I. THE PROBLEM STATED

Recent local studies in Chicago seem to show that the number of competent persons in the community is frequently no real measure of the competency—if one may use that expression in this connection—of the community itself. A high communal intelligence quotient does not always, it seems, insure communal efficiency.

The explanation that at once suggests itself is that competent persons presumably are specialists deeply concerned in the little area of human experience in which they have chosen to operate, but profoundly indifferent to the interests of the particular geographical area in which they may happen to reside.

It is the incompetent persons, apparently, who still maintain an interest that could in any sense be called lively in the local communities of our great cities. Women, particularly women without professional training, and immigrants who are locally segregated and immured within the invisible walls of an alien language are bound to have some sort of interest in their neighbors. Children in great cities, who necessarily live close to the ground, however, are the real neighbors. Boys’ gangs are neighborhood institutions. Politicians are professional neighbors. When the boys’ gangs are graduated, as they frequently are, into local politics, the local political boss assumes toward them the rôle of patron, and they assume toward him the rôle of clients.

The competent people—that is to say, the professional people—are, on the other hand, either physically or in imagination, abroad most of the time. They live in the city—in their offices and in their clubs. They go home to sleep. Most of our residential suburbs tend to assume, as far as the professional classes are concerned, the character of dormitories. It is seldom that anyone who is sufficiently eminent or sufficiently competent to find a place in Who’s Who has time for anything more than a benevolent interest in his local community.

On the other hand, the competent people are keenly alive to the interests of their professions, and if we could organize our politics, as the Russians have sought to organize theirs, on the basis of occupations, that is, in soviets, it might be possible to awaken in our intelligenzia a more than dilettante and sporting interest in local politics and the problems of the local community. But the actual situation is different.

Our political system is founded on the presumption that the local community is the local political unit. If the local community is organized, knows its own local interests, and has a mind of its own, democracy prospers. It is said that 50 per cent of the qualified voters in this country do not exercise the franchise. So far as this is an index of their indifference to local community interests, it is at the same time a measure of the efficiency or inefficiency of the local community.

The National Community Center Association represents one of many efforts in recent years to alter the situation of which non-voting is perhaps one evidence. Community organizations aim, for one thing, to discover, to organize, and to make available for the local community the local community’s resources, particularly its human resources. The extent to which it succeeds is the measure of its efficiency. How to assess these resources, how to use them: these are problems.

II. THE COMMUNITY DEFINED

But what is a community and what is community organization? Before assessing the communal efficiency one should at least be able to describe a community. The simplest possible description of a community is this: a collection of people occupying a more or less clearly defined area. But a community is more than that. A community is not only a collection of people, but it is a collection of institutions. Not people, but institutions, are final and decisive in distinguishing the community from other social constellations.

Among the institutions of the community there will always be homes and something more: churches, schools, playgrounds, a communal hall, a local theater, perhaps, and, of course, business and industrial enterprises of some sort. Communities might well be classified by the number and variety of the institutions—cultural, political, and occupational—which they possess. This would indicate the extent to which they were autonomous or, conversely, the extent to which their communal functions were mediatized, so to speak, and incorporated into the larger community.

There is always a larger community. Every single community is always a part of some larger and more inclusive one. There are no longer any communities wholly detached and isolated; all are interdependent economically and politically upon one another. The ultimate community is the wide world.

a) The ecological organization.—Within the limits of any community the communal institutions—economic, political, and cultural—will tend to assume a more or less clearly defined and characteristic distribution. For example, the community will always have a center and a circumference, defining the position of each single community to every other. Within the area so defined the local populations and the local institutions will tend to group themselves in some characteristic pattern, dependent upon geography, lines of communication, and land values. This distribution of population and institutions we may call the ecological organization of the community.

Town-planning is an attempt to direct and control the ecological organization. Town-planning is probably not so simple as it seems. Cities, even those like the city of Washington, D.C., that have been most elaborately planned, are always getting out of hand. The actual plan of a city is never a mere artifact, it is always quite as much a product of nature as of design. But a plan is one factor in communal efficiency.

b) The economic organization.—Within the limits of the ecological organization, so far as a free exchange of goods and services exists, there inevitably grows up another type of community organization based on the division of labor. This is what we may call the occupational organization of the community.

The occupational organization, like the ecological, is a product of competition. Eventually every individual member of the community is driven, as a result of competition with every other, to do the thing he can do rather than the thing he would like to do. Our secret ambitions are seldom realized in our actual occupations. The struggle to live determines finally not only where we shall live within the limits of the community, but what we shall do.

The number and variety of professions and occupations carried on within the limits of a community would seem to be one measure of its competency, since in the wider division of labor and the greater specialization—in the diversities of interests and tasks—and in the vast unconscious co-operation of city life, the individual man has not only the opportunity, but the necessity, to choose his vocation and develop his individual talents.

Nevertheless, in the struggle to find his place in a changing world there are enormous wastes. Vocational training is one attempt to meet the situation; the proposed national organization of employment is another. But until a more rational organization of industry has somehow been achieved, little progress may be expected or hoped for.

c) The cultural and political organization.—Competition is never unlimited in human society. Always there is custom and law which sets some bounds and imposes some restraints upon the wild and wilful impulses of the individual man. The cultural and political organization of the community rests upon the occupational organization, just as the latter, in turn, grows up in, and rests upon, the ecological organization.

It is this final division or segment of the communal organization with which community-center associations are mainly concerned. Politics, religion, and community welfare, like golf, bridge, and other forms of recreation, are leisure-time activities, and it is the leisure time of the community that we are seeking to organize.

Aristotle, who described man as a political animal, lived a long time ago, and his description was more true of man then than it is today. Aristotle lived in a world in which art, religion, and politics were the main concerns of life, and public life was the natural vocation of every citizen.

Under modern conditions of life, where the division of labor has gone so far that—to cite a notorious instance—it takes 150 separate operations to make a suit of clothes, the situation is totally different. Most of us now, during the major portion of our waking hours, are so busy on some minute detail of the common task that we frequently lose sight altogether of the community in which we live.

On the other hand, our leisure is now mainly a restless search for excitement. It is the romantic impulse, the desire to escape the dull routine of life at home and in the local community, that drives us abroad in search of adventure. This romantic quest, which finds its most outrageous expression in the dance halls and jazz parlors, is characteristic of almost every other expression of modern life. Political revolution and social reform are themselves often merely expressions of this same romantic impulse. Millennialism in religion, the missionary enterprises, particularly those that are limited to “regions beyond,” are manifestations of this same wish to escape reality.

We are everywhere hunting the bluebird of romance, and we are hunting it with automobiles and flying machines. The new devices of locomotion have permitted millions of people to realize, in actual life, flights of which they had only dreamed previously. But this physical mobility is but the reflection of a corresponding mental instability.

This restlessness and thirst for adventure is, for the most part, barren and illusory, because it is uncreative. We are seeking to escape from a dull world instead of turning back upon it to transform it.

Art, religion, and politics are still the means through which we participate in the common life, but they have ceased to be our chief concern. As leisure-time activities they must now compete for attention with livelier forms of recreation. It is in the improvident use of our leisure, I suspect, that the greatest wastes in American life occur.

III. THE MEASUREMENT OF COMMUNAL EFFICIENCY

This, then, is our community. How are we to measure its efficiency? Here, I am bound to confess, we have still much to learn.

The simplest and most elementary way of estimating the competency and efficiency of a community, as something different from the competency and efficiency of the individual men and women who compose it, is by a comparative study of that community’s social statistics. Poverty, disease, and delinquency have frequently been called social diseases. They may be said to measure the extent to which the community has been able to provide an environment in which the individuals which compose it are able to live, or, to state it from the opposite point of view, they measure the extent to which the individuals who compose the community have been able to adapt themselves to the environment which the community provided.

The immigrant community manifestly exists to enable the immigrant to live. By life, however, we mean something more than mere physical existence. Man is a creature such that when he lives at all he lives in society, lives in his hopes, in his dreams, and in the minds of other men. In some way or another, man is bound to realize all his fundamental wishes, and these wishes, according to Dr. W. I. Thomas, are four:

He must have (1) security, that is, a home; some place to go out from and return to.

He must have (2) new experience, recreation, adventure, new sensations.

He must have (3) recognition, i.e., he must belong to some society in which he has status, some group in which he is somebody; somewhere or other, in short, he must be a person, rather than a mere cog in the economic or social machine.

Finally (4) he must have affection, intimate association with someone or something, even though it be merely a cat or a dog, for which he feels affection and knows that affection is returned. All special human wishes reduce finally to these four categories, and no human creature is likely to be wholesome and happy unless, in some form or manner, all four of these wishes are more or less adequately realized.^[62]

While I was on the Pacific Coast a few months ago, studying what we have called “race relations,” I was impressed by the marked differences, as between immigrant groups, with respect to their ability to accommodate themselves to the American environment and, within the limitations imposed upon them by our customs and our laws, to provide for all the interests of life.

Immigrant communities are likely to include within the circle of their interests and their organizations all the interests of life. Every immigrant community will have a religious organization—a synagogue, a temple, or a church—with its related, often dependent, mutual aid and welfare organizations. It will have also its own business enterprises, its clubs, lodges, coffee houses, restaurants and gathering places, and a press. Every immigrant community is likely to have its press in America even if it did not have one in the home country. The immigrant colony is frequently nothing more than a transplanted village, for America actually has been colonized not by races or by nationalities, but by villages.

As to the competence of these immigrant communities to provide an environment in which immigrants can live, Raymond Pearl’s paper, “The Racial Origin of Almshouse Paupers in the United States,” published in Science (October 31, 1924), throws some light.

One paragraph in that paper states the situation as between the nation and the foreign-born. It says:

While on January 1, 1923, there were in almshouses 59.8 native-born white persons per 100,000 of the same class in the population, the corresponding figure for the foreign-born was 173.6. This is by some regarded as a fact of dread significance. Perhaps it is. To me it seems possibly only an interesting expression of the difficulties which the human organism finds in adapting itself to a new environment.

If these figures may be regarded, as Dr. Pearl suggests that they should, as an index of the difficulties which the human organism finds in adapting itself to a new environment, the more detailed study of the various racial groups exhibits some surprising results.

They show, in the first place, wide divergencies in the capacity of different immigrant groups to adapt themselves to American life; they show, in the second place, that the races and nationalities that have lived here longest are the least able to meet the demands of the new environment. Dr. Pearl states it in this way:

With a few trifling exceptions, all the countries from which the present law encourages immigration contributed to almshouse pauperism in 1923 in excess of their representation in the population in 1920. On the other hand, again with a few trifling exceptions, those countries from which the present immigration law was especially framed to discourage immigration appear in the lower part of the diagram, because they contribute a smaller proportion to almshouse pauperism in 1923 than their representation in the general population in 1920.

Two things strike me as significant in this connection: (1) It is the recent immigrants who contribute least to the almshouse population; (2) among these recent immigrants it is, apparently, those who for one reason or another are least willing or able to participate in American life who contribute the least to our almshouse population.

Why is this true? My own inference is that the decisive factors are not biological, but sociological. The explanation of the almshouse statistics, in other words, is less a matter of racial temperament than of social tradition. It is the immigrants who have maintained in this country their simple village religions and mutual aid organizations who have been most able to withstand the shock of the new environment.

The whole subject needs to be investigated further. What would a comparative study of different racial and language groups with reference to disease, delinquency, and family disorganization show? What would a comparison of the Japanese, Chinese, and Mexicans show with reference to crime? I mention these three groups because they are living and working side by side on the Pacific Coast.

The census of 1910 showed the Mexicans to have the highest crime rate of any immigrant group in the United States. My conviction is that when we obtain the facts we shall find that the Japanese have the lowest crime rate, at least the lowest of any immigrant group on the Coast.

The explanation is that the Japanese—and the same is true of the Chinese—have organized what we may call “control organizations” to deal at once with disputes arising among themselves and with the larger community outside.

The Japanese Association, like the Chinese Six Companies, is organized to keep their nationals out of the courts. But the Japanese Association is more than a court of arbitration and conciliation. Its function is not merely to settle disputes, but to maintain the morale of the local Japanese community and to promote in every practical way, mainly by education, the efforts of the Japanese people to make their way in the communities in which they live. With the possible exception of the Jews, the Japanese are better informed than any other group about the condition of their own people in America.

One thing that has sensibly raised the morale of the Japanese, as it has, indeed of the Jews, is its struggle to maintain its racial status in the United States. Nothing, as Sumner observed, so easily establishes solidarity within the group as an attack from without. Nothing so contributes to the discipline of a racial or national minority as the opposition of the racial or national majority.

The peoples who are making, or have made in recent years, the most progress in America today are, I suspect, the Jews, the Negroes, and the Japanese. There is, of course, no comparison to be made between the Jew, the Japanese, and the Negro as to their racial competence. Of all the immigrant peoples in the United States, the Jews are the most able and the most progressive; the Negro, on the other hand, is just emerging, and is still a little afraid of the consequences of his newly acquired race-consciousness.

What is alike in the case of the Jew, the Negro, and the Japanese is that their conflict with America has been grave enough to create in each a new sense of racial identity, and to give the sort of solidarity that grows out of a common cause. It is the existence in a people of the sense of a cause which finally determines their group efficiency.

In some sense these communities in which our immigrants live their smaller lives may be regarded as models for our own. We are seeking to do, through the medium of our local community organizations, such things as will get attention and interest for the little world of the locality. We are encouraging a new parochialism, seeking to initiate a movement that will run counter to the current romanticism with its eye always on the horizon, one which will recognize limits and work within them.

Our problem is to encourage men to seek God in their own village and to see the social problem in their own neighborhood. These immigrant communities deserve further study.