or harbor appropriation, we go to Congress. And if
such demands are supplied at present on the log-rolling basis, we can
only hope that this will not always be so. When group organization has
vitalized our whole political life, there may then be some chance that
log-rolling will be repudiated.
And we do not stop even at Washington. Immigration is a national and
international problem, but the immigrant may live next door to you, and
thus the immigration question becomes one of nearest concern. This
intricate interweaving of our life allows no man to live to himself or
to his neighborhood.
Then when neighborhood joins with neighborhood all the lessons learned
in the simple group must be practised in the complex one. As the group
lesson includes not only my responsibility _to_ my group but my
responsibility _for_ my group, so I learn not only my duty to my
neighborhood but that I am responsible for my neighborhood. Also it is
seen that as the individuals of a group are interdependent, so the
various groups are interdependent, and the problem is to understand just
in what way they are interdependent and how they can be adjusted to one
another. The process of the joining of several groups into a larger
whole is exactly the same as the joining of individuals to form a
group—a reciprocal interaction and correlation.
The usual notion is that our neighborhood association is to evolve an
idea, a plan, and then when we go to represent it at a meeting of
neighborhood associations from different parts of the city that we are
to try to push through the plan of action decided on by our own local
group. If we do not do this, we are not supposed to be loyal. But we are
certainly to do nothing of the kind. We are to try to evolve the
collective idea which shall represent the new group, that is, the
various neighborhood associations all acting together. We are told that
we must not sacrifice the interests of the particular group we
represent. No, but also we must not try to make its interests prevail
against those of others. Its real interests are the interests of the
whole.
And then when we have learned to be truly citizens of Boston, we must
discover how Boston and other cities, how cities and the rural
communities can join. And so on and so on. At last the “real” state
appears. We are pragmatists because we do not want to unite with the
state imaginatively, we want to be the state; we want to actualize and
feel our way every moment, let every group open the way for a larger
group, let every circumference become the centre of a new circumference.
My neighborhood group opens the path to the State.
But neighborhoods coöperating actively with the city government is not
to-day a dream. Marcus M. Marks, President of the Borough of Manhattan,
New York City, in 1914 divided Manhattan into sixteen neighborhoods, and
appointed for each a neighborhood commission composed of business men,
professional men, mechanics, clerks etc.—a thoroughly representative
body chosen irrespective of party lines. Mr. Marks’ avowed object was to
obtain a knowledge of the needs of his constituents, to form connecting
links between neighborhoods and the city government. And these bodies
need not exist dormant until their advice is asked. Sections 1 and 2 of
the Rules and Regulations read:
“1. The Commissions shall recommend, or suggest, to the Borough
President, for his consideration and advice, matters which, in
their opinion will be of benefit to their districts and to the
City.
“2. The Commissions shall receive from the Borough President
suggestions or recommendations for their consideration as to
matters affecting their districts, and report back their
conclusions with respect thereto.”
Moreover, beyond the recommendations of the Commission, the coöperation
of the whole neighborhood is sought. “Whenever the commissions are in
doubt as to the policy they desire to advocate and wish to further sound
the sentiment of their localities, meetings similar to town-meetings are
held, usually in the local schoolhouse.” The “neighborhoods” of
Manhattan have coöperated with the city government in such matters as
bus franchise, markets, location of tracks, floating baths, pavement
construction, sewerage etc. One of the results of this plan, Mr. Marks
tells us, is that many types of improvement which were formerly opposed,
such as sewerage construction by the owners of abutting property, now
receive the support of the citizens because there is opportunity for
them to understand fully the needs of the situation and even to employ
their own expert if they wish.
The chairmen of the twelve Neighborhood Commissions form a body called
the Manhattan Commission. This meets to confer with the President on
matters affecting the interests of the entire borough.[96]
This plan, while not yet ideal, particularly in so far as the
commissions are appointed from above, is most interesting to all those
who are looking towards neighborhood organization as the basis of the
new state.
To summarize: neighborhood groups join with other neighborhood groups to
form the city—then only shall we understand what it is to be the city;
neighborhood groups join with other neighborhood groups to form the
state—then only shall we understand what it is to be the state. We do
not begin with a unified state which delegates authority; we begin with
the neighborhood group and create the state ourselves. Thus is the state
built up through the intimate intertwining of all.