"NEIGHBOR" THE PASSWORD
Truly, we live in a wonderful time. Here have I been trying to bring up
to date this account of the battle with the slum, and in the doing of it
have been compelled, not once, but half a dozen times, to go back and
wipe out what I had written because it no longer applied. The ink was
not dry on the page that pleaded for the helpless ones who have to leave
the hospital before they are fit to take up their battle with the world,
so as to make room for others in instant need--one of the saddest of
sights that has wrung the heart of the philanthropist these many
years--when I read in my paper of the four million dollar gift to build
a convalescents' home at once. I would rather be in that man's shoes
than be the Czar of all the Russias. I would rather be blessed by the
grateful heart of man or woman, who but just now was without hope, than
have all the diamonds in the Kimberley mines. Yes, ours is the greatest
of all times. Since I started putting these pages in shape for the
printer, the Child Labor Committee and the Tuberculosis Committee have
been formed to put up bars against the slum where it roamed
unrestrained; the Tenement House Department has been organized and got
under way, and the knell of the double-decker and the twenty-five-foot
lot has been sounded. Two hundred tenements are going up to-day under
the new law, that are in all respects model buildings, as good as the
City and Suburban Home Company's houses, though built for revenue only.
All over the greater city the libraries are rising which, when Mr.
Carnegie's munificent plan has been worked out to the full, are to make,
with the noble central edifice in Bryant Park, the greatest free library
system of any day, with a princely fortune to back it.[42] New bridges
are spanning our rivers, tunnels are being bored, engineers are blasting
a way for the city out of its bonds on crowded Manhattan, devotion and
high principle rule once more at the City Hall, Cuba is free, Tammany is
out; the boy is coming into his rights; the toughs of Hell's Kitchen
have taken to farming on the site of Stryker's Lane, demolished and
gone.
[Footnote 42: The Astor, Lenox, and Tilden foundations represent a
total of some seven millions of dollars. The great central library,
erected by the city, is to cost five millions, and the fifty
branches for which the city gives the sites and Andrew Carnegie the
buildings, $5,200,000. The city's contribution for maintenance will
be over half a million yearly.]
And here upon my table lies a letter from the head-worker of the
University Settlement, which the postman brought half an hour ago, that
lets more daylight in, it seems to me, than all the rest. He has been
thinking, he writes, of how to yoke the public school and the social
settlement together, and the conviction that comes to everybody who
thinks to solve problems, has come to him, too, that the way to do a
thing is to do it. So he proposes, since they need another house over at
the West Side branch, to acquire it by annexing the public school and
turning "all the force and power that is in the branch into the bare
walls of the school, there to develop a social spirit and an enthusiasm"
among young and old that shall make of the school truly the neighborhood
house and soul. And he asks us all to fall in.
I say it lets daylight in, because we have all felt for some time that
something like this was bound to come, only how was not clear yet. Here
is this immense need of a tenement house population of more than two
million souls: something to take the place, as far as anything can, of
the home that isn't there, a place to meet other than the saloon; a
place for the young to do their courting--there is no room for it in the
tenement, and the street is not the place for it, yet it has got to be
done; a place to make their elders feel that they are men and women,
something else than mere rent-paying units. Why, it was this very need
that gave birth to the social settlement among us, and we see now that
with the old machinery it does not supply it and never can. "I can reach
the people of just about two blocks about me here," said this same head
worker of the same settlement to me an evening or two ago, "and that is
all." But there are hundreds of blocks filled with hungry minds and
souls. A hundred settlements would be needed where there is one.
The churches could not meet the need. They ought to and some day they
will, when we build the church down-town and the mission up-town. But
now they can't. There are not enough of them, for one thing. They do
try; for only the other day, when I went to tell the Methodist ministers
of it, and of how they ought to back up the effort to have the public
school thrown open on Sundays for concerts, lectures, and the like,
after the first shock of surprise they pulled themselves together
manfully and said that they would do it. They saw with me that it is a
question, not of damaging the Lord's Day, but of wresting it from the
devil, who has had it all this while over there on the East Side, and on
the West Side too. All along the swarming streets with no church in
sight, but a saloon on every corner, stand the big schoolhouses with
their spacious halls, empty and silent and grim, waiting to have the
soul breathed into them that alone can make their teaching effective for
good citizenship. They belong to the people. Why should they not be
used by the people Sunday and week-day and day and night, for whatever
will serve their ends--if the janitor has a fit?
Now here come the social settlements with their plan of doing it. What
claim have they to stand in the gap?
This one, that they are there now, though they do not fill it. The gap
has been too much for them. They need the help of those they came to
succor quite as much as _they_ need them. I have no desire to find fault
with any one who wants to help his neighbor. God forbid! I am not even a
settlement worker. But when I read, as I did yesterday, a summing up of
the meaning of settlements by three or four residents in such houses,
and see education, reform politics, local improvements, legislation,
characterized as the aim and objects of settlement work, I am afraid
somebody is on the wrong track. Those things are good, provided they
spring naturally from the intellectual life that moves in and about the
settlement house; indeed, unless they do, something has quite decidedly
miscarried there. But they are not the object. When I pick up a report
of one settlement and another, and find them filled with little essays
on the people and their ways and manners, as if the settlement were same
kind of a laboratory where they prepare human specimens for inspection
and classification,--stick them on pins like bugs and hold them up and
twirl them so as to let us have a good look,--then I know that somebody
has wandered away off, and that _he knows he has_, for all he is making
a brave show trying to persuade himself and us that it was worth the
money. No use going into that farther. The fact is that we have all been
groping. We saw the need and started to fill it, and in the strange
surroundings we lost our bearings and the password. We got to be
sociological instead of neighborly. It is not the same thing.
[Illustration: A Cooking Lesson in Vacation School: the Best Temperance
Sermon.]
Here is the lost password: "neighbor". That is all there is to it. If a
settlement isn't the neighbor of those it would reach, it is nothing at
all. "A place," said the sub-warden of Toynbee Hall in the discussion I
spoke of, and set it on even keel in an instant, "a place of good will
rather than of good works." That is it. We had become strangers, had
drifted apart, and the settlement came to introduce us to one another
again, as it were, to remind us that we were neighbors. And because that
was the one thing above all that was wanted, it became an instant
success where it was not converted into a social experiment station; and
even that could not kill it. If any one doubts that I have the right
password, let him look for the proof in the organization this past month
of a new "coöperative social settlement," to be carried on "in
conjunction and association with the people in the neighborhood." Not a
new idea at all, only a fresh grip taken on the old one. It is sound
enough and strong enough to set itself right if we will only let it.
Only last week Dr. Elliot of the Hudson Guild over in West Twenty-sixth
Street told me of his boys' and their fathers' subscribing their savings
with the hope of owning the guild house themselves. They had never let
go their grip on the idea over there. They are of Felix Adler's flock.
But take now the elements as we have them: this great and terrible
longing for neighborliness where the home feeling is gone with the
home; the five hundred school buildings in the metropolis that have
already successfully been put to neighborhood use. It was nothing else
that Dr. Leipziger did when he began his evening lectures in the schools
to grown audiences a dozen years ago, and proudly pointed to a record of
twenty-two thousand in attendance for the season. Last winter nearly a
million workingmen and their wives attended over three thousand
lectures.[43] Dr. Leipziger is now the strong advocate of opening the
schools on the Sabbath, as a kind of Sunday opening we can all join in.
Of course he is; he has seen what it means. These factors, the need, the
means, and then the settlement that is there to put the two together, as
its own great opportunity--has it not a good claim?
[Footnote 43: The first year's record was 186 lectures and 22,149
hearers. Last winter (1901-1902) there were 3172 lectures in over
100 places, and the total attendance was 928,251. This winter there
will be 115 centres. It is satisfactory to know that churches and
church houses fall in with the plan more and more where there are no
schools to serve as halls.]
Experimenting with the school? Well, what of it? _They_ can stand it.
What else have we been doing the last half-dozen years or more, and what
splendid results have we not to show for it? It is the spirit that calls
every innovation frills, and boasts that we have got the finest schools
in the world which blocks the way to progress. It cropped out at a
meeting of settlement workers and schoolmen that had for its purpose a
better understanding. In the meeting one gray-haired teacher arose and
said that the schools as they are were good enough for his father, and
therefore they were good enough for him. That teacher's place is on the
shelf that has been provided now for those who have done good work in a
day that is past. "Vaudeville," sneered the last Tammany mayor, when the
East Side asked for a playground for the children. "Vaudeville for the
masses killed Rome." The masses responded by killing him politically. My
father was a teacher, and it is because he was a good one and taught me
that when growth ceases decay begins, that I am never going to be
satisfied, no matter how good the schools get to be. I want them ever
closer to the people's life, because upon that does that very life
depend. Turn back to what I said about the slum tenant and see what it
means: in the slum only 4.97 per cent of native parentage. All but five
in a hundred had either come over the sea, or else their parents had.
Nearly half (46.65) were ignorant, illiterate; for the whole city the
percentage of illiteracy was only 7.69. Turn to the reformatory showing:
of ten thousand and odd prisoners 66.55 utterly illiterate, or able to
read and write only with difficulty. Do you see how the whole battle
with the slum is fought out in and around the public school? For in
ignorance selfishness finds its opportunity, and the two together make
the slum.
The mere teaching is only a part of it. The school itself is a
bigger--the meeting there of rich and poor. Out of the public school
comes, must come if we are to last, the real democracy that has our hope
in keeping. I wish it were in my power to compel every father to send
his boy to the public school; I would do it, and so perchance bring the
school up to the top notch where it was lacking. The President of the
United States to-day sets a splendid example to us all in letting his
boys mingle with those who are to be their fellow-citizens by and by. It
is precisely in the sundering of our society into classes that have
little in common, _that are no longer neighbors_, that our peril lives.
A people cannot work together for the good of the state if they are not
on speaking terms. In the gap the slum grows up. That was one reason why
I hailed with a shout the proposition of Mr. Schwab, the steel trust
millionnaire, to take a regiment of boys down to Staten Island on an
excursion every day in summer. Let me see, I haven't told about that, I
think. He had bought a large property down there, all beach and lake and
field and woodland, and proposed to build a steamer with room for a
thousand or two, and then take them down with a band of music on board,
and give them a swim, a romp, and a jolly good time. As soon as he
spoke to me about it, I said: Yes! and hitch it to the public school
somehow; make it part of the curriculum. No more nature study out of a
barrel! Take the whole school, teachers and all, and let them do their
own gathering of specimens. So the children shall be under efficient
control, and so the tired teacher shall get a chance too. But more than
all, so it may befall that the boys themselves shall come to know one
another better and that more of them shall get together; for what boy
does not want a jolly good romp, and why should he not be Mr. Schwab's
guest for the day, if he does count his dollars by millions?
The working plan the Board of Education can be trusted to provide. I
think it will do it gladly, once it understands. Indeed, why should it
not? No one thinks of surrendering the schools, but simply of enlisting
the young enthusiasm that is looking for employment, and of a way of
turning it to use, while the board is constantly calling for just that
priceless personal element which money cannot buy and without which the
schools will never reach their highest development. Precedents there are
in plenty. If not, we can make them. New York is the metropolis. In
Toledo the Park Commissioners take the public school boys sleigh-riding
in winter. Our Park Commissioner is ploughing up land for them to learn
farming and gardening. It is all experimenting, and let us be glad we
have got to that, if we do blunder once and again. The laboratory study,
the bug business, we shall get rid of, and we shall get rid of some
antediluvian ways that hamper our educational development yet. We shall
find a way to make the schools centres of distribution in our library
system as its projectors have hoped. Just now it cannot be done, because
it takes about a year for a book to pass the ten or twelve different
kinds of censorship our sectarian zeal has erected about the school. We
shall have the assembly halls thrown open, not only for Dr. Leipziger's
lectures and Sunday concerts (already one permit has been granted for
the latter), but for trades-union meetings, and for political meetings,
if I have my way. Until we consider our politics quite good enough to be
made welcome in the school, they won't be good enough for it. The day we
do let them in, the saloon will lose its grip, and not much before. When
the fathers and mothers meet under the school roof as in their
neighborhood house, and the children have their games, their clubs, and
their dances there--when the school, in short, takes the place in the
life of the people in the crowded quarters which the saloon now
monopolizes, there will no longer be a saloon question in politics; and
that day the slum is beaten.
[Illustration: Such a Ball-room!]
Very likely I shall not find many to agree with me on this question of
political meetings. Non-partisan let them be then. So we shall more
readily find our way out of the delusion that national politics have any
place in municipal elections or affairs, a notion that has delayed the
day of decency too long. We shall grow, along with the schools, and by
and by our party politics will be clean enough to sit in the school
seats too. And oh! by the way, as to those seats, is there any special
virtue in the "dead-line" of straight rows that have come down to us
from the time of the Egyptians or farther back still? No. I would not
lay impious hand on any hallowed tradition, educational or otherwise.
But is it that? And why is it? It would be so much easier to make the
school the people's hall and the boys' club, if those seats could be
moved around in human fashion; they might come naturally into human
shape in the doing of it. But, as I said, I wouldn't for the world--not
for the world. Only, why is the dead-line hallowed?
I am willing to leave it to the Board. We are singularly fortunate in
having just now a mayor who will listen, a Board of Education that will
act, and a superintendent of school buildings who can and will build
schools to meet neighborhood needs--if we will make them plain. The last
time I dropped into his office I found him busy, between tiffs with
contractors, sketching an underground story for the schoolhouse, like
the great hall of the Cooper Institute, that should at the same time
serve the purpose of an assembly hall, and put the roof garden one story
nearer the street. That was his answer to the cry of elevators. "We do
not need municipal boys' club houses," said Mayor Low in vetoing the
bill to build them last winter, "we have the schools." True! Then let us
have them used, and if the classroom is not the best kind of place for
them, the experience of the settlements will show us what kind is. They
carry on no end of such clubs. And let the Board of Education trustily
leave the rest to Superintendent Snyder, who knows. Isn't it enough to
make a man believe the millennium has come, to find that there is at
last some one who knows? Not necessarily all at once.
In a copy of _Charities_ which just now came in (did I not say that it
goes that way all the time?) I read that the Chicago Small Parks
Commission has recommended nine neighborhood parks at a cost of a
million dollars,--wise City of the Winds! we waited till we had to pay a
million for each park,--but that the playgrounds had been left to the
Board of Education, which body was "not certain whether school funds may
be spent for playgrounds apart from buildings." However, they are going
to provide seventy-five school yards big enough to romp in, and the
other trouble will be got over. In Boston they are planning neighborhood
entertainment as a proper function of the school. Here we shall find for
both school and settlement their proper places with one swoop. The
kindergarten, manual training, and the cooking school, all experiments
in their day, cried out as fads by some, have brought common sense in
their train. When it rules the public school in our cities--I said it
before--we can put off our armor; the battle with the slum will be
over.
[Illustration: Teaching the Girls to Swim: Part of the Public School
Course.]