Tammany won in New York and we heard many people say, “Well, this is your democracy, the people want bad government, the majority of people in New York city have voted for it.” Nothing could be more superficial. What the election in New York meant was that “the people” are cleverer than was thought; they know that the question should not be of “good” government or “bad” government, but only of self-government, and the only way they have of expressing this is to vote against a government which seems to disregard them.
To say, “We are good men, we are honest officials, we are employing experts on education, sanitation etc., you must trust us,” will not do; some way must be devised of connecting the experts and the people—that is the first thing to be worked out, then some way of taking the people into the counsels of city administration. All of us criticize things we don’t know anything about. As soon as we see the difficulties, as soon as the responsibility is put upon us, our whole attitude changes. Take the popular cry “Boston positions for Boston people.” This seems a pretty good principle to superficial thinking. But when we know that we have an appropriation of $200,000 a year for a certain department, and are looking for a man to administer it, when we go into the matter and find that there are only two or three experts for this position in the United States, and that not one of these lives in Boston, the question takes the concrete form, “Shall we allow $200,000 of our money to be wasted through inept administration?” It might be said, “But city governments do have the responsibility and yet this is just what they are all the time doing.” Certainly, because their position rests on patronage, but I am proposing that the whole system be changed.
Neighborhood organization must be the method of effective popular responsibility: first, by giving reality to the political bond; secondly, by providing the machinery by which a genuine control of the people can be put into operation. At present nearly all our needs are satisfied by external agencies, government or institutional. Health societies offer health to us, recreation associations teach us how to play, civic art leagues give us more beautiful surroundings, associated charities give us poor relief. A kind lady leads my girl to the dentist, a kind young man finds employment for my boy, a stern officer of the city sees that my children are in their places at school. I am constantly being acted upon, no one is encouraging me to act. New York has one hundred municipal welfare divisions and bureaus. Thus am I robbed of my most precious possession—my responsibilities—for only the active process of participation can shape me for the social purpose.
But all this is to end. The community itself must grip its own problems, must fill its needs, must make effective its aspirations. If we want the latest scientific knowledge in regard to food values, let us get an expert to come to us, not wait for some society to send an “agent” to us; if the stores near us are not selling at fair prices, let us make a coöperative effort to set this right. If we want milk and baby hygiene organized, our own local doctors should, in proper coöperation with experts on the one hand and the mothers on the other, organize this branch of public service. The medical experts may be employees of the government, but if the plan of their service be worked out by all three—the experts, the local doctors and the mothers—the results will be: (1) that the needs of the neighborhood will really be met, (2) much valuable time of the expert will be saved, (3) a close follow-up will be possible, (4) the expert can be called in whenever necessary through local initiative, and (5) the machinery will be in existence by which the study of that particular problem can be carried on not as a special investigation but as a regular part of neighborhood life.
Take another example. The Placement Bureau is also a necessary public service: it needs the work of experts and it needs pooled information and centralized machinery; a parent cannot find out all the jobs available in a city for boys of 16 in order to place one boy. But as long as the secretary of the Placement Bureau appears in the home and takes this whole burden off the parent, and off the community he is serving, his work will not be well done. For the boy will suffer eventually: he cannot be cut off from his community without being hurt; community incentive is the greatest one we know, and somehow there must be worked out some community responsibility for that boy, as well as some responsibility on his part to his community for standing up or falling down on his job. I say that the boy will eventually suffer; his community also will suffer, for it also has need of him; moreover, the community will greatly suffer by the loss of this opportunity of connecting it, through the parents, with the whole industrial problem of the city. The expert service of the Placement Bureau, whether it is administered by city or state, should always be joined to local initiative, effort and responsibility.
And so for every need. If we want well-managed dances for our daughters, we, mothers and fathers, must go and manage them. We do not exist on one side and the government on the other. If you go to a municipal dance-hall and see it managed by officials appointed from City Hall, you say, “This is a government affair.” But if you go to a schoolhouse and see a dance managed by men and women chosen by the district, you say, “This is a community affair, government has nothing to do with this.” These two conceptions must mingle before we can have any worthy political life. It must be clearly seen that we can operate as government as well as with government, that the citizen functions through government and the government functions through the citizen. It is not a municipal dance-hall regulated by the city authorities which expresses the right relation between civics and dancing, but dances planned and managed by a neighborhood for itself.
It is not the civic theatre which is the last word in the relation of the drama to the people, it is a community organized theatre. Art and civics do not meet merely by the state presenting art to its members; the civic expression of art is illustrated by locally managed festivals, by community singing, a local orchestra or dramatic club, community dancing etc. Those of us who are working for civic art are working for this: for people to express themselves in artistic forms and to organize themselves for that purpose. The state must give the people every opportunity for building up their own full, varied, healthful life. It seems to be often thought that when the state provides schools, parks, universities etc., there you have the ideal state. But we must go beyond this and find our ideal state in that which shows its members how to build up its own life in schools, parks, universities etc.[[86]]
The question which the state must always be trying to answer is how it can do more for its members at the same time that it is stimulating them to do more for themselves. No, more than this, its doing more for them must take the form of their doing more for themselves. Our modern problem is not, as one would think from some of the writing on social legislation, how much the increased activity of the state can do for the individual, but how the increasing activity of the individual can be state activity, how the widening of the sphere of state activity can be a widening of our own activity. The arguments for or against government action should not take the form of how much or how little government action we shall have, but entirely of how government action and self-action can coincide. Our one essential political problem is always how to be the state, not, putting the state on one side and the individual on the other, to work out their respective provinces. I have said in the chapter on “Our Political Dualism” that the state and the individual are one, yet this is pure theory until we make them one. But they can never be made one through schemes of representation etc., only by the intimate daily lives of all becoming the constituents of the life of the state.
When a Mothers’ Club in one of the Boston School Centres found a united want—that of keeping their children off the streets on Saturday afternoon and giving them some wholesome amusement—and decided to meet this want by asking the city of Boston for permission to use the moving-picture machine of the Dorchester High School for fairy-story films, the mothers to manage the undertaking, two significant facts stand out: (1) they did not ask an outside agency to do something for them, for the men and women of Dorchester, with all the other men and women of Boston, are the city of Boston; (2) they were not merely doing something for their children on those Saturday afternoons, they were in a sense officials of the city of Boston working for the youth of Boston. These two conceptions must blend: we do not do for government, government does not do for us, we should be constantly the hands and feet, yes and the head and heart of government.[[87]]
A most successful effort at neighborhood organization is that of the East Harlem Community Association, which set East Harlem to work on its own problems: first to investigate conditions, and then to find a way of meeting these conditions. The most interesting point about the whole scheme is that the work is not done by “experts” or any one else from outside; there are no paid visitors, but a committee of twelve mothers—one colored woman, two Italian, two Jewish, two Irish, three American, one Polish, and one German—are doing the work well. As a result of the activities of the East Harlem Community Association there are now in a public school building of the neighborhood organized athletic clubs, industrial classes, orchestra, glee, dramatic and art clubs, concerts, good moving pictures, dances, big brother and big sister groups, Mothers’ Leagues, Parents’ Associations, physical examination of school children etc. Of course these community associations must use expert advice and expert service. Exactly how this relation will be most satisfactorily worked out we do not yet clearly see.[[88]]