Part 11 (1/2)

XIII

RECREATION

The time has pa.s.sed in which the amus.e.m.e.nts of the community can be neglected or dismissed with mere condemnation. In the husbandry of the country every factor must be counted. We are dealing no longer with a fatalistic country life, but with the economy of all resources.

Therefore the neglecting of the play life and ignoring the leisure occupations of a country people are inconsistent with the new economy.

Moreover the ancient method of condemning all recreations pa.s.sed away with the austere economy of earlier days. The churches in the country no longer discipline their members for ”going to frolics.” The country community no longer is of one mind as to the standard by which recreation shall be governed. Yet every event of this sort is closely inspected by the general attention.

The experience of the cities, in which social control has gone much farther than in the country under the deliberate harmonizing of life with economic principles, has much to contribute for the building up of rural society through various means, among which is recreation.

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 leaders.h.i.+p and a common a.s.sembling. 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 cla.s.sifications 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 pa.s.sing 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 acc.u.mulated. 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 fellows.h.i.+p and seeking for comrades.h.i.+p in the self-expression which the long hours of the day have denied him.

The result is that in every factory town the open s.p.a.ces 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 acc.u.mulating 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 abolis.h.i.+ng 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 mult.i.tude 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 a.s.sociates 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 a.s.sociation.

The Christian a.s.sociations began their work in the lifetime of present generations and for accomplis.h.i.+ng certain purposes they have used recreation. They provided a gymnasium, at first, in order to get men into the prayer-meeting. They offered social parlors in which young men could always hear the sound of sacred song. But the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation has traveled far from its crude and early use of recreation. Some of the early a.s.sociation leaders are still living and still leading. They have steadily advanced with care and wisdom in the use of recreation. Within very recent years the leaders of the a.s.sociations have countenanced the use of billiard tables. No longer is the gymnasium an annex to the prayer-meeting. It has values of its own.

Without moralizing, these practical men have discovered that the social parlors were good for ends of their own and not merely as a place for hearing the distant sound of hymns. In other words, recreation is a form of ethical culture.

Rev. C. O. Gill, who was captain of the Yale football team in 1890, has had an extended experience among farmers. He says, ”The reason why farmers cannot co-operate is in the fact that they did not play when they were boys. They never learned team work. They cannot yield to one another, or surrender themselves to the common purpose.” The writer, observing Mr. Gill coaching a university team, commented upon the good spirits with which a player yielded his place on the team just before the victory. Mr. Gill had removed him, as he explained to him, not because he played poorly, but because a new formation required a rearrangement of the team. In reply to comment upon the player's self-forgetfulness, Mr. Gill said, ”Football is the greatest school of morals in the country. I learned more ethics from the coaches when I was an undergraduate in Yale, than from all other sources combined.”

It is this high ethical value of recreation which causes the working man to defend his amateur baseball team, and makes it so hard to repress Sunday games. The working man admits the high value of the Sabbath, but he sets a value also upon recreation, and without a.n.a.lysis of the philosophy either of the Sabbath or of the play-ground, stoutly maintains the goodness of recreation and its necessity for those who have labored all the week. ”I work six days in the week, and I must have some time for recreation,” is the working man's answer to all Sunday reformers. Waiving for a moment the question of the Sabbath, the human process to which the working man testifies is exactly as he describes it. Organized labor and systematic industry will react on any population in the form of systematic recreation.

The Play-ground Movement, therefore, is extending itself throughout the country by the very influence of modern industry. Given intelligence to interpret it, and one understands at once the desire of philanthropic and public spirited men and women to provide ”a playground beside every school building, open for all the people.”

Dr. Luther H. Gulick, who was born of missionary parents, was trained in religious schools, graduated as a physician, employed for years in the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation, and then made Play-Ground Director in the New York Public Schools, has become legitimately the heir of the experiences of the modern social conscience. He has summed up the philosophy of working men, students, and of the people whose lives are systematized, in a sentence: ”There is a higher morality in the reactions of play than in the experiences of labor.”

The tradition of the church has been opposed to amus.e.m.e.nt and recreation. The church of our fathers recognized the moral possibilities of play by calling all play immoral. The early Quakers filled their records in the eighteenth century with denunciations of ”frollicks.”