The Evolution of the Country Community / A Study in Religious Sociology

by Warren H. Wilson

The need of recreative activities in the country is shown by recent surveys undertaken in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Kentucky by the Presbyterian Department of Church and Country Life. Generally, throughout the farming population, it was discovered that no common occasions and no common experiences fell to the lot of the country community. In the course of the round year there is, in thousands of farming communities in Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois, no single meeting that brings all the people together. The small town has its fireman's parade, to the small city comes once a year the circus and to the great city comes an anniversary or an exposition. Every year there is some common experience which welds the population, increases acquaintance and intensifies social unity. The tillage of the soil in those farming communities from which the blacksmith, the storekeeper, the peddler and the shoemaker have departed, is very lonely.

The telephone is the new system of nerves for the rural organism, but the telephone is a cold, steel wire instead of the warm and cordial personal meetings with which the countryside was once enlivened. In eighty country towns in Pennsylvania, of which fifty are purely agricultural, we found in our survey only three that had a common leadership and a common assembling. The life of the people in these communities is so solitary as to be almost repellent. Their social habits are those of aggressive loneliness. This isolation in the pioneer days made the country people cordial to the visitor: but in the coming of the new economy the farmer shrinks from strangers, because he has become accustomed to social divisions and classifications in which he feels himself inferior; so that the loneliness of country life has become not merely geographical, but sociological. The farmer is shut in not merely by distances in miles, but by distances of social aversion and suspicion. Difference has become a more hostile influence in the country than distance.

Organized industry necessitates organized recreation. The subjection of mind and body to machine labor requires a reaction in the form of play. All factory and industrial populations, without exception, provide themselves with play-grounds of some sort. In the city where no public provision is made the streets are used by the boys for their games, even at the risk of injury or death from the passing traffic. Jane [Addams] has shown, in a fine literary appeal in her "The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets," the necessity of some provision for the recreations of the young and of working people in a great city.

This necessity is not primarily due to congestion of the population. Its real sources are in the system and organization by which modern work is done. This necessity is as characteristic of the rural community as it is of the city, for on the farms as well as in the factory towns labor is performed by machinery. This means that through the working hours of the day, from eight to twelve in number, the attention of the worker must be concentrated upon one task, patiently and steadfastly pursued. The machine worker exerts himself in the control of great powers, horse power or steam power, committed to his charge. He has no opportunity for languor or rest. He has no choice. His job drives him. His movements are fixed and regulated by the nature of the machine with which he is working, and of the task to be accomplished. At the end of the day he has acted involuntarily and mechanically until his own powers of will and choice are accumulated. Being repressed through long hours of prescribed labor he is ready for a rebound. His nature demands self-expression. This [self-expression] takes the form of play.

The recreation which results is organized. The laborer in a factory or on a railroad is conscious of organization by the very nature of his work. He labors with a machine driven by powers unseen but of whose operation he is aware, in a great plant wherein his own labor is co-ordinated with that of other workers like unto himself. The hours of self-devotion and prescribed attention leave him free for sympathy with the other workers, whose action and whose toil are organized with his own, and on whose skill and devotion his life and limb and the continuance of his job are dependent. When he turns to recreation he naturally seeks to continue the silent communion with his fellow-workers. The repressed personal energies are already prepared for team work. He comes out of the factory bubbling over with good fellowship and seeking for comradeship in the self-expression which the long hours of the day have denied him.

The result is that in every factory town the open spaces are devoted to playground uses. Vacant lots, unoccupied fields, and the open street are used by men and boys for their games.

Exactly the same experience results from school and college organization of education work. The student in the common schools does not choose his course; it is prescribed for him by his family and by society. He does not go to school because he is mentally ambitious, but because the standards of universal education require it of him. Especially in the colleges which inherit a great name and attract young men and women for social advantage, the students are characterized by an involuntary subjection to the routine of modern pedagogy. Educational discipline is imposed upon them through the long hours of lectures and laboratory and recitations. The students in high school and college are accumulating a rebound of voluntary action. This organized self-expression takes the form of school and college athletics, which has long since been adopted as a part of the educational routine. No considerable number of educators are in favor of abolishing it, and only a few venture to believe in restricting college athletics. Its moral value is everywhere tacitly recognized, and pretty generally it is consciously accepted by college and school faculties.

Play of this sort has great moral value. We are hired to work, and we do it without choice or enthusiasm, but in play the natural forces and the personal choice are at their maximum. Every action is chosen and is saturated with the pleasure of self-expression. The result is that play has high ethical value.

Especially has organized recreation great moral power, because it involves team work, and the subjection of the individual to the success of the team. Organized recreation teaches self-denial in a multitude of experiences which are all the more powerful because they are not prescribed by any teacher or preacher, but are the free natural expression of the human spirit under the government of chosen associates working out together a common purpose.

Therefore it is necessary to use play for the recreation of country life. The word is literal, not figurative. It is not a problem merely of games, nor the question of gymnasium, but a profound ethical enterprise of disciplining the whole population through the use of the play spirit. This question must be approached on the high plane of the teaching of modern theorists, and the experience of such practical organizations as the Young Men's Christian Association.