The city

by Robert Ezra Park; E. W. Burgess; Roderick Duncan McKenzie

III. THE FAMILY AS A CORPORATE PERSON

After the individual’s own person, the most intimate environment to which the person responds is the family. The family is, or was, under earlier and simpler conditions of life, a sort of larger corporate person. Among the Polish peasants, for example, where the family completely dominates the individual, “husband and wife,” we are told, “are not individuals more or less closely connected according to their personal sentiments, but group members, controlled by both the united families.”[^[59]] It is on this basis that we can understand completely the letters written by immigrant boys to their parents asking them to send them wives:

Dearest Parents:

Please do not be angry with me for what I shall write. I write you that it is hard to live alone, so please find some girl for me, but an orderly [honest] one, for in America there is not even one single orderly [Polish] girl.... [December 21, 1902.] I thank you kindly for your letter, for it was happy. As to the girl, although I don’t know her, my companion, who knows her, says that she is stately and pretty, and I believe him, as well as you, my parents.... Please inform me which one (of the sisters) is to come, the older or the younger one, whether Aledsandra or Stanislawa.[^[60]]

Of such a family it may almost be said that the unrebellious and completely accommodated individuals who compose it have ceased to exist as persons. They have no independent social status and no personal responsibilities except as members of the family group.

The family, as it exists under modern conditions, has fallen from the high estimation in which it was held by an earlier generation. I once heard a distinguished psychologist say that he had been forced to the conclusion, after much patient study, that the family was probably the worst possible place in which to bring up a child. In general, I should say the psychiatrists seem to have a very poor opinion of the modern family as an environment for children. This opinion, if it is not justified, is at least supported by studies of juvenile delinquency made some years ago, in which it appeared that 50 per cent of the delinquencies studied were from broken homes.

The “one-child family” is now generally recognized as one of the characteristic social situations in which egocentric behavior is likely to manifest itself. It is certain that parents, just because of their solicitude for the welfare of their offspring, are not always safe companions for them. However that may be today, it is certain that in the past it was within the limits of the family group that most of the traits which we may describe as human were originally developed.

Outside the circle of the family and the neighborhood, within which intimate and the so-called “primary relations” are maintained, there is the larger circle of influences we call the community; the local community, and then the larger, organized community, represented by the city and the nation. And out beyond the limits of these there are beginning to emerge the vast and vague outlines of that larger world-community which Graham Wallas has described under the title, The Great Society.

The community, then, is the name that we give to this larger and most inclusive social milieu, outside of ourselves, our family, and our immediate neighborhood, in which the individual maintains not merely his existence as an individual, but his life as a person.

The community, including the family, with its wider interests, its larger purposes, and its more deliberate aims, surrounds us, incloses us, and compels us to conform; not by mere pressure from without, not by the fear of censure merely, but by the sense of our interest in, and responsibility to, certain interests not our own.

The sources of our actions are, no doubt, in the organic impulses of the individual man; but actual conduct is determined more or less by public opinion, by custom, and by a code which exists outside of us in the family, in the neighborhood, and in the community. This community, however, with its less immediate purposes and its more deliberate aims, is always more or less outside of, and alien to, us; much more so than the family, for example, or any other congenial group. This is to such an extent true that certain sociological writers have conceived society as having an existence quite independent of the individuals who compose it at any given time. Under these circumstances the natural condition of the individual in society is one of conflict; conflict with other individuals, to be sure, but particularly conflict with the conventions and regulations of the social group of which he is a member. Personal freedom—self-expression, as we have learned to call it in recent years—is, therefore, if not a fruitless, still a never ending, quest.

Only gradually, as he succeeds in accommodating himself to the life of the larger group, incorporating into the specific purposes and ambitions of his own life the larger and calmer purposes of the society in which he lives, does the individual man find himself quite at home in the community of which he is a part.

If this is true of mankind as a whole, it is still more true of the younger person. The natural impulses of the child are inevitably so far from conforming to the social situation in which he finds himself that his relations to the community seem to be almost completely defined in a series of “don’ts.” Under these circumstances juvenile delinquency is, within certain age-limits at least, not merely something to be expected; it may almost be said to be normal.

It is in the community, rather than in the family, that our moral codes first get explicit and formal definition and assume the external and coercive character of municipal law.