Not in the school or settlement, but at home, said Professor Racca, we learn not to steal and lie. In Italy and Russia the home, he said, is the center of the intellectual and moral life. Therefore the responsibility is America’s if in America these homes crumble and the morals of the children crumble with them. To prevent family disruption the adults as well as the children must be adjusted to the new environment. This adjustment is to be made, he declared, through the right kind of settlement. And this is what a social settlement should be:
“It should be a small institution for all the poor, not merely for the children. At its head should be one boss—a man. He should be married or a widower, and have varied experience. He should not be a minister, for if he is of the same religion as the people he would duplicate the work of their minister, and if he proselytizes, the people will run away. He should not be a professor, because he sees through narrow academic spectacles, and he should not be an amateur who goes into the work for a few years. He ought to be a practical sociologist, not necessarily acquainted with the theories, but he should know the facts. He should be a psychologist. He should know America thoroughly. If he is working for Italians he should have lived at least two years in Italy in the very provinces from which immigrants come. He should know dialect. He should not think that he can learn to know the Italian and his traditions by “doing Italy”—by visiting museums, art collections and churches. He should work in a narrow field and should take the place of the priests in Italy.
“He should visit every person every day, and in this way really be their friend, father and brother. He should be connected with all their organizations, so that the settlement could be the bridge between the organizations and the workers. If he thus knows everybody, the bad elements would dread this headworker. He would know that certain men were not working, and he would know that if they were nevertheless getting a living they are probably blackmailing. He must know individuals so well that he can handle each in his own way; one through an appeal to pride, another through a command, and so on.”
Some headworkers, he said, are out of town several days a week. Social workers should not be “out” so much at lectures and parties. They should be at the disposal of the people of the neighborhood at every moment of the day and night. Educational work can be done better through chats than through lectures. “No one’s system of life is ever changed because he has heard a lecture,” he said. A headworker once made an appointment with him, he said, to explain to him what her settlement did and to take him around. Her telephone called her away every few minutes, and he had to content himself with reading a folder on the settlement’s work.
Another mistake, said Professor Racca, was to let Italians speak at the settlement. “Southern Italians speak marvelously before they are born,” he said; “though what they say may mean nothing. They always speak against America and praise the old country. And when poor people hear these hollow words they think this speaker worthy to be their leader.”
Professor Racca in his address expressed the opinion that volunteer workers should be avoided because they usually have little preparation and the settlements cannot command them as well as if they were paid. Not many girls, he thought, should do social work for young men, because young men, of southern races especially, although they have respect for women, “do not have enough respect to accept a woman as their leader as confidentially as they would a man.” For work with women and children he was of opinion there should be a woman as headworker. “She should be married and of mature age, so that she may have had varied experience. If possible, she should also be a nurse.”
EDITORIAL GRIST
IN PROGRESSIVE KANSAS!
ISABEL C. BARROWS
How hard it is for a man who has at heart the principles of prison reform to carry them out in an old institution that should be leveled to the ground! J. K. Codding, warden of the Kansas State Penitentiary, writing in his eighteenth biennial report, expresses a wish to repair broken men and remake defective ones by plenty of productive labor, wise and firmly administered discipline, proper bodily care, and such mental and spiritual training as is possible under the limited opportunities afforded by a penitentiary. Prison recreations he advocates “not solely for the purpose of giving pleasure to the prisoners, nor as a prison fad, but for the same reason that we give them work, discipline and wholesome food.”