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A COMMUNITY CENTER
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
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TOXONTO
THE TWO AMBITIONS . . . FRANK F. STONE
A COMMUNITY CENTER
WHAT IT IS AND HOW TO ORGANIZE IT
BY
HENRY E. JACKSON
Special Agent in Community Organization
United States Bureau of Education
Washington, D. C.
Evtry Schoolhouse a Community Capitol mnd every Community a little Democracy
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1918
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OOPTBiaHT. 1918
By the macmillan company
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• • * • » !!
THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON
March 13, 1918. Dear Mr, Chairman:
Your state, in extending its national defense organi- zation 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 weld- ing 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 pur- pose 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 har- monious 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 school house 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.
Sincerely yours, (Signed) WooDROw Wilson. [Letter sent to the chairmen of State Councils of Defense]
*'A system of general instruction, which shall reach every description of our citizens, from the richest to the poorest, as it was the earliest, so it shall be the latest of all the public concerns in which I shall permit myself to take an interest."
Thomas Jefferson.
» » • , * •
FOREWORD
The challenge of the World War to all thoughtful people is to organize human life on saner and juster lines in the construction of a better sort of world. This bulletin aims to make a suggestion toward an answer to this challenge.
The sorrow and tragedy of the war cause men and women everywhere to ask themselves not only what sort of a world they ought to work for, but also how and where they can be- gin to work for it. To find a practical answer to these questions is the persistent prayer of all who believe in democracy. Honest prayer is the expression of a dominant desire for what we believe is best and also the willingness to cooperate in bringing it to pass. The follow- ing pages are addressed to those who are will- ing to cooperate in answering their own prayers, to those who know what sort of world they ought to work for but are at a loss to know what is the best instrument to be used
FOREWORD
for constructing it. This bulletin suggests such an instrument.
It is a curious fact that usually it is com- paratively easy to interest ten men in an in- definite scheme about which they have nothing to do but talk, whereas it is difBcult to induce ^ one man to undertake a more modest but defi- ' nite piece of constructive work. But the war i has awakened the desire of all people of good will to do something. They want to make a motor-reaction to the war's challenge. They say : "We see what needs to be done. What is the best instrument with which to do it? That is the difficult thing to find." The sug- gestion here made is intended for such people, I who have discovered the futility of attempting I to purify the water in a well by painting the ' pump, and who therefore seek a constructive plan in the process of building a better world. The instrument here suggested is The Com- munity Center, which may be put into opera- tion anywhere, in city, village, or countryside. If we desire to get anywhere, we have to start from somewhere. The place to start from is where we are. The best point of contact with the world problem, raised anew by the war, is
FOREWORD
to be found in the community where we live, for the world problem exists in every com- munity in America. All political questions, if considered fundamentally, will be found to apply to human needs which are at once lo- cal, national, and international. The inter- national problem is now, and has always been, how to organize and keep organized a method of mutual understanding by which nations may cooperate rather th^n compete with each other. The national problem is to do the same for the social and economic forces within the Nation itself. The problem in any local community is to do the same for the forces operating in that community. With reference to this present and permanent world problem the writer has attempted to answer two ques- tions— what is a community center, and how ought it to be organized. He has endeavored to make the answer as brief as may be con- sistent with clearness.
Our three most urgent national needs are to mobilize intelligence, food, and money. But it is not possible to mobilize them until we first mobilize the people. The Nation's pres- ent need has made apparent the necessity of
FOREWORD
organizing local communities. The Council of National Defense discovered it through its experience in the war. The Bureau of Edu- cation had begun the task before we entered the war. These two organizations have now united their forces for the accomplishment of their common purpose to promote community organization throughout the Nation. The slogan of the one is, ''Every school district a community council for national service." The slogan of the other is, "Every schoolhouse a community capitol and every community a little democracy."
President Wilson has clearly indicated the profound significance of this movement in the letter he wrote to commend it. He elsewhere says that our present need is "to arouse and inform the people so that each individual may be able to play his part intelligently in our great struggle for democracy and justice." This is a perfect statement of the aim of our movement. With the addition of one word it would be a complete description of it. That one word is "organize." The aim of the movement — to arouse and inform the people, to enable each individual to play his part in-
FOREWORD
telligcntly — can be achieved only when the people organize themselves.
The creation of a democratic and intelligent social order is essentially the same task, whether our approach to it be local, national, or international. This fact has been clearly understood by thinkers as far back as Socrates, who said: "Then, without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, this much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evil in States, pri- vate as well as public." Any one, therefore, who attempts to remove these causes in a local community is working at a world problem, and he who attempts to remove them as be- tween nations is obliged, in order to preserve his honesty and self-respect, to make the same effort within his own nation and in his own community. It magnifies the value and stimulates one's zest in working for it to re- member that a community center is the center t of concentric circles which compass not only i the local community but also the larger com- \ munities of the Nation and the world. To es- • tablish free trade in friendship in all three
FOREWORD
communities is the goal of the community cen- ter movement.
February i, 1918.
k^NRY E. Jackson.
NOTE
This book contains the reproduction of a bulletin, published simultaneously under the same title, by the United States Bureau of Education. The Bureau of Education is limited by law to 12,500 copies of its bulletins. But in its agreement with the Council of National Defense to promote jointly the or- ganization of local communities, it promised to print and distribute, if possible, 300,000 copies, so that each school district in the United States might receive one copy. Since special funds for this purpose have not yet been secured, the bulletin is reproduced in this form to make it more available for use in the national campaign for the organization of community centers and community councils. The book contains also an additional section describing typical community centers in opera- tion.
The Publishers.
CONTENTS
The President's Letter Letter of Transmittal Foreword ....
I
Part I— WHAT IS A COMMUNITY CEN TER?
The People's University The Community Capitol The Community Forum The Neighborhood Club The Home and School League The Community Bank . The Cooperative Exchange The Child's Right of Way
Part II— HOW TO ORGANIZE A COM MUNITY CENTER .
A Little Democracy . Membership in America The Community Secretary The Board of Directors The Trouble Committee Public and Self-support A Working Constitution Decrease of Organizations The House of the People Free Trade in Friendship
CONTENTS
PAGE
Part III— THE PRACTICE OF CITIZEN- SHIP 97
The "Common House" .... 97
How It Works 98
A Village loi
A Country-side ...... 104
A Suburb 108
A Small City 114
An Average City 117
A Big City 122
A State 126
A Half-finished Product . . .132
"Never so Baffled, But — " . . 135
Lincoln's Mistake 138
The Meaning of the Flag . . 140
Part IV— A SUGGESTED CONSTITUTION 149
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The Two Ambitions Frontispiece
yAOINO PAGE
A Suggested Symbol for the use of Community
Centers 39
Shoes which suggest a social program .... 97
LETTER OE TRANSMITTAL
Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Washington, February 19, 191 8.
Sir: To make more valuable to the people those things from which the people are accus- tomed to derive value has very appropriately been said to be the prime business of legis- lators. 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 which this bureau has undertaken to foster.
A great democracy like ours, extending over more than three and one-half million square miles of territory and including more than 100,000,000 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
LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL
community capitol. Here the people should meet to discuss among themselves their com- mon interests and to devise methods of helpful cooperation. It should also be the social cen- ter of the community, vv^here all the people come together in a neighborly w^ay on terms of democratic equality, learn to know each other, and extend and enrich the community sympathies.
For this purpose the schoolhouse is spe- cially fitted; it is nonsectarian and nonpar- tisan; the property of no individual, group, or clique, but the common property of all; the one place in every community in v^hich all have equal rights and all are equally at home. The schoolhouse is also made sacred to every family and to 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 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
LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL
stroke of the new democracy." These facts are not new, but the emphasis on their im- portance is new and amounts to a new dis- covery. The Nation's immediate need to mo- bilize 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 organization is evidenced by the fact that the Council of National Defense has planned a nation-wide movement to organize school districts or similar communities of the United States as the ultimate branches of its council of defense system, believing that the organization of communities will enable the Council of National Defense to put directly before the individual citizen the needs of the Nation, to create and unify their sentiment, and to mobilize and direct their efforts for the defense of the Nation.
In order that this organization may be most effective and be made permanent, the council has expressed a desire to cooperate with the Bureau of Education, and I have detailed one of the specialists in community organization to
LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL
cooperate with the council for the accomplish- ment of our common purpose. That the peo- ple may have information in regard to com- munity organization in its simplest form, I recommend that the manuscript transmitted herewith be published as a bulletin of the Bureau of Education. It has been prepared at my request by Dr. Henry E. Jackson, the bureau's special agent in community organ- ization.
Respectfully submitted.
P. P. Claxton,
Commissioner.
The Secretary of the Interior.
PART I WHAT IS A COMMUNITY CENTER?
A COMMUNITY CENTER
WHAT IT IS AND HOW TO ORGANIZE IT
WHAT IS A COMMUNITY CENTER?
THE people's university "All men naturally desire knowledge," is the buoyant sentence with which Aristotle be- gins his great book on Ethics. It states our ground of hope for the possibility of progress and for the success of democracy. No demo- cratic form of government can long endure without popular education or the means of acquiring it. The first and chief aim of the community center movement is to deepen the content and broaden the scope of the term "education" and to extend the activities of the public schools so that they may evolve into people's universities.
When it is remembered that only lo per cent of the adult citizens have had a high-
3
4^ „\ ,A COMMIJNITY CENTER
school education and only 50 per cent have ever completed the grammar grades, it be- comes apparent that one of our greatest na- tional needs is a university for the education of grown men and women. The public school as a community center is the answer to this national need. The community center move- ment recognizes the fact that the mind matures V. more slowly than the body and that education is a life-long process. While the public school is dedicated primarily to the welfare of the child, it is becoming daily more evident that the Nation's welfare requires it to be used for adults and youths as well. Notwithstand- ing the fact that it is our finest American in- vention and the most successful social enter- prise ever undertaken, its golden age lies be- fore it. It is now being discovered anew in its possibilities for larger public service. The ; fact that all men naturally desire knowledge » is the fact which has justified the investment ^ of $1,347,000,000 in the public school equip- ment; it is the fact which now justifies the use of this equipment by adults. In every part of the country there is a manifest tendency for the public school to develop into a house of
A COMMUNITY CENTER 5
the people to be used by them for "mutual aid in self-development." This is the significant fact at the heart of the community center movement and the touchstone of its value for the national welfare.
THE COMMUNITY CAPITOL "The walls of Sparta are built of Spartans," sang an old poet. The walls of America like- wise are built of Americans. The primary V function of the public schools is to make, not merely good men and women, but good citi- zens for the Republic. From the standpoint of citizenship, therefore, every schoolhouse ought to be used as a polling place. This is the first logical step toward making it the com- munity capitol, although it may not be the first step chronologically. This use of the schoolhouse would save every State many thousands of dollars each year. When the people already own these houses, conveniently distributed in every section of the country, why should public funds be wasted in rent for other buildings? But economy, while a sufficient, is not the chief reason for making the school- house a polling place. The best reason is the
6 A COMMUNITY CENTER
ideal for which the ballot box stands. It is the symbol of citizenship in America. As such it deserves a worthy place. In the last / presidential election, President Wilson voted / in a fire-engine house in Princeton, and Candi- f date Hughes voted in a laundry in New York J City. Hitherto any kind of a place has been considered fit for the highest act of citizenship. In the Hebrew republic the symbol of the nation was a small richly decorated box called the "Ark of the Covenant." It was kept in the most honored place in the national Temple at the capital. The corresponding emblem in the American Republic is the ballot box. It ought to occupy a place befitting its import- ance. The one fitting place is the public schoolhouse, the community capitol and the temple of American democracy. Moreover, the voting instrument, which is the chief na- tional emblem in every democracy, should be constructed with architectural dignity and es- tablished permanently in the schoolhouse be- cause of the ideals it embodies and the supreme function it serves. It would thus be a per- petual reminder that the function of the school is to make citizens for the Republic.
A COMMUNITY CENTER 7
It would cause the question repeatedly to be asked, What kind of school subjects are best calculated to make good citizens? It would help to keep the curriculum vitalized, by con- necting it with practical and national processes.
It can continue to be vital only by the con- tinued process of adapting itself to meet the Nation's expanding needs. A fixed curricu- 1 lum is a false curriculum. The significant I fact about a school is not the condition in j which it is, but the direction in which it is' moving. Its only safety, like that of an indi-j vidual, lies in moving on. It will be stimu- lated to move on by making the practice of citizenship to be its goal. A constant re- minder of the practice of citizenship is the presence of the polling instrument in the school.
THE COMMUNITY FORUM J
It may or may not have been a mistake to have granted suffrage to the average man. An educational and character qualification for voting may now be the wiser policy to pursue in regard to both men and women, for no
8 A COMMUNITY CENTER
man is fit to govern another unless he has sufH- cient self-control to govern himself, and yet no man, however intelligent, can be trusted to govern another man without his consent. At any rate, universal manhood suffrage is the present fact, and nothing is so convincing as a fact. Inasmuch as the right to vote on pub- lic policies is now in the hands of the average man, it is of paramount importance that he should be given the opportunity to make him- self fit to perform this function intelligently. This is the necessity on which the community forum fundamentally rests. It is a school for citizenship.
The community forum is the meeting of citizens in their schoolhouse for the courteous and orderly discussion of all questions which concern their common welfare. A com- munity may begin with questions in which local interest is manifest, such as good roads, or public health, or the method of raising and spending public funds, or methods of produc- tion and transportation of food products. A discussion of these questions will reveal at once the fact that they transcend local limits. A road is built to go somewhere, and it will
A COMMUNITY CENTER 9
relate one community to another. Local health conditions can not be maintained with- out considering other localities, for the causes of local disease frequently lie elsewhere.
A local community pays part of the revenue raised by the county. The expenditure of these funds, therefore, is the affair of the local community. The same is true of the adminis- tration of State funds. The question of pro- duction and transportation is no longer re- garded as a rural problem or a city problem, but a national problem. The reason why no community should live for itself is because none exists by itself. Every community is at the center of several concentric circles. The subjects of most value for discussion in a local forum are those which connect it with county, State, and National interests. And herein lies the educational value of the forum.
One of the folk high schools of Denmark maintains a regular study called "A Window in the West," the purpose of which is to ac- quire new ideas from England and America, that Denmark may use them for its own im- provement. Such a course should be in the curriculurp of every public school.
lo A COMMUNITY CENTER
The aim of the forum is to put a new win- dow into the mental outlook of every com- munity. The value of an open mind can not be calculated. Every great leader of the world's thought and action has insisted on its indispensable importance. Confucius ex- pressed it in the golden phrase "mental hos- pitality." Socrates used a phrase out of which was coined the word "philosopher." He said, "I am not a wise man ; I am a lover of wisdom ; a seeker after new ideas." Jesus called it, "the spirit of truth." So highly did he regard it that he called it a holy spirit. The reason why these masterful leaders of men so prized the habit of being open-minded is because they understood that without mental hos- pitality no progress in any line is possible.
Ours is a Government by public opinion. It is obvious that the public welfare requires that public opinion be informed and educated. The forum is an instrument fitted to meet this most urgent public need. It is organized not on the basis of agreement, but of difference. It aims not at uniformity, but unity. It would be a stupid and unprogressive world if all were forced to think alike. We are under
A COMMUNITY CENTER ii
no obligation to agree with each other, but as neighbors and as members of America it is our moral and patriotic duty to make the attempt to understand each other.
Public discussion renders a great variety of services to spiritual and social progress. It puts a premium on intelligence, liberates a community from useless customs, puts a check on hasty action, secures united approval for measures proposed, creates the spirit of toler- ance, promotes cooperation, and best of all and hardest of all it equips citizens v^ith the ability to differ in opinion without differing in feel- ing. This habit can be acquired only through practice. The forum furnishes the means for mutual understanding. It aims to create public-mindedness.
THE NEIGHBORHOOD CLUB The basic assumption of the community I center movement is that democracy is the or- J ganization of society on the basis of friend- 1 ship. *'Man is a political animal," said Aristotle. He requires the companionship of his fellows. His happiness is largely linked up with their approval. His instinctive need
12 A COMMUNITY CENTER
for fellowship leads him to create a sort of social center out of anything available for the purpose. The post office has served as such a village center, but the free delivery of mail is destroying its social uses. The corner store has acquired fame as an informal forum and neighborly club, but the mail-order house is rapidly robbing it of members, and at best it serves only a few. The saloon has served the purpose of a neighborhood club and friendly meeting place on equal terms for large num- bers of men, but moral and economic consid- erations have doomed it to extinction.
The post office, corner store, and saloon are passing as social centers, but they must be re- placed with something better if they are not to be replaced with something worse. For only he can destroy who can replace. The public school therefore stands before an open door of opportunity to become a neighborhood club, where the people can meet on terms which preserve their self-respect. Almost every individual lives in the center of several concentric circles. There is the little inner circle of his intellectual and spiritual com- rades; then the larger circle of his friends;
A COMMUNITY CENTER 13
beyond that the still larger circle of those with whom the business of life brings him into con- tact; and the largest circle of all includes all members of the community as fellow citizens. There need be no conflict among these circles, no suggestion of inferiority or superiority. It is never to be forgotten that these circles are concentric. The experiences of life make them natural and necessary.
The community center is limited only by this last and largest circle. It seeks to broaden the basis of unity among men, to mul- tiply their points of contact, to consider those interests which all have in common. It is not difficult to discover that the interests, which unite men, are bigger, both in number and importance, than those which separate them. The list of things which can only be achieved as joint enterprises is long. Roads can only be built by community cooperation. Only so can the community's health be safeguarded. Food, clothing, and shelter are the common needs of all. Production and transportation are therefore questions of social service. The Greek word for "private," peculiar to one's self, unrelated to the interest of others, is the
14 A COMMUNITY CENTER
original of our word "idiot." The corre- sponding modern term in our common speech is "crank." The community center is a sure cure for "cranks." It aims to promote pub- lic-mindedness.
The schoolhouse used as a neighborhood club renders therefore an invaluable public service. It seeks to create the neighborly spirit essential for concerted action. The means employed are various — games, folk dances, dramas, chorus singing — which re- quire the subordination of self to cooperative effort, dinner parties, where the people break bread in celebration of their communion with each other as neighbors. These activities not only render a service to the individual by pro- moting his happiness and decreasing his lone- liness, they discover in the community unsus- pected abilities and unused resources. To set them to work not only develops the individual but enriches the community life.
The same is true of the spirit of play in gen- eral. To cultivate the spirit of play not only meets an instinctive human need for physical and mental recreation, but renders a distinc- tive service to democracy on account of its
A COMMUNITY CENTER 15
spiritual value. One can carry on the work of destruction by himself, but he must organize in order to produce. He must cooperate in order to play. He can not monopolize the victory ; he must share it with the team. Play thus develops the spirit of sportsmanship, the willingness to play fair, the capacity to be a good loser.
It thus becomes apparent that the neighbor- hood club furnishes the key to the possible solution of a variety of problems — the Amer- icanization problem, for example. The ob- ject of the community-center movement is to achieve "freemen's citizenship," both for na- tive and foreign-born alike. But citizenship means membership. It is obvious that the teaching of English to aliens is not sufficient to make them members of America. To ac- quire the language as a means of communica- tion with their fellows is, of course, a neces- sary preliminary. But it is only a means to an end. If they are ever to feel that they be- long with us, the right hand of fellowship must be extended to them. The neighbor- hood spirit alone can create in them the spirit of America. One of the by-laws of the con-
i6 A COMMUNITY CENTER
stitution of the Hebrew republic was to this effect: "Love ye, therefore, the resident alien for ye were resident aliens in the land of Egypt." This law does not enjoin citizens to teach them the language of the land. The necessity for that is assumed. The chief thing needful, it says, is to love them. Friendliness is not only the soul of democracy but also the most successful method of securing practical results. The community center is the most available and effective instrument through which this method can be applied. The process of Americanization consists essentially not in learning a language but in acquiring a spirit.
Cooperation and the spirit of sportsmanship are indispensable qualities for citizens of a democracy. The spirit and purpose of a neighborhood club are clearly suggested by the significant questions asked and answered by a negro bishop of Kansas. "When is a man lost?" he asked. "A man is never lost when he doesn't know where he is, for he always knows where he is wherever he is. A man is lost when he doesn't know where the other folks are."
A COMMUNITY CENTER 17
THE HOME AND SCHOOL LEAGUE
The free public school is at once the product and safeguard of democracy. The kind of public school, therefore, which a community has, is an accurate index of its community consciousness and its estimate of democratic ideals. "The average farmer and rural teacher,'' says T. J. Coates, "think of the rural school as a little equipment where a little teacher, at a little salary, for a little while, teaches little children little things." The ob- 'f ject of the home and school department of ^ the community center is to substitute the word ' "big" for the word "little" in the above state- ment, to magnify the work and function of the school, to make it worthy to occupy a larger place in the people's thought and affec- tion. This is the work which Home and School Leagues are now doing. The com- munity center in no wise interferes with their work. It is not a rival but an ally. Its plan is to give to and not to take from the Home and School League. Indeed, it is probable that the Home and School League quite generally, may become the parent organization out of
i8 A COMMUNITY CENTER
which will be born the community center. This is the natural and logical thing to happen, and in many places it is the process of develop- ment now in operation. Wherever this oc- curs it is against the natural order for the mother to be jealous of the daughter. If and when a Home and School League expands it- self into a community center, it ought to be- come a department of the community organ- ization.
By becoming a department of a larger or- ganization and limiting itself to its own special task, the Home and School League will not only do its work better, but will find it more than sufficient to occupy all its time. Its spe- cific work is to promote the progress of the school and to improve the school equipment. To this end it seeks to secure closer co- operation between the home and school, the parents and teachers. When Madame de Stael asked Napoleon what was needed to im- prove the educational system of France, he re- plied, "Better mothers." The noblest influ- ence on any child is that of a good mother. Every school, therefore, ought to strive to keep a close bond between the home and itself. It
A COMMUNITY CENTER 19
ought to do so not only for the sake of the children while they are in school but also be- fore they come to school and after they leave it. To build battlements around girls and boys at the point of their greatest danger, dur- ing the period between 16 and 21, when they are most neglected, is a task worthy in itself to enlist the deepest interest and occupy the en- tire energy of the Home and School League.
The three unsettled questions which school- masters are always debating — the content of the curriculum, the method of teaching, and the business management — will be illuminated if there is brought to bear upon them the view- point of parents who own and support the schools and who are interested to get the proper return on their investment. The same will be true of all school questions if con- sidered frorh the standpoint of the community center. It will connect school activities with life processes. This means vitality for the school. For, as the great educational re- former Grundtvig said, "Any school that has its beginning in the alphabet and its ending only in book learning is a school of death."
Inasmuch as the key to a better school is a
20 A COMMUNITY CENTER
better teacher, the home and school depart- ment of the community center will make it its special aim to develop the type of teacher described in Herbert Quick's "The Brown Mouse." It will endeavor to secure for teachers not only a larger degree of moral support but more adequate financial support, which is not the only thing needful, but the first thing needful toward the attainment of this goal. The constructive service rendered to the Republic by public-school teachers is as important, if not the most important, rendered by any class of public servants, and they are not mercenary or lacking in heroic devotion to the common welfare. But it is idle to expect that the right type of teacher can be secured or retained without a decent living wage. If Henry Ford is able to make $5 the minimum daily wage for the work of producing his machines, there is still more justification for fixing this as the minimum for the far more delicate and difficult business of making citi- zens for the Nation. When a community offers such a wage, then and then only will it be able to secure a $5 type of person for the position. In order to retain them after they
A COMMUNITY CENTER 21
are secured there ought to be a school manse — a teachers' house — as part of the necessary equipment of every school. Proper support and housing in order to secure the right type of teacher in itself constitutes a worthy pro- gram for this department.
The home and school department will naturally have charge of such school-extension activities as evening classes for youths and adults. These classes should be designed not only as a part of the work in the Ameri- canization of immigrants, but for the better equipment of all citizens. "It is the prime business of legislators," said Confucius, "to make more valuable to the people those things from which the people are accustomed to derive value." This states in brief the func- tion of the home and school department. The Nation's destiny was decided at the beginning by the establishment, for the first time in the modern world, of a free public-school system. To keep vital its processes and to improve its equipment that it may be still more valuable to the people is the chief business of this depart- ment.
22 A COMMUNITY CENTER
THE COMMUNITY BANK
The purpose of discussion in a community forum is not entertainment but action. It is responsible discussion ; that is, it is discussion by citizens who bear the responsibility for voting on the questions under discussion. Such questions will be many and various. Some will have a temporary and some a per- manent value. They will naturally grow out of community-center activities. But in order to guarantee that these social recreational and educational activities shall be related to life there ought to be established one or two de- partments to meet concrete human needs.
One of the best of these is a community bank, for it not only meets a practical need but also cultivates an ethical view of money and uses it as a means of moral culture. A community bank is primarily a savings bank both for children and adults. As regards children, it ought, so far as possible, to be a part of the curriculum of the school. Such banks are now conducted in many schools for children. Cooperative banks are conducted for adults in some States under the name of
A COMMUNITY CENTER 23
credit unions. New York State has a good law on credit unions, on which the laws of other States have been modeled.
But a real community bank is designed to serve other purposes than those of saving. Its aim is to multiply the efficiency of the people's savings by pooling them for cooperative uses. Its aim is to capitalize character and to democratize credit. It serves a community use by enabling the people to do jointly what they can not do separately. By clubbing their resources they can use their own money for their own productive purposes.
Such a bank operated for the common wel- fare will not only furnish the working capital for community enterprises, but will also be a loan society. It will make short-time loans to its members on reasonable terms. It will thus become the salvation of the poor from the tyranny and degradation of the loan shark. It will also make large long-time loans to young men and women who desire to marry and start homes, in order to enable them to become the owners of houses. It will permit them to repay the loan on the amortization plan. No community could render a more
24 A COMMUNITY CENTER
statesmanlike service to its members. The service already rendered by building and loan associations, which are in fact cooperative banks, is a guarantee of the success of the plan. There are in the United States 7,034 such asso- ciations, with a membership of 3,568,342, and assets amounting to $1,696,707,041. These figues are eloquent and tell a significant story. They show how ready is the response of men to the opportunity of owning their own houses and that this opportunity needs to be vastly ex- tended. The motto of the United States league of these associations is "The American Home, the Safeguard of American Liberties." The motto is both sentimental and accurately true. The well-being of a nation depends pri- marily upon the existence of conditions under which family life may be promoted and fos- tered. The family is the true social unit, older than church or state and more important than either. The welfare of family life is every statesman's chief concern.
The community bank enters not only a vitally important but a practically unoccupied field, and will meet felt needs unmet at pres- ent. The cooperative handling of credit is
A COMMUNITY CENTER 25
not new. It has been done in Europe for 50 years with marked success. The community bank is the adaptation to American conditions of the Raiffeisen Bank of Germany, the Luz- zatti Bank of Italy, and the Government Bank of New Zealand. It is a democratic bank; that is, it is of the people, in that it receives the people's money; it is by the people, in that it is operated by the people themselves; it is for the people, in that the money is used for the welfare of the people who saved it.
A community bank's ability to render these needed public services depends wholly on the people's desire and capacity to save and their willingness to pool their savings. To culti- vate the habit of thrift is the first necessity. That America needs to acquire this habit is too obvious to need comment. Americans are the least provident of peoples. Compared with a list of 14 other nations, the number of people out of every thousand who have savings ac- counts is only about one-sixth as many in America as in the nation highest on this list, and less than one-half as many as in the nation lowest on the list. Switzerland stands high- est, with 554. Denmark is next, with 442.
26 A COMMUNITY CENTER
The lowest is Italy, with 220. But in America it is only 99.
The economic welfare of a community, however, is not the most important result which the habit of thrift produces. Since money is the commonest representative of value and a symbol of the property sense, it is the best practical means of moral culture. A community bank will furnish the best antidote for the common desire to get something for nothing, "the determination of the ownership of property by appeal to chance," the habit of gambling, which is distorting the moral sense of all classes of people.
The community bank is designed to promote an ethical view of money. When we consider that if a man earns $100 for a month's labor he has put into this money his physical force, his nervous energy, his brain power, that part of his life has been given away in return for it, then money becomes a sacred thing. When we consider the humiliation and suffering of a destitute old age entailed by a lack of economy, then the need of thrift assumes a new sig- nificance. When one considers how manifold are the bearings of money on the lives of men.
A COMMUNITY CENTER 27
and how many are the virtues with which money is mixed up — honesty, justice, gener- osity, frugality, forethought, and self-sacrifice — an ethical view of it is unescapable.
A small competency is necessary to make life what it ought to be for every man, espe- cially in a democracy. "Whoever has six- pence," said Carlyle, "is sovereign over all to the extent of that sixpence ; commands cooks to feed him, philosophers to teach him, kings to mount guard over him, to the extent of that sixpence." An assured competence, however small, gives the priceless blessing of inde- pendence. Not only personal health and happiness, but social and political independ- ence are involved in a man's saving fund. The kind and amount of service which a com- munity bank can render to democratic ideals is beyond calculation.
THE COOPERATIVE EXCHANGE The fundamental aim of the community- center movement is to secure cooperation for the common welfare. But if cooperation is to be anything more than a beautiful dream, there must be cooperation about something. It
28 A COMMUNITY CENTER
must not only be good, but be good for some- thing. When the spirit of cooperation has been created, it must have an outlet in action, for to stir up the emotions and give them no outlet is mere sentimentality and is dangerous to moral health.
This principle is at once the reason and im- pulse back of the cooperative enterprises now carried on in schools. They assume a great variety of forms. Sometimes it is a cooper- ative creamery and cheese factory, which in some rural sections has meant new hope and larger resources, not only for the school, but also for the homes of the community. Some- times it is a farmers' club for the purchase of farm supplies. It may be a canning club in which the women meet in the school to pre- serve fruits and vegetables and sell them at cost, in order to raise funds for community uses, or for the national Red Cross. It may be a housekeepers' alliance, in which the women meet to exchange ideas as to the best methods of buying and preparing foods. In one community center the people have agreed to get their milk from one source and to pay for it in advance, in order to eliminate the
A COMMUNITY CENTER 29
wastes in distribution and receive the benefit of the money thus saved. For the successful handling of farm products it is essential that they be standardized both in form and quality. For this purpose it would be well to use a trademark or label, which would be of psycho- logical value in suggesting teamwork, and also be a guarantee of quality.
All of these activities are now in the process of being grouped together under a buying club, or cooperative exchange, for the organ- ization of which there is a rapidly growing demand. The State of North Carolina has ( already passed a law authorizing communities ,' to organize them in the schoolhouses. Co- ' operative buying and banking has been ope- ; rated with notable success for 50 years in } England, Denmark, and other countries. It has met little success as yet in America, be- cause Americans have been too rich and too individualistic. There seems to be an obvious need for an intermediate step between un- limited competition and the European type of cooperative society. It seems probable that this need will be supplied by the buying club. It is not a shop in the English sense, nor a
30 A COMMUNITY CENTER
store in the modern sense, but a store in the original American sense — that is, a store- house, a distribution station for goods kept in their original containers. Indeed, for the most part no goods need to be kept in the schoolhouse at all. The schoolhouse is used chiefly for the stimulation and formation of plans of operation.
Three things are necessary to success in any practical cooperative enterprise — a desire to save, good business sense, and the spirit of cooperation; of these the greatest is the last, because cooperation is primarily a state of mind; it is a matter of education. It is sig- nificant that the cooperative societies of Eng- land not only gave the name "society" to their organization, but also devote 2>4 per cent of their annual profits to the education of their members in the principle and practice of cooperation.
Thus there grew up in these stores real social-center activities. In America social and civic activities are already started in the schoolhouses, and out of them practical cooperation is now developing. Our ap- proach is the reverse of the English expe-
A COMMUNITY CENTER 31
rience, but the principle is the same. It is highly important to see clearly that the other community-center activities are an educational necessity to the success of its practical cooper- ative enterprises. A buying club unattached to the means of creating the cooperative spirit is almost sure to fail.
It will save time to recognize at the begin- ning that to acquire the spirit and method of cooperation is a slow process of education. The chief danger to be guarded against is the common tendency on the part of Americans to demand fruit the day the tree is planted. While the spirit of cooperation is difficult to acquire, like all other good things, yet it is worth all it costs. Cooperation in buying and banking is itself the best means for moral cul- ture. Its educational value is of the highest. It minimizes the evils of debt, cultivates self- control and self-reliance, checks reckless ex- penditures, develops a sense of responsibility, quickens intelligence and a public spirit, and prepares citizens for self-government in a democratic state. The schoolhouse is not only the appropriate place to acquire these educa- tional values and cooperative virtues, but it
32 A COMMUNITY CENTER
also furnishes the inspiration for success in the process, because the American public school is itself the most successful social enterprise yet undertaken in this or any other nation.
THE child's right OF WAY It is because there exists in America a marked degree of independence and initiative, and consequently a wide divergence in local conditions, that community centers differ widely in the kind and number of their ac- tivities. While variety in unity is the demo- cratic law of development, yet unity in variety is the other half of the same law. There are certain kinds of activities required by universal human needs. The activities herein described are the typical activities adapted to the average normal community, both rural and urban. If then one were asked what a com- munity center aims to be, it is a sufficiently full / and accurate answer to say that it is, what has just been briefly described, a people's univer- sity, a community capitol, a forum, a neigh- borhood club, a home-and-school league, a community bank, and a cooperative exchange. It is all of these in one organization. The
A COMMUNITY CENTER 33
unity among them is vital and organic like the unity of the fingers in a hand.
Whatever the number and variety of ac- tivities undertaken, the distinguishing mark of the community center is the fact that it is or- ganized not on the basis of personal pleasure or private profit or any political or religious creed, but on the basis of responsibility for the welfare of children. The "house of the peo- ple" in which it meets is the symbol of its cen- tral idea. The public school is the only national institution primarily dedicated to the welfare of the child.
Here as nowhere else men and women forget their partisan and sectarian divisions and breathe an atmosphere which accentuates their resemblances and minimizes their differences. Childhood is the ground floor of life. It takes us beneath all superficial and artificial distinc- tions.
Centuries ago a great statesman and phil- osopher said that the key to any right solution of our social and economic problems is to be found by "setting the child in the midst of them." Jesus regarded the child as the model citizen in the Kingdpm of God, which was his
34 A COMMUNITY CENTER
term for democracy. The child is still the most respectable citizen we have. The posi- tion of Jesus on the place of the child has been shown by John Fiske to be abundantly sup- ported by the biological history of the race. The prolonged infancy of the human baby is the factor which developed motherhood and all our altruistic sentiments. And it will be by keeping the child in the midst of our thought, by giving the child the right of way in our economics, by making the child's wel- fare the formative principle in our social and civic activities that we will transform these activities into community interests.
This the community center aims to do. In brief, it is a movement for the extension of the spirit of the home and fireside, the spirit of childhood, of good will, of intelligent sym- pathy, of mutual aid — the extension of this spirit to all the activities of the community. The indispensable importance of this spirit can not be overemphasized, for without it a community center is a body without a soul, and a body without a soul is not a living thing. A community center's capacity to produce prac- tical results is always to be measured by its
A COMMUNITY CENTER 35
capacity to create such a spirit. For, as John Dewey wisely says :
The chief constituent of social efficiency is intelligent sympathy or good will. For sympathy, as a desirable quality, is something more than mere feeling. It is a cul- tivated imagination for what men have in common and a rebellion at whatever unnecessarily divides them.
PART II
HOW TO ORGANIZE A COMMUNITY CENTER
HOW TO ORGANIZE A COMMUNITY CENTER
What needs to be done is fairly clear; how to do it is the difficult thing. ''If," said the shrewd Portia, "to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men's cottages princes' palaces." Nevertheless, to discover how, while difficult, it is an inspiring task. In the organization of a community center the essen- tial factors to be considered are its member- ship, its size, its executive officer, its board of directors, its finances, and its constitution. The suggestions here offered concerning them, together with the reasons for the suggestions, are the product of experience and have been tested in operation.
A LITTLE DEMOCRACY
The organization of a community around
the schoolhouse as its capitol is the creation of
a new political unit, a little democracy. It is
new in the sense that it is the revival and en-
39
40 A COMMUNITY CENTER
largement of an old institution that we ought not willingly to let die. Thomas Jefferson did not exaggerate when he said :
Those wards called townships in New England are the vital principle of their governments, and have proved themselves the wisest invention ever devised by the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self-government and for its preservation. * * * As Cato, then, concluded every speech with the words, ''Carthago delenda est," so do I conclude every opinion with the injunction, "Divide the counties into wards."
The movement to organize local self-gov- erning communities takes us back not only to the New England town meeting but still fur- ther back to the Teutonic "mark," the Russian "mir," and to the ancient Swiss cantonal as- sembly. The fact that free village commun- ities in some form have existed in so many parts of the world is a significant indication of a universal conviction that such organization is a necessity to human welfare.
The community center aims to form such a free village community, a town, a borough, a little democracy, both in the cities and the open country. Its capitol, or headquarters, is the schoolhouse, because this is the most
HOW TO ORGANIZE 41
American institution and the only one suitable for the purpose. It alone provides a place where all can meet on equal terms of self- respect. It is conveniently distributed in every city, town, and village in America. The term "center" applies to the schoolhouse, the place of meeting. The term applied to the organization of the people themselves is "com- munity association."
The first step in organization is to define the boundaries of the community. These ought to be determined along naturaljines, such as\ the territory from which the children in the school are drawn, or a district in which the people^come together for other reasons than the fact that an artificial line is drawn around them. It ought not to be too large.
Being a little democracy, all adult citizens, both men and women, living in the prescribed territory are members of it. It must be com- prehensive if the public schoolhouse is to be used as its capitol. It must be nonpartisan, nonsectarian, and nonexclusive. You do not become a member of a community center by joining. You are a member by virtue of your citizenship and residence in the district.
42 A COMMUNITY CENTER
Everywhere else men and women are divided into groups and classes on the ground of their personal taste or occupation. In a com- munity center they meet as "folks" on the ground of their common citizenship and their common human needs. This is the distin- guishing mark of the community center.
It is quite true that this democratic ideal is difficult to operate. That is nothing against it. AH worth-while ideals are difficult. Fisher Ames says, "A monarchy is a merchant- man which sails well but will sometimes strike a rock and go to the bottom, whilst a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water." Let us grant that it may be even hot water, but it is quite as true that the very difficulty in operating the democratic ideal constitutes its fascination and its worth. When a thing becomes easy of ac- complishment it loses much, both of its value and its interest.
MEMBERSHIP IN AMERICA It is possible for the form of democracy to exist without its spirit and method. The term "community"^ is not merely "a geographical
HOW TO ORGANIZE 43
expression." It applies not only to a geo- graphical area, but embodies an idea. Its real y content includes the spirit" and" method of — democracy. Unless it promotes this spiritual ideal its meaning is of small value. The Cen- tury Dictionary quotes the Attorney General of the United States as saying, ^^The phrase, ^a citizen of the United States' without addition or qualification means neither more nor less than a member of the Nation."
Membership implies obligation and respon- sibility. It gives not only a new sense of pride, but an intimate feeling of duty to the common welfare, for a man to say to himself, "I am a member of America." To make citizenship mean membership is one of the obvious needs in every community. The outstanding char- acteristic of the American Republic, which is unlike any other in the world, is that it is a double government, a double allegiance. It is a "Republic of republics." Every citizen feels two loyalties — one to his State and the other to his Nation. In addition to these two he feels a third loyalty. It is to his local com- munity. And just as every man is a better ciUzcn if he is first of all devoted to his own
44 A COMMUNITY CENTER
family, so will he be more loyal to the State and Nation if he is loyal to his own com- munity.
To induce citizens to recognize their re- sponsibility for the administration of public business, to become active members of their own communities, to assist in the improvement of local schools, of politics, of roads, of the general health, of housing conditions — this is the result which the community center aims to achieve. It is the law of all improvement that you must start from where you are. If a man can not love his own community, which he can see, how can he love the whole country, which he can not see?
The success of the work in any community depends on the amount of public-mindedness existing there or the possibility of creating it. Those who undertake community-center work ought to guard themselves against the danger of expecting too much at the start. To de- velop public-mindedness is a slow and difficult task. It ought never to be forgotten that democracy, like liberty, is not an accomplish- ment but a growth, not an act but a process.
It is of the highest importance that this f ^gt
HOW TO ORGANIZE 45
should be perceived by pioneers in community work, in order that they may not be deceived by the passion for size and numbers. A dozen public-minded persons are sufficient for a be- ginning. One of the biggest movements in history began with a little circle of 12 men.
They who have discovered the meaning of democracy do not need large immediate results to keep up their courage; they only need a cause; and the greatest of all causes is con- structive democracy. The people will re- spond when they understand. In the entire history of the community-center movement there has never been a time more than now when they were so ready to respond. Let no worker in any community despise small begin- nings. It is always better to begin small and grow big than to begin big and grow small.
THE COMMUNITY SECRETARY Nothing runs itself unless it is running down hill. If community work is to be done, some- body has to be the doer of it The growing realization of this fact has led to the creation of a new profession. The term applied to this profession is "community secretary," "a
46 A COMMUNITY CENTER
/ keeper of secrets," a servant of the whole com- ( munity. This community executive should be elected by ballot in a public election held in the schoolhouse and supported out of public funds. There are now four such publicly elected and publicly supported community secretaries in Washington, D. C, and eight more such offices are in the process of being created. It seems certain that it is destined to be one of the most honored and useful of all public offices. Its ideal was expressed by the ^^first real democrat in history," when he said, "The kings of the Gentiles are their mas- ters, and those who exercise authority over them are called benefactors. With you it is not so; but let the greatest among you be as the younger, and the leader be like him who
serves."
The qualifications for this office are mani- festly large, and its duties complex and exact- ing. The ablest person to be found is none too able. The function of the secretary is nothing less than to organize and to keep organized all the community activities herein described; to assist the people to learn the science and to practice the art of living together; and to show
HOW TO ORGANIZE
@
them how they may put into effective opera- tion the spirit and method of cooperation. Who is equal to a task like this? In addition to intellectual power and a large store of gen- eral information, one must be equipped with many more qualities equally important. The seven cardinal virtues of a community secre- tary are: Patience, unselfishness, a sense of humor, a balanced judgment, the ability to differ in opinion without differing in feeling, respect for the personality of other people, and faith in the good intentions of the average man. When one considers the requirements for this office, one's first impulse is to do what King Solomon did. After making a rarely beautiful description of a wise and ideal wife, he ended it by asking, "but where can such a woman be found?"
There will be no dearth of able men and women to fill this office, when once it is prop- erly created and adequately supported. For there is a particular satisfaction, not other- wise obtainable, to be derived from the service of a cause bigger than one's personal interests. Where possible, the community secretary ought to be the principal of the school. But
4B A COMMUNITY CENTER
where the principal can not be released from his other duties sufficiently to undertake the work, the secretary ought to be a person who is agreeable to the principal, in order to insure concerted action. In thousands of villages and open-country communities the teacher's work lasts for only part of the year and the compensation is shamefully inadequate. This is a great economic waste as well as an injury to children. If these teachers were made community secretaries, were given an all-year- round job and were compensated for the addi- tional work by a living wage, it would mean a better type of teacher and a better type of school. The bigger task would not only de- mand the bigger person, but the task itself would create them. Moreover, when the teacher's activities become linked up with life processes the community will be the more will- ing to support the office adequately. It seems clear that the office of community secretary is the key to a worthier support of the school. It will magnify the function of teaching, give a new civic status to the teacher, and make more apparent the patriotic and con-
HOW TO ORGANIZE
structive service which the school renders the nation.
While the demands, which this new profes- sion makes, may seem discouragingly high, nevertheless therein lie its merit and charm. ^'Our reach should exceed our grasp," or there is no opportunity for growth. The posi- tion is so big that it can not be outgrown. It is worthy of any one's life-time loyalty. A change to any other vocation is not a promo- tion. A teacher who is a community secre- tary, or who is associated with one in com- munity work, is justified in having the same degree of self-respect and exalted regard for the worth of his work which was expressed by a great pioneer in the same field, Pestalozzi. At one period of his career, he went to Paris, and a friend endeavored to present him to Napoleon the Great. Napoleon declined. "I have no time for A. B. C," he said. When Pestalozzi returned to his home his friends asked him, "Did you see Napoleon the Great?" "No; I did not see Napoleon the Great, and Napoleon the Great did not see me."
©
A COMMUNITY CENTER
THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS However able a community secretary may be, no one alone is able enough for the con- structive kind of work which the community center requires. Since it is a cooperative en- terprise, it is necessary that it be democrati- cally organized. The next step in its organ- ization, therefore, should be to provide the secretary with a cabinet. It may be called a board of directors, or a community council, or an executive committee. These names sug- gest its various functions. Its first function is to give council and advice to the community secretary, to act as a little forum for discus- sion, out of which may develop wise methods of procedure. Its next function is to share with the secretary the responsibility for the work, the burden of which is too heavy to be borne by any one alone. But the cabinet is not a legislative body alone to determine what is to be done, but also an executive body as well. It is not only an executive body, to carry out the general plans of the association, but also a body of directors to plan and conduct special kinds of activities. In every community there
HOW TO ORGANIZE 51
are men and women who have the ability and / leisure to render public service. As directors they would have a recognized position and channel through which they can more effec- tively render such service.
Each director ought to be the head of a de- partment of work, or at least the head of every department of work ought to be a director. The head of each department ought to choose the members of his own committee. Thus by having the heads of departments of work on the board of directors, the entire work of the association can be frequently reviewed, and the departments of activity can, by cooperating, not only avoid needless waste through dupli- cation, but also stimulate each other. The board of directors ought to hold regular meet- ings in the schoolhouse, and in order that the work may be responsive to public opinion the meetings ought to be open to any who wish to attend them, just as the meetings of a town council are open. The community center stands for visible government, and daylight diplomacy. ^
In the conduct of the association's activities a large measure of freedom ought to be granted
A COMMUNITY CENTER
the directors as well as the secretary. There can be no responsibility without freedom. The test of democracy is its willingness to trust its leaders. It is a test which democ- racies find it difficult to measure up to. The association ought to hold its officials to strict accountability, and it has the power to recall and replace them, but while they are in office and bear the responsibility they ought to be given freedom to use the means and methods which in their judgment are best suited to produce the results expected of them. The question here raised by democracy is not the extent of authority but its source. The prin- ciple of democracy is preserved if the source of authority is limited; the efficiency of democracy is secured if the extent of authority is enlarged.
The directors in community-center work will not only feel the need of taking counsel with each other, but also of getting suggestions from other communities. In every city and county, the community associations would do wisely to form a league for the purpose of pooling their experience and helping each
HOW TO ORGANIZE
other in what is manifestly a difficult task. In such a conference the representatives of local communities would discover that there may be many good roads leading to the same goal. Moreover, while it is possible to agree on our goal, it is rarely possible to agree on the methods of reaching it. No principle is more important to observe in conducting community work. If, then, we can agree on our goal, we may well spare criticism on our fellows who travel a road different from ours.
THE TROUBLE COMMITTEE It is not so difficult to organize a community center; the difficulty is to keep it organized. By no means the only one, but the chief means of securing a permanently useful community center is to have a wise and constructive pro- gram, big enough to merit interest. A good way to formulate such a program is to appoint a permanent committee which we may call "the trouble committee." The function of this committee is not to make trouble, but to remove it. Its task is to discover the causes of trouble in the community, to learn the rea-
L
A COMMUNITY CENTER
sons for dissatisfaction, to state the problems which ought to be solved, to exhibit the thing that needs to be done.
A community center can get helpful sugges- tions concerning programs from State uni- versities or extension committees, and it w^ill naturally w^ant to discuss the questions promi- nently in the public mind, but the most inter- esting and constructive program is the attempt to improve conditions of living oii its home soil. In such a program the first thing needed preparatory to action is diagnosis. Problem making is almost as important as problem solving. To know what the problem is, is half the battle. When the terms of a prob- lem are accurately stated, the problem itself is partly solved in the process. It was a fre- quent experience of Lincoln that, after he had stated the facts of a case in court, the trial of it was arrested and called off.
The work of the trouble committee is prob- lem making. For example, why are country- bred boys leaving the farm in such large num- bers; is farming a profitable industry; to what extent is the food of the country produced by the unpaid labor of children; does it pay bet-
HOW TO ORGANIZE 55
ter to rent or to own a farm ; could an average young man earn enough from a farm to pay for it by honest labor in a reasonable number of years; why do half the girls and boys fail to finish the grammar grades in school; is the work of transportation and distribution of food supplies economically done; why is the cost of living so high? If any community center should attempt to discover the causes of these unsatisfactory conditions, it would be a vital and attractive program sufficient to oc- cupy it for several years.
The function of the trouble committee is to"^ furnish nuts for the community association to ' crack. No one believes in diagnosis for the sake of diagnosis any more than he believes in ^'amputation for the sake of amputation." Its only use is to reveal the disease and to point the way to a remedy. The aim of the trouble committee is to point out the difficulties at the bottom of our social problems for the sake of removing them. Whenever they are re- moved, the problem vanishes. The method of the committee is constructive democracy.
No community, however, ought to assume that it can solve all of its problems, at least, not
A COMMUNITY CENTER
speedily. "We are not born," said Goethe, "to solve the problems of the world but to find out where the problems begin, and then to keep within the limits of what we can grasp," This is a luminous remark, and the trouble committee merely assumes that in treating any problem the place to begin is at the beginning of it, and that the beginning of it is its cause. It assumes that "there is no alleviation for the suffering of mankind except veracity of thought and action, and the resolute facing of the world as it is." It assumes that it is not possible to purify the water in a well by paint- ing the pump. It is painful to think how much social energy has been wasted in this process. No community center whose pro- gram is limited to painting the pump can either win or long hold the support of thought- ful men and women. Nor does it deserve to. The test of sanity used in some asylums is to take the patient to a trough partially filled and into which an open spigot is pouring new sup- plies of water. The patient is asked to bail the water out of the trough. If he attempts to do so without first turning off the flow he is regarded as insane, and properly so. It is ob-
HOW TO ORGANIZE 57
viously sane to turn off the spigot, to remove the causes of disorder, if we ever expect to pro- duce a social order in harmony with the intel- ligence and conscience of the Nation. This is the purpose and function of the trouble com- mittee. For the most part, this committee holds the key to the success or failure of a community center. —-
PUBLIC AND SELF-SUPPORT The finances of an organization usually con- stitute its storm center. Money is the kind of thing it is difficult to get along with and im- possible to get along without. After a com- munity center determines its plans and poli- cies, the next question in its organization is finance. But since money is the root of so much trouble, it ought to be kept in the back- ground. It is properly called "ways and means." It is not the end; human welfare is the end. Money is a detail, and ought always to be treated as such.
The superior advantage of a community center over private organizations is that it does not need an amount of money sufficient to cause it any distress. To begin with, there
58 A COMMUNITY CENTER
are no dues. They are already paid when the taxes are paid. The schoolhouse, together with heat, light, and janitor service, and in some places a portion of the secretary's sal- ary, is provided out of public funds. Thus the overhead charges are comparatively very small. The time will doubtless come when the entire expense will be provided out of pub- lic funds, but the movement is new; and for the present and immediate future, if the build- ing, heat, light, and janitor service are pro- vided, it is all that can reasonably be expected. The community center needs, for the pres- ent, to supplement its public funds. The highest salary paid out of public funds to a community secretary in Washington, D. C, is $420 per year. This is not a salary, but a contribution toward a salary. This amount must be increased if we can hope ever to se- cure and retain the right type of person for this position. Then there is the stationery, postage, printing, and clerical work. How are these needs to be met? The only way is by voluntary effort. Each department of ac- tivity ought to be self-supporting. Those de- partments, like the buying club and the bank,
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which have an income ought to contribute a certain regular percentage to the association as a whole, because its general activities are necessary to the success of these departments. This percentage should be considered part of the necessary operating expenses of each de- partment. The members of the community association ought to register to indicate their intention to take an active part in its affairs. When they do, a small registration fee should be charged.
These two sources will doubtless net suf- ficient funds. If they do not, then voluntary contributions and entertainments should fur- nish what is needed. It ought to be clearly noted that for a community center to raise part of its funds by voluntary effort does not mean that it is privately supported. The commun- ity association is a public body. As such, what money it raises is public money. It is not private support, but voluntary self-help. In a community center, public support and self-support are one and the same thing. Since the amount needed to be raised by vol- untary effort is smaller than the amount re- ceived from public funds, there is little dan-
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ger that large givers will have the opportun- ity to dominate the policies of the community center through their gifts. Above all others, this is the one danger most to be guarded against. Because it is chiefly supported by public taxation, the community center is a place where all can meet on the basis of self- respect, where a man's standing is determined not by gifts of money, but by character and intelligence. Whenever this condition ceases to exist, the community center dies.
But so long as the finances are organized democratically, the need for the community itself to raise part of its fund is a moral ad- vantage and is social justice. For until pub- lic opinion becomes informed and unified, a city or county must be fair to all its communi- ties. To compel one community, without its consent, to support the activities of another is manifestly unjust and undemocratic. Whit- man's definition of democracy, "I will have nothing which every other man may not have the counterpart of on like terms," is our guid- ing principle in community finances. For a community to raise part of its funds is not only social justice to other communities but a
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benefit to the community itself. The com- munity center is an enterprise for mutual aid in self-development. The process of raising part of its own funds is one of the means of such development. The people are com- pelled to pay taxes, but what they freely choose to contribute to their own enterprise is the only trustworthy guide to their attitude toward it and the best stimulus of their devotion to it. There can be self-development only where there is freedom. Partial voluntary support by a community insures local autonomy. "Democracy," says Bertrand Russell, ^^is a de- vice— the best so far invented — for diminish- ing the interference of governments with lib- erty." But political freedom is conditioned upon financial freedom. A degree of self- support, therefore, frees a community from the domination of city and county govern- ments. These considerations, if accepted as true, convert apparent burdens into blessings and weights into wings.
A WORKING CONSTITUTION What's a constitution among friends? It's a necessity if they are to continue to be friends.
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s the word itself suggests, a constitution es- tablishes the basis on which friends may stand for the accomplishment of their common pur- poses. Its value is always to be measured by the importance of the purpose to be accom- plished. Inasmuch as the purpose of a com- munity center is of the highest value not only to the welfare of the local community, but also to the welfare of democracy in the Nation and in the world, the making of its constitution is a highly important item in its organization. *'If democracy," said Havelock Ellis, "means a state in which every man shall be a freeman, neither in economic, nor intellectual, nor moral subjection, two processes at least are necessary to render democracy possible; on the one hand, a large and many-sided edu- cation; on the other, the reasonable organiza- tion of life" — nothing less than to state how these two objects may be secured is the purpose of the constitution of a community center.
It will thus be seen that this constitution is very different from that of an ordinary society, which merely aims to give information about officers and meetings. This one may deeply affect the spiritual and economic life of a com-
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munity. As the expression of certain ideas in a document known as "Magna charta," was a great gain in the long fight for freedom in the English-speaking world, so the expression of a community's new social purpose may mean new freedom for it.
As regards the work of the community cen- ter, the constitution is a working agreement, a clear understanding as to what is to be done and who is to do it. A clear statement will prevent needless friction and confusion. As regards the growth of the work in the com- munity, the constitution will serve the purpose of propaganda. If a new or uninformed member of the community should ask an ac- tive member, "What is a community center and what is its purpose?" a copy of the consti- tution ought to furnish a full answer to his question. Therefore, it should not be too brief, if it is to serve this purpose.
Each community ought to draft its own con- stitution, not only because the needs of com- munities vary, and not only because it should be the honest expression of the community's own thought and purpose, but especially be- cause a constitution brought from outside and
64 A COMMUNITY CENTER
dropped on the people's heads has little value for the community. Of course, it is possible for a community to work over and assimilate another community's constitution until it be- comes its own. It ought also to get help and suggestions from as many constitutions as it can find. For this reason there will be found in Part IV the copy of a constitution which the writer prepared to meet the needs of the Wilson Normal Community in Washington, D. C, his own community. It was patiently considered in committee and thoroughly dis- cussed in public meetings. It is now in oper- ation. y^"^ It is better for the people to make their own, either by creating a new one or adapting others to their needs, even if it is not as well done as somebody else could do it for them. In starting a community center an organizing committee should be charged with the task of drafting and submitting a constitution. If several weeks were spent on the task both in committee work and in public discussion, the time would be well spent. The educational value of the process is too great for the people to miss. The process would educate a con-
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siderable number who will grasp the meaning of a community center and who will therefore be equipped to a degree for conducting its work.
While the types of constitutions will be very various, yet there are certain formative prin- ciples which are basic in the structure of a community center. They are so essential to the life of the community ideal that the writer has called them "The ten commandments for a community center." They are as follows:
I. It must guarantee freedom of thought
and freedom in its expression. II. It must aim at unity, not uniformity, and accentuate resemblances, not dif- ferences. III. It must be organized democratically, with the right to learn by making mistakes. IV. It must be free from the domination of money, giving the right of way to character and intelligence. V. It must be nonpartisan, nonsectarian, and nonexclusive both in purpose and practice.
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VI. Remember that nothing will run itself unless it is running down hill. VII. Remember that to get anywhere, it is necessary to start from where you are. VIII. Remember that the thing to be done is more important than the method of doing it. IX. Remember that the water in a well can not be purified by painting the pump. X. Remember that progress is possible only when there is mental hospitality to new ideas.
DECREASE OF ORGANIZATIONS Edward Everett Hale reported Louis Agas- siz as saying that, when he came to America, one of the amazing things he discovered was that no set of men could get together to do any- thing, though there were but five of them, un- less they first drew up a constitution. If lo botanists, he said, met in a hotel in Switzer- land to hear a paper read, they would sit down and hear it. But if American botanists meet for the same purpose, they spend the first day in forming ari organization, appointing a com- mittee to draw a constitution, correcting the
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draft made by them, appointing a committee to nominate officers, and then choosing a pres- ident, vice president, two secretaries, and a treasurer. This takes all the first day. If any of these people are fools enough or wise enough — ^^persistent" is the modern word — to come the next day, all will be well. They will hear the paper on botany. This is a good- natured, but well-deserved, criticism of the common tendency to start a new organization if any one has an idea he wishes to propagate.
The resulting damage of a multiplicity of organizations is that so much energy is con- sumed in the work of organizing that there is not enough left to operate them. It is like the steamboat of Lincoln's story, with a 7-foot whistle and a 5-foot boiler. Every time the whistle blew, the engine had to stop running.
There now exist over 80 separate organiza- tions for the purpose of supplying some kind of war relief. Many of them have already applied and more doubtless will apply for permission to use the public schools to advance their various causes. It would be nothing short of a public benefaction if some device could be found to decrease the present number
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of organizations and prevent the inexcusable economic waste due to the duplication of ac- tivities. It is because we have so many or- ganizations (plural) that we need more or- ganization (singular) as a cure for this need- less waste.
The community center is such a device. It can perform this function because it is a com- prehensive organization. The center of any American community is the free public school, the only center it has. The community cen- ter is not a rival, but an ally, of other organiza- tions. It is more; it is their foster mother; it is thejjiatrix which gives them their setting. It embraces them as departmental activities. It is a coordinating instrument. It is a bureau of community service. Both its spirit and method are well stated in the lines of Edwin Markham, which he appropriately calls *'Out- witted" :
He drew a circle which shut me out, Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout; But Love and I had the wit to win. We drew a circle that took him in.
The fact that a community center is the community matrix explains why and how it
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can decrease the number of organizations and prevent unnecessary new ones from forming. The method of direct attack is not only incon- siderate, but is foredoomed to failure. If a community center should say to any existing organization, ^'We want you deliberately to disband, to chloroform yourself," it would de- feat its own purpose. Human nature just doesn't operate that way. The wiser method of the community center is to relate them to each other and to itself, as departments of ac- tivity, so that duplication may be exhibited as social waste. The mere exhibition of this fact will induce some organizations voluntarily to disband or merge with others. The disease of overorganization, like some other diseases, only needs, for its cure, exposure to the fresh air. The community center furnishes the at- mospheric condition of public opinion, in which unfit organizations will naturally die and the fit survive. The method is both gen- tle and just. It treats outgrown organizations as we always treat outgrown laws. We do not rescind them, we just let them die.
Just as fair competition in an open field fur- nishes the condition under which weak and
?
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less worthy organizations die^ likewise it fur- nishes the condition under which strong and worthy ones thrive and expand. All they ask is a fair field and no favors. Their work speaks for itself. The civilian relief work of the Red Cross is a case in point. The Red Cross has enlarged the scope of its activities to include not only remedial but constructive work. Its policy is not only to cure but to prevent disease. Constructive work under the noble name and sign of the Red Cross in up- building the Nation's strength is so akin to the aims of the community center that they ought to cooperate in order to save needless social waste. They travel the same road ; they ought to travel together as comrades. A few coun- ties now employ Red Cross public health nurses. One State has recently passed a law which provides that each of its counties shall support out of public funds a nurse for town and country service. It is only a question of time when a public health nurse will be at- tached to every community center.
The community center is the natural hub of a community wheel. It does not claim to be, it is necessarily, the comprehensive organiza-
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tion. But Red Cross work ought to be a de- partment of the community center. They need each other. The community center is in a position to open just the kind of a door of opportunity which the Red Cross needs for the success of its work. There are large classes of people who have not enlisted in Red Cross work. And yet they have sons in the war and are making heroic sacrifices. They desire to do war work as they have always been willing to do relief and constructive work in times of peace. But they will not come to fashionable hotels or similar exclusive places. For obvious reasons they will come to the schoolhouse. If, therefore, Red Cross units were organized as departments of community centers, the Red Cross could enlist in its serv- ice a multitude now outside of its reach, and the Red Cross, because of its resources and its semiofficial character, could put the aims of the community center into operation. The opportunity for mutual service is such that it would be a statesmanlike move if the Red Cross should devote time and money to the establishment of community centers as the most practical and economical instruments
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through which to expand its activities. A Red Cross unit ought to exist as a department of the community center in every school dis- trict of the United States.
The community-center movement and the Red Cross have the more reason for uniting their strength because the preventive work which they both aim to do, while more im- portant, is less dramatic and usually attracts less popular support. But it is to this kind of work that the world gives its verdict of approval when the perspective of time en- ables it to distinguish between the big and the little. It is doubtful whether to-day one man in a thousand knows the names of the two generals who commanded the opposing armies in the Crimean War. Even when they are mentioned — Lord Raglan and Gen. Toddle- ben — they sound strangely unfamiliar. But there was one participant in that war whose name is now a household word — Florence Nightingale. Yet it was the generals who occupied the conspicuous positions; it was they who rode horseback and wore showy uni- forms; it was they for whom the bands played and the soldiers applauded, while this Red
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Cross nurse did the apparently commonplace work of giving cups of cold water to wounded soldiers and easing the head of some home- sick man as he lay dying. But these wounded men kissed her very shadow where it fell. It was a healing shadow. Such constructive work, even though it consists in little deeds of wayside kindness, is work for the ages. Such constructive work will be so needed to heal the wounds in the social, industrial, and politi- cal world in the reconstruction days immedi- ately ahead that the community center and the Red Cross would do wisely to unite their strength, not only to meet the Nation's present need but to assist in building a better sort of world. The task of the community-center movement is at once so difficult and so essen- tial for the success of our experiment in de- mocracy that it needs the assistance of every agency whose aims are similar to its own. In helping to create community centers the Red Cross would not only be serving itself but ren- dering a national service of the highest im- portance.
We are thus equipped with a wise principle always to be observed in the organization of a
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community center. It should adapt itself to the organizations already in the field and co- operate with them. It does not antagonize them but assists them to expand into some- thing bigger. It may more speedily reach its goal if it would evolve out of some good existing organization. A community center never loses sight of its ultimate purpose, but it does not disdain to make use of the instru- ments which lie at its hand because they are imperfect. Lincoln applied this principle in the policy of reconstruction he had begun. Although he was bitterly criticized for it he defended it in the last speech he ever made. "Concede," he said, "that the new government of Louisiana is only, to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl ; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it."
THE HOUSE OF THE PEOPLE Whenever an idea gets itself embodied in concrete form, visible to the eye, it becomes the more potent and persuasive. The reason why the ancient and common use of symbols renders a distinct service to ideals is obvious. Sense impressions received through the eye
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gate are more vivid and permanent than those received through any other gate. We say, ^^in one ear and out the other"; we do not say, "in one eye and out the other." As an efficient means of propaganda, therefore, it is pro- foundly important that the community ideal should be embodied in a type of school build- ing which represents it. If it is to be used as a house of the people, it ought to look like a house of the people. A community which plans to build a new schoolhouse or to adapt an old one to new community uses must con- sider two questions: First, what are its in- ternal needs? Second, what style of building best serves these needs? The two questions are one and inseparable. They are related to each other like a man and his clothes or like ideas and the words which express them.
What are the internal needs and community uses which the new type of school buildings is required to meet? The essential needs may fairly be regarded as seven. They seem to re- quire a large expenditure, but from the stand- point of community finances the facilities here suggested obviously mean a wise economy, be- cause they will prevent a needless duplication
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^ buildings. They are used not only for school activities, but also for every variety of activity by youths and adults. These essen- tial facilities are as follows :
1. An assembly room; to be used also for so- cial games, folk dances, dinner parties, and gymnasium purposes.
2. Classrooms; to be so arranged that they may be used also for departmental activities of the community center.
3. A workshop; to be used also for voca- tional night classes and for mechanical experi- mental work as recreation.
4. Library and reading room; to be used also as a neighborhood club, conference room, and a clearing house for information.
5. Kitchen and storeroom; to be used also for household economics, community dinners, and cooperative exchanges.
6. An open fireplace; to be used for its spir- itual value in creating good cheer and the neighborly sense of fellowship.
7. Voting instruments ; to be erected perma- nently and used not only in the curriculum of the school and in public elections, but also as
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a symbol of the aim for which both the school and community center stand.
In addition to these seven practical and typ- ical features of a community schoolhouse, there is one small luxury which properly may be regarded as a necessity. On the lawn of every community school should be erected a sundial. Its use is not the ordering of the day by the sundial rather than the time-table in order to stimulate good and honest work; nor is its use to act as a reminder of the need of leisure for personal growth, although it would serve both of these purposes. But its chief use is to be the symbol of an idea, with- out which a community center can not live. Charles Lamb said that if a sundial could talk, it would say of itself, "I count only those hours which are serene." It operates only when the sun shines. It illustrates the wisdom of look- ing on the bright, not the dark side of things; of being positive, not negative; of accentuat- ing the resemblances, not the differences; of cultivating one's admirations, not one's dis- gusts. Without the practice of the principle of the sundial, the people of the community
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can never be mobilized for effective concerted action and national service.
In view of patriotic ideals like these which the school is designed to serve, the question concerning the style of building acquires a new and profound significance. What type of ar- chitecture most fittingly represents the institu- tion most characteristic of the American ideal, the community schoolhouse? Two types have been generally suggested and widely used. They are the colonial and the Tudor or col- legiate gothic. Both have real merits, but both have defects which seriously handicap their use for our purpose. The colonial has simple, effective lines, but is cold, rigid, puri- tanic, and lacking in joy. Moreover, in its more elaborate forms, it was the common type used for the elegant mansions of southern aris- tocracy. Their pillared porticoes suggest a coach and four driving under them.
The Gothic type has the advantage of be- ing more economical to build. Its chief merit originally was its "rudeness" or imperfection. The term "Gothic" was at first a term of re- proach, but it acquired honor as men discov- ered that every great work ought to be imper-
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feet if it is inspired by an unattainable ideal, as it ought to be. For this reason the lines in a Gothic building suggest aspiration. The distinguishing feature of Gothic architecture is that its beautiful ornaments, while always aspiring after an unattained perfection, always rest on the utilitarian principle of use. The flying buttress was not attached to a Gothic cathedral as an ornament. It was put there to prop up the wall. The pinnacle on its top, ornamental as it is, was not put there as an ornament. It was put there as a weight to keep the prop from slipping off the wall.
In spite of the obvious and great merits of the Gothic type of building, which can and ought to be utilized in new forms, its defects should be frankly recognized. It has been associated in our thought with exclusive, clois- tered seats of learning, like Cambridge and Oxford ; it lends itself easily to indulgence in elaborate display of art for art's sake instead of for life's sake; and it is a permanent re- minder of mediaeval ecclesiasticism, which is out of harmony with modern ideals of democ- racy.
It seems evident that the appropriate style
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of architecture to embody the democratic idea for which America stands remains still to be created. The best is yet to be. Ruskin says that:
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts— the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three, the only trustworthy one is the last.
What men embody in material form, invest large sums of money in, and lovingly seek to beautify, is a sure index of the value they place upon it. America has not yet written her autobiography in architecture, but she has started to write it, and has begun to express her appreciation of the indispensable import- ance of education to a democracy, as is seen in the handsome new school buildings now being erected in all parts of the country. A rare op- portunity to render a patriotic service is now afforded to those architects who are also ar- tists, if they have the courage to discard an- cient conventional standards and create a new type to represent the American democratic idea.
In this process laymen in art have a marked
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responsibility, because they finally determine the kind of building to be erected. In a democracy, art, like everything else, is pro- foundly affected by public opinion. More- over, laymen can prevent professional archi- tects from imposing any one conventional type of school building upon all communities. To do so would be deadly dullness. This will be prevented also by the need for adaptation in various sections of the country to conditions of climate, to materials available for use, and to the location of buildings. But while there should be variety of form, there are certain formative principles which must always dis- tinguish a community type of building. It must be a democratic building; that is, it must be beautiful, because hunger for beauty is uni- versal and beauty is of the highest educational value ; it must be cheerful, for to dispense joy to all is a duty demanded of the democratic ideal ; it must be in simple good taste, so that the average man will feel unoppressed and un- embarrassed by it; it must be economical to build, and a beautiful building is necessarily more economical; it must be low, springing out of the soil, easy of access, wide spreading,
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ample for hospitality, for no man can be a democrat by himself; it must be an honest building; that is, its beauty must be organic. It is not artificial adornment superimposed from the outside, but inheres in the structure itself. It is like the true beauty of com- plexion, which does not depend on an external application of paint, but on the rude internal facts of digestion and circulation of blood. No beauty exists in nature unconnected with her useful processes. Likewise a democratic building is natural and honest. It has little or no ornament; its charm is an inborn fitness and proportion. No canon of taste is more holy than fitness.
The style of architecture which embodies these essential principles of a democratic building more nearly perhaps than any other is the new Santa Fe type, which is a combina- tion of the old mission and adobe style in such a way as to justify us in regarding it as a real American product. It is well illustrated in the Alhambra Consolidated School near Phoe- nix, Ariz. The artist-architect who has cour- age to escape from slavery to the precedents of yesterday and the stupid imitations of out-
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grown standards, and who will take for his motto ''Not one thing that you do not know to be useful and believe to be beautiful," has to- day the opportunity to assist the people to create a new representative American archi- tecture, fitted to express their new discovery of the need for a community schoolhouse. To build a real house of the people is a patriotic service of the highest order. Fletcher B. Dresslar, in his able and comprehensive bul- letin on American Schoolhouses, very appro- priately reminds the builders of one of these temples of democracy that ''Whoever under- takes to build a schoolhouse to meet and foster these ideals ought to approach his task with holy hands and a consciousness of the devotion which it is to typify."
FREE TRADE IN FRIENDSHIP This, then, is the writer's understanding as to what a community center is and how to or- ganize it, briefly stated. To treat in brief a subject so big with meaning for the common welfare, one needs what the poet Keats calls "negative capabilities"; he must know what to leave in the inkstand, unsaid.
^84 A COMMUNITY CENTER
/ But after the most efficient methods of or- ganization have been discovered and applied, there is one word which must never be left unsaid or unheeded. Organization is to the thing to be done what a shell is to an egg. And while a shell is necessary for the conven- ient handling of eggs, the shell is not the egg. The egg of a community center, its heart and soul, is an idea, a spiritual purpose. To sac- rifice its soul to efficiency is like selling the egg for the shell.
"^' ^f Ruth's sickle, used in the Hebrew repub- lic, were placed by the side of the McCormick reaper in a world's fair, our progress in me- chanical efficiency would be dramatically ex- hibited. But how about Ruth herself? If she appeared among the women at the fair, would our superiority in that branch of man- ufacture be so apparent? Is it Ruth or only her sickle we have improved? Almost every nation has at its beginning some formative principle which shapes its organization and determines its contribution to the world's wel- fare. In Palestine it was religion ; in Greece it was culture; in Rome it was law; in Amer- ica it is what? Her birth and history clearly
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indicate that America's high mission is the en- franchisement of manhood, the development of the individual. This purpose is the soul of the community center movement.
The community ideal is fittingly expressed in a high relief by Frank F. Stone, w^ho illum- inates it by contrasting it with its opposite ideal. In this v^ork of art three figures are represented. On the right is the figure of a v^ell-fed, self-centered man. The expression on the face is a freezing scorn and utter dis- dain of his fellow men. The crown, miter, money bag, sword, and ermine robe which he holds in his hands, all indicate that he is an egotist, who through wealth, the assumption of divine rights, the accident of birth, or the sword of force seeks power, prestige, and ad- vantage over others. Opposite him is the type of a true democrat, who finds life not insipid, but inspiring. He is in the act of scaling the difficult heights of human achievement through his own unaided efforts. But he is unwilling to rise alone, and as he fixes his eyes on the heights which beckon him, he reaches down a helping hand to raise a weaker brother with himself. No work of art could more
86 A COMMUNITY CENTER
clearly represent the community center ideal, together with the ideal which it seeks to re- place. The only effective way to destroy an unworthy ideal is to replace it with a better one.
The community center aims to realize its ideal by promoting free trade in friendship among all individuals and classes of the com- munity. This is its most efficient means for producing results, because men are more influ- enced through their feelings than their intel- lects. This is the reason why "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." For the same reason friendship is the chief solvent of social and industrial difficulties. When David Grayson sat at dinner with a fac- tory owner, Mr. Vedder, and was helping him to settle a strike then in operation, Mr. Vedder asked him what kind of social philosopher he called himself. "I do not call myself by any name," said Grayson, **but if I chose a name, do you know the name I would like to have ap- plied to me?" "I can not imagine," was the answer. "Well, I would like to be called 'an introducer.' My friend, Mr. Blacksmith, let me introduce you to my friend, Mr. Plutocrat,
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I could almost swear that you are brothers, so near alike you are. You will find each other wonderfully interesting, once you get over the awkwardness of the introduction." "It is a good name," said Mr. Vedder, laughing. "It's a wonderful name," said Grayson, "and it's about the biggest and finest work in the world — to know human beings just as they are and to make them acquainted with one another just as they are. Why, it's the foundation of all the democracy there is or ever will be. Sometimes I think that friendliness is the only achievement of life worth while, and un-, friendliness the only tragedy." The commun-l ity center is a factory for the manufacture of] friendship, and the chief business of a com-\ munity secretary is to be "an introducer." )
Just as the mere statement of a problem is half of its solution, likewise free trade in friendship among men would break down half the barriers which separate them, because it would remove the chief cause of their strife. For a community to carry on its work without cultivating the spirit of friendship is like drawing a harrow over frozen ground. This is so essential to success that one of its chief
88 A COMMUNITY CENTER
aims should be to promote free trade in friend- ship by producing a collection of community center songs, so that the people could sing the sentiment as it is expressed in such poems as Richard Burton's —
If I had the time to find a place And sit me down full face to face,
With my better self that can not show
In my daily life that rushes so : It might be then I would see my soul Was stumbling still toward the shining goal, I might be nerved by the thought sublime — If I had the time!
If I had the time to let my heart Speak out and take in my life a part, To look about and to stretch a hand To a comrade quartered in no-luck land ; Ah, God! If I might but just sit still And hear the note of the whippoorwill, I think that my wish with God's would rhymfr— If I had the time!
If I had the time to learn from you How much for comfort my word could do; And I told you then of my sudden will To kiss your feet when I did you ill ; If the tears aback of the coldness feigned Could flow, and the wrong be quite explained^ Brothers, the souls of us all would chime, If we had the time!
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The community center seeks to promote freindship, not only in local communities but also among communities, and not only among communities in a single state or nation, but among the larger communities of the nations themselves, by stimulating devotion to com- mon ideals, for there can be no friendship un less there is similarity of aims and purposes. There is, perhaps, no more accurate or beau- tiful expression of that which separates and unites national communities than is to be found in the following letter sent to America by a pupil in Paris and made public by John H. Finley:
It was only a little river, almost a brook; it was called the Yser. One could talk from one side to the other without raising one's voice, and the birds could fly over it with one sweep of their wings. And on the two banks there were millions of men, the one turned toward the other, eye to eye. But the distance which separated them was greater than the stars in the sky ; it was the distance which separates right from injustice.
The ocean is so vast that the sea gulls do not dare to cross it. During the seven days and seven nights the great steamships of America, going at full speed, drive through the deep waters before the lighthouses of France come into view; but from one side to the other hearts are touching.
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Manifestly the task of the community center is complex and difHcult. Our business, how- ever, is not to debate the possibility of reach- ing the goal, but to make a start toward it. When Socrates was asked, "How shall we get to Mount Olympus?" he answered, "By doing all your walking in that direction." While we keep Mount Olmypus in sight to give us direction, we must recognize that the amount of possible progress toward it is determined by conditions as we find them. Our choice does not lie between the ideal and the actual. We must always choose both. We must know not only the goal but the road to it. Our practi- cal problem is to devise a working plan which includes what is both ideally desirable and actually possible. If we are ever to arrive at Mount Olympus, we must start from where we are, we must take things "as is"; we must "ac- cept the universe" and "try to fashion it as best we may with patience and good humor.
Although the road to the community center goal is difficult, nevertheless the hope of ul- timate success has the best of guarantees. It is buttressed by unescapable necessity. The solid basis on which this hope rests is the lack
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of self-sufficiency. On this fact society itself is founded. On this principle, Plato con- structed his republic. No community nor na- tion, as well as no individual, is self-sufficient. This applies both to the supply of physical necessities and the supply of food for minds and souls. No nation, as no man, can long live a Robinson Crusoe type of existence. They have a community of interests. All men are political animals. They must have with each other some kind of business, either good or bad. The community center movement merely aims to make this business good instead of bad. The obvious sanity of this policy is the guarantee of its ultimate triumph.
While a lack of knowledge concerning both the spirit and method of democracy makes the road to this goal a difficult one to travel, yet the rewards by the way are always in propor- tion to the hardships. The satisfaction of working for a cause bigger than one's private advantage is never lost, whatever be the for- tunes of the cause itself. Eric, a dying soldier boy in France writing his last letter to his father and mother, well expressed both the sat- isfaction and its cause when he said : "To a
Q
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very small number it is given to live in history ; their number is scarcely i to 10,000,000. To the rest it is only granted to live in their united achievements." This is the experience not only of vision-seeing, chivalrous youths w^ho have not yet exchanged their ideals for their comforts, but it is the experience also of a ma- ture man like Thomas Jefferson. When the long shadows fell across his life and he came to write his epitaph, this is what he wrote:
HERE WAS BURIED
THOMAS JEFFERSON
AUTHOR OF THE
DECLARATION
OF
AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
OF THE
STATUTE OF VIRGINIA
FOR
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
AND FATHER OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.
It is highly significant that he never men- tions the fact that he had been governor of Virginia, Secretary of State, minister to France, twice President of the United States. That is to say, he never mentions any personal rewards, anything that the people had done
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for him, but only what he had done for the people, only the service which his genius and loyalty had rendered to the community causes of democracy and education. This alone is what he cared to remember with joy and pride. This is why the community-center movement is justified in claiming the major loyalty of all soldiers of the common welfare.
PART III THE PRACTICE OF CITIZENSHIP
SHOES WHICH SUGGEST A SOCIAL PROGRAM
THE PRACTICE OF CITIZENSHIP THE "COMMON HOUSE"
"Come with me now to the common house, the Maison Commune, and tell me, first, if you know a more beautiful name than this ! The common house! What ideas the familiar term awakens! There is, in the village, a house that belongs to no one in particular, that is open to the poor as to the rich; that is, so to speak, the domestic center, the home of the village itself."
With this statement President Poincare of France closes his sketch of the checkered and stormy struggle, on the part of his country, to secure stable local self-government. There are in France to-day 36,225 communes, each with its common house, its mayor and its coun- cilors. Only recently have the liberties of local communities been put on a firm footing, although the Constituent Assembly in 1789 en- deavored to revive and establish them. The leaders of the French Revolution and the lead- ers of the American Revolution agreed in be-
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lieving that the commune, the organized local community, is the corner-stone of the national edifice and the administrative unit most in con- formity with the nature of things. This ideal America has rediscovered, and is now attempt- ing to put it into operation through its com- munity-center movement. It is this ideal on account of which the United States Bureau of Education and the Council of National De- fense have united their forces for the purpose of promoting.
HOW IT WORKS To build a Maison Commune, to make every schoolhouse the community capitol and every community a little democracy, is indeed, as President Poincare says, a beautiful ideal. But how does it work? That is the question with which this ideal is constantly challenged. Let us fearlessly accept the challenge, for ideals are intended to be operated. At the same time it ought to be frankly admitted — indeed it ought not to need stating — that neither in France nor in America does the ideal community as yet exist. The commun- ity, or the individual, laying claim to a ful-
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filled ideal either must have a low ideal, or be self-deceived. The praise of a freeman's citizenship is sung as a kind of doxology in public assemblies. It is an emotional outlet for our worship of American ideals. But the practice of citizenship in an actual community is quite a different thing, and obviously a com- plex and difficult enterprise. The general principles expressed in the first part of our Declaration of Independence are beautiful ideals, but when we came to its bill of partic- ulars our trouble began. It led to the Revolu- tionary War. The ideals of the Declaration did not even get themselves embodied in the Constitution and have never since been prac- ticed in any American Community. This is nothing against the ideals. It is no reason why one's devotion to them should cool. Quite the contrary; it is the most cogent reason for the renewal of loyalty and the increase of zest in working for their realization. All worth-while ideals are difficult to operate. "The task of the American freeman," says Francis B. Gummere, "is to see his ideal com- munity steady and whole, and to put its yoke upon his own neck."
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While the kind of community whose organ- ization we seek to promote is an imagined community, and does not yet exist, yet there have always been encouraging approximations to it. Approximations to it exist to-day in larger numbers, both in America and in other nations, than at any previous period of his- tory. Indeed, so numerous are they that a brief description of them would occupy a vol- ume. A present urgent need of the Bureau of Education is to prepare such a descriptive report in order to answer the requests for in- formation which the newly awakened interest in community organization has inspired in all sections of the country.
Within the limits here allotted it is possible to give only a few brief illustrations. But they are illustrations of typical communities; the writer has first-hand knowledge of them, and they are representative of permanently important lines of work now in the process of development. The communities here selected for illustration are: A village, a country- side, a suburb, a small city, an average city, a big city, a state.
PRACTICE OF CITliENitifF''ic>r
A VILLAGE
The village referred to has a population of 500 and is surrounded by a rich farming coun- try. The way this farm-village began its com- munity work is significant. Some women in the village church gave a simple amateur play, a community drama, to satisfy the young peo- ple's desire for pleasure, to promote the spirit of cooperation and incidentally to raise money for the church. It was a marked success, but when the proceeds were presented to the church officials, they refused it on the ground that it was tainted money. This event bore immediate fruit. It at once revealed the necessity for a building to meet the obvious needs of the community, which the church refused to meet. A movement was started to secure one. It met with enthusiastic response. A beautiful community building was erected and dedicated, free of debt. I had the honor of giving the dedication address. In it are conducted lectures, community dramas, games, socials and dances. It houses a library and provides preaching on Sundays. The community spirit thus created has been so im-
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pressive and helpful that one citizen asked for the privilege of endowing the building. The amount is not sufficient to cripple the move- ment, but enough to ease the burden of raising operating expenses. It has so unified and en- thused the community as to inspire the erec- tion of a large new schoolhouse, a far better equipped building than previously would have been possible. These are visible signs of the new spirit of neighborhood and responsible citizenship born in the community.
The significant fact exhibited in this com- munity's experience is the need to broaden the scope and deepen the content of religion. But since religion is still regarded by many as a dogma instead of an attitude to life, it is bet- ter not to use this term and say rather that the community achieved its freedom from the false distinction between sacred and secular. The contribution which this farm village makes to other communities needs to be em- phasized. It can be done most briefly and effectively by relating it to an incident in Mark Twain's wise book, ^'A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur." He describes a certain zealot and anchorite, who
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condemned himself to the treadmill practice of bending and unbending his body — bowing and rising — all day long, day after day and year after year. That was his religion, — his whole religion as he conceived it — and by its practice he had won for himself a reputation for transcendent piety. But to the hard- headed, practical Yankee this looked like a waste of energy and he began to study how to utilize it and turn it to some good purpose. Accordingly he arranged a device by which the old ascetic was hitched to a sewing-ma- chine, and as he continued to practice his re- ligion he was made to turn the machine and thus his piety was turned to some account. Mark Twain is justified in turning the weapon of his humor against the distinction between sacred and secular, because while it has no existence in fact, and is merely a mental illu- sion, it has done untold damage to human wel- fare. The progress of the community center movement requires that everywhere this dis- tinction be destroyed, just as this farm village succeeded in doing.
I04 A COMMUNITY CENTER
A COUNTRY-SIDE
The open-country community selected for illustration is a county. The special feature of its work here described is a new enterprise and suggestive to other counties. The local communities of this county were requested to send as many of their members as could come to a country schoolhouse and spend one week together in community center activities. They came — men, women and children, youths and adults, — they came on foot, by mule-back and in automobiles, — they came every day from near and far, some as far as twenty miles. They increased in numbers as the week went on. This experiment may most accurately be described by calling it a people's university. There was present a faculty of over a dozen members, made up of representa- tives from the state departments of education, agriculture, health, road-making, fire protec- tion and from the state university and state normal college, and the U. S. Bureau of Edu- cation. Each morning the faculty met on the porch of a near-by hotel to adjust the day's
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program and indulge in jollity and recreation (it is a prohibition state).
The day's work lasted from 3 to 10 P. M. The afternoon was devoted to instruction in road-making, home economics, cooperative buying and selling, fire protection, organized play, music, boys' and girls' club work. There were classes for all, both young and old, the teachers each day exchanging classes. At the twilight hour all remained for a picnic supper in the grove surrounding the school- house. It was a real "communion supper," in which we broke bread together as friends and neighbors devoted to the common welfare.
No such People's University is complete without a motion picture outfit as a time-sav- ing instrument of instruction. But there was no electricity in the county. How could it be managed? Where there's a will there's a way. The leaders of the experiment secured two Ford automobiles. On one they placed a Delco-Light machine which made the electric- ity. On the other they put a projector. Twenty educational reels were sent from the Federal Departments at Washington, and
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story reels were secured from private agencies. The schoolhouse was, of course, too small to hold the people. The screen was hung on the side of the building and the people seated in the grove. The evening program consisted of community singing, motion pictures and a lec- ture by the writer on community organization. To him the prospect of competing with motion pictures was a source of anxiety, especially since more than half of the people had never seen a motion picture. But his fear was un- justified. They enjoyed the pictures but did not lose their heads over them. It is no small compliment to them to report their repeated remarks that they did not come for pictures but for a serious discussion of their community problems. Moreover, the writer presented to them exactly the same lectures which he had delivered to a summer school in a rich and learned northern university, and they received the same appreciation, only more so, which means that one never needs to talk down to the people provided he uses language they can un- derstand. They may not be bookish but they know how to think about life's fundamentals. This was an experiment in taking a univer-
PRACTICE OF CITIZENSHIP 107
sity to the people who need it most. It is a new kind of university extension. It is ap- plied democracy. Its value cannot be over- estimated. For, as President Wilson said, "A kind of liberal education must underlie every wholesome political and social process, the kind of liberal education which connects a man's feeling and his comprehension with the general run of mankind, which disconnects him from the special interests and marries his thought to the common interests of great com- munities."
The significant fact about this county's ex- periment is that the people's response amply justifies the labor involved in it. One result, for example, was that the county commission- ers appropriated $12,000 to secure better sanitary conditions in the county. This is an index of far larger results. The sight of the people seated in the schoolhouse grove on those warm moon-light nights — their wistful eager faces, their hunger for knowledge, their new sense of community responsibility, their social and mental hospitality — leaves a picture in the writer's memory never to be forgotten and furnishes a ground of hope that their en-
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larged outlook upon life will issue in recon- structed communities. As the week drew to a close the members of the faculty were moved in common by a new and strangely vital im- pulse which they confessed to each other. It was a sort of religious passion. They said this is the new evangelism, an educational evangel- ism. This same work must be done in every community of the State. And so it ought.
A SUBURB
The suburb selected for illustration is at- tached to one of our eastern cities already fa- mous for the beauty of its suburbs. This one is among the best. It has no school, no church, and no town government, on account of which happy condition of freedom the writer has told the people they are to be con- gratulated, because there are so many things they will not have to unlearn and so much dead lumber they will not have to remove. The door is wide open for a fine piece of constructive work. The work of construc- tion is so much easier than that of reconstruc- tion or destruction.
The writer has urged this community to
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organize its community life comprehensively, and to build its proposed "common house" in such a way that it will serve as a school, as a social club and as a town hall all at once. He is also urging it to take a big step in advance and to make its "city manager" and school principal to be one and the same person in order to become an object lesson to towns and cities and demonstrate how it is possible to unify and simplify public affairs, to give the school the dominant place it deserves and to redeem politics from its low condition. More than 75 per cent of the money raised by this community from taxation would be used for school purposes. Its other public interests are quite subordinate. Indeed it is getting on very well now without any town government at all except the slight amount exercised by the township. In organizing its public ac- tivities this community has the rare chance of doing the obviously wise but daring thing of putting first things first and second things second.
It has already made a fair start. It has in- corporated its community association in order not only to hold property, but especially in
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order to safeguard the community's develop- ment until such time as a state law can be enacted for the incorporation of towns on lines better suited to promote economic and social welfare. It has secured an old stone mill building long unused and fitted it up to serve as an assembly room and social center. Through the use of this old building a rarely beautiful neighborhood spirit has already been created.
For several years, in this old building, com- munity drama has been developed to a high degree of perfection. Community drama has been called the "ritual of the religion of democracy." It has been so used by this suburb. Members of the Community have both written and staged plays of the highest merit. The writer here witnessed a play called "The Artsman," a local product, which would have done credit to any theater in the country. The secret of its charm, as of all good work, was its sincerity. This was re- vealed by a touching little circumstance. The author of the drama, who was to have taken the leading part, died before the play was given. He had planned to build a real fire-
PRACTICE OF CITIZENSHIP iiii,
place on the stage to add a touch of reality to the drama. In respect to his wish the young people, some of whom had parts in the play, built with their own hands out of real stone a fireplace which burned real wood. Any community where such sincere devotion is possible exhibits unusual capacity for realiz- ing community ideals. When the story of the spiritual value of community drama comes to be written, what this little suburb has done will occupy a worthy place in it.
The typical suburb is in special need of a community center, because it lacks a per- sonality, a community sense. It is neither city nor country. It is chiefly an eating and sleep- ing place. It is semi-detached from normal activities, and has a tendency to breed a semi- detached type of man. On the other hand, the suburb, just because its members have broken away from their old moorings and tra- ditions and represent previous environments so various in their nature, is a place especially fitted for a comprehensive organization like a community center. From long and intimate acquaintance with suburbs, the writer feels that the suburb is the most fruitful of all fields
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for the rapid growth of the community center ideal and can make a distinct contribution to it if it is awake to its opportunity and if money has not destroyed its capacity for public- mindedness.
The suburb here referred to is a striking ex- ample of the opportunity which suburbs in general have. Unhandicapped in the process of organizing its life, it has the chance to do pioneer work of the highest value. It can show town and city governments how they may eliminate needless waste and duplication by using the schoolhouses as convenient and effec- tive avenues through which to perform admin- istrative functions and public services, such as voting, recreation, health, fire-protection, vital statistics and many more.
If it were not so new it would seem an obviously wise thing to say that every police- man ought to be an assistant community secretary, that he ought to receive a course of instruction in social service, and that he ought to be a type of man capable of taking such a course. He ought at least to be a scoutmaster, and all the boys in his district
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should be his assistants. A school would do wisely to include in its curriculum such a field course in civics for its boys. This may of course necessitate a new type of policeman but this is the intention. If policemen became social workers it would halve their troubles and double their joys; that is, it would make them four times as efficient as at present. A beginning in this direction has already been made at Toledo, Ohio, where they have discarded their clubs and adopted the slogan that their business is to help and not hurt people. A policeman should be rewarded not for the number of arrests he succeeds in making, but for the number he succeeds in making unnecessary. His aim should be pre- vention instead of cure.
The suggestion to affiliate the town govern- ment and the school, which this suburb is con- sidering, does not mean that politics should be taken into the schools but that the schools should be taken into politics. It means that it is the effective method, if there is any, by which to redeem the term politics, and make it synonymous, not with partisan and personal
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profit, but with social service, as it once was and as it will be again when the community center movement becomes dominant.
A SMALL CITY The small city, whose community center is selected for illustration, is one of the most beautiful cities in America. Its community center referred to is characteristic of the city. The building is the best equipped building for community center work which the writer has as yet anywhere seen. This community is also in the forefront of community development in that it has a secretary, publicly elected by the people of the neighborhood and supported out of public funds. This fact needs to be care- fully noted because it is certain to become more and more apparent that complex work of this sort cannot be carried on with success unless trained workers are employed. In- deed the need of leadership has already be- come urgent. It is already clear that the field for community work will be ready much sooner than workers can be prepared to man it. Even this community with its fine equipment is typical of this condition. It has the most
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complete and business-like organization that the writer has seen. Its machinery is first class. It only needs to be operated. But there is a call for more work to be done than any one person can do.
In these circumstances it has centered its effort along one or two lines of activity chiefly. Its main work at present is to equip its mem- bers with useful occupations. It conducts evening classes in sewing, millinery, civil serv- ice preparation, public speaking, parliamen- tary law, and other subjects. It pays special attention to health and recreation. It con- ducts classes in gymnasium work for girls and women, social and rhythmic dancing, am- ateur theatricals, junior and senior orches- tra, grade violin classes. The number at- tending these classes is about 800 per week. During special weeks there have been as many as 2,000 in attendance, but the average is about 800 in the winter season. The amount re- ceived to defray operating expenses last year was over $2,000. This year it will be more.
In addition to these there are many other activities like war kitchen work, lectures on food conservation and special entertainments.
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A start has been made in community buying, and plans are all made to operate a community bank. But the fact of importance about this community is the marked success it has made in its work of vocational training. It does not neglect cultural activities, because it believes that men and women are something more than working machines. But it believes that the first essential equipment for a citizen in a democracy is the capacity for self-support. It is not the only equipment but it is the first. It was the law and custom of the Hebrew Republic that every man and woman should have a trade. It is a good rule for every Republic, for no citizen of a democracy ought to be a beggar. Moreover, those, who do not need to earn a living, most of all need the edu- cation which manual training gives. This is a cardinal doctrine of the community center movement. Every community center ought to have a workshop open in the evenings, where mechanics may go to school to each other and where they may get expert help and advice that they may secure greater pro- ficiency. That is the message of this particu- lar center to other communities.
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AN AVERAGE CITY
The type of work in an average city, here given for illustration, is selected because it embodies a distinctive idea of great value. It is a poor, populous typical manufacturing cen- ter. The school is over-crowded with chil- dren and the district is over-crowded with saloons. The school has an especially poor equipment, but it has a principal, equipped with genius and a social vision.
She devised a system by which she knows each day why absent students are absent. A common cause for absence was discovered to be the lack of shoes suitable to wear on stormy days. She removed this cause by having the shoes mended by boys in the manual training department and lending the children shoes while their own were being mended. The boys did this work so well that they were asked to mend shoes for people outside the school. For this they received pay, which they needed in order to be able to remain in school, instead of leaving school in order to help support the family by outside work. Thus was born a cobbling shop. Then the
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principal realized that it would be unwise for some of the boys to take home the money they earned, because it would be spent by unworthy parents in the saloon. She therefore started a savings bank to safeguard these earnings. Thus there originated two economic enter- prises— a bank and a cobbling shop.
On one of my visits I bought a pair of these little dilapidated shoes, for the sake of the parable they embodied. Their owner was a little girl. The health of this potential mother of future American citizens was in danger. Her education was interrupted ; she was debarred from the school equipment, the expense of which went on whether she was present or absent. The principal attempted to meet these obvious human needs, and yet she was called before the school board and re- quired to explain and defend her unusual audacity. The interesting fact to note is that it is the principal who took the initiative in this community work. She is the type de- scribed in Herbert Quick's "The Brown Mouse." She is a woman of tact and force, and was able to continue her work in spite of opposition.
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The situation in this district bristles with interesting problems. Close to the school there is a social settlement with four resident workers and a large yearly budget. It has not been a great success. The school is doing the same work better and at less expense. The school and settlement needed each other. How to coordinate them is the question which the writer was asked to assist in solving. It is a question which everywhere will demand in- creasing attention. The wise step taken by this school in arranging that clinics, conducted by city and private agencies for mothers and babies, use the schoolhouse instead of pri- vately rented quarters is a similar question of great social interest. Interesting as these questions are they are here passed over in order to center attention on the shoe-shop. The issue raised by it is the extent to which a school ought to be used to meet economic needs which involve the moral and spiritual welfare of the community, the extent to which articles made in the schools can be sold to the com- munity, the extent to which school activities can be related to life processes. It is an issue of immediate and growing importance.
I20 A COMMUNITY CENTER
A picture of the shoes referred to is repro- duced at the head of this chapter, because they suggest a complete social program. This fact is here emphasized because so many com- munities are at a loss to know what activities to undertake and are constantly asking some one to furnish them a program. The truth is that the home-soil of any community will probably furnish all the program it needs to ask, just as in the district under discussion. Take so simple and obvious a starting point as this little pair of shoes. If the adults of a community center, who are organized on the basis of their responsibility for children, were to follow the lead presented by these shoes and inquired into the causes which compel the owners of such shoes to drop out of school, it would lead them into the home and its con- ditions; it would lead them into the factory to discover the amount of wage received; it would lead them into the saloon to discover what proportion of the wage was wasted there ; it would lead them into the school to discover whether the studies were such as to hold the interest of children and to equip them for their work in life. Here's a program ready-made
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and amply sufficient to enlist the best thought of any community for an unlimited period.
In this neighborhood over 91 per cent of the girls and boys are eliminated from school before they finish the grammar grades. This percentage is abnormally high, but the average is over 50 per cent for the entire country. The fact that the majority of our children do not receive as much as a grammar school education is an un-American and a suicidal national policy and forebodes serious evil to the Re- public's future. If any community believed that the child is the nation's biggest asset and should set itself the task of providing such ways and means or removing such obstacles as may be necessary to enable all children to remain in school until they have finished the grammar grades; if it adopted the slogan — at least a grammar school education the mini- mum for every American girl and boy; if it courageously attempted to remove the causes which now rob the children of this minimum, whether these causes be the kind of studies now pursued in school, the home conditions of the children, or the economic conditions of the community, it would render a national ser-
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vice second to none in permanent value. It is a project big enough and vital enough to enlist the loyal support of every lover of American ideals.
A BIG CITY
When we come to a big city our real trouble begins. It is so vast, so complex, that one is at a loss to know where to begin or end. A big city is a whole nation in itself, and it is essen- tial that we think of it in these terms. It is because of this complexity that the writer has selected for illustration a phase of community activity which is essential to effective work in a big city.
The district of the city here referred to con- tains a population of 40,000. In it there are more hospitals and more sickness; more charity organizations and more poverty than exists, perhaps, in any other community of like size in the world. It seems incredible but it is true that there are as many as 147 agencies and organizations, municipal, private and char- itable, all operating on the defenseless private citizen. Talk of the "simple life"! Where can such a thing be found in such a com- munity? One mother in this district, whose
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sense of humor gave her some relief, told a friend of the writer that she felt she would be driven to the expediency of keeping office hours in her home in order to receive all the organizations desiring to operate on her.
The immense amount of needless waste in overhead charges through duplication and conflict of activities, which must necessarily re- sult, from such conditions, is too obvious to need explanation. It is a condition of things in which the law of diminishing returns is operating at full speed. Is it any wonder that James Bryce said the government of our cities is America's most conspicuous failure? With a view of eliminating some of the causes of this failure a group of pioneer social workers have put into operation in this neighborhood an in- strument which the writer believes will be widely adopted in other districts of the city. It is "a community clearing house." It is as yet a laboratory experiment in community work, but it has already demonstrated its obvious usefulness.
This particular community clearing house is an intelligence office for information. It is a point of contact between the people and the
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municipal government. It bridges the gulf between them. It furnishes information to municipal departments concerning the needs of the people. It furnishes information to the people concerning the services w^hich their government is prepared to render. It also ren- ders the same sort of service to the numer- ous social service agencies and institutions, both public and private, operating in this dis- trict. They call it "a neighborhood gateway to all the city's resources of helpfulness."
What this service means to the lonely, needy, bewildered citizens of a big city can only be appreciated by one familiar with its life. To bring together human needs and the municipal agencies designed to meet them, this is a task, the importance of which can be learned only by experience. To one ignorant of them, helpful institutions might as well be non-ex- istent unless the knowledge of them is made available for use. The clearing house not only makes such knowledge available, but one of its chief merits is that it does it speedily. The common cause of an incalculable burden on the city is the fact that moral and physical ills arc neglected so long that the remedy,
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when it is applied, is of little avail. Most of the social energy of a large city is consumed in attempting to undo what might have been prevented.
The clearing house has a large significance for a city community. There should be a central clearing house in every large city dis- trict and a sub-station of it in each one of its local community centers. The general data gathered by the central clearing house can be made available for each local schoolhouse, but only through the local center can the human needs be made adequately known. The influ- ence of the clearing house upon the average citizen's attitude to his city government and also upon the character of the government itself will undoubtedly produce a marked and helpful change. One of the pioneers of the project wisely says : "It is important that the people have an intelligent sympathy toward their own government. . . . Ignorance, re- sistance, and hostility must be transformed into sympathy and understanding. The indi- vidual and his immediate group must be led to initiate their own improvement." Does not this state a basic need of the big city? And
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is not this the need which the community cen- ter is designed and equipped to meet?
A STATE
The state selected for illustration has in suc- cessful operation an overhead organization, which in an expanded form the writer believes every other state should duplicate. It is a state Bureau of Community Service. It is a central bureau composed of a representative of the state department of education, agriculture, health, the college of agriculture, and me- chanical arts, the normal and industrial col- lege and the farmer's union. It is designed to coordinate state agencies so that they will be real allies, and not rivals in the public service. Its chairman is the state commissioner of edu- cation. It employs an executive secretary. The state appropriates $25,000 annually for its use.
It seems desirable, in order to secure the best results, that the plan on which this state has organized its bureau should be enlarged. Its membership ought to include representatives not only of state departments, but also of vol- unteer agencies, and individuals who have
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rendered conspicuous service to community de- velopment or who have special equipment for it. The application of the term "State" needs also to be expanded to include cities of the first class. They ought to organize their own ser- vice bureaus. They ought to be regarded as city-states and treated as separate units. They are more populous than some states, indeed one borough of New York City is several times more populous than some states. Moreover, a big city's problems are peculiar to itself. In the work of the Council of National Defense it was found necessary to deal with New York City as a separate entity. With the consent of the State Council, it was so arranged. For several years in educational matters the same plan has been in practical operation, though never definitely agreed upon.
The need for such a bureau in states and cities at once becomes obvious the moment one attempts to do any constructive work. The same old needless waste through duplication and conflicts everywhere clutters up the high- way and obstructs progress. It is one of the ugliest of our social diseases. But our present public need calls for concerted action and to
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this call there is a most encouraging response. Recently one of our large cities invited the writer to assist in coordinating its organ- izations with the mayor's committee of defense for the sake of their common purpose. There were found to be seven large city-wide ac- tivities, as well as many smaller ones, all aim- ing at the same thing, but each going its own way. The facts themselves demand a central bureau as the only instrument to secure effec- tive action and to prevent enormous waste. As soon as representatives of these organ- izations assembled in the same room and faced the facts, they were public-minded enough to pronounce a unanimous verdict in favor of a service bureau through which they could do team work. What they will do when they are out of each other's presence cannot be pre- dicted. But there seems to be good ground for hope that the city will establish a bureau of community service.
Such a bureau would enable councils of defense to do their work more effectively by utilizing those agencies having large expe- rience in community work. It would also be
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prepared to conserve and carry on any good work done by the councils of defense, when they go out of business at the close of the war. The virile and concerted moral forces evoked by the struggle against the enemies of democ- racy outside the nation ought not to be de- mobilized at the close of the war, but ought to be retained as a permanent civilian army to do battle against the foes of democracy within the Nation.
To be most effective such a service bureau ought to be given a public status. This can be done if it is created either by the Council of Defense or by the Board of Education. But since the Council of Defense is a temporary and the Board of Education a permanent body, it seems obviously wiser to relate it to the Board of Education. Such a Bureau ought to be organized with care. How to make it a responsible body, and at the same time grant it a large measure of freedom, requires careful thought. These two elements can doubtless be adjusted by including in the act, which creates the bureau, a clear, definite statement as to its aims and purposes, and an equally
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clear statement granting freedom as to means and methods to be used in securing the results expected of it.
As a suggested basis of discussion the writer would propose that a bureau of community service be composed of an indefinite number of members, both men and women, who have spe- cial equipment for community work; that among its members there shall be at least one representative of those organizations, both governmental and voluntary, which are non- partisan, nonsectarian and whose aim is the public welfare; that its members be appointed either by the Superintendent of Public In- struction or the Board of Education, until three have been appointed, after which they shall be elected by the Bureau itself; that the Bureau organize itself, electing its own offi- cers and making its own rules of procedure; and that the chairman of the Bureau be ap- pointed a collaborator of the United States Bureau of Education in its work of com- munity organization.
Whatever form of organization may be deemed best, the need for such a Bureau seems
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obvious. It would prevent the serious dam- age resulting from the needless waste through the duplication of public social agencies already formed, and prevent new needless ones from forming. It would furnish a point of contact between complementary agencies within the state itself, and enable them to pool their experience, and it would furnish a point of contact between the State and Federal Gov- ernments, thus providing in each state a group of men and women, to whom the United States Bureau of Education could send information and from whom it could receive information to be used for the common advantage of all. The country is so big, that it is physically impossible for the Federal Government to act through individuals. It must act through representative men and women. The writer expresses the earnest hope that each state and city-state will, in the near future, seriously consider the question of creating such a bureau of representatives for organized community service, the value of which one state has al- ready demonstrated.
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A HALF-FINISHED PRODUCT
There are two additional community ac- tivities, of immediate and permanent im- portance, in which the writer is engaged. They are community buying and banking and the incorporation of communities, so that com- munity buildings, erected to supplement the facilities of the schoolhouse, may be owned and operated by the community itself. But these subjects require special and extended treat- ment and are therefore omitted from this sketch.
The seven types of communities, here briefly described, have been selected not only because the writer has first-hand knowledge of them, but also because they are typical of distinct and helpful phases of community work. Each one has achieved a marked suc- cess in one or more activities, which are both significant and suggestive to other communi- ties. While it is thus seen that the community center movement has developed far enough to permit us to say that it is in part an accom- plished fact, and that hundreds of com- munities have made a fair start, yet it needs
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to be clearly understood and frankly acknowl- edged that it is still in its pioneer period. It is in the making. It is a half-finished prod- uct. The work is complex and diflScult. It would be quite easy if it were not for human nature. The problem is difficult because it is a human problem. But the rectification of human nature is the task which the community center movement has deliberately chosen in spite of its known difficulties. It is a pioneer in the new science of human economy.
It is not only the complexity of human nature, which makes its task difficult, but the bigness of its aim. Its aim is nothing less than that suggested by the motto of the French Republic: ^^Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Its aim is not only high but broad, for it real- izes the frequently forgotten truth that a citi- zen's aspirations can never go any higher on the perpendicular than they go out on the horizontal; that sympathy determines the worth of aspiration ; that if he cannot love his fellow-men whom he can see, he cannot love God, whom he cannot see. A good symbol for a community center would be a circle, be- cause it is not a membership organization, but
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a comprehensive one; it is an all-inclusive circle, vv^hich embraces the w^hole community. Is it not obvious why community center work is difficult? Its glory consists in the fact that its reach exceeds its grasp, as it ought to.
In view of the bigness of the task, and its natural difficulty in ordinary times, it is a source of satisfaction to note the pronounced impetus at present given to the movement by the country's awakened sense of its need, and by the joint effort of the Council of National Defense and the United States Bureau of Edu- cation to meet it. The Nation's biggest need is to mobilize its citizens in local communities for national service. This is a necessity at all times, but an urgent necessity in times of national danger. The first task of the local community is to register all its youths and adults, to ascertain its human resources, to en- list them in community companies for public service and especially to create and maintain a wholesome morale, for the nation's safety, either in war or peace, depends on the morale of its civilian population more than on any other single factor. "Morale," said Napo- leon, "is to force as three is to one."
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If, while local communities are organizing themselves for immediate war work they will so far as possible organize themselves along permanent lines for constructive purposes as well, they will not only do the immediate task better, but it will save them the labor of doing the same work twice. Moreover, by such a wise policy they will be prepared to meet the after-war problems immediately ahead, which in many respects will be far more difficult to handle than are the present problems of the war period. The question is not whether it is easy or difficult, but is it a citizen's duty. It is indeed a difficult and inspiring task at any time. But the Nation's present and per- manent need alike demand that it shall be done, if our experiment in democracy is not to suffer shipwreck; if America is not to become "a land of broken promise." Therefore, what? Therefore, it shall be done.
"never so baffled, but — " The man who understands the meaning of community organization for the Nation's fu- ture welfare; who takes his stand not on his rights, but his duties; who appreciates the
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beauty of the American ideal, will not be baf- fled but inspired by the task. It is useless, and may be worse, for any man to undertake community work unless he is equipped with this point of view. He must take the victory with him before the battle begins. This is not poetry, it is the plainest of common facts. It is the first essential qualification for a man who enlists in the cause of democracy. He does not think failure, he thinks success. He is an optimist by conviction, not because he refuses to face ugly facts, but because he refuses to be defeated by them. His motto is ''Don't count the enemy, beat him."
The real democrat does not need success ; he only needs a cause. That is, he is a man of courage. He has the courage to go on with- out guarantees of any kind. The American ideal has frequently broken down and in a number of respects? Very well. Granted. The real democrat does not permit what America has not yet achieved to blind him to the beauty of what she has already achieved. He knows that the American ideal is the hope of the world. The call to help that ideal progressively to realize itself, he regards as a
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challenge to his heroism. He accepts it. He has the courage to **carry on."
In Browning's poem, "Ixion," occurs a phrase repeated three times, which aptly de- scribes the true American spirit. It is: "Never so baffled, but — " This is character- istic of Browning. He always ends in the crescendo, the rising scale, the optimistic note. He never ends in the dumps. If he had writ- ten the story of a certain Syrian nobleman, he would not have said, as his ancient biographer did, "Naaman was a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper." He would have reversed the sentence: "Naaman was a leper, but he was a mighty man of valor." Stevenson was an invalid, but he was a courageously happy man. Helen Keller is a deaf mute, but she is a bril- liant and beautiful spirit. There exist social and economic conditions in America, which contradict her democratic ideals, but she has done more towards the enfranchisement of the individual than has ever been done by any Nation in any previous period of history. She is still a young nation, but she is the oldest Republic of the World. ''Never so baffled, but — " aptly expresses the kind of morale
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which, above everything else , needs to be created in her civilian Army, and which the community center movement aims to create by mobilizing her citizens in every city and vil- lage and countryside community. If the American democracy is not as democratic as it ought to be, arise, let us do what we can to make it so.
LINCOLN'S MISTAKE
The most effective instrument through which to stimulate the practice of citizenship, to mobilize the intelligence, sympathy and material resources of the people in behalf of the cause of democracy, now threatened with defeat, is the organization of small com- munities into little democracies with school- houses for their capitols. But this is a big program. What can an individual do to con- tribute to its success? The first and most needful thing for him to do is to talk about it. All great movements began in talk. The be- ginning of a deed is an idea. The best con- ductor of an idea is a living word.
It is a common and careless habit to em- phasize the importance of a deed by dispar-
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aging the importance of talk, forgetting that deeds and words constitute one piece of goods, like the two sides of a shield, only their rela- tion is not mechanical as in a shield, but vital. The men, who have most profoundly affected the course of history, men like Confucius, Jesus and Lincoln, were all teachers, were great talkers. Their weapon was an idea. The instrument they used to convey it was a living and dynamic word. There is now in the White House a teacher of democracy, whose great speeches are more effective than many battles.
In Lincoln's memorable speech at Gettys- burg, he made one profound mistake. He said that no words he uttered there would long be remembered, whereas the fact is that the words he uttered there seem destined to out- live the memory of the battle. His great words are being cast in bronze and hung in innumerable schools throughout the country. Indeed it is not improbable that the time may come, when it will be necessary to subjoin a footnote to his speech in order to inform the people concerning the name of the battlefield, on which it was uttered. The movement to
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organize local communities aims to realize the ideal, which formed the subject of Lincoln's speech, and the present great need of the movement is for men and women, who under- stand what it means and who can express its meaning in living words, not only to public assemblies, but also in private to their neigh- bors. The subject of the kind of talk neces- sary to create public opinion effective enough to organize local communities into little democracies, is none other than the ideal for which our flag stands. When that ideal is once understood, and when it is exhibited by a community center in operation, the average man, both native and foreign born, will gladly accept it, because it is that for which he has been searching.
THE MEANING OF THE FLAG Over no institution does the American flag more appropriately float than over the free public schoolhouse. It is not put there for decorative purposes. The inner meaning of its presence on the schoolhouse begins to ap- pear when we remember that in every city and village and countryside girls and boys, —
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twenty-two millions of them, — every morning stretch forth their hands towards the flag and salute it with the significant words, — "I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the country for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
With the opening of the schools in New England, the salutation to the flag is caught up, hour after hour, with the course of the sun across the continent. It is noon in Boston before the children in San Francisco pledge allegiance in their morning devotions. By the time the morning salutation is given in the school outposts of Alaska, the school flag on the Atlantic has been furled! Every moment during the entire school day, somewhere in the Republic, American girls and boys are stretch- ing forth their hands to express their sincere devotion to the nation's emblem, and pledge their allegiance to the liberty and justice for which it stands.
It is a scene which grips the heart with hope, when once it is pictured by the imag-^ ination. "Old Glory," says Eugene Wood, "has floated victoriously on many a gallant fight by sea and land, but never do its silver
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stars glitter more bravely or its blood-red stripes curve more proudly on the fawning breeze than when it floats above the school- house, over the daily battle against ignorance and prejudice, for freedom and for equal rights. . . ."
"The flag of our union forever," is our prayer, our heart's desire for us and for our children after us. Heroes have died to give us that, heroes with glazing eyes beheld the tattered ensign and spent their last breath to cheer it as it passed on in triumph. "We who are about to die, salute thee." The heart swells to think of it. But it swells to think that day by day thousands upon thousands of little children stretch out their hands towards that flag and pledge allegiance to it. "We who are about to live, salute thee !"
What is it that these millions, who are about to live for their country, are saluting? Their flag? Yes. But their flag only as an emblem. An emblem of what? Their country? Yes. But what is their country? No one has ever seen his country. It is not the soil, or the buildings or the public oflScials or the people. It is an unseen spiritual idea ; it is the will to be
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one nation ; it exists only in the hearts of the people. What is this unseen and imperish- able idea, which constitutes the country, and of which the flag is the symbol?
It has never been better described than in the brief dynamic words, uttered by President Lincoln, in our most sacred building, the plain brick building in Philadelphia, in which the Republic was born. "I have often pondered," said our typical American, "over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assem- bled here, and who formed and adopted the Declaration of Independence. I have pon- dered over the toils of the officers and soldiers who achieved that independence. I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the motherland, but that sentiment in the Declar- ation, which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men," The same sentiment which six months later he thus expressed: "This is es- sentially a people's contest . . . for maintain- ing in the world that form and substance of
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government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laud- able pursuits for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life."
This is the ideal which makes America to be what she is; it is the ideal to which she was dedicated at her birth; it is the religion of democracy, of which the flag is the emblem, and on account of which it is justified in claim- ing the major loyalty of all friends of free- dom. The national movement to organize local communities into little democracies aims to preserve this ideal for the flag. It not only seeks to inspire all youths and adults to pledge allegiance to the flag with the same sincere and understanding devotion, with which school girls and boys pledge theirs. It seeks to do more. It seeks to inspire the practice of citi- zenship. If in any section of the country or in any phase of its social, political, or indus- trial life the flag's ideal of liberty and justice exists in theory only and not in fact, it chal- lenges citizens to do their utmost, just as Lin- coln did, to make its ideal a reality and to exhibit its meaning in practice.
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To secure liberty and justice for all; to lift artificial burdens from all shoulders; to achieve "freemen's citizenship"; to preserve government "of the people, by the people and for the people"; to develop small communities into little democracies with schoolhouses for their capitols; to put human rights above property rights, as our boys in the trenches of France are now doing; to apply ethical standards to politics and economics; to make social, political, and economic conditions such that all citizens, both native and foreign born, when speaking of America, may say, "My Country" and mean what they say; that they may say it not only with honesty but with such a degree of enthusiasm as to be willing to put the interests of "My Country" above the in- terests of "My Self," — nothing less than this, as I understand it, is the meaning of the flag. To make its meaning clear through the prac- tice of citizenship is the aim of the community center movement. It is a permanent and dominant challenge to all loyal citizens, if America is not to become "a land of broken promise."
PART IV
A SUGGESTED CONSTITUTION
A SUGGESTED CONSTITUTION
The following is the constitution prepared by the writer for a community center in Wash- ington, D. C, and is reproduced here as a sug- gestion to other communities :
PREAMBLE
We, the people of the Wilson Normal Community of the City of Washington, D. C, in order to secure the advantages of organized self-help, to make public opinion more enlightened and effective, to promote the education of adults and youths for citizenship in a democracy, to organize the use of the public school as the community capitol, to foster a neighborhood spirit through which the community may become a more efficient social unit, to prevent needless waste through the duplication of social activities, to engage in cooperative enterprises for our moral and material welfare, and to create a social order more in harmony with the conscience and intelligence of the Nation, do ordain and establish this constitution.
Article I. — Name The name of this organization shall be the Wilson Normal Community Association, and its headquarters the Wilson Normal School Building.
Article II. — Location
The community shall be defined as follows: Beginning 149
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at Fourteenth and W Streets, thence north on the east side of Fourteenth Street to Monroe Street, thence east on the cast side of Monroe Street and Park Road to Georgia Avenue, thence south on the west side of Georgia Avenue to Irving Street, thence east on the south side of Irving Street to Soldiers* Home, thence south on west side of Soldiers* Home, McMillan Park, and Reser- voir to College Street, thence west on north side of Col- lege Street and Barry Place to Tenth Street, thence south on the west side of Tenth Street to W Street, thence west on the north side of W Street to Fourteenth Street, the place of beginning.
Article III. — Members
The members of the association shall be all white adult citizens of this community, both men and women. A limited number of nonresident members may be received into membership, provided they are not registered members of any other organized community. Organizations now in operation which are nonpartisan, nonsectarian, and whose aim is the public welfare, such as "Citizens associa- tions," "Home and school leagues,*' "Red Cross chap- ters,** "Women*s clubs,'* "College settlements,** "House- keepers* alliances," desiring to retain their name and identity for the sake of cooperation with other branches of similar organizations, may become departments of this association. There shall be no suggestion of superiority or inferiority among the departments. The members of each department shall have the same standing as all other members.
Article IV. — Officers
The association shall elect by ballot from its own
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members a board of directors, or community council, which shall be both a legislative and an executive body. It shall consist of not less than 6 nor more than 1 5 members. They shall be elected for a period of three years, except- ing for the first year, when one-third of the number shall be elected for one year, one-third for two years, and one- third for three years.
The chairman of the committee in charge of each de- partment of the association shall be a member of the board of directors. A chairman may be appointed by the board or selected by the department itself and confirmed by the board. Chairmen shall have the right to select the members of their own committees.
The community secretary, whose public election is pro- vided for by the board of education, shall be a member of the board of directors and a member ex officio of all committees. It shall be his duty to exercise general super- vision over all the activities of the association, and to nominate, by and with the consent of the directors, all assistant secretaries. They shall have the right to at- tend all meetings of the board and take part in the discus- sions, but shall have no vote.
As soon after the annual election as convenient the directors shall meet to organize, and shall elect from their own number a president, vice president, and a secretary- treasurer, who shall perform the duties usually performed by such officers, and who shall also be the officers of the association.
Article V. — Departments The board of directors is authorized to organize and operate departments of activity, such as forum, civics, recreation, home and school, buying club, and community
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bank, whose activities shall be supervised and whose ac- counts shall be audited by the board of directors.
1. Forum Department: The committee in charge of this department shall arrange for public meetings, at such time as the association may decide, for the free and orderly discussion of all questions which concern the social, moral, political, and economic welfare of the community. It shall select a presiding officer for such meetings, secure speakers, suggest subjects, and formulate the method of conducting discussions.
2. Recreation Department: The committee in charge of this department shall provide and conduct games, dances, community dramas, musicals, motion pictures, and shall promote all similar play activities, with a view to increasing the joy, health, and good fellowship among both adults and youths.
3. Civics Department: The committee in charge of this department shall provide the members with the means of securing information concerning politics, local, national, and international; it shall stimulate a more intelligent interest in government by the use of publicity pamphlets ; it shall suggest ways in which the members may con- tribute to the economic and efficient administration of the city's affairs ; it shall provide courses of studies for young men and women as a preparation for citizenship, and de- vise methods of organizing the youth into voluntary, co- operative, and constructive forms of patriotic service.
4. The Home and School Department: The committee in charge of this department shall seek to promote closer cooperation between the school and home, the teachers and parents ; it shall aim to improve the school equipment, to secure more adequate support and better housing con- ditions for teachers; it shall organize and conduct study
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classes for youths and adults; it shall provide such ways and means or remove such obstacles as may be necessary to enable all children to remain in school until they have finished the grammar grades, whether these obstacles be the kind of studies now pursued in school, the home con- ditions of the children, or the economic conditions of the community.
5. Buying Club Department: The committee in charge of this department shall organize and operate in the school a delivery station for food products with a view of de- creasing the cost of living; it shall establish a direct re- lation between the producer and consumer in order to eliminate wastes; it shall seek to safeguard the people's health by furnishing the purest food obtainable; it shall aim to moralize trade by giving full weight and measure and substituting public service for private exploitation; it shall eliminate debt by asking no credit and giving none ; it shall practice economy and equity in order to secure a larger return to the producer and decrease the cost to the consumer.
An annual fee shall be required of all members of the buying club, payable quarterly in advance, to defray operating expenses, the amount of the fee to be determined by the committee, and it shall be decreased or increased as the number of members and volume of business war- rant. All members shall secure their goods at the net wholesale cost price.
Goods shall be sold only to members of the buying club. Membership in the buying club is open only to members of the association and only to those members who are depositors in the community bank.
The buying club shall set aside annually a sum equal to 2 per cent of the amount of its sales, to be used by the
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association for the purpose of educating its members in the principle and practice of cooperation, until public appropri- ations are sufficient to provide the means for such educa- tion.
The club shall set aside annually a sum equal to I per cent of the amount of its sales as a reserve fund to cover unexpected losses.
The committee in charge of the buying club shall serve without compensation but may employ one or more execu- tives to conduct the business of the club, who shall receive compensation for their services, the amount of which shall be fixed by the committee, but the amount shall be deter- mined, as far as possible, on a percentage basis according to service rendered.
All checks, drafts, or notes made in the name of the club shall be countersigned by the chairman of the direct- ing committee. The executive in charge of the buying club shall be required to give a surety bond.
6. Community Bank Department: The committee in charge of this department shall organize and conduct a credit union bank for members of the association in order to capitalize honestly and to democratize credit, and to multiply the efficiency of their savings by pooling them for cooperative use. It shall be known as the "Com- munity Bank." It shall receive savings deposits both from children and adults and shall make loans. It shall, if possible, be a part of the curriculum of the school, at least as regards deposits of children. The committee in charge shall serve without compensation, but may employ one executive to conduct its business who shall be required to furnish a surety bond.
The bank shall make loans only to individual members of the association and to the buying club for productive
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purposes, but no loan shall be made to any member of the committee in charge of the bank. Deposits may be re- ceived from those other than members.
The bank shall issue no capital stock, but shall charge entrance fees, which shall be used as a reserve fund and returned to depositors when they withdraw from member- ship.
The bank may make small short-time loans secured only by the character and industry of the borrower. It may make long-time loans, secured by mortgage, character, and industry, to young men and women for the purpose of helping them to secure houses in which to start homes, and the payment of such loans may be made on the amortization plan.
The rate of interest charged for all loans shall be 5 per cent. The amount of interest allowed on deposits shall be the net profit after operating expenses are paid. The bank shall use no other bank as a clearing house which is not under the supervision of the United States Government. All loans shall be made by check and all such checks shall be countersigned by the chairman of the directing committee.
An amount equal to one-half of i per cent of its deposits shall be set aside as a reserve fund. An amount equal to 10 per cent of its deposits shall be invested in Federal Farm Loan Bonds, Liberty Bonds, or in other Federal, State, or municipal bonds.
The community bank shall be operated not on the principle of unlimited, joint, and several liability of its members, but it shall have the right to demand pro rata payments from them to meet any loss through unpaid loans, provided the reserve fund is not sufficient to cover such losses.
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Article VI. — Cooperation
There shall be no dues for membership in the com- munity association, the dues having already been paid through public taxation; but the association, by voluntary subscription and in other ways, may raise funds to inaugurate or support its work if the amount received from public appropriation is insufficient to meet its needs.
The association may unite with other similar associa- tions in the District of Columbia to form a community league, in order to conduct a central forum or cooperate with each other for any other purpose which may serve their common welfare.
The association adopts the policy of cordial cooperation with the board of education and provides that a designated member of the school board may be a member ex officio of its board of directors. He may attend any of its meetings, take part in the discussions, and vote on all questions.
Article VII. — Meetings
The board of directors shall hold monthly meetings at such times as they may determine. All regular monthly meetings of the board shall be open meetings. When a vacancy occurs, through death or otherwise, the board may fill the vacancy until the next annual meeting. If any director shall be absent from three successive stated meet- ings without excuse, such absence shall be deemed a resig- nation.
Quarterly meetings of the association shall be held on the second Tuesday of January, April, July, and October. The April quarterly meeting shall be the annual meeting
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to elect officers, hear reports from all departments, and to transact such other business as may be necessary.
This constitution may be amended at any annual meet- ing or at any quarterly meeting if previous notice of the proposed amendment is given. In all elections the pref- erential ballot may be used with reference both to officers and measures; the initiative, referendum, and recall may be employed in such manner as the association itself may determine.
AN OUTLINE FOR A CONSTITUTION
The following is a digest of the preceding constitution for those communities which may prefer a briefer form:
Article I. — Name This association shall be known as The Community
Center Association of School District No. ,
County of , State of , and its headquarters
the — • schoolhouse.
Article II. — Object Its object shall be to mobilize the people of this com- munity for national service and organized self-help, to equip its members for citizenship in a democracy, to pre- vent needless waste through the duplication of activities, and to create a social order in harmony with the conscience and intelligence of the Nation.
Article III. — Members Its members shall be all adult citizens of the district. Any organization which is nonpartisan and nonsectarian
158 A COMMUNITY CENTER
and whose aim is the public welfare may become at depart- ment of the association.
Article IV. — Officers The association shall elect not less than 9 and not more than 15 directors, who shall constitute the community council. The council shall elect from its own members a president, vice president, and secretary-treasurer, who shall also be the officers of the association. The chair- man in charge of any department of work shall be a member of the community council.
Article V. — Community Secretary The community council may employ an executive or business manager to carry on its work, who shall be paid either from public appropriations or by volunteer contri- butions.
Article VI. — Departments The association shall organize and conduct whatever departments of activity it deems necessary to meet present and permanent needs, both local and national, such as forum, civics, recreation, home and school, buying club, and community bank.
Article VII. — Finances There shall be no dues for membership in the associa- tion, the dues having already been paid through public taxation. But when necessary it may raise, through voluntary subscriptions and in other ways, the funds re- quired to conduct its activities.
A SUGGESTED CONSTITUTION 159
Article VIII. — Meetings The association shall hold quarterly meetings, one of which shall be the annual meeting to hear reports and elect officers. The community council shall hold regular monthly meetings which shall be open to the public. The departments shall be free to hold as many meetings as may be necessary.
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AMERICAN SOCIAL PROGRESS SERIES
Edited by Professor SAMUEL McCUNE LINDSAY
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AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS W.UU B. ^-lT.Z7:rEvXrJ^-^-^^
THIS BOOK °NT."f° CENTS ON THE FOURTH
^jl^^^rNO^TO ,™l on"- — - °"" OVERDUE.
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