The little democracy, a text-book on community organization

Front matter

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Author's Preface

The Community Center movement in America has been slowly but steadily gaining momentum for a number of years, but it took a state of war to turn into a single channel the full power of every organized effort in that direction. Very early in the war there came a realization that the 50,000,000 civilian population could render more effective service through group organizations. This became apparent to me through the thousands of letters I received, as "Washington Editor of Pictorial Review, and in response to a wide demand for information on community organization I wrote for the magazine a series of articles on this subject. I searched the country for concrete examples of successful community organization, as few experiments had been made on a large scale and facts of practical value were difficult to secure. While these articles were running in the magazine a great driving force was injected into the community work ; the Government, through the Council of National Defense, the United States Bureau of Education, and the Woman 's Committee of the Council of National Defense, inaugurated a nation-wide campaign in the interest of community organization.

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AUTHOR'S PREFACE

For years the United States Department of Agriculture has been directing highly successful cooperative work among people of the rural districts. I have made no attempt to cover this in detail, but have outlined the work in a few of its phases in the hope that interest may be stimulated and that a wider use may be made of the vast amount of valuable material on the subject that is at all times available at Washington.

The book does not pretend to present any views I may personally have on the methods of community organization; I am not an expert but a student, and therefore I have merely tried to present, in logical sequence and in convenient and condensed form, the views of experts in various lines of community work for the benefit of other students of this important subject.

The book would not have been possible except for the generous and enthusiastic assistance of Dr. Henry B. Jackson, Expert in Community Work of the United States Bureau of Eduation. I am also indebted to Mr. 0. B. Martin, and to other officials of the States Relations Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, for guidance in the selection of bulletins from which the material on rural community organization has been taken.

Ida Clyde Clabke.

Washington, D. C.

Contents

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Introduction ... By Dr. P. P. Claxton,

U. S. Commissioner op Education . . xiii

Introduction

Pioneer life in America with its broad marches,long lines of frontier, sparse population and limited means of intercourse, stimulated independence and called for individual effort. To an extent unknown elsewhere in the modern world it fostered the spirit of self-reliance and the power of individual initiative, which for a century and a half have been the most characteristic features of the American people and have contributed most to our strength and our unprecedented attainments. But increase in population and wealth, scientific knowledge and modern methods of industry and means of travel and intercourse demand organization and cooperation and turn individualism from strength into weakness. Things that were formerly of interest only to the individual or the family now concern vitally the entire community and local community interests extend to municipality, county, State and Nation. With all this have come also a large extension of the spirit of democracy and a tendency to depend on the people for initiative and final decision in many things that formerly would have been left to their representatives in legislative bodies. Public opinion and popular sentiment become constantly more pervasive and more powerful. For the safety"

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INTRODUCTION

and welfare of the people and of the country public opinion must be intelligent and enlightened and popular sentiment must be free from the corruption of self-seeking and narrow partisanship and sectarianism. The need for developing and uniting the full strength of the Nation for success in the great war in which we are engaged, not for self-aggrandizement but for the freedom of the world, has given a sudden impulse toward national organization and has shown that this can never be made effective except through community organization. "We see now more clearly than ever before that the strength of a nation like ours depends on the developed strength of all of its constituent units and that a democracy must be alive in all its parts. For the welfare and safety of the democratic republic every final local community unit of it must be intelligent, virtuous and united for the public good. In these local communities the people must come together on terms of democratic equality for mutual instruction in regard to all things of common interest to them as members of these local communities and as members of the larger communities, of municipality, county, State and Nation. Here also they must learn to cooperate in production, exchange and consumption for the protection of life, the promotion of health, the education of themselves and their children, and for all those things which can be had only in common and obtained only by united effort.

In response to an increasing consciousness of the xiv

INTRODUCTION

need for such organization and cooperation many agencies are at work and many persons are attempting to set forth the principles and methods necessary for success. The Little Democracy^ by Ida Clyde Clarke, summarizes quite fully and effectively the best that has been done and will be welcomed by the rapidly increasing and already large number of people interested in various forms of community organization and cooperation.

P. P. Claxton.

Washington, D. C.

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Chapter I

The Government of the United States has asked that every community in America, in town and countryside, organize itself into a "little democracy," to the end that we may more quickly achieve that world-wide democracy which is our ideal, and in defense of which we have pledged to fight with all the resources at our command. The Council of National Defense and the United States Bureau of Education have cooperated in a campaign in the interest of organizing a ** Community Council" in every school district, in every state in the Union, and the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense has put forth its best efforts in support of the plan. President

Wilson stated, succinctly and forcibly, the whole purpose of this plan in his letter to the chairmen of the State Councils of Defense when he said:

"Your state, in extending its national defense organization by the creation of Community Councils, is in my opinion making 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 will build up from the bottom an understanding and sympathy and unity of purpose and effort which will no doubt have an immediate and decisive effect upon our great undertaking. You will find it, I think, not so much a new task as a unification of existing efforts, a fusion of energies now too much scattered and at times somewhat confused, into one harmonious and effective power. It is only by extending your organization to small communities that every citizen of the State can be reached and touched with the inspiration of the common cause. The schoolhouse has been suggested as an apt though not essential center for your local council. It symbolizes one of the first fruits of such an organization, namely, the spreading of the realization of the great truth that it is each one of us as an individual citizen upon whom rests the ultimate responsibility. Through this great new organization we will express with added emphasis our will to win and our confidence in the utter righteousness of our purpose."

As President Wilson has suggested we are not asked to contemplate any new ideas, for the Community Movement is almost world-old. We find it among the Christians in the catacombs ; in the guilds of medieval times ; in the group organization of the Artel and the Mir in Russia; in the social center work everywhere; in the broadly conceived playground movement; in our modern system of education. In these and many ways we find the old ideal struggling to express itself, until now, when the very bulwarks of our civilization seem threatened, the cruel and costly demands of war have thrown into the limelight the one instrument, ready made to our hand that can "weld the nation together as no nation of great size has ever been welded before." There are many who believe with John Collier that *'In Eussia today these Community Centers, thousands of years old, are being welded into organization along modem lines, and that new Eussia, Imperial Eussia, the Eussia which wiU fight great wars, and not only military wars, the Eussia which will yet blossom as the most glorious of all the flowers of national life — ^the roots of that Eussia will be living roots growing out of a folk life, a local community life comparable in fairly close detail to the town meetings and Jto the Community Centers in America today. '* And who doubts that out of the Community Center movement as it is being presented to us today there will come a more unified America and a wider application of the democratic principle for which the most enlightened nations of the world have staked their all.

The Neighborhood the Unit. — ^America is the sum total of thousands upon thousands of neighborhoods, and therefore the neighborhood is the logical unit of the Community Center organization. The labors of the educator and the statesman are more conspicuous but not more important than the labors of the community organizer, for no patriotic work can rival in value that of the group of people who steadily build toward a common consciousness, a common purpose, and a common devotion. Thousands of organizations, based on altruistic principles and founded and grounded in a desire to serve humanity, sprang up and died before they developed definitely in the consciousness of the people the realization that it is necessary to get at the first unit, to reach people in their original habitat, to deal with fundamentals, before we can hope to have a national mind, to think nationally, and to feel nationally. Dr. Graham Taylor has said:

'*I don't know what is coming with suflBcient centrifugal force to drive us together, but I believe we never can be driven together except in these neighborhood units; the city is made up of its neighborhoods, and can be no stronger than its neighborhood power. Whatever comes the state and the nation will be stronger when the local comnmnities shall be linked together. ' *

Has the war furnished the centrifugal force that is to drive us together? Will the Community Center Movement, started in many ways and in many places, gain the needed impetus, now that the full power of the United States Government has been turned on? The answer remains with every community in America — with every man, woman and child in these communities.

Dr. Shailer Mathews says:

''Democracy in the eighteenth century was essentially a fight to get rights that somebody else had that we thought we ought to have. It was a great and a tremendous struggle for rights. Under the conception of certain philosophies men thought that democracy was a sort of replevin of stolen rights. But as we have gone on during these hundred years there has grown up this tremendous and wonderful conception complementary to the struggle to get rights, namely, the great conception that we must give other people rights, and the world justice, and to give justice has come to be a bigger and more appealing ideal than to get rights."

And this is the ideal, this is the variety of democracy that can live and flourish in the soil of the Community Center.

The School as the Center. — If the neighborhood is the logical unit of organization for a real democracy, it seems almost obvious that the public school is the logical center. The United States Government has invested in the Public School system the impressive sum of $1,347,000,000, a fact which undoubtedly justifies the wider use of the public school buildings — the use of them all the year through and the use of them by adults as well as by children. There has been during recent years a marked and growing tendency for the public school to develop into a house of the people to be used by them, for mutual aid in self-development. This idea is at the very heart of the Community Center movement and it is the touchstone of its value for the national welfare.

The schoolhouse is the logical center for the commiuiity orgamzation because schoolhouses are the property of the people and because they are conveniently distributed in every section of the country. President Wilson's pronouncement on this subject is full of ringing truths. He said:

"A vision of the meaning of democracy opens before us when we conceive of citizens going to school to one another in the common schoolhouses to understand and answer public questions, as hitherto only representatives of the citizens (in legislatures) have gone to school to one another in the buildings provided for them.

''When we make this use of these buildings that belong to all of us, that stand ready in every neighborhood in America, we are recovering in a very practical way the institution which freemen have always and everywhere held fundamental — ^the institution of common counsel and mutual comprehension. In this restoration of the ancient equipment and practice of freemen, we are meeting a vital need of our new and complex age. We are answering the necessity that a simple means be found whereby, by an interchange of points of view, men of differing private interests and opinions may get together upon the common ground of public responsibility; the necessity, which is made acute by the fact that the process of modem industry, the process of modem politics, the whole process of modern life is a process from which we must exclude misunderstandings.

**If there is, anywhere in the United States, a person who objects to this use of the otherwise-idle public buildings for frank, orderly, all-sided consideration of the facts regarding matters of general concern, you may be reasonably sure that there is being concealed behind that person something which particularly needs to be looked into. Nothing that ought to be kept will be hurt by the fair and thorough discussion of citizens in neighborhood assembly.

**The spread and growth of this movement by which schoolhouses, instead of less worthy places, are coming to be used as voting centers, and by which these appropriate buildings are being opened to serve, not the children only, but all the people of their communities, must encourage and challenge to cooperation every man and woman who shares the spirit of America and appreciates the immediate and primary importance of visualizing the conmaon interest." With rare eloquence and convincing logic Dr. Philander P. Claxton, United States Commissioner of Education, has stated his views on the subject of the schoolhouse as the capitol of the ' ' Little Democracy. ' '

**To make more valuable to the people those things from which the people are accustomed to derive value [says Dr. Claxton] has very appropriately been said to be the prime business of legislators. That the schoolhouse, whose value to the people is already great, may become still more valuable to them, is the purpose of the community organization movement. A great democracy like ours, extending over three and one-half million square miles of territory and including more than one hundred million people, must be alive, intelligent, and virtuous in all its parts ; every unit of it must be democratic. The ultimate unit in every State, Territory and possession of the United States is the school district; every school district should therefore be a little democracy, and the schoolhouse should be the community capitol ; here the people should meet to discuss among themselves their common interests and to devise methods of helpful cooperation. It should also be the social center of the community, where all the people come together in a neighborly way on terms of democratic equality, learn to know each other, and extend and enrich their community sjrmpathies.

*'To this purpose the schoolhouse is especially fitted; it is non-sectarian and non-partisan; the property of no individual, group or clique, but the common property of all; the one place in every community where all have equal rights and are equally at home. The schoolhouse is also made sacred to every family and the community as a whole by the fact that it is the home of their children and the training place of future citizens; here all members of the community may appropriately send themselves to school to each other and learn from each other of all things pertaining to the life of the local community, the State, the Nation, and the world. The appropriation of the schoolhouse for community uses has well been called a master-stroke of a new democracy.

** These facts are not new, but the emphasis on their importance is new and amounts to a new discovery. The Nation's immediate need

THE LITTLE DEMOCRAGT

to mobilize the sentiments of the people and to make available the material resources has directed special attention to the schoolhouse as an effective agency ready-made to its hand for this purpose. The National importance of this new discovery is evidenced by the fact that the Council of National Defense has planned a nation-wide movement to organize the school districts of the United States as a means of bringing to the people information in regard to the immediate needs of the nation and creating and ^unifying sentiment for the National defense. In order that this organization may be made most effective and be made permanent, the Council expressed a desire to cooperate with the Bureau of Education."

Basic Principles of Commimity Movement. — The Community Center Movement does not aim merely to increased efficiency measured by the standards of the factory and machine industry. ** Human beings," said John Collier, President of the National Community Center Association, "are not to be dealt with as if they were passive material, like iron ore or cotton thread, which can be taken and put in a machine and hammered or woven and put through specialized processes and turned out at the end a finished product. Unconsciously we have modeled our governmental efficiency on the efficiency which has characterized the nineteenth century, which is the efficient production of wealth, of goods ; and of course goods have no memories, no hopes, no rights, no souls. See those highly complicated welfare activities threading their way among the people ; see the unconsciousness of the people as they are being operated upon by the truant officer, by employment agent, by protective devices of one kind or another; see their unconsciousness as they are touched here and touched there by these highly efficient and highly specialized ministrations of government, and see if the picture of the people as being mere passive material does not hold good. The people are not conscious of what the government is aiming at. The development of our centralized welfare work in government and private social service is being carried out on the machine patterns, and we must discover some way by which to bring all these purposes of government to bear on the personality of the common man, which means all of us. We must discover some way to enlist a passionate and continuous personal response from the individual so that he will, as he alone can do, shape himself through cooperating in the common purpose."

The Community Center Movement seems to answer this need, for its underlying purpose is to bring the mass of people into day-by-day working relations with constructive operations of the government. This of course establishes a very important relation between the Community Center and the whole problem of government. The Community Center proposes that the people should govern themselves ; it asserts that there are vast stores of unreleased energy in every neighborhood; and that the organization of the neighborhood is the power that helps to release these energies to the interest of the whole of society.

The Glorified Mill-Pond. — But back of the Community Center Movement there is something more — something that lies at the base of every fundamental. It is something spiritually deeper than these things that are translatable into words, something that may be realized but never comprehended by the finite mind. In Hopedale, Mass., there was an ugly mill pond, a bare, bulrush-shored, mucky stretch of bog and y^ater that nestled up close to the heart of the town. But the community organized, and someone saw the possibilities of that dingy morass. The lakelet was drained, dead trees removed, boulders blasted, and God's own trees and flowers were given a chance to grow in their own way. The sermon of the mill pond and the spiritual conception back of every sincerely planned Community Movement is expressed in one sentence at the end of the story of the transformed mill pond; it is this: '^The whole morale of the village is raised and transfigured by Hopedale' s glorified mill pond."

Existing Organisations. — However glorious the future of the Community Movement may be the debt it owes to the work of previously existing organizations will never be forgotten, nor will any dazzling success of the future obliterate the successes of the past, when pioneer workers, catching the vision, struggled through the darkness of half -awakened public opinion and laid the foundation stones upon which we to-day are building. The American Civic Association was a result of a realization that size in the building of our cities, without coordination, in a spirit of beauty and usefulness, was a menace rather than an asset. Among the subjects seriously studied and intelligently dealt with by this association since it was organized more than a dozen years ago are the community drama, the use of the schools as Community Centers, government city planning and park development, billboard and noise nuisance, good roads, country architecture, national parks and better homes for wage earners. The contribution of this association to the general welfare of the country cannot be overestimated, and to those specifically interested in these and other civic questions its work is cordially commended, for President Wilson has said, ''War must not destroy our civic efficiency." The organization has headquarters at Washington, D. C. The National Community Center Association concerns itself, as its name implies, with the problems of community organization, and is doing a splendid work. The national headquarters are at 123 Madison Street, Chicago. The National Playground-Eecreation Association of America has done such broadly valuable work that its activities have been linked up with the Commission on Training Camp Activities, in connection with which it is doing much constructive war work. These and other organizations have been too conspicuously successful not to be mentioned here, and each of them has immediately before it a much wider field of usefulness than it has enjoyed before. In anything like a summing up of the debt the Community Center Movement owes to the past, the work of the settlement must be mentioned, for it has a distinct place in the Community Center Movement. In fact, every settlement in America, as it has sought to bridge the gulf between the plain man and the expert worker, has shortened the distance to the ultimate goal of every sincere social service worker. And we are moving rapidly indeed now toward this goal. Those who doubt it should learn of the Community Clearing House Plan devised by the New York Committee on Unadjusted Children in the Gramercy District of New York City; the National Social Unit organization recently put in operation in Cincinnati, or the social service plans in any of our larger cities.

The Problem of the City. — Heretofore those who have focused their attention on the problems of the city have had little in common with those who are specifically interested in the improvement of country life. They have studied the same basic problem, it is true, but from such vastly different angles that it has sometimes seemed that two unrelated problems have been presented. The Conununity Movement is the key to the whole problem — it represents a principle that is fundamental, and therefore it applies to the city as well as to the country. A Community may be organized with equal promise of success in city or village, or countryside.

The most conspicuous social growth of our modem civilization is that thing we call a city, and so complex have become its problems that some of the master minds of the day have concentrated on them. Many serious, thinking peopl'^ are asking, "Has the city broken downl! Has it failed to meet the demands that have been put upon it? Are new problems piling up faster than we can solve the existing ones?" Mr. John E. Lathrop, who made an intensive study of the problems of two hundred cities while he was engaged with the American City Bureau, and who was director of the city planning exhibit shown in thirty cities of the United States, Canada and South America, gives some startling figures and cites some amazing facts. From 1900 to 1910 population of the cities increased much more rapidly than that of the country. With increasing population in the city there must be increased facilities, and the problem of transportation looms larger and larger, while the cost of operation increases per capita with increased population. In 1905 New York spent

^90,000,000 for subways. The added facilities "were absorbed in six months, and the cars were more crowded at that time than they had been before. Seven years later, having endured to the utmost, the city planned more subways — $350,000,000 of them. And thus in ten years New York City made debts of $440,000,000 to «olve its transportation problem. Yet who can say that the new subways will be adequate to meet the increasing demands of an enlarged city? Of striking interest in this connection is the statement of Mr. Theodore P. Shonts, President of the Interboro Transit Company of New York, who said: *'Each year the problem of handling the millions of New York traffic grows increasingly difficult. The struggle is hard, not to anticipate the city's future needs, but merely to keep up with the present. Public Service Commissioner Travis H. Whitney estimates that city traffic is increasing at the rate of more than 100,000,000 annually. We seem to be working in a circle: (1) added facilities; (2)' more population; (3) more congestion."

The Croton water supply was provided 20 at great expense. Immediately a new supply was planned at a cost of nearly $200,- 000,000. Bridges have been built by New York which have cost nearly $100,000,000, and several others have been planned, one to cost $42,- 000,000. Freight terminals are proposed for New York in Brooklyn to cost perhaps $100,- 000,000. The passenger terminals of the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroads cost at least $500,000,000. The improvements to Riverside Drive and the covered freight tracks of the New York Central are to cost something like $50,000,000. In the five years it took to build the new subways the regular expense of New York City was $100,000,000 a year, or $500,000,000 in the five years. In this period other improvements will probably aggregate $100,000,000. In 1915 the Comptroller was quoted ofiBcially as saying that New York City during that fiscal year had received more than $500,000,000 and disbursed more than $500,- 000,000, so that during the five year period the total will be the unthinkable total of $2,500,- 000,000, or at 5,000,000 population, a per capita of $500. In, reviewing these staggering figures Mr. Lathrop says:

*'As New York's population grows, the figures per capita are constantly increased. Unless something cures this balloon-like tendency, these charges per capita will reach $1,000, or twice a whole year's total income of the average representative adult worker in the United States. What is the use in going on in this fashion? Is it pessimism to pause to consider? Is it not simple wisdom to do so ? What business can endure when costs pile up faster than returns ? ' '

This presents a bird's-eye view of some of the purely material problems of the city, but how much greater are those in which human life and human welfare and human progress are concerned; problems which cannot be stated in figures or crystalized in facts. These problems, too, are receiving the most thoughtful and the most expensive attention. Germany places a higher economic value on human beings than she does on material wealth, but she has dehumanized herself in the process of working out this policy, for the reason that the rights of the individual are ignored, and human beings are manipulated, ground up, if need be, to satisfy the iron will of the few. If in America we are learning to value humanity more and the material less, we must attain our ideal of democracy by developing in the individual the desire and the intelligence to exercise the right to speak for himself in all of those matters that concern himself. It has been asserted that there are in the city of New York no less than one hundred and forty-seven organizations doing welfare work of one kind or another — one hundred and forty-seven agencies occupying expensive buildings, employing expensive staffs, engaging the sincere and often sacrificial services of master minds, operating on an unconscious public! The need is not to interrupt the work of these agencies, but to intensify and coordinate it, and to make it more effective.