VI. THE PROBLEM STATED
In a recent volume, Studies in Human Nature, Mr. J. B. Baillie has suggested that the disposition and the ability to think abstractly, disinterestedly, and scientifically is not only a relatively recent acquisition of the human race, but at the same time is a local phenomenon.
This geographical limitation of science is indeed a remarkable fact, the importance of which our familiarity with the scientific mood and our insularity of mind constantly tend to obscure.... We should not forget that millions of human beings have no interest in the scientific mood at all, and seem by constitution to have no capacity for it.... Some individuals among these nonscientific peoples may, and do, assimilate the science of the West. But experience seems to show that such acquisition is at best a mere accomplishment, and leaves the racial structure and composition of their minds unaffected.... The nonscientific peoples take up science as they put on Western clothes. One may change one’s clothes, but there is no changing the skin. The fact is that the scientific mood arises from a peculiar attitude of the mind to the world found amongst certain peoples of the globe; and without this attitude science will always appear a curiosity or an irrelevance.[[68]]
The author assumes that the disposition to think rationally and to cultivate abstract and scientific thought is a racial attribute. Perhaps a more accurate statement of the matter would take account of the fact that even within the comparatively limited area where science is in vogue, there are large numbers of people who still—even while using the language of science—think in the more elementary forms of folk-thought. This seems to be true wherever large masses of the population are still illiterate, or where, for any reason, even when able to read, they habitually think in terms of the spoken language, rather than in the language of the printed page. Literacy itself is very largely a product of modern city life. Books and reading which used to be, and to a certain extent are yet, a luxury in the country, become a necessity in the city.
The Negroes migrating in such large numbers from the West Indies to the United States are bringing with them habits of thought which have largely disappeared among the Negro population native to this country. The obeah men of the West Indies have many clients in the United States, and a recent issue of the New York Age announced that the Negro quarter around 135th Street, New York, was overrun with fortune tellers and witch doctors, many or most of them from the West Indies.
Within a few years, however, most of these superstitions will have disappeared, or at any rate will have assumed those more conventional forms with which we are familiar and have learned to tolerate. This is certainly true of the city population.
Great changes are taking place, with the introduction of modern methods of education, in our own insular possessions. Mr. Axel Holst, of the National Bank of the Danish West Indies, who has been a close and assiduous student of Negro folklore in the Virgin Islands, says that the effect of the American system of education will within a few years totally change the mental habits of the natives of St. Thomas. Since the younger generation have begun to read books, they are not so interested as they were in the Nansi stories, which correspond to the Bre’r Rabbit stories of the States. Since the introduction of American rule, newspapers have come into vogue, and the young men have taken to political discussion.
The changes in the “mentality” of the Negro population are, Mr. Holst says, going on visibly, and at a surprising rate. These changes, if they are actually taking place, should be made the subject of further investigation. Such study should enable us to determine, among other things, more precisely than we have been able to determine hitherto, the rôle which cultural contacts, social heritages, and racial temperament play in the whole cultural process.
It is evident that we are not to assume, as otherwise we might, that there is no area of the experience in which primitive or preliterate people think realistically and rationally. On the other hand, in contrasting primitive mentality with that of civilized man, we need not assume—except for the sake of the contrast—that the thinking of civilized man is always and everywhere either rational or scientific. As a matter of fact, there are still wide areas of our experience that have not as yet been fully rationalized, notably the fields of medicine and religion. In medicine, at least—if we are to believe a recent medical critic of what, in imitation of Lévy-Bruhl, we might call “medical mentality”—the majority of practitioners still think of diseases as morbid entities instead of convenient labels for groups of symptoms.
The following paragraph from a recent writer states the matter from the point of view of a critic of “medical mentality.”
It is not to be thought that any educated medical man indeed believes “a disease” to be a material thing, although the phraseology in current use lends colour to such supposition. Nevertheless, in hospital jargon, “diseases” are “morbid entities,” and medical students fondly believe that these “entities” somehow exist in rebus Naturae and were discovered by their teachers, much as was America by Columbus.... In fact, for these gentlemen “diseases” are Platonic realities; universals ante rem. This unavowed belief, which might be condoned were it frankly admitted, is an inheritance from Galen, and carries with it the corollary that our notions concerning this, that, or the other “diseases” are either absolutely right or absolutely wrong, and are not merely matters of mental convenience.
But if the practitioners think of diseases in pre-logical terms what can we expect of the layman, whose medical education has been largely confined to the reading of patent medical advertisements? What has been said suggests a problem which may be perhaps stated in this way: How far is the existence of magic and magical mode of thought a measure of the mentality of a racial or cultural group in which it is found to persist? How far is what Ballie calls “the scientific mood” an effect of the urban environment?
Robert E. Park
CHAPTER VIII
CAN NEIGHBORHOOD WORK HAVE A SCIENTIFIC BASIS?
Neighborhood work at present and as now practiced cannot, for two reasons, be said to be based upon science. First, the social sciences—and I refer to sociology in particular—have at present little to offer as a scientific basis for social work; secondly, what knowledge the social sciences have accumulated has been used little, or not at all, by neighborhood workers.
The trend of neighborhood work to a scientific basis.—But if neighborhood work has not had a scientific basis, it has had, from its inception, as one of its conscious or unconscious motives, the search after knowledge as the basis of human relations. Settlement work, especially, represents not only the most devoted and the most idealistic, but also the most intelligent, phase of social work of the past generation. The settlement in its origin was an extension of the university. It carried over into a new environment the love of truth and, it may be added, the spirit of science. The residents of the settlement were brought at once into touch with social reality; that is, with the concrete facts of human life.
This early venture into intimate contact with social reality may accordingly be called the first stage in the trend of neighborhood work toward a scientific basis. But settlement workers soon found that sympathetic understanding and intimate contacts failed to solve many of the actual problems of neighborhood work. The recalcitrancy of the boys’ gang, the opposition and manipulations of the ward boss, the competition of commercialized recreation, the unsolvable cultural conflict between immigrant parents and Americanized children are only a few of the many perplexing conditions of neighborhood life in immigrant areas which resisted the spirit of good will of settlement workers. They therefore began to study their communities in the attempt to state the factors at work by an analysis of the elements in the situation. Hull House Maps and Papers, The City Wilderness, and Americans in Process are illustrations of the careful study and keen observation of these very early efforts to determine and to take account of the many and different conditions affecting neighborhood work. This interest in the discovery of factors in the social situation may therefore be called the second stage in the trend of neighborhood work toward a scientific basis.
Science, however, is concerned not with factors, but with forces. The distinction is not always clearly drawn between a factor and a force. “Factors are the elements that co-operate to make a given situation. Forces are type-factors operative in typical situations.”[[69]] A factor is thought of as a concrete cause for an individual event; a force is conceived to be an abstract cause for events in general so far as they are similar. A particular gang of boys, the Torpedo gang, of which Tony is the leader—and which is made up of eight street Arabs—is a factor in the situation which a certain settlement in an Italian colony in Chicago faces. But as soon as the attention shifts from this one gang and this particular settlement to settlements in general and to gangs in general the transition is made from a factor to a force. A gang is a factor to a given settlement; the gang is a force from the standpoint of all settlements.
The study of social forces in the community.—If neighborhood work can have a scientific basis, it is because there are social forces in community life—forces like geographical conditions, human wishes, community consciousness—that can be studied, described, analyzed, and ultimately measured. In a series of research projects now in progress in the Department of Sociology in the University of Chicago, studies are being made of the social forces of community life. While the city of Chicago is used as the laboratory for this investigation, it is assumed that the processes of urban life in one community are in certain ways typical of city life throughout the United States.
The term “community” is widely used by sociologists, neighborhood workers, and others, but often with widely divergent meanings. In research in any field it is necessary to define our concepts and to make relevant distinctions. In the literature of the subject there is a growing disposition to emphasize as one of the fundamental aspects of the community its geographical setting. Whatever else the community may be, it signifies individuals, families, groups, or institutions located upon an area and some or all of the relationships which grow out of this common location. “‘Community’ is the term which is applied to societies and social groups where they are considered from the point of view of the geographical distribution of the individuals and institutions of which they are composed.”[[70]]
Upon reflection it is evident that markedly different social relationships may have their roots in the conditions of a common territorial location. Indeed, it is just these outstanding differences in communal activities, viewed in relation to their geographic background, which have caused much of the confusion in the use of the term “community.” For community life, as conditioned by the distribution of individuals and institutions over an area, has at least three quite different aspects.
First of all, there is the community viewed almost exclusively in terms of location and movement. How far has the area itself, by its very topography and by all its other external and physical characteristics, as railroads, parks, types of housing, conditioned community formation and exerted a determining influence upon the distribution of its inhabitants and upon their movements and life? To what extent has it had a selective effect in sifting and sorting families over the area by occupation, nationality, and economic or social class? To what extent is the work of neighborhood or community institutions promoted or impeded by favorable or unfavorable location? How far do geographical distances within or without the community symbolize social distances? This apparently “natural” organization of the human community, so similar in the formation of plant and animal communities, may be called the “ecological community.”
No comprehensive study of the human community from this standpoint has yet been made. A prospectus for such a study is outlined in an earlier chapter by Professor R. D. McKenzie, in this volume, under the title, “The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community.”[[71]] Yet there are several systematic treatises and a rapidly growing literature of scientific research in the two analogous fields of plant ecology and animal ecology. The processes of competition, invasion, succession, and segregation described in elaborate detail for plant and animal communities seem to be strikingly similar to the operation of these same processes in the human community. The assertion might even be defended that the student of community life or the community organization worker might secure at present a more adequate understanding of the basic factors in the natural organization of the community from Warming’s Oecology of Plants or from Adams’s Guide to the Study of Animal Ecology than from any other source.
In the second place, the community may be conceived in terms of the effects of communal life in a given area upon the formation or the maintenance of a local culture. Local culture includes those sentiments, forms of conduct, attachments, and ceremonies which are characteristic of a locality, which have either originated in the area or have become identified with it. This aspect of local life may be called “the cultural community.” This relationship of cultural patterns to territorial areas has not yet been adequately studied unless in the phenomena of language. What, for example, are studies in dialect but one illustration of how local areas with their entailed isolation differentially affect customs of speech? Concrete materials for a wider study of culture in relation to location are increasing, notably upon preliterate peoples and upon retarded groups geographically isolated, as the southern mountaineers or the remote inhabitants of Pitcairn Island.
The immigrant colony in an American city possesses a culture unmistakably not indigenous but transplanted from the Old World. The telling fact, however, is not that the immigrant colony maintains its old-world cultural organization, but that in its new environment it mediates a cultural adjustment to its new situation. How basically culture is dependent upon place is suggested by the following expressions, “New England conscience,” “southern hospitality,” “Scottish thrift,” “Kansas is not a geographical location so much as a state of mind.” Neighborhood institutions like the church, the school, and the settlement are essentially cultural institutions, and recognition of this fact has far-reaching implications for the policies and programs of these local centers.
There remains a third standpoint from which the relation of a local area to group life may be stated. In what ways and to what extent does the fact of common residence in a locality compel or invite its inhabitants to act together? Is there, or may there be developed upon a geographical basis, a community consciousness? Does contiguity by residence insure or predispose to co-operation in at least those conditions of life inherent in geographic location, as transportation, water supply, playgrounds, etc.? Finally, what degree of social and political action can be secured on the basis of local areas? This is the community of the community organization worker and of the politician, and may be described as “the political community.” It is upon this concept of the community as a local area that American political organization has been founded.
These three definitions of the community are not perhaps altogether mutually exclusive. They do, however, represent three distinctly different aspects of community life that will have to be recognized in any basic study of the community and of community organization. A given local area, like Hyde Park in Chicago, may at the same time constitute an ecological, cultural, and political community, while another area like the lower North Side in the same city, which forms a distinct ecological unit, falls apart into several cultural communities and cannot, at any rate from the standpoint of a common and effective public opinion, be said to constitute a going political community. The Black Belt in Chicago comprises one cultural community but overflows several ecological areas and has no means of common political action except through ward lines arbitrarily drawn.
It follows that the boundaries of local areas determined ecologically, culturally, and politically seldom, if ever, exactly coincide. In fact, for American cities it is generally true that political boundaries are drawn most arbitrarily, without regard either to ecological or cultural lines, as is notoriously the case in the familiar instance of the gerrymander. Therefore it is fair to raise the question: How far are the deficiencies in political action through our governmental bodies and welfare action through our social agencies the result of the failure to base administrative districts upon ecological or cultural communities?[[72]]
This analysis of the community into its threefold aspects suggests that the study of social forces in a local area should assume that the neighborhood or the community is the resultant of three main types of determining influences: first, ecological forces; second, cultural forces; and third, political forces.
Ecological forces.—The ecological forces are those which have to do with the process of competition and the consequent distribution and segregation by residence and occupation. Through competition and the factors which affect it, as trade centers, etc., every neighborhood in the city becomes a component and integral part of the larger community, with a destiny bound up by its relation to it. In the study of the growth of the city it is found that the life of any neighborhood is determined, in the long run, not altogether by the forces within itself, but even more by the total course of city life. To think of the neighborhood or the community in isolation from the city is to disregard the biggest fact about the neighborhood.
Studies of urban growth reveal that the city grows outward from its central business district (1) in a series of expanding zones.[[73]] There is a “zone of transition” (2) encircling the downtown area. This is the area of deterioration, the so-called “slum”, created in large part by the invasion of business and light manufacture. A third area (3) is inhabited by workers in industry who have escaped from the area of deterioration (2) and who desire to live within easy access of their work. Beyond this zone is the “residential area” (4) of high-class apartment buildings or of exclusive “restricted” districts of single family dwellings. Still farther, out beyond the city limits, is the “commuters’ zone” (5) of suburban areas or satellite cities within a sixty-minute ride of the central business district.
Within these zones of urban growth are to be found local districts or communities, and these in turn subdivide into smaller areas called neighborhoods. In the long run, geographical factors and the process of competition fix the boundaries and the centers of these areas. It is important that neighborhood work be in accordance with, rather than in opposition to, these silent but continuous influences. A map of local communities was prepared to show the way in which rivers, railroads, large industrial establishments, parks, and boulevards divide the city into its constituent local communities—residential and industrial.
The centers of local communities are to be found at the point of highest land value in the intersection of two business streets. These local community centers are also characterized by the concentration of retail business, of banks, of restaurants, and of the large and magnificent palaces of amusement, like motion picture houses and public dance halls. If high land values indicate the center of the community, the lowest land values generally define its periphera.
CHART I
Schematic Representation of the Division of a Community into Neighborhoods by the Intersection of Two Business Streets.
But if the intersection of two business streets determines the trade center, these same streets divide it into neighborhoods. In Chart I on this page is offered a schematic representation of a Chicago local community, Woodlawn, with its economic center at the intersection of the two main business streets of Sixty-Third Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. At this intersection land values are five thousand dollars a front foot. Woodlawn falls into four neighborhoods, A, B, C, and D, divided from each other by these same intersecting business streets. It is interesting that each of these neighborhoods has its own public school. Even more significant is the fact that an attempt to unite two struggling churches of the same denomination in two of these neighborhoods into one strong church failed because neither would surrender its location.
It seems almost axiomatic to state that community and neighborhood work must take into account the operation of these silent but continuous ecological forces and work with them rather than against them. Yet how often are social centers located on the edge, rather than at the center, of a neighborhood. In the location of a neighborhood center the consequences which flow from the play of ecological forces must be heeded, because they condition the development of its work and the radius of its influence.
Cultural forces.—Ecological or economic forces are naturally basic to the play of cultural forces. Culture, as the social heritage of the group, implies both a locality to which it is indigenous and a constant, rather than a changing, social situation. Chicago, like other large cities, has its cultural communities, each of which has, if not a local area, at least a local center. Hobohemia, Bohemia, Philistia, the Ghetto, and the Gold Coast are cultural communities.
Movement in the person, as from one social location to another, or any sudden change as caused by an invention, carries with it the possibility or the probability of cultural decadence. The cultural controls over conduct disintegrate; impulses and wishes take random and wild expression. The result is immorality and delinquency; in short, personal and social disorganization. An illustration of cultural decadence as a result of movement is the excessively high rate of juvenile delinquency among the children of immigrant parents. To what extent have neighborhood workers gauged the effect of the daily newspaper, the motion picture, the automobile, and the radio, in releasing the child, the youth, and the adult from the confines of the neighborhood and of bringing them into contact with the city-wide, nation-wide, and world-wide life of our time?
These changes taking place in community life may be observed in a dramatic form in commercialized recreation. The day of the neighborhood public dance hall and the neighborhood motion picture show has passed, or at least is passing. Young people are deserting the neighborhood recreation centers and are thronging to centers outside the local community, to the high-class, magnificent dance gardens and palaces, and to the so-called “wonder” theaters of the “bright light” areas.
A realignment of the leisure-time movements of urban young people is taking place, which every agency engaged in neighborhood work must take into account. Is the neighborhood as a factor in the lives of youth soon to become a situation of the past? Can settlements and social centers expect to hold back the tide of the forces of city life?
A map of the residences of dance hall patrons which shows both the disappearance of the small public dance hall from the neighborhood and the concentration of large dance halls in “bright light” areas is all the more significant because it portrays the phenomenon of promiscuity. By promiscuity is meant primary and intimate behavior upon the basis of secondary contacts. In the village type of neighborhood, where everyone knows everyone else, the social relationships of the young people were safeguarded by the primary controls of group opinion. But in the public dance hall, where young people are drawn from all parts of the city, this old primary control breaks down. Is not this the basic reason why social workers find the dance hall so recurring a factor in personal disorganization and delinquency? As yet, however, we have no satisfactory study of the dance hall as a social world of youth. Two new social types—the “sheik” and the “flapper”—have been created by the dance hall and the motion picture, but they are regarded as subjects for jest rather than for serious study.
Form 1.—The Neighborhood Triangle.
A study by Miss Evelyn Buchan of girl delinquency shows the effect of the increasing mobility and promiscuity of city life upon the behavior of youth, and suggests an interesting method of study. To bring into clearer relief the rôle of mobility and promiscuity as factors in behavior, a device called “the delinquency triangle” was employed. The three points of the triangle were located by spotting the home of the girl, the home of her male companion, and the place of delinquency. Three typical forms of the triangle soon appeared.
Form 1 represents the traditional form of sex delinquency, where all three points of the triangle are within the community. This may be called the “neighborhood triangle.” In this case the intimacy of the boy and girl might be little more than the continuance in this country of old-world folkways, but without the protection for the girl in subsequent marriage which the European peasant mores afford.
Form 2.—The Mobility Triangle.
Form 2, which is “the mobility triangle,” stands for delinquency of the type related to increased freedom of movement, where two points of the triangle or its base, formed by the homes of the girl and the boy, lie within the same community, but where its apex, or the place of delinquency, is situated outside. In this case the bright-light area becomes a place of freedom from the narrower, distant controls of the home and the neighborhood.
Form 3.—The Promiscuity Triangle.
In form 3, delinquency is of the type of promiscuity, because here all the points of the triangle lie in different communities. The intimacy developing from the casual acquaintance of the metal worker from the steel mills with the girl from the West Side whom he “picked up” at an amusement park may be so transient that neither knows the family name or the address of the other.
The total effect of forces of city life, like mobility and promiscuity, upon the neighborhood and upon our traditional culture seems to be subversive and disorganizing. Particularly is this true of deteriorating areas, where neighborhood work originated, and where it is still, in any completely developed state, for the most part confined. A series of maps has been prepared which shows graphically what, of course, is known to social students—that the zone of deterioration and the areas of the greatest mobility in the city have the greatest concentration of poverty, vice, crime, juvenile delinquency, divorce, desertion, abandoned infants, murder, and suicide.
Political forces.—The political forces have to do with the more formal control of public opinion and law. Neighborhood work is concerned with political forces whenever social action is desired. Our whole scheme of social work may be regarded, from this standpoint at least, as social politics. But has the social worker, who is the social politician, the same intimate knowledge of his neighborhood that the professional politician possesses? A minimum of information which he needs is a card catalogue of, plus some direct contact with, all the local dynamic personalities, including gang leaders, pool hall proprietors, leaders of all the neighborhood organizations, and of all professional persons, like representatives of social agencies, physicians, lawyers, clergymen, at work in his locality. More than that, he needs to know the basic interests, the driving wishes, and the vital problems of the men and women, the youth and the children, living in the community.
The knowledge of these forces in neighborhood life will suggest feasible projects and programs. Too often, however, attempts at social control rise from ignorant good will rather than from the facts of the situation. This is particularly true of the many futile efforts to impose neighborly relationships upon areas which are no longer neighborhoods.
What, then, is our answer to the question, Can neighborhood work have a scientific basis? It can have a scientific foundation if it will base its activities upon a study of social forces. But the social forces of city life seem, from our studies, to be destroying the city neighborhood. Is the neighborhood center to engage in a losing fight against the underlying tendencies of modern urban society? This question should be squarely faced: Is neighborhood work prepared to base its justification for existence upon facts rather than upon sentiment?
There are those who are convinced that the function of the neighborhood center is passing with the decay of the neighborhood in the city. For myself, I am not so certain. Surely the work of the neighborhood center must now be conceived and planned in terms of its relationship to the entire life of the city. The work of neighborhood centers, like that of all other social agencies, must increasingly be placed upon the basis of the scientific study of the social forces with which they have to deal. Especially are studies desired of the actual effect and rôle of intimate contacts in personal development and social control.
A feasible way for neighborhood centers to place their work upon a scientific basis would be to stress the impulse to research that has always been associated with the settlement movement. Thirty years ago Mr. Robert A. Woods read a paper on “University Settlements as Laboratories in Social Science.” The argument for research in its relations to neighborhood work is contained in that article. He conceived the advantage of research both to social science and to the settlement. The growing fluidity and complexity of urban life has but increased the force of his argument.
Neighborhood work, by the logic of the situation, if it is to evolve a successful technique, will be compelled more and more to depend upon research into the social forces of modern life.
Ernest W. Burgess
CHAPTER IX
THE MIND OF THE HOBO: REFLECTIONS UPON THE RELATION BETWEEN MENTALITY AND LOCOMOTION
In the evolutionary hierarchy, as Herbert Spencer has sketched it for us, the animal series occupied a higher position than that of the plants. But in spite of all the progress represented in the long march from the amoeba to man, it is still true that the human creature is a good deal of a vegetable. This is evident in the invincible attachment of mankind to localities and places; in man’s, and particularly woman’s, inveterate and irrational ambition to have a home—some cave or hut or tenement—in which to live and vegetate; some secure hole or corner from which to come forth in the morning and return to at night.
As long as man is thus attached to the earth and to places on the earth, as long as nostalgia and plain homesickness hold him and draw him inevitably back to the haunts and places he knows best, he will never fully realize that other characteristic ambition of mankind, namely, to move freely and untrammeled over the surface of mundane things, and to live, like pure spirit, in his mind and in his imagination alone.
I mention these things merely to emphasize a single point, namely, mind is an incident of locomotion. The first and most convincing indication of mind is not motion merely, but, as I have said, locomotion. The plants don’t locomote, don’t move through space; they respond more or less to stimulation, even though they have no nerves, but they do not move through space, certainly not of their own motion. And when they do move, they have no goal, no destination, and that is because they have no imagination.
Now it is characteristic of animals that they can and do change their spots. The ability to do this implies that they are able not merely to wag a tail or move a limb, but that they are able to co-ordinate and mobilize the whole organism in the execution of a single act. Mind, as we ordinarily understand it, is an organ of control. It does not so much initiate new movements as co-ordinate impulses, and so mobilize the organism for action; for mind, in its substantive aspect, is just our disposition to act; our instincts and attitudes, in other words.
Mental activity begins on the periphery, with stimuli which are antecedent to, but ultimately discharged in, actions. But mind in the transitive, verbal aspect is a process by which, as we say, we “make up our minds” or change them; that is to say, it is a process by which we define the direction in which we are going to move, and locate in imagination the goal that we intend to seek.
Plants carry on, apparently, all the processes of metabolism which are characteristic of animals—these are, in fact, what we mean by the vegetative processes—but they do not go anywhere. If the plants have minds, as some people assume they do, they must be of that brooding, vegetative sort characteristic of those mystics who, quite forgetful of the active world, are absorbed in the contemplation of their own inner processes. But the characteristic of the animal, and of the higher types of animal—everything above the oyster, in fact—is that they are made for locomotion and for action. Furthermore, it is in the processes of locomotion—involving, as they do, change of scene and change of location—that mankind is enabled to develop just those mental aptitudes most characteristic of man, namely, the aptitude and habit of abstract thought.
It is in locomotion, also, that the peculiar type of organization that we call “social” develops. The characteristic of a social organism—if we may call it an organism—is the fact that it is made up of individuals capable of independent locomotion. If society were, as some individuals have sought to conceive it, an organism in the biological sense—if it were made up of little cells all neatly and safely inclosed in an outer integument, or skin, in which all cells were so controlled and protected that no single cell could by any chance have any adventures or new experience of its own—there would be no need for men in society to have minds, for it is not because men are alike that they are social, but because they are different. They are moved to act by individual purposes, but in doing so they realize a common end. Their impulses are private, but actions are public.
In view of all this we may well ask ourselves what, if anything, is the matter with the hobo’s mind. Why is it that with all the variety of his experiences he still has so many dull days? Why, with so much leisure, has he so little philosophy? Why, with so wide an acquaintance with regions, with men, and with cities, with life in the open road and in the slums, has he been able to contribute so little to our actual knowledge of life?
We need not even pause for a reply. The trouble with the hobo mind is not lack of experience, but lack of a vocation. The hobo is, to be sure, always on the move, but he has no destination, and naturally he never arrives. Wanderlust, which is the most elementary expression of the romantic temperament and the romantic interest in life, has assumed for him, as for so many others, the character of a vice. He has gained his freedom, but he has lost his direction. Locomotion and change of scene have had for him no ulterior significance. It is locomotion for its own sake. Restlessness and the impulse to escape from the routine of ordinary life, which in the case of others frequently marks the beginning of some new enterprise, spends itself for him in movements that are expressive merely. The hobo seeks change solely for the sake of change; it is a habit, and, like the drug habit, moves in a vicious circle. The more he wanders, the more he must. It is merely putting the matter in an another way to say that the trouble with the hobo, as Nels Anderson has pointed out in his recent volume, The Hobo, is that he is an individualist. He has sacrificed the human need of association and organization to a romantic passion for individual freedom. Society is, to be sure, made up of independent, locomoting individuals. It is this fact of locomotion, as I have said, that defines the very nature of society. But in order that there may be permanence and progress in society the individuals who compose it must be located; they must be located, for one thing, in order to maintain communication, for it is only through communication that the moving equilibrium which we call society can be maintained.
All forms of association among human beings rest finally upon locality and local association. The extraordinary means of communication that characterize modern society—the newspaper, the radio, and the telephone—are merely devices for preserving this permanence of location and of function in the social group, in connection with the greatest possible mobility and freedom of its members.
The hobo, who begins his career by breaking the local ties that bound him to his family and his neighborhood, has ended by breaking all other associations. He is not only a “homeless man,” but a man without a cause and without a country; and this emphasizes the significance, however, futile of the efforts of men like James Eads How to establish hobo colleges in different parts of the country, places where hobos can meet to exchange experiences, to discuss their problems, and all of the problems of society; places, also, where they can maintain some sort of corporate existence and meet and exchange views with the rest of the world on a basis of something like equality and with some hope of understanding.
The same thing may be said of the Industrial Workers of the World, the only labor organization that has persistently sought and to some extent succeeded in organizing the unorganizable element among laboring men, namely, the seasonal and casual laborers. The tendency of their efforts to organize the hobo in his own interest has been, so far as they have been successful, to give him what he needed most, namely, a group-consciousness, a cause, and a recognized position in society.
If they have failed, it is due in part to the fact that so large a part of modern industry is organized in a way which tends inevitably to the casualization of labor. It is due, in part, to the fact that the hobo, in so far as he is a congenital type, finds in casual and seasonal labor a kind of occupation congenial to his temperament, for the hobo is the bohemian in the ranks of common labor. He has the artistic temperament. Aside from the indispensable labor of his hands, the only important contribution which he has made to the permanent common fund of our experience which we call our culture has been his poetry. It is an interesting fact, however, that some of the best of this poetry has been produced in jail. During these periods of enforced quietude, when he could no longer move, the hobo has vented his habitual restlessness in songs, songs of protest, the hymns of the rebellious I.W.W., tragic little ballads describing some of the hardships and tragedies of life on the long, gray road.
There have been many hobo poets. The most eminent of them, Walt Whitman, reflected the restlessness and rebelliousness and individualism of the hobo mind not only in the content but in the very formlessness of his verse.
What do you suppose will satisfy the soul, except to walk free and own no superior?
Nothing could better express the spirit of the old frontier which, more than any other feature in American life, has served to characterize American institutions and American mores. The hobo is, in fact, merely a belated frontiersman, a frontiersman at a time and in a place when the frontier is passing or no longer exists.
Robert E. Park
CHAPTER X
A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE URBAN COMMUNITY
The task of compiling a bibliography on the city which is to be of use to the sociologist involves many difficulties. The materials are scattered over many fields of investigation ranging all the way from the various branches of the natural and social sciences to the practical arts and crafts. Much of the material is highly technical and abstract, while the rest is popular and full of human interest. If one attempts to survey the whole field he is likely to be led into tempting bypaths which lead far afield and in the end arrive nowhere. Moreover, the bibliographer has neither chart nor compass to guide him in his search, for the sociologist himself is not yet certain of the meaning of the concept “city” and of the relationship of his science to the phenomenon.
Specialization has gone so far that no one can hope to become an expert in more than one field in a lifetime. The sanitary engineer, interested in urban sanitation, is mainly concerned with drainage systems, pumps, sewer pipes, and incinerators; but the accountant, the political scientist, and the sociologist are not primarily interested in these matters. At first glance the sociologist might be tempted to pass over such material as lying outside his province, while he would be less likely to pass over materials relating to parks, playgrounds, schools, infant mortality, city-planning, and non-voting, because these institutions and processes have traditionally held the sociologist’s interest. And yet it is within the realm of possibility that such a question as that of the type of sewer pipe that is to be employed in a city drainage system may become one with which the sociologist is as legitimately concerned as the question of city-planning or juvenile delinquency.
The problem of deciding what is pertinent and what is extraneous is, then, obviously an important one. While the sociologist may be intensely interested in a subject matter pertaining to another science or craft, he has his own distinctive point of view, methodology, and objective, and since he cannot be an expert engineer, city manager, and sociologist all at the same time, he must accept the data of these other specialists when they happen to form the subject matter of his investigation. The sociologist is no more a housing specialist or a zoning specialist or a social case worker in a metropolitan social agency than he is an urban engineer or health officer, but he may have an important contribution to make to all of these activities, and may in turn acquire from these technicians a body of materials which shed light on his own problems and yield to sociological analysis. What is to be included or excluded from a sociological bibliography of the city depends upon the sociological definition of the city.
Although the literature on the city extends as far back as the city itself, the subject is now being studied with renewed interest and with a new point of view. If we were compiling a complete bibliography we would most likely begin with the classical discussion of Socrates in the second book of Plato’s Republic and follow the increasingly complex and scattered writings up to the present day, when we can scarcely find a science that does not have something to contribute to the subject. But this is not the aim of this bibliography. The attempt is here made to note just that part of the literature which has something to offer to the sociologist in the way of source material, point of view, method, and interpretation. A great deal, no doubt, has been included which is of little value. At the same time much has been necessarily omitted which is important. Some effort was made to avoid excessive duplication, but this attempt has not been wholly successful. The list of books and articles includes many works which were inaccessible at the time the bibliography was compiled, and whose contents could therefore not be examined. They are included because either the titles were suggestive or else the reputation of the authors merited attention.
The contribution which a bibliography is able to make to the study of any subject lies probably as much in the viewpoint it incorporates and the method of presentation it uses as in the references it presents. The scheme of classification here employed may lay claim to offering a rather new approach to the study of the city. It will probably have to be modified as new material is discovered and as the sociologists themselves continue to make their own distinctive contributions. It ought to offer an index to the aspects of the city that promise most in the way of results from research. At the same time it may be of assistance in organizing and funding the rapidly increasing body of knowledge concerning the sociology of the city.
A TENTATIVE SCHEME FOR THE CLASSIFICATION OF THE LITERATURE OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE CITY[[74]]
I. The City Defined
1. Geographically: by site, situation, topography, density 2. Historically: by political status, title, law 3. Statistically: by census 4. As an economic unit 5. Sociologically
1. Ancient cities: Asia, Egypt, Greece, Rome 2. The medieval city 3. The modern city
1. Historical types 2. Location types: sea coast, inland, river, lake 3. Site types: plain, valley, mountain, hill, harbor, island 4. Functional types: capital, railroad, port, commercial, industrial, resort, cultural 5. The town, the city, and the metropolis 6. Structural types: the natural city and the planned city
1. The trade area 2. The commuting area: the metropolitan area 3. The administrative city 4. The city and its satellites 5. The city and its cultural periphery 6. The city and world economy
1. Natural areas 2. The neighborhood 3. The local community 4. Zones and zoning 5. The city plan
1. Public utilities: water, gas, electricity 2. Means of communication: telephone, mails, telegraph, street-car, busses, automobile 3. Streets and sewers 4. Public safety and welfare: fire, police, health departments, social agencies 5. Schools, theaters, museums, parks, churches, settlements 6. Recreation 7. City government: the city manager, the boss 8. Food supply, stores (department and chain stores) 9. Steel construction: the skyscraper 10. Housing and land values
1. Expansion 2. Allocation and distribution of population: “city-building” 3. Population statistics: natural growth and migration 4. Mobility and metabolism in city life 5. Social organization and disorganization and city growth
1. Birth, death, and marriage rates: the span of life 2. Sex and age groups 3. Fecundity
1. The division of labor: professions and specialization of occupations
1. Conflicts of interest 2. Comparison of social organization and social processes 3. Differences in personality types
1. Systematic studies of cities 2. The technique of the community survey 3. Periodicals on the city