It must be borne in mind that much that I say of Pittsburgh is true of practically all our industrial centers; our severest criticism of any one comes not from a comparison with its fellows, but from a comparison of the haphazard development of its social institutions with the splendid organic development of its industrial enterprises. And more, in the methods and scope of progressive business organizations we have some of the most suggestive clues as to ways for municipal progress.
My first point has to do with administrative areas. The most effective city administration cannot act to advantage unless the units through which it operates are workable and bear some relation to the function they are designed to perform. The radius of the old time city, as one English writer has pointed out, was the distance you could walk from your work in the center to a home convenient in the outskirts. To-day, for most purposes, a city is a rapid transit proposition. For most purposes, a municipal area can be governed most effectively if it includes all such districts as can be reached by city workers, by subway, steam, or surface lines. The movement for a greater Pittsburgh, which, within the last year, has been advanced by the merging of Allegheny and the movement for a greater Birmingham, which is now in progress in the corresponding English industrial center, are recognitions of this fact. The police, fire,—in fact, every department of municipal activity is cramped and rendered less effective by restricted bounds.
But for certain functional activities much wider areas must be covered. The sanitary inspection force of Cleveland, for instance, inspects dairies and slaughter-houses throughout all that part of Ohio that supplies the Cleveland market; in contrast with the Pittsburgh inspection service which is at present able to inspect supplies only as they come into the city and sources in the immediate neighborhood. Again, the sewer and water problem of Pittsburgh is a water-shed problem. One hundred and twenty-nine towns and boroughs are dumping their sewage into the rivers which run past Pittsburgh and from which Pittsburgh must draw its water. No one of these governmental units can work out its sanitary problem alone. Close co-ordination of sanitary work is needed throughout the whole river district.
There is necessity, then, for increasing our municipal administrative areas and for relating them to the functions which must be performed through them; and this very fact raises the distinctive civic problem of creating this enlarged municipal machinery, without sacrificing that local loyalty and interest which in neighborhoods and smaller districts make for good government. In Pittsburgh we have a central city,—a market and office center with groups of outlying mill towns and half-agricultural districts between. The opponents of city congestion would break up all our big urban centers into such an open work structure; and if the citizenship of the Pittsburgh steel district can work out effective methods of government and high standards of community well-being for this ganglion of working communities, it will have made an original contribution to municipal science.
But let us look more carefully at this question of area as applied to the functioning of particular social institutions. We have the theory in America, for instance, that common school education should be supplied by the public, and to this end, besides state subsidies and other revenues, a general millage is laid on all taxable property in Pittsburgh for the salaries of teachers and for other general expenses. But the actual operation of the schools continues on an old vestry system of ward control,—a system given up by Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore and other cities of Pittsburgh's class, because the ward has proved an ineffective administrative unit. Let us see how it works in Pittsburgh. Each ward lays and collects a tax on property within its limits for the erection and maintenance of school buildings. Thus, ward two in the business district, with a total of only 363 pupils, can draw on property with an assessed valuation of $37,491,708; while ward fourteen, with 2,423 children, can draw on property worth $34,264,077 (less taxable property and seven times as many children); while ward thirty-one has 1,173 children and only $3,074,085 in assessed property (or three times as many children as ward two and not one-tenth the taxable property). No wonder, then, that the valuation of school buildings and equipment ranges from approximately $41 per school child in the thirty-first ward to $1,033 per school child in the second; and the income for maintenance of buildings, etc., from $6 per school child in the thirty-fifth ward to $84 per school child in the first. No wonder, then, that in these ward-school buildings and their equipment there is the utmost divergence. Our investigators found buildings every room of which was overcrowded, with children sitting on benches, with chairs in the aisles; wards in which basement rooms were thrown into commission without adequate heat, light, desks or ventilation; schools unconnected with the sewer; schools without fireproofing, without fire escapes, without fire drills;—all these in contrast to progressive schools in other wards with first-rate equipment, small classes, good plumbing and adequate light. Wards which have the most children, whose children have the least cultural environment and stimulus at home, have, many of them, the least resources to tax for school purposes. By an out-worn system of ward control and taxation, then, the teaching force of Pittsburgh is supplied in districts where the work is hardest with schoolhouses and other tools which are least effective. Some districts have schools which in equipment and spirit rank with any in the country; while in some the school plants ought to be scrapped offhand.
Turn to another social institution,—the hospitals. We may conceive that the first service of hospitals is to be accessible to the sick and injured, and that an adequate hospital system should be at all times quickly available to the people who may have use for it. We may compare it with the efficiency of the telephone company which, through sub-exchanges, centrals and private connections, effectively reaches every district. How stands the case with the hospitals of Pittsburgh? The city is served by a group of private institutions, many of them adequately equipped and progressively managed; but there is no system of co-ordination between them, either in the operation of their free wards or in the maintenance of an effective ambulance service. New hospitals are erected under the eaves of old hospitals. Sick and injured people are carried long, unnecessary distances at great risk. Seven new hospitals are going up in Pittsburgh and yet, when they are all completed and other changes which have been decided upon are carried out, there will be a great belt of river wards, thickly populated, without a convenient hospital plant,—wards in which we shall see disease is most rife. This failure of a co-ordination of hospital work in Pittsburgh is appreciated by a number of the most progressive superintendents, and no one would welcome more than they a movement to interlock the hospital service of the city in some effective way.
Another point of contrast between Pittsburgh, the industrial center, and Pittsburgh, the community, lies in the progressiveness and invention which have gone into the details of one and the other; for instance, aldermen's courts which dispense justice to the working population of Pittsburgh and deal with the minor civil business of a city of half a million. They serve very well in an agricultural district. They are of the vintage of the village blacksmith. But with the exception of a few well conducted courts, the forty or more ward courts may be said to clutter up and befog the course of minor justice, and to be an exasperation in the conduct of civil business. They add to rather than subtract from the business of the higher courts, and there is no effective supervision of their operation. They compare with the new municipal courts of Chicago about as the open forges of King John's time compare with a Bessemer converter.
Again,—Pittsburgh is the second city in Pennsylvania in point of population; in some respects it is the center of the most marvelous industrial district in the world. Thousands of men and women are engaged in hundreds of processes. But the state factory inspection department has not so much as an office in this city. There are inspectors, but they are not easily get-at-able for the workingman who may be laboring under unsanitary conditions or with unprotected machinery, or for the citizen who may know of violations of the factory acts which he conceives it his duty to report. My conception of an adequate labor department office in Pittsburgh is more than that of an industrial detective bureau. My conception is rather that of a headquarters, with an adequate force of technical experts and physicians who would be constantly studying the work processes of the district with the idea of eliminating wherever possible, those conditions which make for disease; with laboratory facilities for experiment and demonstration of protective devices calculated to reduce accidents; drawing, to this end, upon the industrial experience of the whole world. The factory inspector's office in Birmingham, for instance, is in close co-operation with courts, with employers and with workmen. Within three years, its suggestions have reduced the number of deaths due to one variety of crane from twenty-one to three.