III. THE MEASUREMENT OF COMMUNAL EFFICIENCY
This, then, is our community. How are we to measure its efficiency? Here, I am bound to confess, we have still much to learn.
The simplest and most elementary way of estimating the competency and efficiency of a community, as something different from the competency and efficiency of the individual men and women who compose it, is by a comparative study of that community’s social statistics. Poverty, disease, and delinquency have frequently been called social diseases. They may be said to measure the extent to which the community has been able to provide an environment in which the individuals which compose it are able to live, or, to state it from the opposite point of view, they measure the extent to which the individuals who compose the community have been able to adapt themselves to the environment which the community provided.
The immigrant community manifestly exists to enable the immigrant to live. By life, however, we mean something more than mere physical existence. Man is a creature such that when he lives at all he lives in society, lives in his hopes, in his dreams, and in the minds of other men. In some way or another, man is bound to realize all his fundamental wishes, and these wishes, according to Dr. W. I. Thomas, are four:
He must have (1) security, that is, a home; some place to go out from and return to.
He must have (2) new experience, recreation, adventure, new sensations.
He must have (3) recognition, i.e., he must belong to some society in which he has status, some group in which he is somebody; somewhere or other, in short, he must be a person, rather than a mere cog in the economic or social machine.
Finally (4) he must have affection, intimate association with someone or something, even though it be merely a cat or a dog, for which he feels affection and knows that affection is returned. All special human wishes reduce finally to these four categories, and no human creature is likely to be wholesome and happy unless, in some form or manner, all four of these wishes are more or less adequately realized.[[62]]
While I was on the Pacific Coast a few months ago, studying what we have called “race relations,” I was impressed by the marked differences, as between immigrant groups, with respect to their ability to accommodate themselves to the American environment and, within the limitations imposed upon them by our customs and our laws, to provide for all the interests of life.
Immigrant communities are likely to include within the circle of their interests and their organizations all the interests of life. Every immigrant community will have a religious organization—a synagogue, a temple, or a church—with its related, often dependent, mutual aid and welfare organizations. It will have also its own business enterprises, its clubs, lodges, coffee houses, restaurants and gathering places, and a press. Every immigrant community is likely to have its press in America even if it did not have one in the home country. The immigrant colony is frequently nothing more than a transplanted village, for America actually has been colonized not by races or by nationalities, but by villages.
As to the competence of these immigrant communities to provide an environment in which immigrants can live, Raymond Pearl’s paper, “The Racial Origin of Almshouse Paupers in the United States,” published in Science (October 31, 1924), throws some light.
One paragraph in that paper states the situation as between the nation and the foreign-born. It says:
While on January 1, 1923, there were in almshouses 59.8 native-born white persons per 100,000 of the same class in the population, the corresponding figure for the foreign-born was 173.6. This is by some regarded as a fact of dread significance. Perhaps it is. To me it seems possibly only an interesting expression of the difficulties which the human organism finds in adapting itself to a new environment.
If these figures may be regarded, as Dr. Pearl suggests that they should, as an index of the difficulties which the human organism finds in adapting itself to a new environment, the more detailed study of the various racial groups exhibits some surprising results.
They show, in the first place, wide divergencies in the capacity of different immigrant groups to adapt themselves to American life; they show, in the second place, that the races and nationalities that have lived here longest are the least able to meet the demands of the new environment. Dr. Pearl states it in this way:
With a few trifling exceptions, all the countries from which the present law encourages immigration contributed to almshouse pauperism in 1923 in excess of their representation in the population in 1920. On the other hand, again with a few trifling exceptions, those countries from which the present immigration law was especially framed to discourage immigration appear in the lower part of the diagram, because they contribute a smaller proportion to almshouse pauperism in 1923 than their representation in the general population in 1920.
Two things strike me as significant in this connection: (1) It is the recent immigrants who contribute least to the almshouse population; (2) among these recent immigrants it is, apparently, those who for one reason or another are least willing or able to participate in American life who contribute the least to our almshouse population.
Why is this true? My own inference is that the decisive factors are not biological, but sociological. The explanation of the almshouse statistics, in other words, is less a matter of racial temperament than of social tradition. It is the immigrants who have maintained in this country their simple village religions and mutual aid organizations who have been most able to withstand the shock of the new environment.
The whole subject needs to be investigated further. What would a comparative study of different racial and language groups with reference to disease, delinquency, and family disorganization show? What would a comparison of the Japanese, Chinese, and Mexicans show with reference to crime? I mention these three groups because they are living and working side by side on the Pacific Coast.
The census of 1910 showed the Mexicans to have the highest crime rate of any immigrant group in the United States. My conviction is that when we obtain the facts we shall find that the Japanese have the lowest crime rate, at least the lowest of any immigrant group on the Coast.
The explanation is that the Japanese—and the same is true of the Chinese—have organized what we may call “control organizations” to deal at once with disputes arising among themselves and with the larger community outside.
The Japanese Association, like the Chinese Six Companies, is organized to keep their nationals out of the courts. But the Japanese Association is more than a court of arbitration and conciliation. Its function is not merely to settle disputes, but to maintain the morale of the local Japanese community and to promote in every practical way, mainly by education, the efforts of the Japanese people to make their way in the communities in which they live. With the possible exception of the Jews, the Japanese are better informed than any other group about the condition of their own people in America.
One thing that has sensibly raised the morale of the Japanese, as it has, indeed of the Jews, is its struggle to maintain its racial status in the United States. Nothing, as Sumner observed, so easily establishes solidarity within the group as an attack from without. Nothing so contributes to the discipline of a racial or national minority as the opposition of the racial or national majority.
The peoples who are making, or have made in recent years, the most progress in America today are, I suspect, the Jews, the Negroes, and the Japanese. There is, of course, no comparison to be made between the Jew, the Japanese, and the Negro as to their racial competence. Of all the immigrant peoples in the United States, the Jews are the most able and the most progressive; the Negro, on the other hand, is just emerging, and is still a little afraid of the consequences of his newly acquired race-consciousness.
What is alike in the case of the Jew, the Negro, and the Japanese is that their conflict with America has been grave enough to create in each a new sense of racial identity, and to give the sort of solidarity that grows out of a common cause. It is the existence in a people of the sense of a cause which finally determines their group efficiency.
In some sense these communities in which our immigrants live their smaller lives may be regarded as models for our own. We are seeking to do, through the medium of our local community organizations, such things as will get attention and interest for the little world of the locality. We are encouraging a new parochialism, seeking to initiate a movement that will run counter to the current romanticism with its eye always on the horizon, one which will recognize limits and work within them.
Our problem is to encourage men to seek God in their own village and to see the social problem in their own neighborhood. These immigrant communities deserve further study.
Robert E. Park