It urges also that local self-government in social centers will be a mere pretense unless it be accompanied with the power to disburse funds. Self-government is desired primarily because it means that the local center will, through self-government, begin to take on individuality, to develop a neighborhood policy, to seek the fulfillment of neighborhood needs.
For all these purposes a budget will be necessary, and the most direct, obvious and disciplinary way to raise the budget is through local effort. The natural method, as already demonstrated in several New York schools, is to charge an entrance fee to a few popular features of the center, preferably those which compete directly with the commercialized amusements. Moving pictures and public dancing are illustrations. These features, and others such as amateur theatricals, athletic meets, sociables and bazaars, the renting of rooms in the school building, club dues, etc., can be made not only self-supporting but profitable and the surplus can be applied to other non-profitable activities. At present, even in New York, some social centers, such as the well-known center in Public School 63, Manhattan, meet all local expenses, including supervision and janitor service, by such means as these.
The following paragraph from the memorandum is suggestive:
“Those men and women who are members of private clubs, insist on being allowed to spend their social hours with their own group, among people who want what they want in the way they want it. The great mass of the people, who have no private clubs, are entitled to these same privileges. They too are entitled to pay for their own recreation, to govern their own recreation, and to spend their leisure hours with their own social group. The social center, whether it be on school property, park property, or other public property, is such by reason of the very fact that it gives this kind of right to the average man, woman or child.... The aim of the social center is that public money shall provide simply the basic physical opportunity for recreation, while the people themselves, through the effort of organized voluntary groups, shall make their own recreation, govern it and pay for it. The social center is not a form of paternalism, for it merely provides the channels through which the social life can flow, just as the street provides the channel through which the physical city is able to move.”
CHAPTER V
THE ASSIMILATION OF RACES
One of the unique, if not the one unique, American problem has been that of assimilating great masses of nearly all the important races of the earth. As far as European and Asiatic races are concerned the question of absorption into the American nation has been largely an urban one. More and more the assimilation of the negro also is becoming an urban problem, for the migration of negroes to the towns and cities is a significant part of the general movement of the population cityward. The Census of 1910 showed that more than one-fourth of the negro population now dwells in towns of 2,500 population and over. Thirty-nine cities have ten thousand or more negroes; five northern and seven southern cities have more than forty thousand negroes each. Negroes are not only moving to the cities, but the Census further shows that in each of twenty-seven large cities, negroes form one-fourth or more of the total population and in four cities they constitute one-half the population.
On one side the question of assimilation of all races in the cities is a labor problem: one of employment, a living wage, proper housing, and industrial opportunity. On the other, it is a social problem: one of education, recreation, common counsel, investigation, publicity, and protection. It is with the social aspects of assimilation that we shall deal in this chapter.
Investigations
As a preparation for constructive work with them, women first studied the needs, customs, and labor of foreigners as well as they knew how. Louise Montgomery’s investigation of “Old Country Mothers and American Daughters” in the stockyards district of Chicago is an excellent example of such study. It is thus reviewed by Christina Merriman:
It is a remarkably comprehensive, balanced and interesting survey that Miss Montgomery has made, of the industrial and educational problems of a district torn by the struggle between the inherited standards of the European peasants and those of their American daughters, “struggling to keep up with American standards” and making every effort to avoid being classed as a “foreigner.” The same problem concerns every American city which has a foreign industrial community.