Society: Its Origin and Development

by Henry K. Rowe

PART IV—SOCIAL LIFE IN THE CITY

CHAPTER XXV[ToC]

FROM COUNTRY TO CITY

177. Enlarging the Social Environment.—In the story of the family and the rural community it has become clear that the normal individual as he grows to maturity lives in an expanding circle of social relations. The primary unit of his social life is the family in the home. There the elemental human instincts are satisfied. There while a child he learns the first lessons of social conduct. From the home he enters into the larger life of the community. He takes his place in the school, where he touches the lives of other children and learns that he is a part of a larger social order. He gets into the current of community life and finds out the importance of local institutions like the country store and the meeting-house. He becomes accustomed to the ways that are characteristic of country people, and finds a place for himself in the industry and social activity of the countryside. When the boy who has grown up in a rural community comes to manhood, his natural tendency is to accept the occupation of farming with which he has become acquainted in boyhood, to woo a country maid for a mate, and to make for himself a rural home after the pattern of his ancestors. In that case his social environment remains restricted. His relations are with nature rather than with men. His horizon is narrow, his interests limited. The institutions that mould him are few, the forces that stimulate to progress are likely to be lacking altogether. He need not, but he usually does, cease to grow.

178. Characteristics of the City.—Certain individuals find the static life of the country unbearable. Their nature demands larger scope in an expanding environment. To them the stirring town beckons, and they are restless until they escape. The city is a centre of social life where the individual feels a greater stimulus than in the home or the rural community. It resembles the family and the village in providing social relations and an interchange of ideas, but it surpasses them in the large scale of its activities. It presents many of the same social characteristics that they do, but geared in each case for higher speed. Its activities are swifter and more varied. Its associations are more numerous and kaleidoscopic. Its people are less independent than in the country; control, economic and political, is more pervasive, even though crude in method. Change is more rapid in the city, because the forces that are at work are charged with dynamic energy. Weakness in social structure and functioning is conspicuous. In the large cities all these are intensified, but they are everywhere apparent whenever a community passes beyond the village stage. The line that separates the village or small town from the city is an arbitrary one. The United States calls those communities rural that have a population not exceeding twenty-five hundred, but it is less a question of population than of interests and activities. When agriculture gives place to trade or manufacturing as the leading economic interest; when the community takes on the social characteristics that belong to urban life; and when places of business and amusement assume a place of importance rather than the home, the school, and the church, the community passes into the urban class. Names and forms of government are of small consequence in classification compared with the spirit and ways of the community.

179. How the City Grows.—The city grows by the natural excess of births over deaths and by immigration. Without immigration the city grows more slowly but more wholesomely. Immigration introduces an alien element that has to adjust itself to new ways and does not always fuse readily with the native element. This is true of immigration from the country village as well as from a foreign country, but an American, even though brought up differently, finds it easier to adapt himself to his new environment. An increasingly large percentage of children are born and grow to maturity in the city. There are thousands of urban communities of moderate size in America, where there are few who come in from any distance, but for nearly a hundred years in the older parts of the country a rural migration has been carrying young people into town, and the recent volume of foreign immigration is spilling over from the large cities into the smaller urban centres, so that the mixture of population is becoming general.

180. The Attraction of the City.—Foreign immigration is a subject that must be treated by itself; rural immigration needs no prolonged discussion once the present limitations of life in the country are understood. Multitudes of ambitious young people are not contented with the opportunities offered by the rural environment. They want to be at the strategic points of the world's activities, struggling for success in the thick of things. The city attracts the country boy who is ambitious, exactly as old Rome attracted the immature German. The blare of its noisy traffic, the glare of its myriad lights, the rush and the roar and the rabble all urge him to get into the scramble for fun and gain. The crowd attracts. The instinct of sociability draws people together. Those who are unfamiliar with rural spaces and are accustomed to live in crowded tenements find it lonesome in the country, and prefer the discomfort of their congested quarters in town to the pure air and unspoiled beauty of the country. They love the stir of the streets, and enjoy sitting on the door-steps and wandering up and down the sidewalks, feeling the push of the motley crowd. Those who leave the country for the city feel all these attractions and are impelled by them, but beyond these attractions, re-enforcing them by an appeal to the intellect, are the economic advantages that lie in the numerous occupations and chances for promotion to high-salaried positions, the educational advantages for children and youth in the better-graded schools, the colleges, the libraries, and the other cultural institutions, and such social advantages as variety of entertainment, modern conveniences in houses and hotels, more beautiful and up-to-date churches, well-equipped hospitals, and comfortable and convenient means of transportation from place to place.

181. Making a Countryman into a Citizen.—It is important to enter into the spirit of the young people who prefer the streets and blocks of the town to the winding country roads, and are willing to sacrifice what there is of beauty and leisure in rural life for the ugliness, sordidness, and continuous drive of the city; to understand that a greater driving force, stirring in the soul of youth and thrusting upon him with every item of news from the city, is impelling him to disdain what the country can give him and to magnify the counter-attractions of the town. He has felt the monotony and the contracted opportunity of farm life as he knows it. He has experienced the drudgery of it ever since he began to do the chores. Familiar only with the methods of his ancestors, he knows that labor is hard and returns are few. He may look across broad acres that will some day be his, but he knows that his father is "land poor." As a farmer he sees no future for agriculture. He has known the village and the surrounding country ever since he graduated from the farmyard to the schoolhouse, and came into association with the boys and girls of the neighborhood. He knows the economic and social resources of the community and is satisfied that he can never hope for much enjoyment or profit in the limited rural environment. The school gave him little mental stimulus, but opened the door ajar into a larger world. The church gave him an orthodox gospel in terms of divinity and its environment rather than humanity on earth, but stirred vaguely his aspirations for a fuller life. He has sounded the depths of rural existence and found it unsatisfying. He wants to learn more, to do more, to be more.

One eventful day he graduates from the village to the city, as years before he graduated from the home into the community. By boat or train, or by the more primitive method of stage-coach or afoot, he travels until he joins the surging crowd that swarms in the streets. He feels himself thrilling with the consciousness that he is moving toward success and possibly greatness. He does not stop to think that hundreds of those who seek their fortune in the city have failed, and have found themselves far worse off than the contented folk back in the home village. The newcomer establishes himself in a boarding-house or lodging-house which hundreds of others accept as an apology for a home, joins the multitude of unemployed in a search for work, and is happy if he finds it in an office that is smaller and darker than the wood-shed on the farm, or behind a counter where fresh air and sunlight never penetrate. He will put up with these non-essentials, for he expects in days ahead to move higher up, when the large rewards that are worth while will be his.