It is obvious that the schoolhouse is in most communities used only during certain hours of the day, those hours when the rest of the community is busily engaged in bread-winning work. It occurred to the gentlemen who started this movement that inasmuch as the schoolhouses belonged to the community it was perfectly legitimate that the community should use them for its own entertainment and schooling when the young people were not occupying them. And that, therefore, it would be a good idea to have there all sorts of gatherings, for social purposes, for purposes of entertainment, for purposes of conference, for any legitimate thing that might bring neighbors and friends together in the schoolhouses. That, I understand it, in its simplest terms is the civic center movement—that the schoolhouses might be made a place of meeting—in short, where by meeting each other the people of a community might know each other, and by knowing each other might concert a common life, a common action.
Spontaneous Development
The study of the civic center is the study of the spontaneous life of communities. What you do is to open the schoolhouse and light it in the evening and say: “Here is a place where you are welcome to come and do anything that it occurs to you to do.”
And the interesting thing about this movement is that a great many things have occurred to people to do in the schoolhouse, things social, things educational, things political,—for one of the reasons why politics took on a new complexion in the city in which this movement originated was that the people who could go into the schoolhouses at night knew what was going on in that city and insisted upon talking about it, and the minute they began talking about it, many things became impossible, for there are scores of things that must be put a stop to in our politics that will stop the moment they are talked of where men will listen. The treatment for bad politics is exactly the modern treatment for tuberculosis—it is exposure to the open air.
Now you have to begin at the root of the matter in order to understand what it is you intend to serve by this movement. You intend to serve the life of communities, the life that is there, the life that you cannot create, the life to which you can only give release and opportunity; and wherein does that life consist? That is the question that interests me. There can be no life in a community so long as its parts are segregated and separated. It is just as if you separated the organs of the human body and then expected them to produce life. You must open wide the channels of sympathy and communication between them, you must make channels for the tides of life; if you clog them anywhere, if you stop them anywhere, why then the processes of disease set in, which are the processes of misunderstanding, which are the disconnections between the spiritual impulses of different sections of men.
Common Center Essential to Community Life
The very definition of community is a body of men who have things in common, who are conscious that they have things in common, who judge those common things from a single point of view, namely, the point of view of general interest. Such a thing as a community is unthinkable, therefore, unless you have close communication; there must be a vital inter-relationship of parts, there must be a fusion, there must be a coördination, there must be a free intercourse, there must be such a contact as will constitute union itself before you will have the true course of the wholesome blood throughout the body.
Therefore, when you analyze some of our communities you will see just how necessary it is to get their parts together. Take some of our great cities for example. Do you not realize by common gossip even, the absolute disconnection of what we call their residential sections from the rest of the city? Isn’t it singular that while human beings live all over a city, we pick out a part, a place where there are luxurious and well-appointed houses and call that the residential section? As if nobody else lived anywhere in that city. That is the place where the most disconnected part and in some instances the most useless part of the community lives. There men do not know their next-door neighbors; there men do not want to know their next-door neighbors; there is no bond of sympathy; there is no bond of knowledge or common acquaintanceship.
I am not speaking of these things to impeach a class, for I know of no just way in which to impeach a class.
It is necessary that such portions of the community should be linked with the other portions; it is necessary that simple means should be found by which by an interchange of points of view we may get together, for the whole process of modern life, the whole process of modern politics, is a process by which we must exclude misunderstandings, exclude hostilities, exclude deadly rivalries, make men understand other men’s interests, bring all men into common counsel, and so discover what is the common interest.