I + 

The Neighborhood Group + 

XXII + 

Neighborhood Needs the Basis of Politics + 

Politics are changing in character: shall the change be without plan or method, or is this the guiding moment? + 

We are at a critical hour in our history. We have long thought of politics as entirely outside our daily life manipulated by those set apart for the purpose. The methods by which the party platform is constructed are not those which put into it the real issues before the public; the tendency is to put in what will elect candidates or to cover up the real issues by generalities. But just so long as we separate politics and our daily life, just so long shall we have all our present evils. Politics can no longer be an extra-activity of the American people, they must be a means of satisfying our actual wants. + 

We are now beginning to recognize more and more clearly that the work we do, the conditions of that work, the houses in which we live, the water we drink, the food we eat, the opportunities for bringing up our children, that in fact the whole area of our daily life should constitute politics. There is no line where the life of the home ends and the life of the city begins. There is no wall between my private life and my public life. A man I know tells me that he “wouldn’t touch politics with a ten-foot pole,” but how can he help touching politics? He may not like the party game, but politics shape the life he leads from hour to hour. When this is once understood no question in history will seem more astonishing than the one so often reiterated in these days, “Should woman be given a place in politics?” Woman is in politics; no power under the sun can put her out. + 

Politics then must satisfy the needs of the people. What are the needs of the people? Nobody knows. We know the supposed needs of certain classes, of certain “interests”; these can never be woven into the needs of the people. Further back we must go, down into the actual life from which all these needs spring, down into the daily, hourly living with all its innumerable cross currents, with all its longings and heartburnings, with its envies and jealousies perhaps, with its unsatisfied desires, its embryonic aspirations, and its power, manifest or latent, for endeavor and accomplishment. The needs of the people are not now articulate: they loom out of the darkness, vague, big, portentously big, but dumb because of the separation of men. To open up this hinterland of our life the cross currents now burrowing under ground must come to the surface and be openly acknowledged. + 

We work, we spend most of our waking hours working for some one of whose life we know nothing, who knows nothing of us; we pay rent to a landlord whom we never see or see only once a month, and yet our home is our most precious possession; we have a doctor who is with us in the crucial moments of birth and death, but whom we ordinarily do not meet; we buy our food, our clothes, our fuel, of automatons for the selling of food, clothes and fuel. We know all these people in their occupational capacity, not as men like ourselves with hearts like ours, desires like ours, hopes like ours. And this isolation from those who minister to our lives, to whose lives we minister, does not bring us any nearer to our neighbors in their isolation. For every two or three of us think ourselves a little better than every other two or three, and this becomes a dead wall of separation, of misunderstanding, of antagonism. How can we do away with this artificial separation which is the dry-rot of our life? First we must realize that each has something to give. Every man comes to us with a golden gift in his heart. Do we dare, therefore, avoid any man? If I stay by myself on my little self-made pedestal, I narrow myself down to my own personal equation of error. If I go to all my neighbors, my own life increases in multiple measure. The aim of each of us should be to live in the lives of all. Those fringes which connect my life with the life of every other human being in the world are the inlets by which the central forces flow into me. I am a worse lawyer, a worse teacher, a worse doctor if I do not know these wider contacts. Let us seek then those bonds which unite us with every other life. Then do we find reality, only in union, never in isolation. + 

But it must be a significant union, never a mere coming together. How we waste immeasurable force in much of our social life in a mere tossing of the ball, on the merest externality and travesty of a common life which we do not penetrate for the secret at its heart. The quest of life and the meaning of life is reality. We may flit on the surface as gnats in the sunlight, but in each of us, however overlaid, is the hunger and thirst for realness, for substance. We must plunge down to find our treasure. The core of a worthy associated life is the call of reality to reality, the calling and answering and the bringing it forth from the depths forever more and more. To go to meet our fellows is to go out and let the winds of Heaven blow upon us⁠—we throw ourselves open to every breath and current which spring from this meeting of life’s vital forces. + 

Some of us are looking for the remedy for our fatal isolation in a worthy and purposeful neighborhood life. Our proposal is that people should organize themselves into neighborhood groups to express their daily life, to bring to the surface the needs, desires and aspirations of that life, that these needs should become the substance of politics, and that these neighborhood groups should become the recognized political unit. + 

Let us consider some of the advantages of the neighborhood group. First, it makes possible the association of neighbors, which means fuller acquaintance and a more real understanding. The task of creation from electrons up is putting self in relation. Is man the only one who refuses this task? I do not know my next-door neighbor! One of the most unfortunate circumstances of our large towns is that we expect concerted action from people who are strangers to one another. So mere acquaintance is the first essential. This will lead inevitably to friendly feeling. The story is told of some American official who begged not to be introduced to a political enemy, for he said he could not hate anyone with whom he became acquainted. We certainly do feel more kindly to the people we actually see. It is what has been called “the pungent sense of effective reality.” Neighborhood organization will substitute confidence for suspicion⁠—a great gain. + 

Moreover, neighborhood organization gives opportunity for constant and regular intercourse. We are indeed far more interested in humanity than ever before. Look at what we are studying: social psychology, social economics, social medicine and hygiene, social ethics etc. But people must socialize their lives by practice, not by study. Until we begin to acquire the habit of a social life no theory of a social life will do us any good. It is a mistake to think that such abstractions as unity, brotherhood etc. are as self-evident to our wills as to our intellect. I learn my duty to my friends not by reading essays on friendship, but by living my life with my friends and learning by experience the obligations friendship demands. Just so must I learn my relation to society by coming into contact with a wide range of experiences, of people, by cultivating and deepening my sympathy and whole understanding of life. + 

When we have come together and got acquainted with one another, then we shall have an opportunity for learning the rules of the game⁠—the game of association which is the game of life. Certain organizations have sprung up since 1914 with the avowed object of fighting war with love. If only we knew how to love! I am ready to say to you this minute, “I love my neighbors.” But all that I mean by it is that I have a vague feeling of kindliness towards them. I have no idea how to do the actual deed. I shall offend against the law of love within an hour. The love of our fellow-men to be effective must be the love evolved from some actual group relation. We talk of fellowship; we, puny separatists bristling with a thousand unharmonized traits, with our assertive particularist consciousness, think that all we have to do is to decide on fellowship as a delightful idea. But fellowship will be the slowest thing on earth to create. An eager longing for it may help, but it can come into being as a genuine part of our life only through a deep understanding of what it really means. + 

Yet association is the impulse at the core of our being. The whole social process is that of association, individual with individual, group with group. Progress from one point of view is a continuously widening of the area of association. Our modern civilization has simply overlaid and falsified this primary instinct of life. But this is rapidly changing. The most striking characteristic of the present day is that people are doing more things together: they are coming together as never before in labor organizations, in cooperative societies, in consumers’ leagues, in associations of employers and employed, in municipal movements, for national purposes, etc. etc. We have the Men’s City Club, the Women’s City Club; professional societies are multiplying over night. The explanation sometimes given for this present tendency towards union is that we are beginning to see the material advantages of cooperation, but the root of the thing is far from utilitarian advantage. Our happiness, our sense of living at all, is directly dependent on our joining with others. We are lost, exiled, imprisoned until we feel the joy of union. + 

I believe that the realization of oneness which will come to us with a fuller sense of democracy, with a deeper sense of our common life, is going to be the substitute for what men now get in war. Some psychologists tell us that fighting is one of the fundamental instincts, and that if we do not have war we shall have all the dangers of thwarted instinct. But the lure of war is neither the instinct of hate nor the love of fighting; it is the joining of one with another in a common purpose. “And the heart of a people beat with one desire.” Many men have gone joyfully to war because it gave them fellowship. I said to someone that I thought the reason war was still popular in spite of all its horrors was because of our lack of imagination, we simply could not realize war. “No,” said the man I spoke to, “I know war, I know its horrors, and the reason that in spite of it all men like war is because there we are doing something all together. That is its exhilaration and why we can’t give it up. We come home and each leads his separate life and it seems tame and uninteresting merely on that account, the deadly separateness of our ordinary life.” + 

When we want a substitute for war, therefore, we need not seek for a substitute for fighting or for hating; we must find some way of making ourselves feel at one with some portion of our fellow-creatures. If the essential characteristic of war is doing things together, let us begin to do things together in peace. Yet not an artificial doing things together, we could so easily fall into that, but an entire reorganization of life so that the doing things together shall be the natural way⁠—the way we shall all want to do things. + 

But mere association is not enough. We need more than the “collective life,” the mere “getting-together,” so much talked of in these days; our getting together must be made effective, must exercise our minds and wills as well as our emotions, must serve the great ends of a great life. Neighborhood organization gives all an opportunity to learn the technique of association. + 

A further advantage of neighborhood organization is that as a member of a neighborhood group we get a fuller and more varied life than as a member of any other kind of a group we can find, no matter how big our city or how complex or comprehensive its interests. This statement sounds paradoxical⁠—it will seem to many like saying that the smaller is greater than the larger. Let us examine this statement therefore and see if perhaps in this case the smaller is not greater than the larger. Why is the neighborhood group better for us than the selected group? Why are provincial people more interesting than cosmopolitan, that is, if provincial people have taken advantage of their opportunities? Because cosmopolitan people are all alike⁠—that has been the aim of their existence and they have accomplished it. The man who knows the “best” society of Petrograd, Paris, London and New York, and that only, is a narrow man because the ideals and standards of the “best” society of London, Paris and New York are the same. He knows life across but not down⁠—it is a horizontal civilization instead of a vertical one, with all the lack of depth and height of everything horizontal. This man has always been among the same kind of people, his life has not been enlarged and enriched by the friction of ideas and ideals which comes from the meeting of people of different opportunities and different tastes and different standards. But this is just what we may have in a neighborhood group⁠—different education, different interests, different standards. Think of the doctor, the man who runs the factory, the organist and choir leader, the grocer, the minister, the watchmaker, the schoolteacher, all living within a few blocks of one another. + 

On the other hand consider how different it is when we choose the constituents of our group⁠—then we choose those who are the same as ourselves in some particular. We have the authors’ club, the social workers’ club, the artists’ club, the actors’ society, the business men’s club, the business women’s club, the teachers’ club etc. The satisfaction and contentment that comes with sameness indicates a meagre personality. I go to the medical association to meet doctors, I go to my neighborhood club to meet men. It is just because my next door neighbor has never been to college that he is good for me. The stenographer may come to see that her life is really richer from getting the factory girl’s point of view. + 

In a neighborhood group you have the stimulus and the bracing effect of many different experiences and ideals. And in this infinite variety which touches you on every side, you have a life which enriches and enlarges and fecundates; this is the true soil of human development⁠—just because you have here a natural and not an artificial group, the members find all that is necessary in order to grow into that whole which is true community living. + 

Many young men and women think as they come to the teeming cities that there they are to find the fuller life they have longed for, but often the larger our world the narrower we become, for we cannot face the vague largeness, and so we join a clique of people as nearly like ourselves as we can find. + 

In so far, therefore, as neighborhoods are the result of some selective process, they are not so good for our purpose. The Italian colony or the Syrian colony does not give us the best material for group organization, neither does any occupational segregation like the stockyard district of Chicago. (This is an argument against the industrial colonies which are spreading.) In a more or less mixed neighborhood, people of different nationalities or different classes come together easily and naturally on the ground of many common interests: the school, recreational opportunities, the placing of their children in industry, hygiene, housing etc. Race and class prejudices are broken down by working together for intimate objects. + 

Whenever I speak of neighborhood organization to my friends, those who disagree with me at once become violent on the subject. I have never understood why it inflames them more easily than other topics. They immediately take it for granted that I am proposing to shut them up tight in their neighborhoods and seal them hermetically; they assume that I mean to substitute the neighborhood for every other contact. They tell me of the pettiness of neighborhood life, and I have to listen to stories of neighborhood iniquities ranging from small gossip to determined boycotting. Intolerance and narrowness thrive in the neighborhood group they say; in the wider group they do not. But I am not proposing to substitute the neighborhood group for others, yet even so I should like to say a word for the neighborhood. + 

We may like some selected group better than the company of our neighbors, but such a group is no “broader” necessarily, because it draws from all over the city, than a local one. You can have narrow interests as well as narrow spaces. Neighbors may, it is true, discuss the comings and goings of the family down the street, but I have heard people who are not neighbors discuss equally trivial subjects. But supposing that non-neighborhood groups are less petty in the sense of less personal in their conversation, they are often also less real, and this is an important point. If I dress in my best clothes and go to another part of the city and take all my best class of conversation with me, I don’t know that it does me any good if I am the same person who in my everyday clothes goes in next door and talks slander. What I mean is that the only place in the world where we can change ourselves is on that level where we are real. And what is forgotten by my friends who think neighborhood life trivial is that (according to their own argument) it is the same people who talk gossip in their neighborhoods who are impersonal and noble in another part of the city. + 

Moreover, if we are happier away from our neighborhood it would be well for us to analyze the cause⁠—there may be a worthy reason, there may not. Is it perhaps that one does not get as much consideration there as one thinks one’s due? Have we perhaps, led by our vanity, been drawn to those groups where we get the most consideration? My neighbors may not think much of me because I paint pictures, knowing that my back yard is dirty, but my artist friends who like my color do not know or care about my back yard. My neighbors may feel no admiring awe of my scientific researches knowing that I am not the first in the house of a neighbor in trouble. + 

You may reply, “But this is not my case. I am one of the most esteemed people in my neighborhood and one of the lowest in the City Club, but I prefer the latter just because of that: there is room for me to aspire there, but where I am leading what is there for me to grow toward, how can I expand in such an atmosphere?” But I should say that this also might be a case of vanity: possibly these people prefer the City Club because they do not like to think they have found their place in life in what they consider an inferior group; it flatters them more to think that they belong to a superior group even if they occupy the lowest place there. But the final word to be said is I think that this kind of seeking implies always the attitude of getting, almost as bad as the attitude of conferring. It is extremely salutary to take our place in a neighborhood group. + 

Then, too, that does not always do us most good which we enjoy most, as we are not always progressing most when thrills go up and down our spine. We may have a selected group feeling “good,” but that is not going to make us good. That very homogeneity which we nestle down into and in which we find all the comfort of a down pillow, does not provide the differences in which alone we can grow. We must know the finer enjoyment of recognized diversity. + 

It must be noted, however, that while it is not proposed that the neighborhood association be substituted for other forms of association⁠—trade-union, church societies, fraternal societies, local improvement leagues, cooperative societies, men’s clubs, women’s clubs etc.⁠—yet the hope is that it shall not be one more association merely, but that it shall be the means of coordinating and translating into community values other local groups. The neighborhood association might become a very mechanical affair if we were all to go there every evening and go nowhere else. It must not with its professed attempt to give a richer life cut off the variety and spontaneity we now have. + 

But the trouble now is that we have so much unrelated variety, so much unutilized spontaneity. The small merchant of a neighborhood meets with the other small dealers for business purposes, he goes to church on Sundays, he gets his social intercourse at his lodge or club, but where and when does he consider any possible integration of these into channels for community life? At his political rally, to be sure, he meets his neighbors irrespective of business or church or social lines, but there he comes under party domination. A free, full community life lived within the sustaining and nourishing power of the community bond, lived for community ends, is almost unknown now. This will not come by substituting the neighborhood group for other groups, not even by using it as a clearing-house, but by using it as a medium for interpretation and unofficial integration. + 

There should be as much spontaneous association as the vitality of the neighborhood makes possible, but other groups may perhaps find their significance and coordination through the neighborhood association. If a men’s or women’s club is of no use to the community it should not exist; if it is of use, it must find out of what use, how related to all other organizations, how through and with them related to the whole community. The lawyers’ club, the teachers’ club, the trade association or the union⁠—these can have little influence on their community until they discover their relation to the community through and in one another. I have seen many examples of this. If the neighborhood group is to be the political unit, it must learn how to gather up into significant community expression these more partial expressions of individual wants. + 

It is sometimes said that the force of the neighborhood bond is lessening nowadays with the ease of communication, but this is true only for the wealthy. The poor cannot afford constantly to be paying the ten-cent carfare necessary to leave and return to their homes, nor the more well-to-do of the suburbs the twenty or twenty-five cents it costs them to go to the city and back. The fluctuating population of neighborhoods may be an argument against getting all we should like out of the neighborhood bond, but at the same time it makes it all the more necessary that some organization should be ready at hand to assimilate the newcomers and give them an opportunity of sharing in civic life as an integral, responsible part of that life. Moreover a neighborhood has common traditions and memories which persist and influence even although the personnel changes. + 

To sum up: whether we want the exhilaration of a fuller life or whether we want to find the unities which will make for peace and order, for justice and for righteousness, it would be wise to turn back to the neighborhood group and there begin the A.B.C. of a constructive brotherhood of man. We must recognize that too much congeniality makes for narrowness, and that the harmonizing, not the ignoring, of our differences leads us to the truth. Neighborhood organization gives us the best opportunity we have yet discovered of finding the unity underneath all our differences, the real bond between them⁠—of living the consciously creative life. + 

We can never reform American politics from above, by reform associations, by charters and schemes of government. Our political forms will have no vitality unless our political life is so organized that it shall be based primarily and fundamentally on spontaneous association. “Government is a social contact,” was found in the examination papers of a student in a nearby college. He was nearer the truth than he knew. Political progress must be by local communities. Our municipal life will be just as strong as the strength of its parts. We shall never know how to be one of a nation until we are one of a neighborhood. And what better training for world organization can each man receive than for neighbors to live together not as detached individuals but as a true community, for no League of Nations will be successful which regards France and Germany, England and Russia as separatist units of a world-union. + 

Those who are working for particular reforms to be accomplished immediately will not be interested in neighborhood organization; only those will be interested who think that it is far more important for us to find the right method of attacking all our problems than to solve any one. We who believe in neighborhood organization believe that the neighborhood group is a more significant unit to identify ourselves with than any we have hitherto known in cities. People have been getting together in churches, in fraternal societies, in political parties, in industrial and commercial associations, but now in addition to these partial groups communities are to get together as communities. + 

The neighborhood organization movement is not waiting for ideal institutions, or perfect men, but is finding whatever creative forces there are within a community and taking these and building the future with them. The neighborhood organization movement is a protest against both utopias on the one hand and a mechanicalized humanity on the other. It consists of the process of building always with the best we have, and its chief problem is to discover the methods by which the best we have can be brought to the surface. Neighborhood organization gives us a method which will revolutionize politics. + 

XXIII + 

An Integrated Neighborhood + 

How can an active and fruitful neighborhood life be brought into existence and fostered and nurtured? How can we unclose the sources within our own midst from which to draw our inspiration? And then how can the vision which we learn to see together be actualized? How can neighborhoods learn to satisfy their own needs through their own initiative? In other words how can the force generated by our neighborhood life become part of our whole civic and national life? How can an integrated neighborhood responsibility become a civic and national responsibility? + 

There is no such thing as a neighborhood in its true sense, something more, that is, than the physical contiguity of people, until you have a neighborhood consciousness. Rows of houses, rows of streets, do not make a neighborhood. The place bond must give way to a consciousness of real union. This neighborhood consciousness can be evolved in five ways: + 

By regular meetings of neighbors for the consideration of neighborhood and civic problems, not merely sporadic and occasional meetings for specific objects. + 

By a genuine discussion at these regular meetings. + 

By learning together⁠—through lectures, classes, clubs; by sharing one another’s experience through social intercourse; by learning forms of community art expression; in short by leading an actual community life. + 

By taking more and more responsibility for the life of the neighborhood. + 

By establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and city, state and national governments. + 

The most deliberate and conscious movement for neighborhood organization is the Community Centre movement. This is a movement to mobilize community forces and to get these forces expressed in our social and political life. Each community, it is becoming recognized, has its own desires, its own gifts, its own inherent powers to bring to the life of the whole city. But these inner forces must be freed and utilized for public ends. The Community Centre movement is a movement to release the potential values of neighborhood life, to find a channel for them to flow in, to help people find and organize their own resources. It is to provide a means for the self-realization of neighborhoods. In considering, therefore, the various methods of neighborhood integration, it must be remembered that many of these methods are being already actualized in Community Centres, School Centres, Neighborhood Associations⁠—there are many names for the many forms in which this vital need is finding expression. + 

Schoolhouses are being opened all over the country for neighborhood use. In the larger cities, indeed, where school buildings have auditoriums, gymnasiums, cooking-rooms, sewing-rooms etc., the School Centre is for many reasons the best form of community organization. In some cities, as in Chicago, the field-houses in the parks are used as community centres, in addition to the schoolhouses. In many smaller towns or villages, where field-houses are unknown and the schoolhouses unsuitable (although often we find valuable if not showy results in the little red schoolhouse at the crossroads or in a Kansas cyclone cellar underneath the district school), “community buildings” are being built. Their name is significant. They have a reading room, library, rest room, club rooms and usually a small hall with stage for dramatic and musical entertainments. + 

And beyond this conscious effort to organize neighborhoods, or rather to help neighborhoods to organize themselves, much spontaneous initiative in both rural and urban communities, springing from the daily needs of the people, is finding neighborhood organization to be the result of concerted effort. Mothers want to learn more of the care of their homes, men want to discuss local improvements, young men and women want recreation, there is a hunger for a wider social intercourse or for some form of community art-expression, music or drama. Yet whichever of these motives leads us to the schoolhouse or the community building, the result is always the same⁠—a closer forging of the neighborhood bond. Whoever takes the initiative in organizing the Community Centre⁠—a parents’ association, a men’s civic club, a mothers’ club, a committee of citizens, the city council, the board of education⁠—the result is always the same, a closer forging of the community bond. + 

The Community Centre movement has made rapid progress in the last ten years. All over the country new Centres are springing up constantly. That the impulse for their organization is almost as varied as there are different towns and cities is evidence of their real need. I have had letters in regard to the organization of Centres from as widely different sources as the city council of a western city, girls teaching in rural schools, the mayor of a small city, and young working men in a big city. Indeed Centres have become so much the fashion that one man came to me and said, “We want a School Centre in our district⁠—will you help us to get one⁠—what is a School Centre?” + 

In the year 1915⁠–⁠16, 463 cities reported over 59,000 occasions in public school buildings after 6 p.m. in addition to evening school work. + 

But School or Community Centres do not exist merely for the satisfaction of neighborhood needs, for the creating of a community bond, for the expression of that bond in communal action⁠—they also give the training necessary to bring that activity to its highest fulfilment. We all need not merely opportunities to exercise democracy, but opportunity for a training in democracy. We are not going to take any kind of citizen for the new state, we intend to grow our own citizens. Through group activities, through classes and lectures, through university extension, through actual practice in self government by the management of their own Centres and the varied activities therein, all, young and old, may prepare themselves for the new citizenship of the new democracy. + 

Let us now consider the five ways given above for producing an integrated and responsible neighborhood. First, the regular meetings of neighbors in civic clubs. In Boston we have, in connection with the School Centres, the so-called “East Boston Town-Meeting,” the “Charlestown Commonwealth,” etc. At such meetings neighborhood needs can be discussed, and the men and women of those neighborhoods, while getting to know one another and their local conditions, can be training themselves to function with government and as government. The first advantage of such meetings is their regularity. + 

I am urging regular meetings of small groups of neighbors as a new method in politics. Neighbors now often meet for one object or two or three, and then when these are accomplished think that they need not meet again until there is another definite end to be gained. But in the meantime there should be the slow building up of the neighborhood consciousness. A mass-meeting will never do this. But this neighborhood consciousness is far more important than to get a municipal bathhouse for a certain district. If the bathhouse is considered the chief thing, and no effort made to get the neighborhood group together again until something else, a playground for instance, is wanted, this time perhaps not enough cohesion and concentration of purpose can be obtained to secure the playground. The question, in neighborhood organization is⁠—Is our object to get a new playground or to create methods by which playgrounds will become part of the neighborhood consciousness, methods which will above all educate for further concerted effort? If neighborhood organization is one among many methods of getting things, then it is not of great value; if, however, it is going to bring about a different mental life, if it will give us an open mind, a flexible mind, a cooperative mind, then it is the greatest movement of our time. For our object is not to get certain things, or to have certain things; our object is to evolve the kind of life, the way of thinking, within which these specific things will naturally have place. We shall make no real progress until we can do this. + 

Bernard Shaw has said of family life that it is often cut off equally from the blessings of society and the blessings of solitude. We must see that our neighborhood associations are so organized that we do get the advantages of society. + 

The second way of creating an integrated neighborhood is by learning and practising a genuine discussion, that is, a discussion which shall evolve a true collective purpose and bring the group will of the neighborhood to bear directly on city problems. When I speak of discussion I mean always the kind of discussion which is called out by a genuine group. The group idea, not the crowd idea, is to come from discussion. What is the remedy for a “ruthless majority”? What is the remedy for an “arrogant minority”? Group discussion. Group discussion will diminish suggestion as a social force and give place to interpermeation. + 

When we advocate discussion as a political method, we are not advocating the extension of a method already in use. There is little discussion today. Talk to air our grievances or as a steam-valve for the hotheaded, the avowed intention sometimes in the organization of so-called “discussion” societies, is not discussion. People often speak of “self-expression” as if it were a letting off of steam, as if there were something inside us that must be let out before it explodes. But this is not the use to which we must put the powers of self-expression; we must release these powers not to be wasted through a safety valve, but to be used constructively for the good of society. To change the metaphor, we must not make a petty effort to stem a stream which cannot and should not be stemmed but helped to direct itself. + 

Do we have discussion in debating societies? Never. Their influence is pernicious and they should be abolished in colleges, schools, settlements, Young Men’s Christian Associations, or wherever found. In these societies the men as a rule take either side of the question allotted to them, but even if they choose their side the process of the debate is the same. The object is always to win, it is never to discover the truth. This is excellent training for our present party politics. It is wretched preparation for the kind of politics we wish to see in America, because there is no attempt to think together. Some one to whom I said this replied, “But each side has to think together.” Not in the least: they simply pool their information and their arguments, they don’t think together. They don’t even think; that artificial mental process of maintaining a thesis which is not yours by conviction is not thinking. In debating you are always trying to find the ideas and facts which will support your side; you do not look dispassionately at all ideas and all facts, and try to make out just where the truth lies. You do not try to see what ideas of your opponent will enrich your own point of view; you are bound to reject without examination his views, his ideas, almost I might say his facts. In a discussion you can be flexible, you can try experiments, you can grow as the group grows, but in a debate all this is impossible. + 

One of the great advantages of the forum movement is that here we are beginning to have discussion. + 

Let us analyze briefly the advantages of discussion. Genuine discussion is truth-seeking. First, then, it presses every man to think clearly and appreciatively and discriminatingly in order to take his part worthily. What we need above everything else is clear thinking. This need has been covered over by the demand for “honest” men, but hardly anyone would say today, “Give the management of your city over to a group of the most honest men you can find.” A group of honest men⁠—what a disconcerting picture the phrase calls up! We want efficient men, thinking men, as well as honest men. Take care of your thinking and your morals will take care of themselves⁠—is a present which would have benefited certain reform campaigns. + 

The first advantage of discussion then is that it tends to make us think and to seek accurate information in order to be able to think and to think clearly. I belong to a civic conference lunch club which meets once a month to discuss civic questions. On one occasion the program committee discovered a few days before the luncheon that on the question to be considered (a certain bill before the legislature), we were all of the same opinion, and so the discussion did not seem likely to be very lively. But it happened that our secretary knew someone who was on the other side, and this woman was therefore invited to be our guest and present her point of view to us. She accepted with pleasure as she said she felt strongly on the matter. On the morning of the day of our meeting, however, she telephoned that she could not come, as she had just read the bill, thinking it would be wise to do so before she publicly opposed it, and she found she agreed with it heartily! + 

Moreover, no one question can be adequately discussed without an understanding of many more. Remedies for abuses are seldom direct because every abuse is bound up with our whole political and economic system. And if discussion induces thinking by the preparation necessary, it certainly stimulates thinking by the opposition we meet. + 

But the great advantage of discussion is that thereby we overcome misunderstanding and conquer prejudice. An Englishman who visited America last winter said that he had seen in an American newspaper this advice, “Get acquainted with your neighbor, you might like him,” and was much struck with the difference between the American and the English way of looking at the matter. The Englishman, he said, does not get acquainted with his neighbor for fear he might like him! I sometimes feel that we refuse to get acquainted with the arguments of our opponents for fear we might sympathize with them. + 

Genuine discussion, however, will always and should always bring out difference, but at the same time it teaches us what to do with difference. The formative process which takes place in discussion is that unceasing reciprocal adjustment which brings out and gives form to truth. + 

The whole conception of discussion is now changing. Discussion is to be the sharpest, most effective political tool of the future. The value of the town-meeting is not in the fact that everyone goes, but in what everyone does when he gets there. And discussion will overcome much indifference, much complacency. We must remember that most people are not for or against anything; the first object of getting people together is to make them respond somehow, to overcome inertia. To disagree, as well as to agree, with people brings you closer to them. I always feel intimate with my enemies. It is not opposition but indifference which separates men. + 

Another advantage of discussion in regular meetings of neighbors is that men discuss questions there before they come to a political issue, when there is not the heat of the actual fight and the desire to win. + 

Through regular meetings then, and a genuine discussion, we help to forge the neighborhood bond. But this is not enough. A true community life should be developed. If the multiplicity and complexity of interrelations of interests and wants and hopes are to be brought to the surface to form the substance of politics, people must come more and more to live their lives together. We are ignorant: we should form classes and learn together. The farmer in Virginia goes to the School Centre to learn how to test his seed corn. We need social intercourse: we should meet to exchange experiences and to have a “good time” together. We need opportunity for bringing old and young together, parents and children, for boys and girls to meet in a natural, healthy way. We need true recreation, not the passive looking at the motion pictures, not the deadening watching of other people’s acting; we want the real recreation of active participation. The leisure time of men and women is being increased by legislation, by vocational efficiency, by machinery, and by scientific management. One of the most pressing needs of today is the constructive use of leisure. This need can be largely satisfied in the Neighborhood Centre. Festivals, pageants, the celebration of holidays can all be used as recreation, as a means of self-expression, and of building up the neighborhood bond. + 

Here too the family realizes that its life is embedded in a larger life, and the richer that larger life the more the family gains. The family learns its duty to other families, and it finds that its external relations change all its inner life, as the International League will change fundamentally the internal history of every nation. I knew two sisters who were ashamed of their mother until they could say to their friends, “Mother goes to the lectures every Saturday night at the School Centre.” I know men and wives who never went out together until they found an extended home in a School Centre. I know a father, an intelligent policeman, who never had any real friendship with his four daughters until he planned dances for them at the School Centre so that they should not go to the public dance-halls. + 

Families often need some means of coming to a common understanding; they are not always capable by themselves of making the necessary adjustment of points of view brought from so many sources as the different family outgoings produce. For example, food conservation taught in various ways in the Neighborhood Centre⁠—by cooking classes for women, by lectures for both men and women showing the relation of food to the whole present world problem, by having regular afternoons for meeting with agents from the Health Department, by comparison between neighbors of the results of the new feeding⁠—food conservation, that is, taught as a community problem, is more effective than taught merely to classes of mothers. For if the mother makes dishes the father and children refuse to eat, the cooking classes she has attended will have no community value. To give community value to all our apparently isolated activities is one of the primary objects of neighborhood organization. + 

The Neighborhood Centre, therefore, instead of separating families, as sometimes feared, is uniting them. To live their life in the setting of the broader life is continuously to interpret and explain one to the other. And if we have learned that sacred as our family life must always be, the significance of that sacredness is its power of contributing to the life around us, the life of our little neighborhood, then we are ready to understand that the nation too is real, that its tasks are mighty and that those tasks will not be performed unless every one of us can find self-expression through the nation’s needs. + 

We have seen that the regular meeting of neighbors gives an external integration of neighborhood life. We have seen that group discussion begins to forge a real neighborhood bond. We have seen that a sharing of our daily life⁠—its cares and burdens, its pleasures and joys, each with all⁠—furthers this inner, this spiritual union which is at last to be the core of a new politics. The fourth way of developing the neighborhood bond is by citizens taking more and more responsibility for the life of their community. This will mean a moral integration. We are not to dig down into our life to find our true needs and then demand that government satisfy those needs⁠—the satisfaction also must be found in that fermenting life from which our demands issue. The methods of neighborhood responsibility will be discussed in chapter XXVI. + 

The fifth way of developing the neighborhood group is by establishing some regular connection between the neighborhood and city, state and national governments. Then shall we have the political integration of the neighborhood. This will be discussed in chapter XXVII, “From Neighborhood to Nation.” Party politics are organized, “interests” are organized, our citizenship is not organized. Our neighborhood life is starving for lack of any real part in the state. Give us that part and as inevitably as the wake follows the ship will neighborhood responsibility follow the integration of neighborhood and state. + 

XXIV + 

Neighborhood Organization vs. Party Organization I + 

The Will of the People + 

Many of us are feeling strongly at the present moment the importance of neighborhood life, the importance of the development of a neighborhood consciousness, the paramount importance of neighborhood organization as the most effective means of solving our city and national problems. What our political life needs today is to get at the will of the people and to incorporate it in our government, to substitute a man-governed country for a machine-governed country. If politics are to be no longer mysterious and remote, but the warp and woof of our lives, if they are to be neither a game nor a business, far different methods must be adopted from any we have hitherto known. + 

Where do we show political vitality at present? In our government? In our party organization? In our local communities? We can see nowhere any clear stream of political life. The vitality of our community life is frittered away or unused. The muddy stream of party politics is choked with personal ambition, the desire for personal gain. Neighborhood organization is, I believe, to be the vital current of our political life. There is a widespread idea that we can do away with the evils of the party system by attacking the boss. Many think also that all would be well if we could separate politics and business. But far below the surface are the forces which have allied business and politics; far below the surface we must go, therefore, if we would divorce this badly mated couple. + 

Neighborhood organization is to accomplish many things. The most important are: to give a knockout blow to party organization, to make a direct and continuous connection between our daily lives and needs and our government, to diminish race and class prejudices, to create a responsible citizenship, and to train and discipline the new democracy; or, to sum up all these things, to break down party organization and to make a creative citizenship the force of American political life. + 

An effective neighborhood organization will deal the death blow to party: (1) by substituting a real unity for the pseudo unity of party, by creating a genuine public opinion, a true will of the people, (2) by evolving genuine leaders instead of bosses, (3) by putting a responsible government in the place of the irresponsible party. + 

First, there is at present no real unity of the people. + 

It is clear that party organization has succeeded because it was the only way we knew of bringing about concerted action. This must be obtained by the manipulation of other men’s minds or by the evolving of the common mind; we must choose between the two. In the past the monarch got his power from the fact that he represented the unity of his people⁠—the tribal or national consciousness. In the so-called democracies of England and America we have now no one man who represents a true collective consciousness. Much of the power of party has come, therefore, from the fact that it gave expression to a certain kind of pseudo collective consciousness: we found that it was impossible to get a common will from a multitude, the only way we could get any unity was through the party. We have accepted party dictatorship rather than anarchy. We have felt that any discussion of party organization was largely doctrinaire because party has given us collective action of a kind, and what has been offered in its place was a scattered and irresponsible, and therefore weak and ineffective, particularism. No “independent” method of voting can ever vie with the organized party machinery: its loose unintegrated nebulosity will be shattered into smithereens by the impact of the closely organized machine. + 

The problem which many men have wrestled with in their lives⁠—whether they are to adhere to party or to be “independent”⁠—is futile. Personal honesty exhausts no man’s duty in life; an effective life is what is demanded of us, and no isolated honesty gives us social effectiveness. When we go up to the gates of another world and say, “I have been honest, I have been pure, I have been diligent”⁠—no guardian of those Heavenly gates will fling them open for us, but we shall be faced with the counter thrust: “How have you used those qualities for making blossom the earth which was your inheritance? We want no sterile virtues here. Have you sold your inheritance for the pottage of personal purity, personal honesty, personal growth?” + 

To make our “independence” effective, to vie successfully with party organization, we must organize genuine groups and learn in those true collective action. No particularistic theory of politics will ever be strong enough to take the place of party. The political consciousness of men must be transferred from the party to the neighborhood group. + 

We hear discussed from time to time how far public opinion governs the world, but at present there is no public opinion. Our legislatures are supposed to enact the will of the people, our courts are supposed to declare the will of the people, our executive to voice the will of the people, a will surrounding men like a nimbus apparently from their births on. But there is no will of the people. We talk glibly about it but the truth is that it is such a very modern thing that it does not yet exist. There is, it is true, an overwhelming chaos of ideas on all the problems which surround us. Is this public opinion? The urge of the crowd often gets crystallized into a definite policy ardently advocated. Is this public opinion? Certain interests find a voice; one party or another, one group or another, expresses itself. Is this public opinion? Public opinion is that common understanding which is the driving force of a living whole and shapes the life of that whole. + 

We believe that the state should be the incarnation of the common will, but where is the common will? All the proposed new devices for getting at the will of the people (referendum etc.) assume that we have a will to express; but our great need at present is not to get a chance to express our wonderful ideas, but to get some wonderful ideas to express. A more complete representation is the aim of much of our political reform, but our first requirement is surely to have something to represent. It isn’t that we need one kind of government more than another, as the image-breakers tell us, it isn’t that we need honest intentions, as the preachers tell us, our essential and vital need is a people creating a will of its own. In all the sentimental talk of democracy the will of the people is spoken of tenderly as if it were there in all its wisdom and all its completeness and we had only to put it into operation. + 

The tragic thing about our situation in America is, not merely that we have no public opinion, but that we think we have. If I have no money in my pocket and know it, I can go to work and earn some; if I do not know it I may starve. But I do not want the American people to starve. The average American citizen says to himself, “It doesn’t matter very much what I think because American public opinion is sound at the core.” It is our Great Illusion. There has been much apotheosizing of the so-called popular will, but not every circle is a halo, and you can’t put a wreath round “the popular will” and call it democracy. The popular will to mean democracy must be a properly evolved popular will⁠—the true will of the people. + 

Who are the people? Every individual? The majority? A theoretical average? A compromise group? The reason we go astray about public opinion is because we have not as yet a clear and adequate definition of the “people.” We are told that we must elevate the “people.” There are no “people.” We have to create a people. The people are not an imaginary average, shorn of genius and power and leadership. You cannot file off all the points made by talent and efficiency, and call the dead level that is left the people. The people are the integration of every development, of every genius, with everything else that our complex and interacting life brings about. But the method of such integration can never be through crowd association. We may come to think that vox populi is vox Dei, but not until it is the group voice, not until it is found by some more intimate process than listening to the shout of the crowd or counting the votes in the ballot-box. + 

The error in regard to public opinion can be traced to that same sociological error which is the cause of so many confusions in our political thought: that the social process is the spread of similarities by suggestion and imitation. Any opinion that is shared, simply because it is shared, is called public opinion. But if this opinion is shared because it has spread among large numbers by “unconscious imitation,” then it is not a genuine public opinion; to be that, the process by which it has been evolved must be that of intermingling and interpermeating. Public opinion has been defined as the opinions of all the men on the “tops of busses,” or the opinion made by “banks, stock-exchanges and all the wire-pullers of the world,” or the opinion “imposed on the public by a succession of thinkers.” All this is, no doubt, true of much of our so-called public opinion at present, for public opinion today is largely crowd opinion. But there is less of this than formerly. And we must adopt those modes of living by which there shall be less and less infection of crowds and more and more an evolving of genuine group thought. When reforms are brought about by crowds being swept into them, they can be undone just as easily; there is no real progress here. + 

Political parties and business interests will continue to dominate us until we learn new methods of association. Men follow party dictates not because of any worship of party but simply because they have not yet any will of their own. Until they have, they will be used and manipulated and artificially stimulated by those who can command sufficient money to engage leaders for that purpose. Hypnosis will be our normal state until we are roused to claim our own creative power. The promise for the future is the power for working together which lies latent in the great rank and file of men and women today, and which must be brought clearly to their view and utilized in the right way. If we see no fruitful future for our political life under the present scheme of party domination, if we can see no bearable future for our industrial life under the present class domination, then some plan must be devised for the will of the people to control the life of the people. Fighting abuses is not our role, but the full understanding that such fighting is a tilting at windmills. The abuses in themselves amount to nothing. Our role is to leave them alone and build up our own life with our power of creative citizenship. We need today: (1) an active citizenship, (2) a responsible citizenship, (3) a creative citizenship⁠—a citizenship building its own world, creating its own political and social structure, constructing its own life forever. + 

Our faith in democracy rests ultimately on the belief that men have this creative power. Our vital relation to the Infinite consists in our capacity, as its generating force, to bring forth a group idea, to create the common life. But we have at present no machinery for a constructive life. The organization of neighborhood groups will give us this machinery. + 

Let us see how neighborhood groups can create a united will, a genuine public opinion. + 

First, neighborhood groups will naturally discuss their local, intimate, personal concerns. The platitudes and insincerities of the party meeting will give way to the homely realities of the neighborhood meeting. These common interests will become the political issues. Then, and not till then, politics, external at no point to any vital need, will represent the life of our people. Then when we see clearly that the affairs of city and state are our affairs, we shall no longer be apathetic or indifferent in regard to politics. We all are interested in our own affairs. When our daily needs become the basis of politics, then party will no longer be left in control because politics bore us, because we feel that they have nothing to do with us. + 

Already the daily lives of people are passing into the area of government through the increased social legislation of all our states during the last few years. In 1912 a national party was organized with social legislation as part of its platform. The introduction of social programs into party platforms means that a powerful influence is at work to change American politics from a machine to a living thing. When the political questions were chiefly the tariff, the trust, the currency, closely as these questions affected the lives of people, there was so little general knowledge in regard to them that most of us could contribute little to their solution. The social legislation of the last few years has taken up crime, poverty, disease, which we all know a great deal about: laws have been passed regarding child labor, workmen’s compensation, occupational disease, prison reform, tuberculosis, mothers’ pensions, the liquor question, minimum wage, employment agencies etc. + 

Tammany is built up on the most intimate local work: no family, no child, is unknown to its organization. And it is founded on the long view: votes are not crudely bought⁠—always; the boy is found a job, the father is helped through his illness, the worn-out mother is sent for a holiday to the country. As politics comes to mean state employment bureaus, sickness and accident insurance, mothers’ pensions, Tammany is being shorn of much of its power. + 

We are sometimes told, however, that while it is conceded that campaign issues should be made up from our intimate, everyday needs, yet it is feared that on each question a different split would come, and thus politics would be too confusing and could not be “handled.” Neighborhood organization is going to help us meet this difficulty. In nonpartisan neighborhood associations we shall have different alignments on every question. Moreover, we shall have different alignments on the same question in different years. Thus the rigidity of the party organization disappears. The party meeting is to the neighborhood meeting what the victrola is to the human voice: the partisan assembly utters what has been impressed upon it, you hear the machine beating its own rhythm; the neighborhood meeting will give the fresh ever-varied voices from the hearts of men. The party system and the genuine group system is the difference between machine-made and man-made. And this may be true of a good government organization as well as of a Tammany organization⁠—it is true wherever the machine is put above the man. We can get no force without freshness, and you cannot get freshness from a machine, only from living men. Just the very thing which costs the party money⁠—keeping its members together⁠—is its condemnation. Men will make up their minds on question after question in their neighborhood groups. Then they will vote according to these conclusions. Party dictation will never cease until we get group conviction. If our political life is going to show any greater sensitiveness to our real wants and needs than it has shown in the past, there must be some provision made for considering and voting on questions irrespective of party: you can not join a different party every day, but you can separate political issues from partisanship and vote for the thing you want. The reason more of our real wants have not got expressed in our politics is just because people cannot be held together on many issues. + 

Again, if neighborhood organization takes the place of party organization each question can be decided on its own merit: we shall not have to ask, “How will the management of this affect the power and prestige of our party?” + 

Also neighborhood groups can study problems, but the study of problems is fatal to party organization. The party hands out the ephemeral comings-to-the-surface of what will help the party, or the particularistic interests dominating the party. Every question brought forward at all is brought forward as a campaign issue. + 

Moreover the group discovers and conserves the individual. A party gathering is always a crowd. And party methods are stereotyped, conventional. Under a party system we have no spontaneous political life. The party system gives no exercise to the judgment, it weakens the will, it does away with personal responsibility. The party, as the crowd, blots out the individual. Mass suggestion is dominating our politics today. We shall get rid of mass influence exactly as fast as we develop the group consciousness. Men who belong to neighborhood organizations will not be the stuff of which parties are made. The party has prevented us from having genuine group opinion; or if we do by any chance get a group opinion now, it can usually speak only in opposition to party, it cannot get incorporated in our political life. + 

Every one of us will have an opportunity to learn collective thinking in the small, local, neighborhood group. No one comes to his neighborhood group pledged beforehand to any particular way of thinking. The object of the party system is to stifle all difference of opinion. Moreover, in partisan discussion you take one of two sides; in neighborhood groups an infinitely varied number of points of view can be brought out, and thus the final decision will be richer from what it gains on all sides. The neighborhood group which makes possible different alignments on every question, allows ultimate honesty in the expression of our views. If we get into the habit of suppressing our differences, these differences atrophy and we lose our sensitiveness to their demands. And we have found that the expression and the maintenance of difference is the condition of the full and free development of the race. + 

But we want not only a genuine public opinion, but a progressive public opinion. We cannot understand once for all, we must be constantly understanding anew. At the same time that we see the necessity of creating the common will and giving voice to it, we must bear in mind that there should be no crystallizing process by which any particular expression of the common will should be taken as eternally right because it is the expression of the common will. It is right for today but not for tomorrow. The flaming fact is our daily life, whatever it is, leaping forever and ever out of the common will. Democracy is the ever-increasing volume of power pouring through men and shaping itself as the moment demands. Constitutional conventions are seeking the machinery by which the reason and justice which have existed among us can be utilized in our life. We must go beyond this and unseal the springs which will reveal the forms for the wisdom and justice of their day. This is life itself, the direct and aboriginal constructor. We meet with our neighbors at our civic club not in order to accumulate facts, but to learn how to release and how to control a constructive force which will build daily for us the habitation of our needs. Then indeed will our government be no longer directed by a “body of law,” but by the self-renewing appearing of the will of the people. + 

The chief need of society today is an enlightened, progressive and organized public opinion, and the first step towards an enlightened and organized public opinion is an enlightened and organized group opinion. When public opinion becomes conscious of itself it will have a justified confidence in itself. Then the “people,” born of an associated life, will truly govern. Then shall we at last really have an America. + 

XXV + 

Neighborhood Organization vs. Party Organization II + 

Leaders or Bosses? + 

Neighborhood organization will prove fatal to party organization not only through the creating of a genuine will of the people, but also through the producing of real leaders to take the place of the bosses. + 

American democracy has always been afraid of leadership. Our constitutions of the eighteenth century provided no one department to lead, no one man in the legislature to lead. Therefore, as we must have leadership, there has been much undefined, irresponsible leadership. This has often meant corruption and abuse, bad enough, but worse still it has meant the creation of machinery for the perpetuation of corruption, the encouragement of abuse. Under machine politics we choose for our leaders the men who are most popular for the moment or who have worked out the most thorough system of patronage, or rather of course we do not choose at all. We have two kinds of leaders under our party system, both the wrong kind: we have our actual leaders, the bosses, and our official leaders who have tended to be men who could be managed by the party. Our officials in their campaign speeches say that they are the “servants of the people.” But we do not want “servants” any more than we want bosses; we want genuine leaders. Now that more and more direct power is being given to the people it is especially necessary that we should not be led by machine bosses, but that we should evolve the kind of leadership which will serve a true democracy, which will be the expression of a true democracy, and will guide it to democratic ends by democratic methods. + 

We hope through local group organization to evolve real leaders. There should be in a democracy some sort of regular and ceaseless process by which ability of all sorts should come to the top, and flexibility in our forms so that new ability can always find its greatest point of usefulness, and so that service which is no longer useful can be replaced by that which is. In neighborhood groups where we have different alignments on different questions, there will be a tendency for those to lead at any particular moment who are most competent to lead in the particular matter in hand. Thus a mechanical leadership will give place to a vital leadership. Suppose the subject is sanitation. The man who is most interested, who has the clearest view of the need and who is its most insistent champion, will naturally step forth as the leader in that. The man who knows most about educational matters will lead in those, will be chosen eventually for the school committee or for the educational committee of the state legislature. Thus the different leaders of a democracy appear. Here in the neighborhood group leaders are born. Democracy is the breeding-ground of aristocracy. You have all the chance the world gives. In your neighborhood group show the clearness of your mind, the strength of your grip, your power to elicit and to guide cooperative action, and you emerge as the leader of men. + 

No adequate statement can be made in regard to leadership until it is studied in relation to group psychology. The leadership of the British Premier, of President Wilson, will become interesting studies when we have a better understanding of this subject. Meanwhile let us look briefly at some of the qualities of leadership. + 

The leader guides the group and is at the same time himself guided by the group, is always a part of the group. No one can truly lead except from within. One danger of conceiving the leader as outside is that then what ought to be group loyalty will become personal loyalty. When we have a leader within the group these two loyalties can merge. + 

The leader must have the instinct to trace every evil to its cause, but, equally valuable, he must be able to see the relative value of the cause to each one of his group⁠—in other words, to see the total relativity of the cause to the group. He must draw out all the varying needs of the neighborhood as related to the cause and reconcile them in the remedy. A baby is ill; is the milk perhaps too rich for babies? But probably the rest of the neighborhood demands rich milk. All the neighborhood needs in regard to milk must be elicited and reconciled in the remedy for the sick child. That is, the remedy cannot be thinner milk, but it may be a demand that the milkman have separate milk for babies. + 

In other words the leader of our neighborhood group must interpret our experience to us, must see all the different points of view which underlie our daily activities and also their connections, must adjust the varying and often conflicting needs, must lead the group to an understanding of its needs and to a unification of its purpose. He must give form to things vague, things latent, to mere tendencies. He must be able to lead us to wise decisions, not to impose his own wise decisions upon us. We need leaders, not masters or drivers. + 

The power of leadership is the power of integrating. This is the power which creates community. You can see it when two or three strangers or casual acquaintances are calling upon someone. With some hostesses you all talk across at one another as entirely separate individuals, pleasantly and friendlily, to be sure, but still across unbridged chasms; while other hostesses have the power of making you all feel for the moment related, as if you were one little community for the time being. This is a subtle as well as a valuable gift. It is one that leaders of men must possess. It is thus that the collective will is evolved from out the chaos of varied personality and complex circumstance. + 

The skilful leader then does not rely on personal force; he controls his group not by dominating but by expressing it. He stimulates what is best in us; he unifies and concentrates what we feel only gropingly and scatteringly, but he never gets away from the current of which we and he are both an integral part. He is a leader who gives form to the inchoate energy in every man. The person who influences me most is not he who does great deeds but he who makes me feel I can do great deeds. Many people tell me what I ought to do and just how I ought to do it, but few have made me want to do something. Who ever has struck fire out of me, aroused me to action which I should not otherwise have taken, he has been my leader. The community leader is he who can liberate the greatest amount of energy in his community. + 

Then the neighborhood leader must be a practical politician. He must be able to interpret a neighborhood not only to itself but to others. He must know not only the need of every charwoman but how politics can answer her call. He must know the great movements of the present and their meaning, and he must know how the smallest needs and the humblest powers of his neighborhood can be fitted into the progressive movements of our time. His duty is to shape politics continuously. As the satisfaction of one need, or the expression of one latent power, reveals many more, he must be always alert and ever ready to gather up the many threads into one strand of united endeavor. He is the patient watcher, the active spokesman, the sincere and ardent exponent of a community consciousness. His guiding, embracing and dominant thought is to make that community consciousness articulate in government. + 

The politician is not a group but a crowd leader. The leader of a crowd dominates because a crowd wants to be dominated. Politicians do not try to convince but to dazzle; they do not deal with facts but with formulae and vague generalizations, with the flag and the country. If our politicians and our representatives are not our most competent men, but those who have the greatest power of suggestion and are most adroit in using it, the proposal here is that we shall develop methods which will produce real leaders. We are aiming now in the reorganization of our state constitutions at responsible official leadership instead of the irresponsible party boss system which was necessary once because we had to have leaders of some sort. How far this new movement shall succeed, will depend on how far it has back of it, or can be made to have back of it, the kind of organization which will develop group not crowd leaders. + 

Through neighborhood organization we hope that real leaders instead of bosses will be evolved. Democracy does not tend to suppress leadership as is often stated; it is the only organization of society which will bring out leadership. As soon as we are given opportunities for the release of the energy there is in us, heroes and leaders will arise among us. These will draw their stimulus, their passion, their life from all, and then in their turn increase in all passion and power and creating force. + 

XXVI + 

Neighborhood Organization vs. Party Organization III + 

A Responsible Neighborhood + 

We have said that neighborhood organization must replace party organization by evolving a true will of the people, by giving us leaders instead of bosses, and by making possible a responsible government to take the place of our irresponsible party government. Let us now consider the last point: the possibility of an integrated neighborhood responsibility. + 

Under our party organization the men who formulate the party platform do not have the official responsibility of carrying it out. Moreover at present representative government rests on the fallacy that when you delegate the job you delegate the responsibility. Most of the abuses which have crept in, business corruption and political bossism alike, are due in large measure to this delegating of responsibility. What we need is a kind of government which will delegate the job but not the responsibility. The case is somewhat like that of the head of a business undertaking, who makes the men under him responsible for their own work and still the final responsibility rests with him. This is not divided responsibility but shared responsibility⁠—a very different thing. + 

Consider what happens when I want to get a bill through the legislature. I may feel sure that the bill is good and also that “the people” want it, but I can work only through party, and at the state house I have to face all the special interests bound up with party, all the thousand and one “political” considerations, whether I succeed or fail. But of course I recognize the humor of this statement: I ought never to try to get a bill through the legislature; special and partial groups have to do this simply because there is at present no other way; there must be some other way, some recognized way. We do not want to circumvent party but to replace party. + 

Our reform associations, while they have fought party, have often endeavored to substitute their own organization for the party organization. This has often been the alternative offered to us⁠—do we want good government or poor government? We have not been asked if we would like to govern ourselves. This is why Mitchell lost last year in New York. One of the New York papers during the campaign advised Mr. Mitchell “to get nearer the people.” But it is not for government to “get nearer” the people; it must identify itself with the people. It isn’t enough for the “good” officials to explain to the people what they are doing; they must take the people into their counsels. If the Gary system had ever been properly put up to the fathers it is doubtful if they would have voted against it. Then a good deal of this advice in regard to city officials “explaining” their plans in all parts of the city leaves out of account that the local people have a great deal to give. Some of the most uneducated, so-called, of the fathers and mothers might have had valuable points of view to offer in regard to the practical workings of the Gary system. + 

Tammany won in New York and we heard many people say, “Well, this is your democracy, the people want bad government, the majority of people in New York city have voted for it.” Nothing could be more superficial. What the election in New York meant was that “the people” are cleverer than was thought; they know that the question should not be of “good” government or “bad” government, but only of self-government, and the only way they have of expressing this is to vote against a government which seems to disregard them. + 

To say, “We are good men, we are honest officials, we are employing experts on education, sanitation etc., you must trust us,” will not do; some way must be devised of connecting the experts and the people⁠—that is the first thing to be worked out, then some way of taking the people into the counsels of city administration. All of us criticize things we don’t know anything about. As soon as we see the difficulties, as soon as the responsibility is put upon us, our whole attitude changes. Take the popular cry “Boston positions for Boston people.” This seems a pretty good principle to superficial thinking. But when we know that we have an appropriation of $200,000 a year for a certain department, and are looking for a man to administer it, when we go into the matter and find that there are only two or three experts for this position in the United States, and that not one of these lives in Boston, the question takes the concrete form, “Shall we allow $200,000 of our money to be wasted through inept administration?” It might be said, “But city governments do have the responsibility and yet this is just what they are all the time doing.” Certainly, because their position rests on patronage, but I am proposing that the whole system be changed. + 

Neighborhood organization must be the method of effective popular responsibility: first, by giving reality to the political bond; secondly, by providing the machinery by which a genuine control of the people can be put into operation. At present nearly all our needs are satisfied by external agencies, government or institutional. Health societies offer health to us, recreation associations teach us how to play, civic art leagues give us more beautiful surroundings, associated charities give us poor relief. A kind lady leads my girl to the dentist, a kind young man finds employment for my boy, a stern officer of the city sees that my children are in their places at school. I am constantly being acted upon, no one is encouraging me to act. New York has one hundred municipal welfare divisions and bureaus. Thus am I robbed of my most precious possession⁠—my responsibilities⁠—for only the active process of participation can shape me for the social purpose. + 

But all this is to end. The community itself must grip its own problems, must fill its needs, must make effective its aspirations. If we want the latest scientific knowledge in regard to food values, let us get an expert to come to us, not wait for some society to send an “agent” to us; if the stores near us are not selling at fair prices, let us make a cooperative effort to set this right. If we want milk and baby hygiene organized, our own local doctors should, in proper cooperation with experts on the one hand and the mothers on the other, organize this branch of public service. The medical experts may be employees of the government, but if the plan of their service be worked out by all three⁠—the experts, the local doctors and the mothers⁠—the results will be: (1) that the needs of the neighborhood will really be met, (2) much valuable time of the expert will be saved, (3) a close followup will be possible, (4) the expert can be called in whenever necessary through local initiative, and (5) the machinery will be in existence by which the study of that particular problem can be carried on not as a special investigation but as a regular part of neighborhood life. + 

Take another example. The Placement Bureau is also a necessary public service: it needs the work of experts and it needs pooled information and centralized machinery; a parent cannot find out all the jobs available in a city for boys of 16 in order to place one boy. But as long as the secretary of the Placement Bureau appears in the home and takes this whole burden off the parent, and off the community he is serving, his work will not be well done. For the boy will suffer eventually: he cannot be cut off from his community without being hurt; community incentive is the greatest one we know, and somehow there must be worked out some community responsibility for that boy, as well as some responsibility on his part to his community for standing up or falling down on his job. I say that the boy will eventually suffer; his community also will suffer, for it also has need of him; moreover, the community will greatly suffer by the loss of this opportunity of connecting it, through the parents, with the whole industrial problem of the city. The expert service of the Placement Bureau, whether it is administered by city or state, should always be joined to local initiative, effort and responsibility. + 

And so for every need. If we want well-managed dances for our daughters, we, mothers and fathers, must go and manage them. We do not exist on one side and the government on the other. If you go to a municipal dance-hall and see it managed by officials appointed from City Hall, you say, “This is a government affair.” But if you go to a schoolhouse and see a dance managed by men and women chosen by the district, you say, “This is a community affair, government has nothing to do with this.” These two conceptions must mingle before we can have any worthy political life. It must be clearly seen that we can operate as government as well as with government, that the citizen functions through government and the government functions through the citizen. It is not a municipal dance-hall regulated by the city authorities which expresses the right relation between civics and dancing, but dances planned and managed by a neighborhood for itself. + 

It is not the civic theatre which is the last word in the relation of the drama to the people, it is a community organized theatre. Art and civics do not meet merely by the state presenting art to its members; the civic expression of art is illustrated by locally managed festivals, by community singing, a local orchestra or dramatic club, community dancing etc. Those of us who are working for civic art are working for this: for people to express themselves in artistic forms and to organize themselves for that purpose. The state must give the people every opportunity for building up their own full, varied, healthful life. It seems to be often thought that when the state provides schools, parks, universities etc., there you have the ideal state. But we must go beyond this and find our ideal state in that which shows its members how to build up its own life in schools, parks, universities etc. + 

The question which the state must always be trying to answer is how it can do more for its members at the same time that it is stimulating them to do more for themselves. No, more than this, its doing more for them must take the form of their doing more for themselves. Our modern problem is not, as one would think from some of the writing on social legislation, how much the increased activity of the state can do for the individual, but how the increasing activity of the individual can be state activity, how the widening of the sphere of state activity can be a widening of our own activity. The arguments for or against government action should not take the form of how much or how little government action we shall have, but entirely of how government action and self-action can coincide. Our one essential political problem is always how to be the state, not, putting the state on one side and the individual on the other, to work out their respective provinces. I have said in the chapter on “Our Political Dualism” that the state and the individual are one, yet this is pure theory until we make them one. But they can never be made one through schemes of representation etc., only by the intimate daily lives of all becoming the constituents of the life of the state. + 

When a Mothers’ Club in one of the Boston School Centres found a united want⁠—that of keeping their children off the streets on Saturday afternoon and giving them some wholesome amusement⁠—and decided to meet this want by asking the city of Boston for permission to use the moving-picture machine of the Dorchester High School for fairy-story films, the mothers to manage the undertaking, two significant facts stand out: (1) they did not ask an outside agency to do something for them, for the men and women of Dorchester, with all the other men and women of Boston, are the city of Boston; (2) they were not merely doing something for their children on those Saturday afternoons, they were in a sense officials of the city of Boston working for the youth of Boston. These two conceptions must blend: we do not do for government, government does not do for us, we should be constantly the hands and feet, yes and the head and heart of government. + 

A most successful effort at neighborhood organization is that of the East Harlem Community Association, which set East Harlem to work on its own problems: first to investigate conditions, and then to find a way of meeting these conditions. The most interesting point about the whole scheme is that the work is not done by “experts” or anyone else from outside; there are no paid visitors, but a committee of twelve mothers⁠—one colored woman, two Italian, two Jewish, two Irish, three American, one Polish, and one German⁠—are doing the work well. As a result of the activities of the East Harlem Community Association there are now in a public school building of the neighborhood organized athletic clubs, industrial classes, orchestra, glee, dramatic and art clubs, concerts, good moving pictures, dances, big brother and big sister groups, Mothers’ Leagues, Parents’ Associations, physical examination of school children etc. Of course these community associations must use expert advice and expert service. Exactly how this relation will be most satisfactorily worked out we do not yet clearly see. + 

I give this merely as one illustration out of many possible ones. The necessity of neighborhood organization as the basis of future progress is seen by many people today. In New York there is a vigorous movement for “Neighborhood Associations”; there are four already in active working order. If the main idea of some of these is services rendered rather than neighborhood organization; if others see too great a separation between needs and the satisfaction of the needs, that is, if the neighborhoods are always to ask the questions and the experts to find the answers, still these Associations are an interesting and valuable part of the neighborhood movement. + 

The acute problem of municipal life is how to make us men and women of Boston feel that we are the city, directly responsible for everything concerning it. Neighborhood organization, brought into existence largely by the growing feeling of each individual that he is responsible for the life around him, itself then increases and focuses this sense of responsibility. Neighborhood association is vivid and intimate. Whereas the individual seems lost in a big city, through his neighborhood he not only becomes an integral part of the city but becomes keenly conscious of his citizenship. + 

In a word, what we hope neighborhood organization will do for the development of responsibility is this: that men will learn that they are not to influence politics through their local groups, they are to be politics. This is the error of some of the reform associations: they want to influence politics. This point of view will never spell progress for us. When we have the organized neighborhood group, when every man sees the problems of political and social reorganization not as abstract matters but as constituting his daily life, when men are so educated in politics as to feel that they themselves are politics functioning, and when our organization is such that this functioning recoils on them, they will so shape their conduct as to change the situation. Then when they are conscious of themselves as masters of the situation they will acknowledge their responsibility. + 

We see many signs around us today of an increased sense of responsibility, of a longing for a self-expression that is not to be an individual self-expression but community self-expression. Take the women’s clubs: in their first stage their object was personal development; in the second they wished to do something for their town; in the present or third stage women are demanding through some of the more progressive clubs, through women’s municipal leagues etc., a more direct share in community life. They are joining together not to benefit themselves, not to benefit others, as others, but because all together they wish to express their community⁠—no, they wish to be their community. They are not satisfied with serving, but gathering up the service of all in a common consciousness, each feels herself the whole and seeks to express the whole. + 

But I do not mean that this greater realization of community is confined to women. How often in the past we have heard a man say complacently, “Well, I suppose I must do my duty and go to the polls and vote tomorrow,” or “I must show myself at that rally tonight.” But a nobler idea than this is now filling the minds of many men. They go to their civic club not because it is their duty, but because just there working together with their fellows for the furtherance of their common aims, they find their greatest satisfaction. In neighborhood groups men can find that self-realization which becomes by the most wonderful miracle life can offer us community realization. That is, I can learn through my neighborhood group that I am the city, I am the nation, and that fatal transference of responsibility to an invisible and nonexistent “they” can be blotted out forever. When neighborhood organization begins to teach that there is no “they,” that it is always we, we, we, that mothers are responsible and fathers are responsible, and young men are responsible, and young women are responsible, for their city and their nation, it will begin to teach its chief lesson. + 

Do I thrill with the passion of service, of joyful, voluntary surrender to a mighty cause as I sail for France to serve the great ends of the Allies? Social and political organization are fatally at fault if they cannot give me the same elation as I go to my Neighborhood Centre and know that there too the world has vital need of me, there too am I not only pouring myself out in world service, but that I am, just in so far, creating, actually building, a new and fairer world. + 

This is the finest word that can be said for neighborhood organization, for my finding my place through my response to every daily need of my nearest group. For the great word I believe on this subject is not that I serve my neighborhood, my city, my nation, but that by this service I become my neighborhood, my city, my nation. Surely at this hour in our history we can realize this as never before. The soul of America is being born today. The war is binding together class and class, alien and American, men and women. We rejoice that we are alive at this moment, but the keenness of my joy is not because I can serve America but because I am America. I save food in my home not in order that my family income can meet the strain of the higher prices, not because I can thereby help to send more food to the Allies, but because I, saving the food of America for the Allies and the world, am performing America’s task, am therefore America. This is the deeper thought of neighborhood organization: that through performing my humblest duties I am creating the soul of this great democracy. + 

Neighborhood organization must then take the place of party organization. The neighborhood group will answer many of the questions we have put to a party organization which has remained deaf to our importunities, dumb to all our entreaties. We have asked for bread and received the stone times without number. The rigid formality of the party means stultification, annihilation. But group politics, made of the very stuff of life, of the people of the groups, will express the inner, intimate, ardent desires of spontaneous human beings, and will contain within its circumference the possibility of the fullest satisfaction of those desires. Group organization gives a living, pulsing unity made up of the minds and hearts and seasoned judgments of vital men and women. Such organization is capable of unbroken growth. And when this vine of life, which sends its roots where every two or three are gathered together, has rooted itself in the neighborhood, faithful care, sedulous watching, loving ministration will appear with it, will be the natural way of living. Its impalpable bonds hold us together, and although we may differ on countless questions, instead of flying asunder we work out the form in political life which will shelter us and supply our needs. Faithfulness to the neighborhood bond must take the place of allegiance to party. Loyalty to a party is loyalty to a thing⁠—we want a living politics in which loyalty is always intrinsic. And from the strength of this living bond shall come the power of our united life. Always the actor, never the spectator, is the rule of the new democracy. Always the sharer, never the giver or the receiver, is the order of our new life. + 

Do you think the neighborhood group too puny to cope with this giant towering above us, drunk with the blood of its many triumphs? The young David went out to conquer Goliath, strong in the conviction of his power. Cannot our cause justify an equal faith? + 

Is our daily life profane and only so far as we rise out of it do we approach the sacred life? Then no wonder politics are what they have become. But this is not the creed of men today: we believe in the sacredness of all our life; we believe that Divinity is forever incarnating in humanity, and so we believe in Humanity and the common daily life of all men. + 

XXVII + 

From Neighborhood to Nation: The Unifying State + 

How can the will of the people be the sovereign power of the state? There must be two changes in our state: first, the state must be the actual integration of living, local groups, thereby finding ways of dealing directly with its individual members. Secondly, other groups than neighborhood groups must be represented in the state: the ever-increasing multiple group life of today must be recognized and given a responsible place in politics. + 

First, every neighborhood must be organized; the neighborhood groups must then be integrated, through larger intermediary groups, into a true state. Neither our cities nor our states can ever be properly administered until representatives from neighborhood groups meet to discuss and thereby to correlate the needs of all parts of the city, of all parts of the state. Social workers and medical experts have a conference on tuberculosis, social workers and educational experts have a conference on industrial education. We must now develop the methods by which the citizens also are represented at these conferences. We must go beyond this (for certain organizations, as the National Settlement Conference at least, do already have neighborhood representation), and develop the methods by which regular meetings of representatives from neighborhood organizations meet to discuss all city and state problems. Further still, we must give official recognition to such gatherings, we must make them a regular part of government. The neighborhood must be actually, not theoretically, an integral part of city, of state, of nation. + 

When Massachusetts is thus organized, the neighborhood groups and intermediary, or district, groups should send representatives to city council and state legislature. The Senate might be composed of experts⁠—experts in education, in housing, in sanitation etc. The neighborhood and district centres would receive reports from their representatives to city council and state legislature and take measures on these reports. They should also be required to send regular reports up to their representative bodies. We should have a definitely organized and strongly articulated network of personal interest and representative reporting. Then the state legislature must devise ways of dealing not only with the district group but with the neighborhood groups through the district group, and thus with every individual in the commonwealth. The nation too must have a real connection with every little neighborhood centre through state and district bodies. + 

America at war has found a way of getting word from Washington to the smallest local units. The Council of National Defense has a “Section of Cooperation with States.” This is connected with a State Council of Defense in every state. In most cases the State Council is connected with County Councils, and these often with councils in cities and towns. Beyond this the Council of National Defense has recently (February, 1918) recommended the extension of county organization by the creation of Community Councils in every school district. Its official statement opens with this sentence: “The first nine months of the war have shown the vital importance of developing an official nationwide organization reaching into the smallest communities to mobilize and make available the efforts of the whole people for the prosecution of the war.” And it goes on to say that the government must have such close contact with small units that personal relation with all the citizens is possible. + 

President Wilson in endorsing this step, said, + 

“[This is an] advance of vital significance. It will, I believe, result when thoroughly carried out in welding the nation together as no nation of great size has ever been welded before.⁠ ⁠… It is only by extending your organization to small communities that every citizen of the state can be reached.” + 

Thus when the government found that it must provide means to its hands for keeping constantly in touch with the whole membership of the nation, it planned to do this by the encouragement and fostering of neighborhood organization. The nation is now seeking the individual through neighborhood groups. It is using the School Centres (it recommends the schoolhouse as the best centre for community organization) for the teaching of Food and Fuel Conservation, for Liberty Loan and Red Cross work, for recruiting for the army, for enlisting workers for war industries, for teaching the necessity and methods of increasing the food supply, for plans to relieve transportation by cooperative shipments and deliveries, for patriotic education etc. This “patriotic education” has an interesting side. In a country which is even nominally a democracy you cannot win a war without explaining your aims and your policy and carrying your people with you step by step. If beyond this the country wishes to be really a democracy, the neighborhood groups must have a share in forming the aims and the policy. + 

Of course one would always prefer this to be a movement from below up rather than from above down, but it is not impossible for the two movements to go on at the same time, as they are in fact doing now with the rapid development of spontaneous local organization. There were Community Councils in existence in fact if not in name before the recommendation of the Council of National Defense. + 

Through these nonpartisan councils not only national policy can be explained and spread throughout the country, but also what one locality thinks out that is good can be reported to Washington and thus handed on to other sections of the country. It is a plan for sending the news backwards and forwards from individual to nation, from nation to individual, and it is also a plan for correlating the problems of the local community with the problems of the nation and of cooperating nations. + 

But why should we be more efficiently organized for war than for peace? Is our proverbial carelessness to be pricked into effectiveness only by emergency calls? Is the only motive you can offer us for efficiency⁠—to win? Or, if that is an instinctive desire, can we not change the goal and be as eager to win other things as war? + 

I speak of the new state as resting upon integrated neighborhood groups. While the changes necessary to bring this about would have to be planned and authorized by constitutional conventions, its psychological basis would be: (1) the fact that we are ready for membership in a larger group only by experience first in the smaller group, and (2) the natural tendency for a real group to seek other groups. Let us look at this second point. + 

We have seen the process of the single group evolving. But contemporaneously a thousand other unities are a-making. Every group once become conscious of itself instinctively seeks other groups with which to unite to form a larger whole. Alone it cannot be effective. As individual progress depends upon the degree of interpenetration, so group progress depends upon the interpenetration of group and group. For convenience I speak of each group as a whole, but from a philosophical point of view there is no whole, only an infinite striving for wholeness, only the principle of wholeness forever leading us on. + 

This is the social law: the law which connects neighborhood with neighborhood. The reason we want neighborhood organization is not to keep people within their neighborhoods but to get them out. The movement for neighborhood organization is a deliberate effort to get people to identify themselves actually, not sentimentally, with a larger and larger collective unit than the neighborhood. We may be able through our neighborhood group to learn the social process, to learn to evolve the social will, but the question before us is whether we have enough political genius to apply this method to city organization, national organization, and international organization. City must join with city, state with state, actually, not through party. Finally nation must join with nation. + 

The recommendation of the Council of National Defense which has been mentioned above would repay careful reading for the indications which one finds in it of the double purpose of neighborhood organization. It is definitely stated that the importance of the Community Council is in: (1) initiating work to meet its own war needs; and (2) in making all its local resources available for the nation. And again it is stated that: (1) in a democracy local emergencies can best be met by local action; and (2) that each local district should feel the duty of bearing its full share of the national burden. + 

Thus our national government clearly sees and specifically states that neighborhood organization is both for the neighborhood and for the nation: that it looks in, it looks out. Thus that which we are coming to understand as the true social process receives practical recognition in government policy. + 

I have said that neighborhood must join with neighborhood to form the state. This joining of neighborhood and neighborhood can be done neither directly nor imaginatively. It cannot be done directly: representation is necessary not only because the numbers would be too great for all neighborhoods to meet together, but because even if it were physically possible we should have created a crowd not a society. Theoretically when you have large numbers you get a big, composite consciousness made up of infinite kinds of fitting together of infinite kinds of individuals, but practically this varied and multiplied fitting together is not possible beyond a certain number. There must be representatives from the smallest units to the larger and larger, up to the federal state. + 

Secondly, neighborhoods cannot join with neighborhoods through the imagination alone. Various people have asserted that now we have large cities and solidarity cannot come by actual acquaintance, it must be got by appropriate appeals to the imagination, by having, for instance, courses of lectures to tell one part of a city about another part. But this alone will never be successful. Real solidarity will never be accomplished except by beginning somewhere the joining of one small group with another. We are told too that the uneducated man cannot think beyond his particular section of the universe. We can teach him to think beyond his particular section of the universe by actually making him participate in other sections through connecting his section with others. We are capable of being faithful to large groups as well as small, to complex groups as well as simple, to our city, to our nation, but this can be effected only by a certain process, and that process, while it may begin by a stimulation of the imagination, must, if it is going to bring forth results in real life, be a matter of actual experience. Only by actual union, not by appeals to the imagination, can the various and varied neighborhood groups be made the constituents of a sound, normal, unpartisan city life. Then being a member of a neighborhood group will mean at the same time being a member and a responsible member of the state. + 

I have spoken of the psychological tendency for group to seek group. Moreover, it is not possible to isolate yourself in your local group because few local needs can be met without joining with other localities, which have these same needs, in order to secure city or state action. We cannot get municipal regulation for the dance-hall in our neighborhood without joining with other neighborhoods which want the same thing and securing municipal regulation for all city dance-halls. If we want better housing laws, grants for industrial education, we join with other groups who want these things and become the state. And even if some need seems purely local, the method of satisfying it ought not to be for the South End to pull as hard as it can for a new ward building, say, while the North End is also pulling as hard as it can for a new ward building, and the winner of such tug-of-war to get the appropriation. If the South End wants a new ward building it should understand how much money is available for ward buildings, and if only enough for one this year, consider where it is most needed. Probably, whatever the evidence, it will be decided that it is most needed in the South End, but a step will be taken towards a different kind of decision in the future. + 

And we join not only to secure city and state but also federal action. If we want a river or harbor appropriation, we go to Congress. And if such demands are supplied at present on the logrolling basis, we can only hope that this will not always be so. When group organization has vitalized our whole political life, there may then be some chance that logrolling will be repudiated. + 

And we do not stop even at Washington. Immigration is a national and international problem, but the immigrant may live next door to you, and thus the immigration question becomes one of nearest concern. This intricate interweaving of our life allows no man to live to himself or to his neighborhood. + 

Then when neighborhood joins with neighborhood all the lessons learned in the simple group must be practised in the complex one. As the group lesson includes not only my responsibility to my group but my responsibility for my group, so I learn not only my duty to my neighborhood but that I am responsible for my neighborhood. Also it is seen that as the individuals of a group are interdependent, so the various groups are interdependent, and the problem is to understand just in what way they are interdependent and how they can be adjusted to one another. The process of the joining of several groups into a larger whole is exactly the same as the joining of individuals to form a group⁠—a reciprocal interaction and correlation. + 

The usual notion is that our neighborhood association is to evolve an idea, a plan, and then when we go to represent it at a meeting of neighborhood associations from different parts of the city that we are to try to push through the plan of action decided on by our own local group. If we do not do this, we are not supposed to be loyal. But we are certainly to do nothing of the kind. We are to try to evolve the collective idea which shall represent the new group, that is, the various neighborhood associations all acting together. We are told that we must not sacrifice the interests of the particular group we represent. No, but also we must not try to make its interests prevail against those of others. Its real interests are the interests of the whole. + 

And then when we have learned to be truly citizens of Boston, we must discover how Boston and other cities, how cities and the rural communities can join. And so on and so on. At last the “real” state appears. We are pragmatists because we do not want to unite with the state imaginatively, we want to be the state; we want to actualize and feel our way every moment, let every group open the way for a larger group, let every circumference become the centre of a new circumference. My neighborhood group opens the path to the State. + 

But neighborhoods cooperating actively with the city government is not today a dream. Marcus M. Marks, President of the Borough of Manhattan, New York City, in 1914 divided Manhattan into sixteen neighborhoods, and appointed for each a neighborhood commission composed of business men, professional men, mechanics, clerks etc.⁠—a thoroughly representative body chosen irrespective of party lines. Mr. Marks’ avowed object was to obtain a knowledge of the needs of his constituents, to form connecting links between neighborhoods and the city government. And these bodies need not exist dormant until their advice is asked. Sections 1 and 2 of the Rules and Regulations read: + 

The Commissions shall recommend, or suggest, to the Borough President, for his consideration and advice, matters which, in their opinion will be of benefit to their districts and to the City. + 

The Commissions shall receive from the Borough President suggestions or recommendations for their consideration as to matters affecting their districts, and report back their conclusions with respect thereto. + 

Moreover, beyond the recommendations of the Commission, the cooperation of the whole neighborhood is sought. “Whenever the commissions are in doubt as to the policy they desire to advocate and wish to further sound the sentiment of their localities, meetings similar to town-meetings are held, usually in the local schoolhouse.” The “neighborhoods” of Manhattan have cooperated with the city government in such matters as bus franchise, markets, location of tracks, floating baths, pavement construction, sewerage etc. One of the results of this plan, Mr. Marks tells us, is that many types of improvement which were formerly opposed, such as sewerage construction by the owners of abutting property, now receive the support of the citizens because there is opportunity for them to understand fully the needs of the situation and even to employ their own expert if they wish. + 

The chairmen of the twelve Neighborhood Commissions form a body called the Manhattan Commission. This meets to confer with the President on matters affecting the interests of the entire borough. + 

This plan, while not yet ideal, particularly in so far as the commissions are appointed from above, is most interesting to all those who are looking towards neighborhood organization as the basis of the new state. + 

To summarize: neighborhood groups join with other neighborhood groups to form the city⁠—then only shall we understand what it is to be the city; neighborhood groups join with other neighborhood groups to form the state⁠—then only shall we understand what it is to be the state. We do not begin with a unified state which delegates authority; we begin with the neighborhood group and create the state ourselves. Thus is the state built up through the intimate intertwining of all. + 

But this is not a crude and external federalism. We have not transferred the unit of democracy from the individual to the group. It is the individual man who must feel himself the unit of city government, of state government: he has not delegated his responsibility to his neighborhood group; he has direct relation with larger wholes. I have no medieval idea of mediate articulation, of individuals forming groups and groups forming the nation. Mechanical federalism we have long outgrown. The members of the nation are to be individuals, not groups. The movement for neighborhood organization is from one point of view a movement to give the individual political effectiveness⁠—it is an individualistic not a collectivistic movement, paradoxical as this may seem to superficial thinking. But, as the whole structure of government must rest on the individual, it must have its roots within that place where you can get nearest to him, and where his latent powers can best be freed and actualized⁠—his local group. + 

What are we ultimately seeking through neighborhood organization? To find the individual. But let no one think that the movement for neighborhood organization is a new movement. Our neighborhood organization, we are often told, had its origin in the New England town-meeting. Yes, and far beyond that in the early institutions of our English ancestors. That our national life must be grounded in the daily, intimate life of all men is the teaching of the whole long stream of English history. + 

We have seen that the increasing activity of the state, its social policies and social legislation, demands the activity of every man. We have seen in considering direct government that the activity of every man is not enough if we mean merely his activity at the polling booths. With the inclusion of all men and women (practically accomplished) in the suffrage, with the rapidly increasing acceptance of direct government, the extensive work of the democratic impulse has ended. Now the intensive work of democracy must begin. The great historic task of the Anglo-Saxon people has been to find wise and reasoned forms for the expression of individual responsibility, has been so to bulwark the rights of the individual as to provide at the same time for the unity and stability of the state. They have done this externally by making the machinery of representative government. We want today to do it spiritually, to direct the spiritual currents in their flow and interflow so that we have not only the external interpenetration⁠—choosing representatives etc.⁠—but the deeper interpenetration which shows the minds and needs and wants of all men. + 

We can satisfy our wants only by a genuine union and communion of all, only in the friendly outpouring of heart to heart. We have come to the time when we see that the machinery of government can be useful to us only so far as it is a living thing: the souls of men are the stones of Heaven, the life of every man must contribute fundamentally to the growth of the state. So the world spirit seeks freedom and finds it in a more and more perfect union of true individuals. The relation of neighbors one to another must be integrated into the substance of the state. Politics must take democracy from its external expression of representation to the expression of that inner meaning hidden in the intermingling of all men. This is our part today⁠—thus shall we take our place in the great task of our race. Our political life began in the small group, but it has taken us long to evolve our relation to a national life, and meanwhile much of the significance and richness of the local life has been lost. Back now to the local unit we must go with all that we have accumulated, to find in and through that our complete realization. Back we must go to this small primary unit if we would understand the meaning of democracy, if we would get the fruits of democracy. As Voltaire said, “The spirit of France is the candle of Europe,” so must the spirit of the neighborhood be the candle of the nation. + 