III. SECONDARY RELATIONS AND SOCIAL CONTROL
Modern methods of urban transportation and communication—the electric railway, the automobile, the telephone, and the radio—have silently and rapidly changed in recent years the social and industrial organization of the modern city. They have been the means of concentrating traffic in the business districts, have changed the whole character of retail trade, multiplying the residence suburbs and making the department store possible. These changes in the industrial organization and in the distribution of population have been accompanied by corresponding changes in the habits, sentiments, and character of the urban population.
The general nature of these changes is indicated by the fact that the growth of cities has been accompanied by the substitution of indirect, “secondary,” for direct, face-to-face, “primary” relations in the associations of individuals in the community.
By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and co-operation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one’s very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a “we”; it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which “we” is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling....[[10]]
Touch and sight, physical contact, are the basis for the first and most elementary human relationships. Mother and child, husband and wife, father and son, master and servant, kinsman and neighbor, minister, physician, and teacher—these are the most intimate and real relationships of life, and in the small community they are practically inclusive.
The interactions which take place among the members of a community so constituted are immediate and unreflecting. Intercourse is carried on largely within the region of instinct and feeling. Social control arises, for the most part spontaneously, in direct response to personal influences and public sentiment. It is the result of a personal accommodation, rather than the formulation of a rational and abstract principle.
The church, the school, and the family.—In a great city, where the population is unstable, where parents and children are employed out of the house and often in distant parts of the city, where thousands of people live side by side for years without so much as a bowing acquaintance, these intimate relationships of the primary group are weakened and the moral order which rested upon them is gradually dissolved.
Under the disintegrating influences of city life most of our traditional institutions, the church, the school, and the family, have been greatly modified. The school, for example, has taken over some of the functions of the family. It is around the public school and its solicitude for the moral and physical welfare of the children that something like a new neighborhood and community spirit tends to get itself organized.
The church, on the other hand, which has lost much of its influence since the printed page has so largely taken the place of the pulpit in the interpretation of life, seems at present to be in process of readjustment to the new conditions.
It is important that the church, the school, and the family should be studied from the point of view of this readjustment to the conditions of city life.
What changes have taken place in recent years in the family sentiments? in the attitudes of husbands toward wives? of wives toward husbands? of children toward parents, etc.?
What do the records of the juvenile and morals courts indicate in regard to this matter?
In what regions of social life have the mores on the subject of the family life changed most?
To what extent have these changes taken place in response to the influences of the city environment?
Similarly, investigations might be carried on with reference to the school and the church. Here, too, there is a changed attitude and changed policy in response to a changed environment. This is important because it is, in the last analysis, upon these institutions in which the immediate and vital interests of life find a corporate expression that social organization ultimately rests.
It is probably the breaking down of local attachments and the weakening of the restraints and inhibitions of the primary group, under the influence of the urban environment, which are largely responsible for the increase of vice and crime in great cities. It would be interesting in this connection to determine by investigation how far the increase in crime keeps pace with the increasing mobility of the population and to what extent this mobility is a function of the growth of population. It is from this point of view that we should seek to interpret all those statistics which register the disintegration of the moral order, for example, the statistics of divorce, of truancy, and of crime.
What is the effect of ownership of property, particularly of the home, on truancy, on divorce, and on crime?
In what regions and classes are certain kinds of crime endemic?
In what classes does divorce occur most frequently? What is the difference in this respect between farmers and, say, actors?
To what extent in any given racial group, for example, the Italians in New York or the Poles in Chicago, do parents and children live in the same world, speak the same language, and share the same ideas, and how far do the conditions found account for juvenile delinquency in that particular group?
How far are the home mores responsible for criminal manifestations of an immigrant group?
Crisis and the courts.—It is characteristic of city life that all sorts of people meet and mingle together who never fully comprehend one another. The anarchist and the club man, the priest and the Levite, the actor and the missionary who touch elbows on the street still live in totally different worlds. So complete is the segregation of vocational classes that it is possible within the limits of the city to live in an isolation almost as complete as that of some remote rural community.
Walter Besant tells the following anecdote of his experience as editor of the People’s Palace Journal:
In that capacity I endeavored to encourage literary effort, in the hope of lighting upon some unknown and latent genius. The readers of the Journal were the members of the various classes connected with the educational side of the place. They were young clerks chiefly—some of them very good fellows. They had a debating society which I attended from time to time. Alas! They carried on their debates in an ignorance the most profound, the most unconscious, and the most satisfied. I endeavored to persuade them that it was desirable at least to master the facts of the case before they spoke. In vain. Then I proposed subjects for essays, and offered prizes for verses. I discovered, to my amazement, that among all the thousands of these young people, lads and girls, there was not discoverable the least rudimentary indication of any literary power whatever. In all other towns there are young people who nourish literary ambitions, with some measure of literary ability. How should there be any in this town, where there were no books, no papers, no journals, and, at that time, no free libraries?[[11]]
In the immigrant colonies which are now well established in every large city, foreign populations live in an isolation which is different from that of the population of East London, but in some respects more complete.
The difference is that each one of these little colonies has a more or less independent political and social organization of its own, and is the center of a more or less vigorous nationalist propaganda. For example, each one of these groups has one or more papers printed in its own language. In New York City there were, a few years ago, 270 publications, most of them supported by the local population, printed in 23 different languages. In Chicago there were 19 daily papers published in 7 foreign languages with a combined daily circulation of 368,000 papers.
Under these conditions the social ritual and the moral order which these immigrants brought with them from their native countries have succeeded in maintaining themselves for a considerable time under the influences of the American environment. Social control, based on the home mores, breaks down, however, in the second generation.
We may express the relation of the city to this fact in general terms by saying that the effect of the urban environment is to intensify all effects of crisis.
The term “crisis” is not to be understood in a violent sense. It is involved in any disturbance of habit. There is a crisis in the boy’s life when he leaves home. The emancipation of the Negro and the immigration of the European peasant are group crises. Any strain of crisis involves three possible changes: greater fitness, reduced efficiency, or death. In biological terms, “survival” means successful adjustment to crisis, accompanied typically by a modification of structure. In man it means mental stimulation and greater intelligence, or mental depression, in case of failure.[[12]]
Under the conditions imposed by city life in which individuals and groups of individuals, widely removed in sympathy and understanding, live together under conditions of interdependence, if not of intimacy, the conditions of social control are greatly altered and the difficulties increased.
The problem thus created is usually characterized as one of “assimilation.” It is assumed that the reason for rapid increase of crime in our large cities is due to the fact that the foreign element in our population has not succeeded in assimilating American culture and does not conform to the American mores. This would be interesting, if true, but the facts seem to suggest that perhaps the truth must be sought in the opposite direction.
One of the most important facts established by the investigation concerns the American-born children of immigrants—the “second generation.” The records of convictions in the New York Court of General Sessions during the period from October 1, 1908, to June 30, 1909, and of all commitments to Massachusetts penal institutions, except those to the state farm, during the year ending September 30, 1909, form the basis of this analysis of the criminal tendencies of the second generation.
From these records it appears that a clear tendency exists on the part of the second generation to differ from the first or immigrant generation in the character of its criminality. It also appears that this difference is much more frequently in the direction of the criminality of the American-born of non-immigrant parentage than it is in the opposite direction. This means that the movement of the second-generation crime is away from the crimes peculiar to immigrants and toward those of the American of native parentage. Sometimes this movement has carried second-generation criminality even beyond that of the native-born of native parentage. Of the second-generation groups submitted to this comparison, one maintains a constant adherence to the general rule above referred to, while all the others at some point fail to follow it. This unique group is the Irish second generation.[[13]]
What we do observe, as a result of the crisis, is that control that was formerly based on mores was replaced by control based on positive law. This change runs parallel to the movement by which secondary relationships have taken the place of primary relationships in the association of individuals in the city environment.
It is characteristic of the United States that great political changes should be effected experimentally under the pressure of agitation or upon the initiative of small but militant minorities. There is probably no other country in the world in which so many “reforms” are in progress as at the present time in the United States. Reform has, in fact, become a kind of popular “indoor sport.” The reforms thus effected, almost without exception, involve some sort of restriction or governmental control over activities that were formerly “free” or controlled only by the mores and public opinion.
The effect of this extension of what is called the police power has been to produce a change, not merely in the fundamental policy of the law, but in the character and standing of the courts.
The juvenile and morals courts illustrate a change which is perhaps taking place elsewhere. In these courts the judges have assumed something of the functions of administrative officers, their duties consisting less in the interpretation of law than in prescribing remedies and administering advice intended to restore delinquents brought before them to their normal place in society.
A similar tendency to give judges a wide discretion and to impose upon them a further responsibility is manifest in those courts which have to deal with the technical affairs of the business world, and in the growth in popularity of commissions in which judicial and administrative functions are combined, for example, the Interstate Commerce Commission.
In order to interpret in a fundamental way the facts in regard to social control it is important to start with a clear conception of the nature of corporate action.
Corporate action begins when there is some sort of communication between individuals who constitute a group. Communication may take place at different levels; that is, suggestions may be given and responded to on the instinctive, senso-motor, or ideo-motor levels. The mechanism of communication is very subtle, so subtle, in fact, that it is often difficult to conceive how suggestions are conveyed from one mind to another. This does not imply that there is any special form of consciousness, any special sense of kinship or consciousness of kind, necessary to explain corporate action.
In fact, it has recently been shown that in the case of certain highly organized and static societies, like that of the well-known ant, probably nothing that we would call communication takes place.
It is a well-known fact that if an ant be removed from a nest and afterward put back it will not be attacked, while almost invariably an ant belonging to another nest will be attacked. It has been customary to use the words memory, enmity, friendship, in describing this fact. Now Bethe made the following experiment. An ant was placed in the liquids (blood and lymph) squeezed out from the bodies of nest companions and was then put back into its nest; it was not attacked. It was then put in the juice taken from the inmates of a “hostile” nest, and was at once attacked and killed.[[14]]
A further instance of the manner in which ants communicate will illustrate how simple and automatic communication may become on the instinctive level.
An ant, when taking a new direction from the nest for the first time, always returns by the same path. This shows that some trace must be left behind which serves as a guide back to the nest. If an ant returning by this path bears no spoils, Bethe found that no other ants try this direction. But if it bring back honey or sugar, other ants are sure to try the path. Hence something of the substances carried over this path by the ants must remain on the path. These substances must be strong enough to affect the ants chemically.[[15]]
The important fact is that by means of this comparatively simple device corporate action is made possible.
Individuals not only react upon one another in this reflex way, but they inevitably communicate their sentiments, attitudes, and organic excitements, and in doing so they necessarily react, not merely to what each individual actually does, but to what he intends, desires, or hopes to do. The fact that individuals often betray sentiments and attitudes to others of which they are themselves only dimly conscious makes it possible for individual A, for example, to act upon motives and tensions in B as soon, or even before, B is able to do so. Furthermore, A may act upon the suggestions that emanate from B without himself being clearly conscious of the source from which his motives spring. So subtle and intimate may the reactions be which control individuals who are bound together in a social-psychological process.
It is upon the basis of this sort of instinctive and spontaneous control that every more formal sort of control must be based in order to be effective.
Changes in the form of social control may for the purposes of investigation be grouped under the general heads:
1. The substitution of positive law for custom, and the extension of municipal control to activities that were formerly left to individual initiative and discretion.
2. The disposition of judges in municipal and criminal courts to assume administrative function so that the administration of the criminal law ceases to be a mere application of the social ritual and becomes an application of rational and technical methods, requiring expert knowledge or advice, in order to restore the individual to society and repair the injury that his delinquency has caused.
3. Changes and divergencies in the mores among the different isolated and segregated groups in the city. What are the mores, for example, of the shopgirl? the immigrant? the politician? and the labor agitator?
It should be the aim of these investigations to distinguish not merely the causes of these changes, the direction in which they are moving, but also the forces that are likely to minimize and neutralize them. For example, it is important to know whether the motives which are at present multiplying the positive restrictions on the individual will necessarily go as far in this country as they have already done in Germany. Will they eventually bring about a condition approaching socialism?
Commercialized vice and the liquor traffic.—Social control, under the conditions of city life, can, perhaps, be best studied in its attempts to stamp out vice and control the liquor traffic.
The saloon and the vice establishments have come into existence as a means of exploiting appetites and instincts fundamental to human nature. This makes the efforts that have been made to regulate and suppress these forms of exploitation and traffic interesting and important as subjects of investigation.
Such an investigation should be based upon thorough study: (1) of the human nature upon which the commerce has been erected, (2) of the social conditions which tend to convert normal appetites into social vices, (3) of the practical effects of the efforts to limit, control, and stamp out the vice traffic and to do away with the use and sale of liquor.
Among the things that we should desire to know are:
To what extent is the appetite for alcoholic stimulus a prenatal disposition?
To what extent may such an appetite be transferred from one form of stimulation to another; that is, e.g., from whiskey to cocaine, etc.?
To what extent is it possible to substitute normal and healthful for pathological and vicious stimulations?
What are the social and moral effects of secret drinking?
Where a taboo is established early in life, does it have the effect of idealizing the delights of indulgence? Does it do this in some cases and not in others? If so, what are the contributing circumstances? Do men suddenly lose the taste for liquor and other stimulants? What are the conditions under which this happens?
Many of these questions can be answered only by a study of individual experiences. Vices undoubtedly have their natural history, like certain forms of disease. They may therefore be regarded as independent entities which find their habitat in human environment, are stimulated by certain conditions, inhibited by others, but invariably exhibit through all changes a character that is typical.
In the early days the temperance movement had something of the character of a religious revival, and the effects were highly picturesque. In recent years the leaders have displayed a more deliberate strategy, but the struggle against the liquor traffic still has all the characteristics of a big popular movement, a movement which, having first conquered the rural districts, is now seeking to enforce itself in the cities.
On the other hand, the vice crusade started with the cities, where, in fact, commercialized vice is indigenous. The mere discussion of this subject in public has meant an enormous change in the sex mores. The fact that this movement is everywhere coincident with the entrance of women into a greater freedom, into industry, the professions, and party politics, is significant.
There are conditions peculiar to the life of great cities (referred to under the heading “Mobility of the Population of Great Cities”) which make the control of vice especially difficult. For example, crusades and religious movements generally do not have the same success in the city environment that they do in the smaller and less heterogeneous communities. What are the conditions which make this true?
Perhaps the facts most worth studying in connection with the movement for suppression of vice are those which indicate the changes which have taken place in fifty years in sex mores, particularly with reference to what is regarded as modest and immodest in the dress and behavior, and with reference to the freedom with which sexual matters are now discussed by young men and young women.
It seems, in fact, as if we were in the presence of two epoch-making changes, the one which seems destined finally to put intoxicating liquors in the category of poisonous drugs, and the other to lift the taboo which, particularly among Anglo-Saxon peoples, has effectually prevented up to the present time the frank discussion of the facts of sex.
Party politics and publicity.—There is everywhere at present a disposition to increase the power of the executive branch of the government at the expense of the legislative. The influence of state legislatures and of city councils has been diminished in some instances by the introduction of the referendum and the recall. In others they have been largely superseded by the commission form of government. The ostensible reason for these changes is that they offer a means for overthrowing the power of the professional politicians. The real ground seems to me the recognition of the fact that the form of government which had its origin in the town meeting and was well suited to the needs of a small community based on primary relations is not suitable to the government of the changing and heterogeneous populations of cities of three or four millions.
Much, of course, depends upon the character and size of the population. Where it is of American stock, and the number of voting citizens is not too great for thorough and calm discussion, no better school of politics can be imagined nor any method of managing affairs more certain to prevent jobbery and waste, to stimulate vigilance and breed contentment. When, however, the town meeting has grown to exceed seven or eight hundred persons, and, still more, when any considerable section are strangers, such as Irish or French Canadians, who have latterly poured into New England, the institution works less perfectly because the multitude is too large for debate, factions are likely to spring up, and the immigrants, untrained in self-government, become the prey of wire pullers or petty demagogues.[[16]]
For one thing, the problems of city government have become, with the growth and organization of city life, so complicated that it is no longer desirable to leave them to the control of men whose only qualification for handling them consists in the fact that they have succeeded in gaining office through the ordinary machinery of ward politics.
Another circumstance which has made the selection of city officials by popular vote impractical under the conditions of city life is the fact that, except in special cases, the voter knows little or nothing about the officials he is voting for; knows little or nothing about the functions of the office to which that official is to be elected; and, besides all the rest, is too busy elsewhere to inform himself about conditions and needs of the city as a whole.
At a recent election in Chicago, for example, voters were called upon to select candidates from a ballot containing 250 names, most of them unknown to the voters. Under these circumstances the citizen who wishes to vote intelligently relies on some more or less interested organization or some more or less interested advisor to tell him how to vote.
To meet this emergency, created primarily by conditions imposed by city life, two types of organization have come into existence for controlling those artificial crises that we call elections. One of these is the organization represented by the political boss and the political machine. The other is that represented by the independent voters’ leagues, taxpayers’ associations, and organizations like the bureaus of municipal research.
It is an indication of the rather primitive conditions in which our political parties were formed that they sought to govern the country on the principle that the remedy for all sorts of administrative evils was to “turn the rascals out,” as the popular phrase expressed it, a change of government. The political machine and the political boss have come into existence in the interest of party politics. The parties were necessarily organized to capture elections. The political machine is merely a technical device invented for the purpose of achieving this end. The boss is the expert who runs the machine. He is as necessary to the winning of an election as a professional coach is necessary to success at football.
It is characteristic of the two types of organization which have grown up for the purpose of controlling the popular vote that the first, the political machine, is based, on the whole, on local, personal, that is to say, primary, relationships. The second, the good-government organizations, make their appeal to the public, and the public, as we ordinarily understand that expression, is a group based on secondary relationships. Members of a public are not as a rule personally acquainted.
The political machine is, in fact, an attempt to maintain, inside the formal administrative organization of the city, the control of a primary group. The organizations thus built up, of which Tammany Hall is the classic illustration, appear to be thoroughly feudal in their character. The relations between the boss and his ward captain seem to be precisely that, of personal loyalty on one side and personal protection on the other, which the feudal relation implies. The virtues which such an organization calls out are the old tribal ones of fidelity, loyalty, and devotion to the interests of the chief and the clan. The people within the organization, their friends and supporters, constitute a “we” group, while the rest of the city is merely the outer world, which is not quite alive and not quite human in the sense in which the members of the “we” group are. We have here something approaching the conditions of primitive society.
The conception of “primitive society” which we ought to form is that of small groups scattered over a territory. The size of the groups is determined by the conditions of the struggle for existence. The internal organization of each group corresponds to its size. A group of groups may have some relation to each other (kin, neighborhood, alliance, connubium, and commercium) which draws them together and differentiates them from others. Thus a differentiation arises between ourselves, the we-group or in-group, and everybody else or the others-groups, out-groups. The insiders in a we-group are in a relation of peace, order, law, government, and industry, to each other. Their relation to all outsiders, or others-groups, is one of war and plunder, except so far as agreements have modified it.
The relation of comradeship and peace in the we-group and that of hostility and war toward others-groups are correlative to each other. The exigencies of war with outsiders are what make peace inside, lest internal discord should weaken the we-group for war. These exigencies also make government and law in the in-group, in order to prevent quarrels and enforce discipline.[[17]]
The politics of most great cities offer abundant materials for the study of the type represented by the political boss, as well as the social mechanisms created by and embodied in the political machine. It is necessary, however, that we study them disinterestedly. Some of the questions we should seek to answer are:
What, as a matter of fact, is the political organization at any point within the city? What are the sentiments and attitudes and interests which find expression through it?
What are the practical devices it employs for mobilizing its forces and putting them into action?
What is the character of the party appeal in the different moral regions of which the city is made up?
How much of the interest in politics is practical and how much is mere sport?
What part of the cost of elections is advertising? How much of it can be classed as “educational publicity,” and how much is pure graft?
To what extent, under existing conditions, particularly as we find them in great cities, can elections be practically controlled by purely technical devices, card catalogues, torch-light processions, spell binders—machinery?
What effect will the introduction of the referendum and recall have upon present methods of conducting elections in cities?
Advertising and social control.—In contrast with the political machine, which has founded its organized action on the local, personal, and immediate interests represented by the different neighborhoods and localities, the good-government organizations, the bureaus of municipal research, and the like have sought to represent the interests of the city as a whole and have appealed to a sentiment and opinion neither local nor personal. These agencies have sought to secure efficiency and good government by the education of the voter, that is to say, by investigating and publishing the facts regarding the government.
In this way publicity has come to be a recognized form of social control, and advertising—“social advertising”—has become a profession with an elaborate technique supported by a body of special knowledge.
It is one of the characteristic phenomena of city life and of society founded on secondary relationships that advertising should have come to occupy so important a place in its economy.
In recent years every individual and organization which has had to deal with the public, that is to say the public outside the smaller and more intimate communities of the village and small town, has come to have its press agent, who is often less an advertising man than a diplomatic man accredited to the newspapers, and through them to the world at large. Institutions like the Russell Sage Foundation, and to a less extent, the General Education Board have sought to influence public opinion directly through the medium of publicity. The Carnegie Report upon Medical Education, the Pittsburgh Survey, the Russel Sage Foundation Report on Comparative Costs of Public-School Education in the several states, are something more than scientific reports. They are rather a high form of journalism, dealing with existing conditions critically, and seeking through the agency of publicity to bring about radical reforms. The work of the Bureau of Municipal Research in New York has had a similar practical purpose. To these must be added the work accomplished by the child-welfare exhibits, by the social surveys undertaken in different parts of the country, and by similar propaganda in favor of public health.
As a source of social control public opinion becomes important in societies founded on secondary relationships, of which great cities are a type. In the city every social group tends to create its own milieu and, as these conditions become fixed, the mores tend to accommodate themselves to the conditions thus created. In secondary groups and in the city fashion tends to take the place of custom, and public opinion, rather than the mores, becomes the dominant force in social control.
In any attempt to understand the nature of public opinion and its relation to social control it is important to investigate first of all the agencies and devices which have come into practical use in the effort to control, enlighten, and exploit it.
The first and the most important of these is the press, that is, the daily newspaper and other forms of current literature, including books classed as current.[[18]]
After the newspaper, the bureaus of research which are now springing up in all the large cities are the most interesting and the most promising devices for using publicity as a means of control.
The fruits of these investigations do not reach the public directly, but are disseminated through the medium of the press, the pulpit, and other sources of popular enlightenment.
In addition to these there are the educational campaigns in the interest of better health conditions, the child-welfare exhibits, and the numerous “social advertising” devices which are now employed, sometimes upon the initiative of private societies, sometimes upon that of popular magazines or newspapers, in order to educate the public and enlist the masses of the people in the movement for the improvement of conditions of community life.
The newspaper is the great medium of communication within the city, and it is on the basis of the information which it supplies that public opinion rests. The first function which a newspaper supplies is that which formerly was performed by the village gossip.
In spite, however, of the industry with which newspapers pursue facts of personal intelligence and human interest, they cannot compete with the village gossips as a means of social control. For one thing, the newspaper maintains some reservations not recognized by gossip, in the matters of personal intelligence. For example, until they run for office or commit some other overt act that brings them before the public conspicuously, the private life of individual men or women is a subject that is, for the newspaper, taboo. It is not so with gossip, partly because in a small community no individual is so obscure that his private affairs escape observation and discussion; partly because the field is smaller. In small communities there is a perfectly amazing amount of personal information afloat among the individuals who compose them.
The absence of this in the city is what, in large part, makes the city what it is.
Some of the questions that arise in regard to the nature and function of the newspaper and of publicity generally are:
What is news?
What are the methods and motives of the newspaper man? Are they those of an artist? a historian? or merely those of a merchant?
To what extent does the newspaper control and to what extent is it controlled by public sentiment?
What is a “fake” and why?
What is yellow journalism and why is it yellow?
What would be the effect of making the newspaper a municipal monopoly?
What is the difference between advertising and news?