Part 15 (1/2)
[89] Many plans for ideal rural community centers have been published.
Among them see N. Y. State College of Agriculture, Extension Circular No. 1, ”A Plan for a Rural Community Center”; Peter A. Speek, ”A Stake in the Land,” Plate facing page 252; plans of Durham and Delhi, California, in reports of Calif. Land Settlement Board.
One of the most comprehensive studies in rural community planning is ”Town Planning for Small Communities,” by Walpole (Ma.s.s.) Town Planning Committee. Edited by C. S. Bird.
[90] Thomas Adams, ”Rural Planning and Development.” Canada Commission of Conservation, Ottawa, 1917, pp. 53-64, with ill.u.s.trations.
[91] Samuel T. Dana, ”Forestry and Community Development.” Bulletin 638, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C.
A. B. Recknagel, ”County, Town, and Village Forests.” N. Y. State College of Agriculture, Cornell Reading Course for the Farm, Lesson 40, 1913.
John S. Everitt, ”Working Plan for a Communal Forest for the Town of Ithaca, N. Y.,” Cornell Univ. Agr. Exp. Station, Bulletin 404.
[92] Chapter 693, Wis. Laws of 1919, Creating section 1458-11 of the Statutes.
[93] See ”The Survey,” Dec. 25, 1920, p. 459.
[94] See Peter A. Speek, ”A Stake in the Land,” p. 53. New York, Harpers, 1921.
[95] See Elwood Mead, ”Helping Men Own Farms.” New York, Macmillan, 1921.
[96] The ”clock system” is described in detail in the writer's bulletin, ”Locating the Rural Community.” Cornell Reading Course for the Farm, Lesson 158. Information concerning it may be secured from the American Rural Index Corporation, Ithaca, N. Y.
CHAPTER XIX
COMMUNITY LOYALTY
Just as we know a man by his bodily presence, so we recognize a community by its location and its physical structure. Yet the man is more than a body and the community is more than its material basis; the real community consists of the men, women, and children living together in a restricted environment. Dr. R. E. Hieronymous has well expressed the most fundamental aspect of the community when he says that its people ”are coming to act together in the chief concerns of life.”[97]
The life of the community consists of the common activities of its people. There can be no community where there is no devotion to a common cause. The cause may be now one thing, now another, it may be worthy or debasing, but in so far as the people of a locality are acting together in the support of various common causes they are living as a community.
Just as the character of an individual is determined by his life purposes and the degree to which he conforms his behavior to them, so the highest type of community is that in which its people are consciously loyal to the common welfare and are ”coming to act together”
for the common good. Like the character of an individual, the community is in process of becoming; it necessarily exists on an unconscious basis, due to locality and heredity, but the strength of the community is measured by the degree to which its members become voluntarily loyal to common purposes.
Outside of early New England the circ.u.mstances of settlement of the United States were not conducive to community development. Most of the country west of the Alleghanies was settled by individuals who secured their land from the federal government and whose prime allegiance was to the nation. The federal government was the outgrowth of a revolution for the right of self-government. Liberty and Freedom were its watchwords and the conditions of life of the pioneer settlers and their rapid spread over one of the richest natural areas in the world favored individual independence. It was the natural reaction from the previous domination of a feudal aristocracy. For over a century our national philosophy has been dominated by a doctrine of rights, and only recently have we come to perceive that if democracy is to function in a complex modern civilization, there must be an equal emphasis on duties. This is the significance of the present interest in instruction in citizens.h.i.+p in our schools.
Most of us hardly appreciate how complete a reversal of the organization of rural life was involved in this sudden domination of individualism.
Primitive agriculture was made possible by men a.s.sociating in small village communities for defense and mutual aid. Their whole system of agriculture, until very modern times, was controlled and directed, not by the individual or family, but by the community. The typical peasant community of Russia or India was in many respects but an enlarged family and its economy and social control were based upon the customs of the family. Indeed, historically the community was the outgrowth of the enlarged family or clan. It is not surprising, therefore, that the peasant's first loyalty is to his community. The nation or state is far away and beyond his ken; his patriotism is for his home village. So Park and Miller in their discussion of immigrants' att.i.tudes say: ”The peasant did not know that he was a Pole; he even denied it. The lord was a Pole; he was a peasant. We have records showing that members of other immigrant groups realize first in America that they are members of a nationality: ”I had never realized I was an Albanian until my brother came from America in 1909. He belonged to an Albanian society over here.”[98]
Prior to the last century the whole social organization of rural life in the Old World was built up around the community. The family, the community, and the state were the primary forms of human a.s.sociation.
Obviously, therefore, when families dispersed over the new territory of the United States with no community ties and with but few contacts with the national government, there was a lack of that social organization to which the people had been accustomed and through which their whole mode of life, their customs and moral code had been built up. These forms of human a.s.sociation, the family, the community, the state, have been built up very slowly through centuries of human strife and suffering; they represent the experience of the race as to the best means of adjusting human relations.h.i.+ps. Break down an essential feature of the structure of human society, as was done when American settlers abandoned community life, and men are compelled to find new methods of meeting their common needs and of maintaining standards of conduct essential for their common welfare. Had it not been for the influence of the school and the church, rural life over most of the United States would have inevitably degenerated, for wherever there is no form of a.s.sociated control there humanity reverts to the level of the brute. Human life is what it is because for countless generations mankind has been learning how to adjust itself through a.s.sociation so that larger opportunity for the individual is secured through a larger measure of well being for all.
The devotion of the American settler to his family eventually necessitated his a.s.sociation for advantages which could be secured only through collective action. When he had subdued the land and established his home, when he commenced to raise farm products for market rather than primarily for support of the family, when better communication gave more contacts with the town and city, the farm family developed new wants and interests which could only be satisfied through a.s.sociation with others. We have already indicated the processes whereby the economic situation, religious life, public education, the need of local government, and the desire for recreational facilities, are inevitably drawing the people of the countryside together at the natural centers into communities. The locality group is again recognized as essential for the best organization of rural life. But the new rural community is a voluntary group, it is not determined by common control of the land or by common subjection to a feudal lord as was the village community of the old world; its people are free to come and go where and when they will. The community can compel only through the power of public opinion and its success must depend upon the voluntary loyalty of its people.
Thus the strength and the weakness of the community lies in the loyalty of its people. No community can permanently succeed whose people a.s.sociate in it merely for the advantages which they may gain. There must be a genuine willingness to give as well as to receive, a real desire to do one's share for the common life. Human a.s.sociation cannot succeed on a basis of organized selfishness. The joy of family life arises from the fact that each member is devoted to all and is willing to sacrifice personal interests for the family; without such devotion and sacrifice the true home is impossible. Just because human nature has arisen through long ages of a.s.sociation, man finds no permanent satisfaction in pursuing his own selfish interest; his greatest joy is found in his devotion to others. All human a.s.sociation therefore depends upon loyalty and the higher and more complex the a.s.sociation, the more essential is the loyalty of its members. As Miss Follett has well said, ”Loyalty means the consciousness of oneness, the full realization that we succeed or fail, live or die, are saved or d.a.m.ned, together. The only unity or community is one we have made of ourselves, by ourselves, for ourselves.”[99]
Here social science and religion agree upon the ultimate objectives of life. Professor Josiah Royce has shown[100] that the ideal of Christianity, the Kingdom of G.o.d, is but a universal community, what he calls the ”beloved community,” which is made possible through the loyalty of all to love and service. There is a fundamentally religious sanction to community loyalty and only an essentially religious motive will inspire men to sublimate personal interests in devotion to the community. Only through loyalty to the highest ideals of community life can the Kingdom of G.o.d be realized on earth. No conceivable cataclysm could make its existence possible without the voluntary allegiance of mankind, for the Kingdom of G.o.d is the kingdom of love; it can exist only as the minds and hearts of men are devoted to it. Nor can the community universal, the ”beloved community,” be achieved except each local community adjusts its own life to the highest social values. The community movement is but a means whereby the ideals of democracy and religion may be given concrete expression in a definite locality. Unless these ideals can be applied to local areas where it is possible to achieve some measure of common life, of community, there is little probability of their realization in the world at large.
But these higher values of human life cannot be brought about by a mere process of organization. They require the dynamic of a religious conviction in the hearts of men. The Gospel and life of Jesus of Nazareth furnish the essential inspiration for that spirit of loyalty without which all organization is in vain. Professor E. C. Lindeman has ably expressed this in his discussion of the relation of the Community and Democracy:
”The most formidable foe of Democracy, however, is the confidence which people place in schemes and plans and forms of organization. What the social machinery of our day needs is spiritual force to provide motive power. The modern Community Movement will fail to give Democracy its practical expression if it is not motivated by a spiritual dynamic.