I. THE PROBLEM STATED
Recent local studies in Chicago seem to show that the number of competent persons in the community is frequently no real measure of the competency—if one may use that expression in this connection—of the community itself. A high communal intelligence quotient does not always, it seems, insure communal efficiency.
The explanation that at once suggests itself is that competent persons presumably are specialists deeply concerned in the little area of human experience in which they have chosen to operate, but profoundly indifferent to the interests of the particular geographical area in which they may happen to reside.
It is the incompetent persons, apparently, who still maintain an interest that could in any sense be called lively in the local communities of our great cities. Women, particularly women without professional training, and immigrants who are locally segregated and immured within the invisible walls of an alien language are bound to have some sort of interest in their neighbors. Children in great cities, who necessarily live close to the ground, however, are the real neighbors. Boys’ gangs are neighborhood institutions. Politicians are professional neighbors. When the boys’ gangs are graduated, as they frequently are, into local politics, the local political boss assumes toward them the rôle of patron, and they assume toward him the rôle of clients.
The competent people—that is to say, the professional people—are, on the other hand, either physically or in imagination, abroad most of the time. They live in the city—in their offices and in their clubs. They go home to sleep. Most of our residential suburbs tend to assume, as far as the professional classes are concerned, the character of dormitories. It is seldom that anyone who is sufficiently eminent or sufficiently competent to find a place in Who’s Who has time for anything more than a benevolent interest in his local community.
On the other hand, the competent people are keenly alive to the interests of their professions, and if we could organize our politics, as the Russians have sought to organize theirs, on the basis of occupations, that is, in soviets, it might be possible to awaken in our intelligenzia a more than dilettante and sporting interest in local politics and the problems of the local community. But the actual situation is different.
Our political system is founded on the presumption that the local community is the local political unit. If the local community is organized, knows its own local interests, and has a mind of its own, democracy prospers. It is said that 50 per cent of the qualified voters in this country do not exercise the franchise. So far as this is an index of their indifference to local community interests, it is at the same time a measure of the efficiency or inefficiency of the local community.
The National Community Center Association represents one of many efforts in recent years to alter the situation of which non-voting is perhaps one evidence. Community organizations aim, for one thing, to discover, to organize, and to make available for the local community the local community’s resources, particularly its human resources. The extent to which it succeeds is the measure of its efficiency. How to assess these resources, how to use them: these are problems.