CIVICS

HENRY S. CURTIS

Daniel said to Nebuchadnezzar: “Thou, O king, sawest and beheld a great image. His head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms were of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of iron, and his feet part of iron and part of clay; and a stone smote the image upon the feet that were of iron and clay and brake them in pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken in pieces together.”

This image might represent America nearly as well as the empire of “the great king.” In the original democracies of Greece, the freemen met together in the market place to elect from their friends and acquaintances the officers who determined the policy of the state. The weakness of American democracy is that we have not organized this primitive element ordemoson which it is supposed to stand.

Politics in our cities have been corrupt, because there have been no meetings of the community to discuss community affairs. The individual has often been reckless in conduct, because he was not acquainted in the section in which he lived and consequently had no social accountability to public opinion. Foreigners have come among us and drifted in and out of the city slum, bearing with them their racial antipathies to each other, and casting no anchor in the locality because at no time have they become a real part of a community. We have had no real city communities or neighborhoods but mere districts of people in no way organized or related to each other. The feet of the image are of miry clay.

In the country sections the situation is little better. In the days of the pioneer the early settlers were drawn together by common dangers and necessities into a brotherhood of the wilderness. They assisted in erecting the cabin of the newcomer. The women had their quiltings and their sewing circles. The whole community met together to marry the lovers and bury the dead. The school house was the common center, where Sabbath service, debate, music school, and “spell down” were held.

These conditions have undergone an almost complete change. The specializing of industry and new machinery have made farmers independent of their neighbors. The community uses of the public school have fallen away.

The last few years have seen a rapid advance in the principles of Democracy through the initiative, referendum and recall, the presidential primaries and other measures; but the fundamental unit is still unorganized. The feet are still of miry clay. To secure the democratic control of the community or district is the greatest problem of our democracy. This result demands that some agora, forum, or neighborhood center shall be restored to the people.

If a neighborhood center is to be created, the facilities which the neighborhood wishes to use must be brought together in a single place. Thus each facility offered will bring patrons, not to itself alone, but to all the others as well, as each department in a department store brings customers to all the others.

A comparatively few years have seen the cities take up as municipal undertakings the public playground, the municipal gymnasium and bath, the branch library, and a few scattered beginnings in the way of municipal camps. While the undertakings have been carried on by the city and maintained by public funds, they have not been really furnished to all the people of the city, as a rule, because they have not been accessible. They have not been placed in communities, they have no definite clientele. They cut across the lines of the existing organizations of the people. The individual has no direct touch with the community that brings him into relationship with them. All of these facilities are at least as much for the children as adults, but they lie off the beaten paths of child travel, and hence secure a minimum rather than a maximum use.

The only public institution that is central to each community is the school. If this can be made the nucleus around which the other institutions can be gathered, it may be possible to create again a modern forum or market place, that will serve the same purpose as did the old. The large undertakings already under way for the improvement of the school itself can not be carried to full success without certain radical improvements in the school equipment. The playground activity demands larger playgrounds. New York is now paying more than a thousand teachers every summer to direct the play in its school playgrounds; but there are very few schools that have an out-door playground fifty feet square. It is not the same thing to play in a school basement that it is to play in the open air. The school basement is always sunless, and the air is not the same as it is in the open. The French requirement for the lighting of school buildings is that there shall be no other building within a distance equal to the height of the school. The gymnastic work, to secure the best results, must be done in the open air, and not in a dusty gymnasium. In London, all the longer exercises are always taken out of doors in pleasant weather. Some foreign cities now require a certain minimum playground space for every child. In Munich this is twenty-five square feet.In London it is thirty square feet. This would mean an acre of playground to 1,452 children, not a large amount surely, and much less than should be taken in the smaller cities. Throughout the middle states and the West, now generally a block for all new schools is given. In some cases the usefulness of the ground is being nearly destroyed by placing the school building in the center, but where the building is placed at the side or end, as it should be, this ground becomes available for many school and community uses.

This block should be shaded by trees. It should have grass plots, if they have to be renewed every year, as Jacob Riis says; and running around the outside should be a narrow space for children’s gardens where all the nature work material of the school could be grown. In one corner should be a school menagerie and benches should be placed under the trees.

During the school hours, the school park should belong to the nurses and mothers with baby carriages. From three to ten p. m. every school day, and all through the summer, it should be the playground of the children and the social center of the adults. In the winter it should be flooded for skating.

Each of the new public schools of New York contains a gymnasium, but most of these are on the top floor, and they have to equip another in the basement for the play center. Each of the new public schools of Cincinnati contains a gymnasium and a swimming pool, and they are generally on the ground floor or near it. Most of the new high schools all over the country contain a gymnasium at least and many of them swimming pools as well. Wherever these facilities are furnished, they are generally used by the school during the day and by the public at night. A number of cities are now building municipal gymnasiums and baths also, but the children want to use the gymnasium and swimming pool during the day, the adults want to use them at night, it is not evident that two sets of gymnasiums and two sets of swimming pools are necessary.

Berlin has an interesting solution of this problem. They house the gymnasium in a separate building in the yard. In this way the noise and dust which is incident to exercise is removed from the school, and it is possible to give more freedom to the work. In most cases there is a swimming pool in the basement where the pupils are taught to swim. But the chief advantage of the gymnasium’s being in a separate building is that it is thus more accessible to the general public as a free gymnasium and bath at night.

Our public schools and especially our summer schools are greatly hampered by the lack of library facilities. The school in order to be successful must create a love of reading. It cannot do this without books. At present only a small proportion of the children have access to a library, and this is often so distant that little use is made of it. The reason is simple, the library is a strange place and its methods are unknown. If the child, despite this, manifests his desire to draw out books, he must often first get some one to be his security for their return, and this is not always easy for a child of laboring or foreign parentage. But the school may safely trust the child because he is a member of the school and known and responsible, when it would not be at all safe for the public library to give out a book to him.

Parents often have little time or inclination to go to libraries for books, but depend on their children to provide them with reading. If the library were a separate building in the school yard or a part of the school, it would be no task for the children to take out and return as many books as might be desired in the home. The growing use of the school as a social center makes it increasingly important that the branch libraries should be connected with it.

The theaters of Greece and Rome were public institutions. Many of the best theaters of Europe are subsidized. The dramatic form of representation is the one that is nearest to having the experience itself. The socialized theater might undoubtedly be one of the greatest agencies for good that could come into any community.

In the past the expense of the public theater has been almost prohibitive; but to the credit of Thomas A. Edison be it said, that he has brought the theater to every man’s door. Most of our new schools contain auditoriums, and the state and city departments of public instruction will soon be required by public sentiment to furnish educational moving-picture films to every school in the state. With the addition of the theater the success of the school social center and the organization of community life is assured.

Besides these activities which should be connected directly with the school itself, the school is the best dispenser of much of the social betterment work for children. If each school had a camp in the country, it could make a much wiser selection of children to be sent there than any fresh air agency can do. No one child would be sent out successively by half a dozen different societies to the exclusion of the needy but timid child. Judging from a very limited experience it has seemed to me that the children are not at their best in the fresh air camps. Often away from all their friends and acquaintances they are homesick and feel that this trip and this camp have no connection with anything else in their lives.

Besides these great disadvantages under which the present system works, there are corresponding advantages that are lost to the school. With such a camp, there would be an opportunity for nature study and gardening of a most approved kind. Athletics might be so carried on as to supply many of the deficiencies of the school year, and boy scout patrols might be organized for all the older boys. But, best of all, the children would then learn to meet their teachers on a common footing and the tone of the school would be improved.

This extension of the school would not meanfor the most part a large increase in expense. Already we are getting the larger playgrounds, the auditoriums, the gymnasiums, and the swimming pools in our new school buildings, but the cities are also building municipal baths and gymnasiums, small playgrounds and public libraries in places that have no relationship to any definite community. It is mostly a question of locating without duplication the facilities that all need in places where they will be accessible to all.

We may well ask ourselves if the school is competent to take these new responsibilities. The answer must be that at present the average school principal is certainly not competent to take charge of these new phases, but that men usually rise soon to new responsibilities or new men appear to take their places. These new relations would bring the school and the home together, would make the school a part of life, would give the pupil a new set of associations with his teachers and with study, and in every way would redound to the good of the school and the community.

S. H. J. SIMPSON

When the sailing list of each trans-Atlantic liner reads like the program of an all-star gala performance, and conductors, managers and husbands also sail, the small number of the cultured rich who maintain music in New York go likewise; but the city is not left empty. Then the Metropolitan assumes a perpetually “morning after” appearance; so, too, Carnegie Hall; and the new piano emporium will serve as a sounding board for band concerts across the way. It is to these band concerts—not only in Bryant Park but in almost every park and pier in the city—that the reader’s attention is called.

The vastness of New York is one of the greatest problems confronting any public spirited enterprise which aims to reach that vague, elusive faction—the people. The problem has been met and fairly solved musically by the three men who are responsible for the invasion by band and orchestra of the city’s parks and piers during the past three years. It is refreshing to meet with a movement which aims toward no tangible education, moral rescue or poor relief, and to find a department of city government frankly idealistic enough to organize a force whose only aim is the presentation of pure beauty. And it is curiously paradoxical that this movement should have found its opportunity in New York. It is, nevertheless, true that New York supports more entirely free summer concerts than any city in the world.

At the beginning of the current municipal administration the park and pier music in its present form had its birth in the constitution of a committee consisting of the commissioner of docks and ferries, the commissioner of parks and a new official designated as the supervisor of municipal concerts in parks and recreation piers. To the latter is due the lion’s share of credit for the ideals, the organization and the practical working of the system. To the commissioners New York owes a debt for their hearty co-operation, and in some cases, acute personal interest in the problems of the undertaking.

Not only has the size of the music loving population been considered in the multiplication of concerts, but the varieties of appreciation and the national tastes of different neighborhoods have been sympathetically studied by Arthur Farwell, the supervisor. The $100,000 annual municipal appropriation is divided between the piers and parks, and provides for a force of about seventy bands and conductors. Extraordinarily interesting is the study of neighborhoods in connection with the make-up of programs. This is especially so among the docks. The long pier at 129th Street, with an orchestra attracts what the directors are pleased to designate as the “high-brow” crowd. The call there is for the best in operatic and symphonic music—two and three movements of symphonies are often given. Selections from Italian opera flourish at East 112th Street, and at East 3d Street, all sorts of Jewish religious music is featured. The only crowd which has given any trouble assembles at West 50th Street, and the largest of the pier audiences is found at East 34th Street. Probably the most generally representative gathering is in the Mall in Central Park, where seven concerts a week are given in summer.

In thus cursorily reviewing the facts of the condition of municipal music in New York, only the smaller part of the situation is discussed. The movement, under its present impetus, is new, and to a large number of people, unknown. Although it is beyond the scope of the present article to consider, in any detail, the ethical aspect of the situation, it is, nevertheless, appropriate, in view of the comparative untriedness of the idea, to answer a few questions which are constantly brought up by those who are interested in the conditions. Even so, it seems that the time has come when the movement may fairly be said to have passed the experimental stage, if success may be measured by popular approval.

It merely remains to count the numbers in attendance. And here we find the answer to the most frequent query as to whether there is sufficient popular demand to warrant all this effort. The question has been submitted to a practical referendum. Do the people want it? Although no formal count of the audiences has been made it has been estimated that they ranged during the summer of 1912 from 5,000 to 15,000, in the various localities. In Central Park, every seat in the Mall and on the terrace was filled byeight o’clock, and stragglers wandered about the outskirts or stood packed between the benches all the evening. Every spot within hearing was filled, and it was with some difficulty that aisles and passages were kept clear. Nor is this audience a casual one. Any number of habitues are noticeable, night after night, in the same seats—jealous of their places—and night after night, the same tired mothers are there, with the same baby carriages. And way off, along the driveways, or here and there in a street near the docks, a policeman, a laborer, a little street urchin, may sometimes be seen to stop, and, “lifting his head in the stillness,” listen—and pass on.

This attention is, with few exceptions, so marked, that it, of itself, answers another question: Isn’t all this stuff way above the heads of the people? Again, the size of the audiences furnishes the most convincing answer. Theoretically, of course, the best, being the most human, is above no one’s head. But even practically, no genuine heterogeneous crowd of “street-bred people” trails from the dark places on a hot night—carrying or wheeling babies, with small children tugging at the skirts or clamoring to be carried—to hear such things as are above its head.

The aim of the movement is distinctly not educational in the instructive sense, nevertheless, the popular interest in the programs has been taken into consideration by Mr. Farwell in his brief and readable program notes. These give simple, important facts relating to composers and compositions, and do not attempt any detailed analyzation such as is familiar to the average concert goer. That these find a place, would seem to be proved by the knots of people who gather, program in hand, under the lights.

Underlying the entire discussion of this, or any purely artistic movement in this country, there is often the question: What’s the use? Be the reason what it may—personal gratification, civic pride, or any other cause—it is almost safe to say that no citizen grudges New York its parks, its buildings, or its Metropolitan Museum of Art. Why, then, its public music, which gives innocent pleasure, rest, perhaps inspiration to thousands? I do not think that this is grudged to the people. Its neglect is simply a matter of ignorance, rather than indifference, on the part of many men who regularly pay their opera and symphony subscriptions, and who have watched with interest the efforts of several organizations to bring the price of concert tickets down to a low figure. But this philanthropic effort does not strike at the root of the matter. Ideally, music should not have to be offered to the people as a commodity, nor as a charity, nor, primarily, as an education. It should stand, rather, as a temple, to which they may come gladly and freely, and from which they may go full hearted, carrying its best with them.

And this has been accomplished in the piers and parks in the last three years. But the winter contrast is striking. Fed up all summer, it seems hardly fair that men should be starved all winter. The daily papers printed, during September, 1912, a number of letters, asking why these concerts could not be continued through the winter months. There is but one solution of the problem—the municipal orchestra—and in this connection I cannot do better than quote a letter, written by Mr. Farwell to the New YorkTimes, in response to the various suggestions and inquiries:

“The Central Park concerts have shown once for all that the greatest in music appeals directly and powerfully to the people when it is given to them under the right conditions. This is one of the mysteries of music—its power to short circuit an intellectual by a spiritual process. To wait until some hypothetical time in the future for the high gift of music to be given to the people is to be both dilatory and blind. The time for national initiative is at hand. What the people of New York really need is a permanent municipal symphony orchestra.”

Popular response to good music is no longer an open question. The people have answered it conclusively, and popular demand has become a live issue.

EDITH M. HADLEYPresident Chelsea House Association, New York

EDITH M. HADLEY

President Chelsea House Association, New York

In a factory town, at the lunch hour, have you ever consciously watched the girls and women thronging down the steps and filling the streets surrounding the workshop? Have you listened to their noisy laughter and scraps of conversation and tried to understand their meaning? In 1910, when the last Census of Manufactures was taken, there were over 1,500,000 of these girls and women—factory workers in the United States.

In a large city at nightfall, when the lamps are lighted, have you ever observed the streams of girls flowing into the streets from the offices and great department stores? Again at night, have you seen the girls, waiting at the entrances of tenement houses or on the street corners for their “gentleman friends” who are to emancipate them for a few hours from their cramped and dingy environment? And have you asked yourself where and how do these girls live?

During the last few years we have heard so much about the discontent of the labor classes, the “restlessness of the present age,” that the phrases fall upon unheeding ears. But it takes no Socialist to understand that, if a family man’s expenses are $900 a year, and that working to the best of his ability he can earn only $700 to $800, and that if it costs a girl $8 a week to live, and she cannot earn that much, there must be discontent. It is time for the community to regulate such conditions.

The question of wages is so closely allied to the question of housing that a study of the latter involves some knowledge of the former. Cost of living and standard of living must be approached from a fact basis. Studies by Robert Chapin, Scott Nearing and the commission appointed by Congress, indicate that a man, hiswife and three children under fourteen, cannot live and maintain efficiency under $900 a year on the Island of Manhattan. This is not excessive for Boston, Buffalo and Chicago. It is low for Pittsburgh, a little high for Philadelphia and Baltimore but a fair average for the great cities east of the Mississippi and north of Virginia.

Investigations prove that there is no great wage variation in different sections of the country. In the West wages run slightly higher than in the East, and in the larger cities than in the smaller towns. From a study of 1,391 New York girls working in department stores, the average earnings were reported as $4.69 a week during the first year and $5.28 the second. They increased in ten years, to $9.81, during which period many fall out of the ranks. Buyers and expert saleswomen remain. Their average earnings mount up to $13.33. In factories the average earnings of 3,421 girls showed $4.62 a week for the first year and $5.34 for the second year. After ten years’ experience $8.48 was reached.

The majority of girls at work live at home and, in many cases, have to a certain extent the protection of their family. But an ever-increasing number of girls are entering the towns and cities, quite alone and friendless, to earn their way. These girls either keep house, live in families, in boarding and lodging houses or in the organized boarding house.

The girl who lives at home usually gives all her earnings to her parents—over 84 per cent working in shops, and 88 per cent in factories in New York city, and a similar number in Chicago and St. Louis. The parents rely upon their daughters for an exact amount of income, so that these girls are in no sense “pin money workers.” The girl at home in New York city usually lives in a three to five-room flat in a tenement house, for which her father pays from $10 to $35 a month; and into these cramped quarters, one, two or more boarders are frequently taken.

In New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Minneapolis and St. Paul, it has been estimated that about 65,000 girls, exclusive of stenographers, office girls, nurses and teachers, are without homes, and entirely dependent upon themselves for support. Girls with a low standard of living can live more cheaply by keeping house than in any other manner. This means that several girls may join together and rent a two or three room flat. After their daily work of eight to twelve hours in factory, shop or office, is over, they have the housework to do—cleaning, cooking, washing and sewing. A girl keeping house or living in lodgings may save on food. She may go without breakfast or lunch, or have bread and coffee for breakfast, bread for lunch, and bread and soup or meat for dinner. She may spend part of her evenings making clothes, the material for which has been bought with money saved from food. “Oh, my, where would we get our clothes, if we bought meat every day?” asked one girl. How long do these girls remain economically efficient?

Fortunate is the girl who can find a home with some respectable tenement house family. Here she frequently underpays. Anna Friedman earns $7 a week as cashier; she lives with Mrs. McCoy in a $27 a month five-room flat. Anna pays $3 a week for her accommodation, but considers herself entirely self-supporting, as Mrs. McCoy’s husband is absent part of the time, and Anna’s companionship is of some value. She therefore has a margin of $4 for clothes, laundry, amusements, sickness and incidentals, and is well off. Girls living in this way usually associate with the family, using all rooms in common.

The most dangerous way in which a girl can live is in a lodging, or as they are called “a furnished-room house.” Investigations of forty-three boarding and lodging houses in one city showed that five were known to be houses where fast women lived. “Not only were good and bad houses on the same block, but good and bad people were living in the same house.”

Freda Lippeg earned $3 a week, and paid $1.50 for her room; her food, which she cooked in her room, cost her $1.46. Seeing how easy it is for them to get plenty to eat, pretty clothes to wear, and to have “good times,” what temptations are placed in the way of such girls living in houses with immoral women!

While a landlady may prove to be a girl’s best friend, giving her advice, trusting her when she is unable to pay, even lending her money, in the majority of cases the girl has no supervision at all. With the exception of houses in Philadelphia, where the wage earner’s standard of respectability demands a sitting room, few houses can afford to have one. As a lodging house is now conducted, the landlady’s net profits, are usually free rent of her room and $150 a year. As the parlor is the best paying room, the requirement of its use for lodgers would mean a readjustment of rents, either of house or rooms or both. So the girls receive their “gentlemen friends” in their bed rooms.

For the young girl in a strange city, earning moderate wages, no manner of life is so capable of approaching that of the home as the organized boarding house. Scattered throughout the United States are a number of these houses, but the supply can in no way approach the demand. In many cases they are too expensive for the poorer girl to afford. Few of these houses aim to be self-supporting, which fact also deters many self-respecting girls. The girl rightfully wishes to be a customer at the boarding house, and not an object of charity. The rules in some of the houses are stringent; sometimes a closing hour is enforced, and girls returning later may be locked out. Nearly all have an age and a wage limit. But they all have a drawing room which is usually furnished with a piano, books and magazines. Here girls may receive their friends, and have the companionship of other girls. Often warm friendships are formed.

The welfare of the house depends upon the “housemother,” whose opportunities and responsibilities are unbounded. To be able to keep a clean, well ordered, full house; to supply an ample amount of nourishing food; to receiveenough board money from the girls to cover all expenses without dunning them is no easy matter. But in addition to this to be sympathetic without being partial or sentimental; to be able to care for the tired and sick; to be patient and firm with the hysterical; to understand and direct youth, gayety and extravagance; and to help the girls who are in danger of losing their “woman’s heritage,” a woman must give the best that is in her. The Eleanor Clubs in Chicago; the Ladies’ Christian Union Houses, the Chelsea House Association and the Virginia in New York; and the Girl’s Friendly Society Lodges in New York, Providence and Louisville are helping to solve the housing problem for girls. But why have we not hundreds, instead of tens of these houses? Can we not see the relationship between unsanitary, overcrowded homes, the loneliness and often vicious environment of many lodging houses, and human waste and immorality?

“If, because of our privileges, because of our warm, comfortable clean homes, we can not say to these girls ‘My sister come home,’ surely it rests upon us to do it in some community way. And if we can not get the housing of girls taken up as a community duty, then all the more must we struggle by private enterprise to find out the way. We must say there shall be no town throughout the length and breadth of our land where the girl can not find safe shelter, a place which if her need is great, she may call home.”

One hundred and seventy-four delegates attended the first state housing conference and participated in the organization of the New Jersey State Housing Association, in the City Hall, Newark, last month. The conference and the formal organization of the association had its inception at the National Housing Conference in Philadelphia in December, 1912, when William L. Kinkead of Paterson and Captain Charles J. Allen, secretary of the New Jersey Tenement House Department, gathered the New Jersey delegates and took the preliminary steps which led to the recent action.

Among the speakers were John A. Campbell, president of the State Board of Tenement House Supervision; former Governor Franklin Murphy, James Ford of Harvard University and his brother George B. Ford of Columbia University, who had just completed an exhaustive survey of Newark, for the City Plan Commission; Judge Harry V. Osborne, of the Essex County Court of Common Pleas; Richard Stevens, Miles W. Beemer and others.

The dominant note in the conference was the proposed amendment to the present Tenement House Law of New Jersey which Professor George B. Ford referred to as “the best law of its kind in America when enacted in 1901 and not far behind the best laws of its kind at this time.” The delegates were agreed that the present law should be amended to include two family houses, many of which it was agreed are in worse condition than the tenement houses.

Another proposed amendment which practically all the delegates favored was to require that all tenement houses three stories high be equipped with fire escapes. The law at present reads that outside iron fire escapes be provided on all non-fireproof tenement homes more than three stories in height. It was stated that the enactment of the proposed amendments would necessitate a considerable increase in the staff of the Tenement House Department and the delegates pledged themselves to use every effort to secure a larger appropriation for additional inspectors and clerks.

In his address Col. Franklin J. Murphy, Jr., called attention to the fact that the city of New York, with 104,000 tenement houses, spends $800,000 annually for the tenement house department, or $7.69 per house per year, while in the last fiscal year New Jersey allowed $51,000 for the tenement department, with 71,000 houses, or seventy-one cents per house per year.

The purposes of the association as set forth in the constitution adopted by the conference are as follows:

1. To improve housing conditions in every practical way.

2. To bring to the attention of each community the importance of right housing conditions and the consequence of bad conditions.

3. To study in various cities and towns the causes of congestion of population and bad housing conditions and the methods by which such conditions may best be remedied.

4. To aid all local housing committees by advice and direction and to encourage the formation of such committees where they do not at present exist.

5. To act as a clearing house of information for such agencies and committees and to furnish advice and suggestions to those interested in housing reform and generally to promote popular interest in the subject.

6. To aid in the enactment and enforcement of laws that will

a—Encourage the erection of proper types of dwellings;

b—Secure their proper maintenance and management;

c—Prevent the erection of unfit buildings;

d—Bring about a reasonable and practical improvement of the older buildings;

e—Secure reasonable, scientific and economical building laws.

7. To aid in defending such laws when enacted and in correcting and amending them from time to time to suit changing conditions.

Iowa claims to have in her “removal law” the best recall of all. This law makes it the duty of the attorney general, or, if he fails, of the governor or any six citizens, to take steps in the courts for the summary removal of any officer of a town, city or county who neglects to enforce any law.

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