Woman's work in municipalities

by Mary Ritter Beard

Financing of Public Recreation

Women formed part of a New York group of public-spirited citizens that, in the summer of 1914, presented to the Board of Estimate and Apportionment, the budget-making authority of the city, an important memorandum dealing with the great problem of financing the urgent recreational facilities such as those we have outlined. The Survey published the following commentary on this memorandum:

Beginning with the statement that not more than 5 per cent. of the population is reached daily by all the intensive or active recreations under public control, the memorandum finds that “the mass of the people depend on commercialized amusements, notably saloons, motion pictures, and dance halls, and on the street, which is the demoralizing and dangerous playground of most of the children. We urge that wholesome recreation, publicly controlled, is needed by all the people, not by the small fraction now cared for.”

In other words, the signers of the memorandum regard public recreation as being as much a public function as education. “It is impossible,” says the memorandum, “for the individual to buy wholesome recreation. Wholesome recreation, in which the social and civic elements are present, can only be provided through community coöperation.” Public recreation is net only for the poor, but for everyone, and without it the rich are nearly as helpless as the poor.

Free recreation made available to the mass of the people would cost the city between $30,000,000 and $40,000,000, a sum impossible to raise by taxation. Yet, says the memorandum, “the people of New York gladly pay $10,000,000 a year for mediocre commercial motion-picture shows, but the city takes it for granted that they will or should pay nothing at all for amusements more attractive, including motion pictures, which can be offered on public properties. The 600 dance halls of the city are operated in considerable part by voluntary groups who pay for the privilege of using the halls, but the city takes for granted that its public properties cannot be operated, even in part, by voluntary groups, and that the people will not or should not pay.”

The mass of the people are thus paying for poor recreation which is not merely neutral, but often demoralizing. The memorandum goes on:

“It has been shown through complete investigation that most juvenile crime is directly due to the attempt to play in the streets or in other forbidden places. There is much evidence that crime among women, especially that which leads to the social evil, is due in large part to the influences which surround women in their search for recreation. Neither commerce nor public effort has provided family recreation places, and most wage-earning families in New York have no leisure resources beyond what they can find in their tenement homes, on the streets, or in a small class of commercial resorts.”

In other words, the memorandum is a challenge to the city to go into vigorous competition with commercialized amusements and develop all public properties to the limit for leisure purposes, as the only means whereby crime can be radically controlled, the family held together in its pleasures, or civic education carried ahead.

The memorandum proceeds to lay down a constructive program by which this wider use of all public properties can be put into effect in line with the social center idea. Its program involves neighborhood organization, the shaping of public amusement according to local needs. It involves equally self-government in the use of public properties for leisure purposes. It goes further and argues that local self-support is necessary before self-government can become a reality.

It urges, in the first place, that public recreation cannot be generally developed unless this be done in a partially self-supporting way, through dues, entrance fees, or the method of private concessions operated on public property. The tax burden would be impossible by any other plan.

It urges also that local self-government in social centers will be a mere pretense unless it be accompanied with the power to disburse funds. Self-government is desired primarily because it means that the local center will, through self-government, begin to take on individuality, to develop a neighborhood policy, to seek the fulfillment of neighborhood needs.

For all these purposes a budget will be necessary, and the most direct, obvious and disciplinary way to raise the budget is through local effort. The natural method, as already demonstrated in several New York schools, is to charge an entrance fee to a few popular features of the center, preferably those which compete directly with the commercialized amusements. Moving pictures and public dancing are illustrations. These features, and others such as amateur theatricals, athletic meets, sociables and bazaars, the renting of rooms in the school building, club dues, etc., can be made not only self-supporting but profitable and the surplus can be applied to other non-profitable activities. At present, even in New York, some social centers, such as the well-known center in Public School 63, Manhattan, meet all local expenses, including supervision and janitor service, by such means as these.

The following paragraph from the memorandum is suggestive:

“Those men and women who are members of private clubs, insist on being allowed to spend their social hours with their own group, among people who want what they want in the way they want it. The great mass of the people, who have no private clubs, are entitled to these same privileges. They too are entitled to pay for their own recreation, to govern their own recreation, and to spend their leisure hours with their own social group. The social center, whether it be on school property, park property, or other public property, is such by reason of the very fact that it gives this kind of right to the average man, woman or child.... The aim of the social center is that public money shall provide simply the basic physical opportunity for recreation, while the people themselves, through the effort of organized voluntary groups, shall make their own recreation, govern it and pay for it. The social center is not a form of paternalism, for it merely provides the channels through which the social life can flow, just as the street provides the channel through which the physical city is able to move.”

CHAPTER V
THE ASSIMILATION OF RACES

One of the unique, if not the one unique, American problem has been that of assimilating great masses of nearly all the important races of the earth. As far as European and Asiatic races are concerned the question of absorption into the American nation has been largely an urban one. More and more the assimilation of the negro also is becoming an urban problem, for the migration of negroes to the towns and cities is a significant part of the general movement of the population cityward. The Census of 1910 showed that more than one-fourth of the negro population now dwells in towns of 2,500 population and over. Thirty-nine cities have ten thousand or more negroes; five northern and seven southern cities have more than forty thousand negroes each. Negroes are not only moving to the cities, but the Census further shows that in each of twenty-seven large cities, negroes form one-fourth or more of the total population and in four cities they constitute one-half the population.

On one side the question of assimilation of all races in the cities is a labor problem: one of employment, a living wage, proper housing, and industrial opportunity. On the other, it is a social problem: one of education, recreation, common counsel, investigation, publicity, and protection. It is with the social aspects of assimilation that we shall deal in this chapter.