JBRARY] UNivERsiry OF I CALIFO«f«A I SAN DIEGO J if. a? JD6 THE LITTLE TOWN THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, I;n>. TORONTO % THE LITTLE TOWN ESPECIALLY IN ITS RURAL RELATIONSHIPS BY HARLAN PAUL ^OUGLASS Secretary American Missionary Association Author of "The New Home Missions," etc. I13ett) gork THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1919 AU rights reserved COPTEiaHT, 1919 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published, March, 1919 V o c5 TO SEVEN LITTLE IOWA TOWNS OSAGK. CLEAR LAKE. GRINNELL. BLAIRSBURG. TIPTON. MANSON AND AMES-ALSO TO MACHIAS. MAINE PREFACE This book has grown out of the author's interest in rural process. For a number of years, in common with large numbers of his fellow Americans, he has been thinking and talking — sometimes publicly — about this great problem. As his thinking gradually clarified he became aware that neither he nor the others were deal- ing adequately with the phase of American life which he knew most about by experience, namely, the life of the little town. There is a new wealth of impulse and inspiration for the dweller in the open country. Most of it is equally applicable to the little town. But the author does not feel that, in its present form, it would greatly encourage him if he were still living in such a town. This book attempts to suggest in what infinite variety the gospel of rural progress applies to the little town. Country-life evangelists do not ordinarily regard it as any part of their business to address the town directly — unless to scold it. They treat it rather as an incidental, and indeed a trivial thing. The ruralist priest and equally the urban Levite have their own important busi- ness. They lend a glance to the little town's needs, but pass by on the other side. At most they only toss a casual word in its direction, to which the little town can only reply, "Did you speak to me? I am not conscious vii viii PREFACE of answering to your description. I do not recog^iize my- self as coming under your classifications." This book on the contrary aims first of all to address the little town mind directly. It proposes its solutions in terms of little town qualities and capacities. It tries to direct the deluge of civic good counsel and to apply its multitude of helpful suggestions in such fashion that the little town will have to say, "This means me." Secondly, the book seeks to discover and release new motive for civic betterment'. It does not expect the little town to improve simply because of intellectual conviction that it ought to be improved. There will be no adequate motive without new vision. In itself the little town is indeed incidental and largely decrepit and dying. But the author, for one, is convinced that in it lies most of the natural leadership for the betterment of the open country. The rural progress cause hangs on the fortunes of the little towns. Their interests need radical re-direction countryward. Let the town become rurally-minded and it will tap fresh streams of purpose and find vast re-enforcement for its own struggle. The big, romantic, beautiful country, the home of most of the American people, the cradle of its ancient virtues, the seedbed of social permanencies and strength, the source of daily bread for us all — the country is infi- nitely worth redeeming. But if the country, then also the little town, the country's capital. Doubtless it can be saved only in the consciousness of its relationship to country interests. Reverently it must say "For their sakes I sanctify myself. ' ' The author would hardly have ventured on just another civic improvement book. No originality is PREFACE ix claimed for the specific items in the current program of town betterment. Yet one can not but feel the strange lack of comprehensiveness and logic in the existing litera- ture as a whole. The betterment hints crowding the pages of periodicals are necessarily presented piecemeal. Books are often thrown together with many vital inter- ests lacking. In contrast with this the author has tried to supply implicitly at least the ghost of a theory of democratic civic progress and has aimed at some sys- tematic consideration of civic problems in their essential relationships. If the results are of value it is not for system's sake, but as an aid to clearness of exposition and as a point of departure. As to form and matter alike I have profited greatly by the discussions of the substance of the book by a group of Oregon teachers and clergjTnen, before whom it was originally presented. I am indebted to many thinkers in the rural life field, with the apparent philosophy of most of whom I am not able to agree. Especially is my thanks due to my colleague in the American Missionary Association, Miss Lura Beam, whose intelligent, sjth- pathetic and persistent help has made this book finally possible. New York, 1918. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I The Little Town 3 II The Town's Relationships and Prospects . . 26 III The Town's Country 50 IV The Town's People 75 V The Town's Possibilities: Structural Fun- damentals 96 VI The Town's Possibilities: Institutions . . 121 VII The Town's Possibilities: Ideals .... 155 VIII The Town's Tools 180 IX The Town's Program 211 Bibliography . 245 ILLUSTRATIONS Somewhere in America Frontispiece FACING PAQB The Farmer in Town 16 Town Beginnings 56 Natural Communities in a Wisconsin County .... 62 Home and "Down Town" 78 Social Segregation of Industrial Populations within Small Communities 90 Civic Center of Fairfield, Alabama 102 Replanning an Old Town 104 Treasure House and Treasure 122 An Ancient New England Church 166 Pageant Scenes as Given by a School for Southern Highlanders 178 Natural Communities as the Basis for J^ducational Re- organization 202 THE LITTLE TOWN THE LITTLE TOWN THE LITTLE TOWN FAIR PLAY FOR THE LITTLE TOWN Somewhere between the country and city lies that which is neither, but which partakes on a petty scale of the nature of both — the little town. After the iso- lation of one leaves off, but before the congestion of the other begins, comes this neuter, sharing the contempt which follows its class. The world regards it as a sort of unsexed creature ; or at best, as a negligible buffer state — a Belgium or a Poland — impotent between its mighty neighbours, with few rights which they are bound to respect. There are twelve thousand such places in the United States, their life characterized by simple complexity, their people a distinct and mediating human ty^e. More than twelve million Americans live in them and they supply the fundamental institutions of civilization for uncounted millions more. As they have collectively impressed the nation, these petty places have won two verdicts which have become a by-word and an example : the little to^vn is ugly ; the little town is bad. "That abomination, the shameless, 3 4 THE LITTLE TOWN unpatriotic, filthy small town," exclaims the president of the American Civic Association. "God made the country, man the city, but the devil the little town": so runs the damnatory proverb. There is much to superficial view which seemingly justifies these verdicts, and too much of fundamental truth, which the farther discussion must needs confess. But neither the memories of the Seven Towns which are the background of this book, nor yet the systematic studies which it has involved, persuade the author that popular opinion in this matter is either adequate or fair. The little town is of one piece with all the rest of the world, something between the Worst and the Best, a fair field for Honour and Dishonour, and capable of be- ing made at least a little better. How much more than a little the succeeding chapters attempt to reveal. THE POINT OF VIEW Inadequacy of "Urban" vs. "Rural." The parsi- monious instinct of the human mind impels it to classify everything as either this or that. Thus, in the United States Census the entire population is by residence either "urban" or "rural." This classification ignores the little town and obscures its significance. True the Census has had an uneasy conscience on this point, shift- ing the boundary between city and country now from eight-thousand population to four-thousand, and from four-thousand to twenty-five hundred; and all along confessing (in small type) that there is a third some- thing not justly dealt with in its divisions. Neverthe- less this general usage prevails. The whole of America is either country or city ; and the little town, in thought, THE LITTLE TOWN 5 is divided between the two or temporarily attached now to the one, now to the other. Serious thinking on social matters ought not to have been caught by this superficiality of classification. Its business was to be fundamental and to avoid inaccurate popular distinctions. But on the whole it has followed blindly. There are hundreds of studies of all aspects of the urban and the rural problems, from which in- formation applicable to the little town may be sifted; but no literature of the little town itself exists, except in faintest beginnings. The City's Neglect and Contempt. From the urban viewpoint the little town is colourless and insignificant. The city has its own magnificent advocates and inter- preters, who condescend occasionally to the little-town point of view. Thus The American City in 191.S began rather apologetically a minor department under the cap- tion "Town and Village," in which the civic interests of the smaller municipalities were featured. By 1915 the department had developed into a separate edition of this periodical, devoting ten or a dozen pages per month to the distinctive interest of the smaller places. But in the main the city is not interested to think out civic problems on the little-town scale. If, for example, there are four corners to be improved, it likes to assume that the land is worth $12,000 per acre and the im- provements $35,000 per corner — which quite possibly is more than the total phj'sical value of the little town. Yet the little town has its own four corners. The city is too busy and too proud to tell it how to treat them. Moreover it naturally views the little town through its own eyes, as a rather contemptible miniature of itself, 6 THE LITTLE TOWN rather than in its profounder rural relationships. The Country's Equivocation. It is at the hands of the country-life movement, however, that the little town has suffered most unreasonably. That movement is im- measurably important and justly popular. But it is guilty of an amazing looseness of utterance in matters concerning which it feels most deeply. Eural better- ment, rural beauty, rural co-operation, the country home, the country school, the country church, — all are equiv- ocal terms because usually they do not tell whether they concern the life of the village centre or the strik- ingly dissimilar life of the open farm land. In its most authoritative current interpretations, a country church is any church in a community of less than twenty-five hundred people ; no matter how differently the people feel — and they feel very differently indeed — or how differently they act from the people of the open country. So far as it at all acknowledges the little town as a distinct phenomenon, the rural life movement does so only to execrate or bewail. The farmer is its hero; the middleman its villain. Around these two it has written a thrilling plot, which while interesting is not wholly true to fact. An official partisanship for the extreme rustic aspect of non -urban life has developed. It has rooted in some of the departments of the Federal Government, and has already become pernicious, be- cause it is hardening into a social philosophy dictating practical policies. The consequences of some of these policies are acute. Dogmatic Ruralism. The deeper characteristics of the prevailing philosophy of ruralism sharply contrast THE LITTLE TOWN 7 with its attractive superficial impressions. Its domi- nant tendencies are admirably summarized by Prof. C. J. Galpin: *' 'Keep the boy on the farm.' There goes with this cry the demand that the farm home shall be 'brighter,' country schools shall be 'redirected toward the land,' business shall be 'co-operative,' religion shall be 'social.' This program of pure ruralism when sifted shows a characteristic kernel, namely, segregation of the farm population ; keep the farmer a pure country man; erect his schools in cornfields; build his churches in the far open ; create an agricultural class conscious- ness ; restrict farm business largely to co-operation of farmers; in fine, do the American farm population up in tinfoil. "1 Cornfield High Schools. Consider how this philoso- phy works out in the immeasurably important field of public education. Where for example, is the country boy's high school to be found? The towns have high schools; the state may permit the townships to send their children to them at public expense or may encour- age the town to gather the surrounding country with it into a legal high school district. The rabid rural par- tisan will have none of this. The town's high schools are so distrusted by him that he seriously proposes to ignore them with its other institutions, and to establish throughout America a complete, duplicatory series of rural high schools, whose environment and outlook shall be exclusively agricultural.^ It will be expensive at least to allow this demand and to ignore the fact that the town is already the natural centre of the very rural 1 University of Wisconsin Research Bulletin Xo. 34, p. 32. 2Betts and Hall, "Better Rural Schools," p. 259 S; Foght, "The American Rural School," p. 320 flF. 8 THE LITTLE TOWN life which it is proposed to keep away from it. For sheer economy's sake it would seem better to study how to improve and to utilize the little town rather than to give it up in disgust. Beginning- to Give the Town Its Due. From two sources chiefly the recognition of the little town in a more balanced and reasonable version of the country- betterment program, is beginning to appear. Of the American sections, New England alone in her local gov- ernment has always linked town- or village-centre with the open country. New England agriculture primitively was largely carried on by village communities rather than in isolation. Her average population is dense and her farms still small. New England institutions there- fore have already transcended the gulf between town and farm land, and the version of the country life pro- gram proceeding from New England assumes the organ- ization of social life around centres rather than the prevalence of rural isolation.^ But it has remained for the Middle "West, especially in the rural social studies of the University of Wiscon- sin, adequately to discover the place of the little town as a factor in American life, and to propose its econo- mic and moral relations to the surrounding country as the fundamental basis of social reconstruction for the greater half of our nation. The indebtedness of this book to these studies will amply appear in later chapters. The Town's Distinctive Place and Outlook. This book proposes, however, a still more radical advocacy of 3 See Hartman, Village Problems and Characteristics, in Annals of the Am. Academy of Political and Social Science, XV, p. 234 f. THE LITTLE TOWN 9 the right of the little town to be viewed independently. As in any special study, it will be necessary to abstract the subject of investigation from its setting in the larger social life of the nation, and to hold it up for minute examination as though it were a thing apart. Then it must be put back into its vital relations — where it be- longs. What is gained will be an ineffaceable sense of its unique characteristics. Thus with the little town : there is something lacking in the country life message which will be remedied only by recognizing towns a.s natural rural centres. But the town is more than centre. It has a life of its own. In a typical Wisconsin community where a town and its surrounding farming population use common institutions, the town furnishes just half the population. They do half the trading — which means approximately half the eating, working, playing, sleeping. The conditions of their living and working are in obvious respects quite different from those of the farmer. What wonder then, in spite of their close ties and use of common institutions, if they acquire a distinctive group consciousness, a town point of view. Why should thoy not? "Tertium Quid." Such confessedly is the viewpoint of this book. In the interests alike of social accuracy and a social welfare, it wants to break with the unscien- tific pre-occupation of the nation with the distinctions "urban," and "rural," and to shake the little town out of the apologetic and brow-beaten attitude in which it cowers at present. It proposes especially to assert the usefulness and dignity of the little town as standing between and sei'ving both extremes. Its urban outlook 10 THE LITTLE TOWN is as legitimate as its rural outlook. The little town is neither to be segregated from the rural population nor with it. By being itself first of all, it is best fitted to become conscious of and to share the life of the nation and the world. The Town's Chief Function. The more radically the little town adopts the independent point of view the more adequately may it return later to a comprehension of its chief task ; namely, the service of the open country on which it depends. After all this is its largest task. The material fortunes of the little town and open coun- try are identical ; their achievements should be common. To fulfil its reasonable service the little town must ap- preciate and love the country. On the whole it does not do so. This constitutes its chief moral problem. Socially speaking, it is the problem of making the little town the centre alike of inspiration and of administra- tion in the reconstruction of rural civilization. THE FIELD AND ITS LIMITS The Minimum of Town Character. The definition of the little town which the book assumes is confessedly somewhat arbitrary and a reason will naturally be asked for it. It concerns incorporated places of less than five thousand people. Many incorporations to be sure have very little social justification, yet somebody must have felt that their group-interests constituted them a body of people different from their neighbours of the open country. They therefore separated themselves into a town. The act of incorporation itself is evidence of a certain minimum of town character. This gives the downward limit. THE LITTLE TOWN 11 The Upward Limit. Five thousand population is taken as the upward limit because a good many American towTis have approximated that size as supported exclu- sively by agriculture. In regions of average fertility and density of population a little town may easily grow to this extent simply as a rural centre ; few grow beyond it, however, without the help of industry. Furthermore, five thousand town people will still keep within walking distance of a single common centre which constitutes the business and institutional focus of their lives. Beyond that number, population tends to seek out- lying sub-centres and to want a street car service. These are the beginnings at least of urban tendencies. Five thousand population is thus a natural upward limit. Elasticity of the Field. The essential import of the book, however, permits quite elastic limits in its field of discussion. If its scope were enlarged so as to in- clude towns of eight thousand population with their two and three-quarter million additional people, most of the discussion still applies perfectly. If, on the other hand, the upward limit is reduced from five thou- sand to twenty-five hundred population, nine-tenths of the little towns of the nation are still included, with two-thirds of the population whose distinctive life is being studied. The field is therefore not dependent upon any particular arbitrary definition, but covers the broad median aspect of American life. The little town is distinguished not so much by the number of its popu- lation as by an attitude toward immediate environment and life in general which maj^ be called the townsman's consciousness. 12 THE LITTLE TOWN THE townsman's CONSCIOUSNESS A Stubborn Human Factor. Two young women of a small county seat in the Middle West recently made their first visit to New York City. They recalled that twenty years ago, as children living in a railroad vil- lage of three hundred people, they visited a "city" of eight thousand and were introduced as coming from the "country." They felt wronged and humiliated then. They still feel that their feeling was right. In their hearts they believe that their home experience belongs rather with New York City than with the open country. This is the stubborn human factor lying at the root of every practical program for the little town. However unreasonable or even comical, it is to be reck- oned with; for this reason it is worth examining in all its baldness. Conscious Urban AfRliations. The citizen of Little- ton is sure that he is different from and superior to the country -man: he feels that he is like, though in- ferior to, the city man; that he belongs to the urban rather than to the rural order of life. Challenged to defend his position, the townsman would think first of the palpable advantages of his lot. He walks on a sidewalk; he works less hard than the farmer; his day begins two hours later and he sits up two hours longer; he wears "good" clothes more of the time; he has better and nearer schools and churches. Fundamental Urban Superiorities: 1. Specializa- tion. Driven to deeper analysis he commonly ends by asserting three final superiorities, each deep rooted in human nature. THE LITTLE TOWN 13 First, the advautai^'o of the town over the country in social specialization and in the consequent honour of belonging with the few as contrasted witii the many. The people of the open country have but one voca- tion, that of farming ; the people of the town are divided between many vocations. Between themselves the farm- ers are equal and their work is similar. Except for the exchange of like services no man depends upon another in economic relations. To the townsman, however, whether the merchant, the skilled mechanic, or the pro- fessional man, the whole group of farmers comes to ask services different from those which any of their own number can render. Severally they may be far richer than the average townsman, but their mental at- titude is that of inferiority. Their total group may be of more importance than his ; but there are only half a dozen preachers or lawyers and only thirty or forty school teachers or merchants to every hundred farmers. In this abiding ratio lies the distinction of specialized service. 2. Sophistication. From the earliest dawn of social life it has been felt that the clash of wits, especially in the market place, sharpens them. The mind stagnates in isolation, is speeded up in association. The man whose business is trade has always felt keenly his sophis- tication and acumen in contrast with the slower move- ment of the rustic mind. The typical townsman still implicitly claims this advantage over the farmer. 3. Prerogative. The townisman feels his superiority as the keeper of the ideals of the community and of their peculiar symbols. He has — to paraphrase Prof. Galpin — not only its pantry and shop but also its safe, 14 THE LITTLE TOWN its medicine chest, its playhouse and its altar. All keepers of ideals tend to hierarchical pride and a sense of class prerogative. It is hard to hold them to the humility of service. Facing- Away from the Country. The townsman uni- versally asserts these superiorities as against the coun- try population. The rural child attending the town school and the retired farmer moving to town to end his days, are made keenly aware of them. Their total result is that the little towns as a group tend to face away from the country in ambition and sympathy, and to envy and ape the city. They recognize the city as still more specialized in its occupations, more wise and witty, and more the shrine of ideals than they are. It is easy to show that this mental attitude is in utter con- tradiction to the main tendency of their economic re- lationships. All the main issues of their lives are bound up with those of the open country; and this the main stream of their thought and feeling ignores. For this they are universally scorned and scolded. It is agreed by nearly all serious thinkers that in the type of its schooling, in its church and religious life and in its social customs and motives the little town needs revolu- tionary redirection, that it needs to become rurally- minded. But neither scorning nor scolding really helps matters. The first step in redeeming the little town is to understand it; after that it may be converted. The roots of its self -consciousness must be utilized as well as modified. INCORPORATION Significance and Methods. Incorporation is the legal and formal act by which the little town declares its THE LITTLE TOWN 15 physical and mental severance from the open country, and registers its sense of independent group-needs and values.* In most states this takes place under general legislation, after a petition of the inhabitants or a pop- ular vote upon the proposed incorporation. Popular vote, however, is not always necessary, the initiative in some states proceeding from the county authorities, who may set off towns at their discretion. The law fre- quently requires a minimum number of inhabitants ; but there is no uniformity on this point nor as to nomencla- ture. There are scores of full-fledged municipalities of less than one hundred population, and "city," in Amer- ica, may mean anything from a few hundred popula- tion upward. Powers of Incorporated Towns. In the theory of American government — handed down in this respect from mediaeval England — the powers of the little town are delegated to it by the state. The state ought, and in general does permit the people of an incorporated place to do the things which are collectively necessary for their closely knit community life. Those include ade- quate powers to provide fire and police protection, streets and sidewalks and means of their lighting at night, sewers and waterworks, and the like. One of the oldest rights of village and town is to make market regu- lations. This was of central importance in the Middle Ages, and even its emasculated modern residuum is still very close to the heart of every town officer who is also in trade, since it enables him to take legal toll of the farmer. Limited powers of taxation are necessary to carry out the functions catalogued above, including those 4 Fairlie, "Local Government, p. 200 f. 16 THE LITTLE TOWN of issuing bonds and of levying special assessments against property for public improvements. DISASTROUS CLEAVAGE BETWEEN TOWN AND COUNTRY Impressed with a consciousness of their group superi- ority over the open country, strongly convinced of the Tightness of their own viewpoint and armed with such legal powers, these thousands of groups of Americans have set up their municipal housekeeping in a certain mood of division from, if not of opposition to, the farm population, the inner motive and complexity of which Prof. Galpin has analysed: ''The banker, store keeper and blacksmith knows (the farmer) as the goose that lays the golden egg. The problem is one of pleasing (him) and getting his trade without building him and his mind, capacities, and wishes, into the community fabric. The farmer's money is good and necessary and must be obtained and his goodwill retained ; but how to accomplish this object is a problem. Thorough-going incorporation of the farmer into the stream of village activities is frustrated by the fundamental conception of the self-sufficiency of the village. The farmer is pre- sented outright with a few donations, as privileges in order to bind him. Toll, of course, is to be exacted by villagers somewhere. Graft sometimes takes the place of open dealing. The farmer does not share in the control and responsibility of certain things which he occasionally enjoys at the village as a spectator. The outlying farm population is seldom massed. Its members come to town by team or automobile or on foot or horseback, do their business without a resting place of their own, stand on other people's streets, in other people's shops, and X - CI w o x 3 s o ~ o f. _ -a ■^ — -^ c — >^ " 2 *" OS c p •n e * -^.2 C S cj •-• en "^ -^ C o THE LITTLE TOWN 17 over other people's counters. They go back after some hours of absence to their own lands, occupations, and homes. In the village they are alictis, but aliens with a possible title to be conciliated. The embarrassment is on both sides. The farmer pays in so much in trade he feels that he ought to have consideration ; he pays so little directly toward the institutions that the village considers that his rights are not compelling. Puzzle, perplexity, and embarrassment, obscure the whole rela- tionship and situation ; and the universal process of legal- ized insulation of village and city away from the farm, which has grown up undisputed, with scarcely a hint of abnormality, is constantly shadowed by this overhanging cloud of doubt. '"^ The final result of it all is one of the most conspicuous moral cleavages within the nation. Though far less recognized, it is as wide and deep as any class distinction, and is more extensive and massive than any race division. It is one of the major social facts. THE ACTU.'\L LITTLE TOWN When such people as we have described get together in human groups of from one or two hundred to five thousand in number under conditions of close neighbour- hood, just what happens ? In terms of concrete descrip- tion what exactly is the little town, first to the casual eye, then to the curious and finally to interpreting mind ? Glimpsed in passing, the composite picture of the type cannot honestly be said to be pleasing. The setting of landscape and country-side activities differs with the physical features of the continent from east to west, and with latitude, from zone to zone ; but it is rarely without 6 University of Wisconsin Research Bulletin No. 34, p. 25 f . 18 THE LITTLE TOWN charm. The to^ni is the ugly accent in an endless pano- rama of interest and beauty. In the Middle-West. Here its fields smile around it, but frequently the chief beauty spot is just outside its borders where the grave stones gleam under the green trees. The cemetery is almost always shaded and is usually better kept than the town. At the outskirts where the cultivated fields stop, come the pastures where the town's cows graze. Then begins the sight of un- kempt premises, of barns, poultry yards, manure heaps, wood piles, and nondescript out-buildings which out- number the dwellings. A careful score kept day after day over hundreds of miles in the agricultural South and Central West, convinces the author that there are seven outbuildings to one dwelling, each if possible more ugly and incongruous than the other. It is extremely rare to find home grounds in which the group of buildings is defi- nitely planned. (The farther West has not yet had time to build so many out-buildings, and the South will leave things out in the open.) Towering over the town is the municipal water tank or stand pipe, — the most conspicu- ous object to the eye. At little extra cost each one of them might have been turned into a civic campanile. Visiting a great state institution, an architect was asked to designate the best designed structure. Unhesitatingly he replied, "The water tower." But the little town erects its water tower only as an expression of utili- tarian ugliness or lack of charm. Crumbs of Comfort. Frequently the most pleasing note is the drab and standardized orderliness of the railroad corporation, lumber yard and oil station. No THE LITTLE TOWN 19 beauty is attempted, but things are at least not out of order as they are everywhere else in the little town. To be sure there is Main Street with its pretentious " White Way" wasting electricity from expensive cluster lights. But the street is muddy and littered; and most of the town has few street lights and no electricity in the houses. Around many of the houses stretch small lawns. A minority have gardens, or at least a few flowers ; but the plantings are usually haphazard, and with no intel- ligent disposition of trees or shrubs. At best a certain comfortable primness characterizes the average individ- ual dwelling. Arrangement and Architecture. The public build- ings consist chiefly of small wooden churches located at random throughout the village, and a public school building or two, usually dingy, with inadequate grounds. If the little town chances to be a county-seat there is the inevitable court house, either utterly nondescript in architecture, or new and pretentious. The location of the public buildings almost never shows definite plan or produces any impression of civic unity. i\Iost of the small towns in America are bisected by a railroad along which much of the ugliness concentrates, and which fre- quently divides the town socially as well as geograph- ically. On the other side of the track are the poorer homes, the muddier and weedier streets, and the fewer sidewalks. On the farther edge possibly, lie the town's one and two industrial plants — a flour mill or a tile works, — also the inevitable base ball field with its rudi- mentary bleachers. Hidden among the trees the reced- ing little town becomes attractive. Its outer beauty de- 20 THE LITTLE TOWN pends upon not looking too closely at the details. There are striking exceptions, but such is the best which can be said for the American little town as a whole. An Actual Inventory. An informal survey of a typi- cal little town in the North-West yields results like the following : There are about one hundred dwelling houses occupied by a total population of five hundred people. The service of this population and the sur- rounding farms involves about seventy-five enterprises other than domestic, expressed in institutions or busi- ness. Beside the school and three churches there are seven professional men maintaining offices, as well as a barber and a photographer to complete the roll of those who live by rendering personal services. Thirty busi- nesses are concerned with providing food, clothing and shelter to the people of the community, and ten to trans- porting them and their products locally or to other parts. Seven enterprises deal chiefly with the physical needs of transients. Beside two hotels there are prob- ably a superfluous number of lunch rooms chiefly catering to the farmer who comes to town to trade. There are five enterprises of finance and credit, including three banks. For amusement there are three pool halls, be- side the public school playground with a minimum of apparatus, two privately-owned tennis courts and the " K. P. " hall used for casual entertainments. For com- munication and information this little town has its post office, a small newspaper and a telephone exchange. There is a privately-owned electric light plant; while a fire department house is the only visible possession of municipal government. There are several miles of con- crete sidewalk, for this is a young and enterprising com- THE LITTLE TOWN 21 munity: but perhaps half of the houses proclaim their possession of individual water supply by the presence of wind mills. A rough estimate gives perhaps twenty- five mechanics about evenly divided between the building industries and the operation and repair of machinery. Incomplete Civic Centres. This collection of homes, streets, institutions, businesses and other activities con- stitutes the outward aspect of the little town of five hun- dred to a thousand people. There is a group of still smaller little towns — comprising perhaps one half of the total number, — each having a population of less than five hundred; with an uncounted number of similar unin- corporated villages. These are best described as incom- plete civic centres. Typically they have church and graded school, a number of stores and facilities of ship- ping for the products of the region ; but they are without high school or newspaper, and the immediately sur- rounding country population does most of its trading and much of its selling of products at the larger centres. The social problems of these communities are less com- plicated. They have more of the neighbourhood spirit and find it easier to blend village and country people in common projects than is the case with the larger com- munities. Their mental break with rural interests is perhaps less pronounced, but so far as present is even less excusable. Beneath the Surface. The systematic study of any social unit is technically called a survey. Such a study of a typical town in a prosperous western state is popu- larly proclaimed as a "Social Photograph of Belleville." ° Belleville had an estimated population of 2367 peo- 6 Rural Manhood, VI, p. 123 f., p. 168 f. 22 THE LITTLE TOWN pie in 1913. Considerably over one-fourth of them have lived there over twenty years. They are the old timers, the settled and established portion of the com- munity. Somewhat less than one-fourth have been resi- dent less than two and one-half years. One may guess that the old ways mean less to many of them and that their minds are more hospitable to change. About one- tenth of the population is of foreign birth. Occupation. One-third of the families live by busi- ness and the few professions represented in the little town ; another third consists of retired farmers and their families; and finally a third are employes of the rail- road, this being a division point with yards and repair shops. The presence of this third element in such large proportion makes the town unlike the majority of its class which are limited to the business and farming ele- ments. Fourteen per cent, of the women of Belleville of twenty years of age and upward are gainfully em- ployed. Income. The weekly incomes of 270 families re- ported upon are distributed as follows: Less than $10.00 per week, 29%\ below standard of corn- $10.-12 " (C 16%) fort, 45% $13.-17 " a 91/2%. $18.-22 " iC 121/2% 11% $23.-27 " ic above standard of com- $28.-40 " iC 12% fort, 55% $40.00 " a 10% More than The investigators find that an income of $650 to $700 per year is necessary to keep a Belleville family of five in comfort. This means an income of at least $13.00 per week, and forty-four per cent, of the inhabitants of the town have less than this. Seventy per cent, of the THE LITTLE TOWN 23 single men over twenty years of age get less than $12.00 per week. In other words, a highly uncomfortable pro- portion of the people are in actual poverty and this in the midst of a splendidly developed county virtually every inch of which is cultivated, whose farm lands are worth nearly twice as much per acre as the average of the state and nation, and the value of whose crops alone would produce an income of $200 per year for every inhabitant. One may speculate as to the probable size of little-town incomes in poorer farming regions. Consumption. How the people in the little town spend their money was studied by grouping the fam- ilies into those receiving an average of $500, of $800 and of $1500 per year respectively. The results secured were those familiar to the student of family budgets. There can be less difference in the cost of food between the poorer and the richer, since all must have at least enough nourishment to live; but there is marked differ- ence in the cost of housing and expenditures for heating, lighting and the comforts of the home; while with the poorest, money for education, for health, insurance, travel, recreation and benevolence, dwindles almost to the vanishing point. Education. In spite of the difference of family in- come, all children go to school. Not only is this taken for granted, but the age at which the majority drop out to begin work is two to three years later than in the great cities, and fully half of the graduates of the high school go on to college. Churches. "With a population of twenty-three hun- dred people Belleville furnishes church sitting for four- teen hundred, has nine hundred and sixty-nine church 24 THE LITTLE TOWN members and an average attendance at morning service of five hundred and twenty-seven. In this matter, a western sociologist has formulated an approximate "law" as follows: That in the average town there in- clines to be half as many church sittings as the popula- tion and about half as many people in average attend- ance as there are sittings. Belleville roughly substan- tiates this generalization. Charity. Twenty families were found to have been aided by public funds during the year, and twenty-five by private charity — chiefly that of the churches. Among these twenty-five cases of aid there were fifteen dupli- cators, showing that the town's right hand did not know what the left hand was doing and that charity in general was on a thoroughly unsystematic basis. Play and Social Life. The study of recreation showed nine types of customary gatherings for social amusement and edification; with annual patronage as follows : Moving pictures. . .105,000 Church socials and Church services . . . 93,600 picnics 8,696 Pool and billiard Lodges 8,692 games 9,000 The Chautauqua. . 5,600 Agricultural fairs Baseball 2,870 and farmers ' Public dances 2,300 meetings 12,400 That the ''movies" lead numerically, whereas ten years ago they were not existent, is of course evidence of the immense revolution which they have wrought in the field of cheap amusement. Going to church has a slight lead over pool and billiards in the recreational THE LITTLE TOWN 25 scale. It is especially interesting that the Chautauqua is just twice as popular as base ball, which raises the question of what really is the great American game in the corn belt. In spite of this considerable range of recreational opportunity, the investigators find a real play problem especially for children. Boys and girls "don't know what to do with themselves" a good deal of the time, especiallj'' on Sundays. They are kept off the public school playground after the close of school for lack of supervision. This situation is reported as usual tlirougliout tlic state. Health and Mortality. In the meagre character of its records on these points, Belleville matches the large majority of smaller American communities. The most that can be proved is that its death rate is more or less than that of the state in a given year. Unlike most similarly located communities, it gets its water from deep wells, and the cases of polluted water supply dis- covered by sanitary inspectors are reported as ''few," — to be accurate, nineteen per cent. only. A physical examination of Belleville school children disclosed the amazing array of defects and ailments everywhere dis- covered and almost everywhere forgotten. That its chil- dren are above average in size gives this community evi- dent pride. Such is Belleville ; such are thousands of other Ameri- can little towns. Around this average they vary slightly to the one side or the other, and play for weal or woe their twelve thousand parts in American life. n THE TOWN'S RELATIONSHIPS AND PROSPECTS THE DISTRIBUTION OP LITTLE TOWNS A town or city of any size or degree is the place where the plasm of social life thickens like the yolk of the egg. It is a natural centre of civilization with respect to the less definitely organized surrounding country. In this character one of the most pertinent questions which can be asked about it is, "How far is it to the next town?" which means, ' ' How large is the area over which the par- ticular town has primary influence, and how many ac- cessible rivals has it?" What also is the actual degree of their frequency in any given area, and does it follow any law? Distribution of Larger Centres. On this point a most interesting method of taking a cross-section of American life is to ride across the continent on slow trains say from Boston to Seattle, and back from Los Angeles to Washington by a southern route, measuring the varying frequency of towns from section to section. The Census has already recorded the facts for the larger centres. From Boston to Albany, for example, there is a town or city of more than twenty-five hundred population every fourteen miles ; thence to Buffalo one every fifteen miles. From Buffalo to the Mississippi River they were twenty- three miles apart; and beyond the Mississippi to the 26 RELATIONSHIPS AND PROSPECTS 27 mountains about twice as far. One travels over one hundred miles in the mountain states before he reaches such a town, and it is another hundred miles to the next. Up and down the Pacific Coast they are fifty-seven miles apart, and perhaps two or three hundred miles apart in the Southwestern district. From Texas east, they gain again in frequency to one in fifty-one miles, and to one in forty or so across the older South. Varies as Density of Population. This is just what one would expect. The distribution of larger towns varies as density of population. When places large enough to be of more than local significance are consid- ered, a good many people will be found to have a good many towns; a few people in an equal area will have a few such towns, each with a wide field of service. They will not occur in exact proportion to population, since even the scantiest population must have some major centres and the thickest could not have proportionately as many more without their treading one upon another. After there get to be, say, one hundred people to the square mile, towns will grow not more numerous but simply larger. They are already so close together that more people do not mean the multiplication of new places, but only the growth of old ones. On the other hand, in regions of three or five people to the square mile, if towns were proportionately as few as the population is sparse they would be virtually of no use at all. Civilization demands a certain number of urban distributing points, both of goods and of culture. Not precisely then, yet on the whole with striking fidelity, the occurrence of larger towns corresponds to density of population. Why is the Little Town? The gaps between larger 28 THE LITTLE TOWN centres vary as has been shown, from fifteen to one hun- dred, and even two or three hundred miles in distance. They are occupied by a filling of still smaller towns and open country ; that is by alternating thickenings up and thinnings out of social relationships. But these group- ings of population bear almost no relation to density. Such a concrete experiment as counting the miles or timing the stops of the local trains between stations in various sections of the country would discover unex- pected variations. Why is the little town plentiful here and rare there? There seem to be three major reasons to account for it ; agricultural prosperity, physiography, and habit. 1. The Little Town a Rural Luxury. In general the answer is simple: the distribution of little towns varies as agricultural prosperity. Where the price of land is highest and there is the largest proportion of improved land, where the value of farm product per acre and of farm improvement is greatest, there the little towns are thickest. Where the reverse is true they are fewest. The frequent little town thus appears as a sort of luxury of prosperous country people, whereas the larger ones come more nearly being the necessity of equally dense populations whatever their degree of pros- perity is. Frequent little towns are the rich farmer's convenience ; or to turn it around, rich farmers are the field of exploitation for many little towns. All coun- trymen support about as many little towns as they can. They must be very poor indeed to go without. This is the largest single factor in determining the town's fre- quency. RELATIONSHIPS AND PROSPECTS 29 Sectional Variations in Frequency. The illustration of this prini'iple from .section to section is extremely impressive. In the South, Georgia excepted, it takes farm populations of from four thousand to eight thou- sand to support one little town, while in the Northern states, bordering on the Mississippi and INIissouri rivers, there is a little town for every twelve hundred and fifty or twenty-five hundred country people. States with ap- proximately equal rural populations show the following glaring contrasts in number of little towns : Illinois 993 Mississippi 325 Iowa 811 Louisiana 161 Rural prosperity is the most outstanding ground of these differences. 2. Physiography. Minor factors, however, enter into the distribution of little towns. Physiography' is one of them. It accounts for the most striking sectional dif- ferences in America through our entire history. The prevalence of mountains and water powers urbanized New England from early times, while the spreading coastal plains invited the South to extensive agriculture, with the plantation instead of the town unit of social organization. Similar contrasts occur in immediately neighbouring states or within the bounds of single states. North Carolina, for example, with less than one-third more of rural population, has nearly twice as many little towns as South Carolina. Its greater Piedmont and mountain area early turned the population of the one state to small farming and domestic manufacture, in- 30 THE LITTLE TOWN volving" compact settlements ; while nearly the entire area of the other was soil congenial to the plantation system. The combination of mountains and little rainfall, as in the West, intensifies the need of towns. Agriculture is confined to limited areas under such conditions and is dependent upon irrigation. Irrigation typically divides the cultivated land into small holdings and permits town and farm life to become almost synonymous. The Ameri- can example of largest scale is, of course, Utah, which under the combined impulse of physiography and a com- mon religion has developed into the most characteris- tically "rurban" state of the Union. "The plan of settlement in Utah brought the people together in com- pact communities. Agriculture was virtually the only industry which the settlers could follow. As irrigation was indispensable to agriculture, each family could care for only a small tract of land. Securing streams of water for this tract of land was often a matter of co- operative enterprise — the work not for one family but for many who could share the streams of water led from the rivers and creeks by co-operative enterprise. This need of co-operative effort applied to practically all the under- takings of pioneer life — road making, church and school- house building, home building, mercantile industry. Life in town groups made this needful co-operative effort the more easy and natural and was determined by this needful co-operation. Life in town, moreover, secured mutual protection from the Indians. More im- portant still it made possible of realization the general desire of the people to come together often in social and religious gatherings. For this privilege they were in large part settlers in this new land. RELATIONSHIPS AND PROSPECTS 31 In these compact communities social conditions in a number of essential respects differed from social condi- tions commonly found elsewhere. Outside of what soon became the largest centres there developed a population neither rural nor urban, yet somewhat like both. The people were of one religious faith. Their hopes and de- sires, their aims and purposes were alike. ' ' ^ The ''rurban" characteristics of irrigated regions have been quickly adopted by "boomers" as bait to attract settlers, as witness the following advertisement: "This is no backwoods country. No primitive pioneering is necessary. Tlie same advantages found in the more thickly populated sections are at the command of the settler." 3. Habit. Another factor influencing the frequency of towns is habit. In the settlement of the newer West, populations emigrating from sections which had few towns did not establish as many as those which had al- ways been accustomed to towais and took them for granted. Thus, Ohio and Indiana, with ^lissouri and Kansas, are strikingly below their neighbouring states to the west and north, in the number of their little towns for each thousand rural population, while they much more nearly equal them in rural prosperity. The former states were settled more largely by immigrants from the rural South ; the latter by those from New England.^ Nebraska and the Dakotas have nearly as many little toAvns relative to population as have Illinois and Iowa, though they cannot nearly so well afford them. Their people carried the town habit as they moved West. In 1 Alatheson, Utak Educational Revietc, VIII, p. 6. 2 Turner, "Rise of the New West," p. 76 f. 32 THE LITTLE TOWN proportion to his wealth the farmer of these states is carrying more little towns on his back than any other human being ever did. The explanation of their fre- quency is psychological rather than economic. CONDITIONS OP MULTIPLICATION The forces which in the past have determined the dis- tribution of little towns are not exactly those which de- termine their present rate of increase in the various sec- tions. There seem to be four situations in which new towns now tend to spring up. 1. With General Increase of Population. Except Ok- lahoma, the states which gained more than fifty per cent, in population between 1900 and 1910 were all in the Kocky Mountain and Pacific Coast sections. Their gain in the growth of little towns is the largest of the nation, averaging from one hundred to two hundred per cent. 2. In the Neighbourhood of Great Urban Growth. While in the East generally there are few new towns being established, their rate of increase in New Jersey, for example, has equalled that of the average Middle Western state, but is entirely in suburban districts con- tiguous to New York and Philadelphia. 3. In the Wake of Progress. New towns, though in- creasing less rapidly, are still notably frequent where, with only moderate general growth in population, there is an awakening of intelligence and a marked growth in wealth. This largely explains the little-town growth of the South, where small places have been incorporated by the hundred in the last twenty years. 4. Where Prosperity Outruns Population. In spite of the stationary character — and even the decrease of its RELATIONSHIPS AND PROSPECTS 33 rural population — the Mkklle-Wcst has luulliplicd little towns by twenty-five per cent, in the last ten years. The loss of people is overborne by the increase of wealth. The first escape of rural prosperity is into little-town forms. This explains the marked addition of their num- bers. The East an Exception. The multiplication of little towns is going on with notable uniformity throughout most of the states. The East, however, has largely com- pleted its town building process. Except in the immedi- ate vicinity of great cities there are already about all the towns there are going to be. There are no surprising changes in general social outlook and no miraculous rises in land values to accelerate their growth. With growth of population, they seem to become larger rather than more numerous. INFLUENCES DETERMINING INCORPORATION A still different set of factors determines incorpora- tion. It is one thing for people to live together in a thickly settled community and another to acquire legal status as a town. With large town communities, of course (except in New England), incorporation may be taken for granted ; but with the town of five hundred people or less (and perhaps one-half of the entire group of twelve thousand belong to this class), the likelihood of incorporation depends very much upon the section in which it is located, or rather upon the differences in local government which characterize the sections. 1. New England. Local government elsewhere in America was devised to meet the cases of thinly settled open country. Incorporation reflects the inadequacy of 34 THE LITTLE TOWN such government for the needs of town centres. There is no machinery with which to do what towns feel the need of doing except by separate incorporation. With New England it has been otherwise. From the beginning she yoked governmentally the fortunes of village-centre and out-lying farm land. Local government took good and equal care of the need of both aspects of the com- munity. This section naturally, therefore, shows least tendency to separate incorporation. Town and town- ship are synonymous, and only to a very limited extent has the latter-day growth of industrial towns with other fortunes than those of the open country, led them to seek separate corporate life. The conditions which have chiefly impelled incorporation in the rest of the nation, have not been present. 2. The South. This section, on the contrary, being from the first sparsely settled and predominantly rural, has developed no effective unit of local government smaller than the county. The little centres, as they have grown up, have found no near-at-hand civil agency meet- ing many of their needs. What could they do except to seek incorporation? Much that the township has done for most of the nation must be accomplished through the incorporated towns in this section. Stimulated by such incentive, incorporation is proceeding rapidly here ; also smaller places are likely to become incorporated than is the average in other sections. Naturally, too, unusual prestige has attached to the country town which has largely monopolized such civic machinery as the section afforded. 3. The Middle-West. Local government here has been less adequate for massed populations than that of RELATIONSHIPS AND PROSPEPTS 35 New England, but more adetiuate than that of the South. Rural prosperity has allowed this section to aft'ord a superfluity of little towns and it has proceeded to incor- porate them with rapidity, from pride as well as from sense of needing? more adequate governmental machinery. 4. Pacific and Mountain States. All the factors which stimulate incorporation in other sections combine here with peculiar urgency. Like the South, these states have not developed the township form of local govern- ment. Consequently incorporation is the only civic re- source open to the local community. Again, these states have an extremely sparse population, which hinders effective rural organization and throws the major bur- dens of civilization upon towns. They are, relatively speaking, the rapidly growing sections of the nation, in which, naturally, new centres are springing up. Finally the dependence of agriculture upon irrigation, as has been shown, tends to unite towns and farms. Such a condition is most general in this group of states; the West therefore shows the most rapid rate of incorpora- tion. The little towns which constitute but thirteen per cent, of the population of the nation at large, approxi- mate thirty per cent, in Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. Wherever rural population is forbidden from scattering over the land and is concentrated in small areas, the dominance of the town bids fair permanently to change the caste of civilization, and to force local government for the open country to discover radically new forms. THE LITTLE TOWN TYPE OF CIVILIZATION Conditions of Town Influence. Shifting the question now from the distribution of towns and their tendency 36 THE LITTLE TOWN to incorporation, to that of the relative influence of the little towns as a group, and of their human type, in the civilization of the various sections ; it is the Middle-West which stands clearly pre-eminent. The influence of such a type gets its greatest chance not by virtue of the popu- lation of the towns themselves, but by virtue of such pop- ulation plus that over which they have leadership. The maximum influence is not found where there is little or no rural population for the town to lead; nor where there are great and commanding cities to steal its pres- tige ; but rather where it is the central organizing prin- ciple and social device of a relatively heavy and highly prosperous rural population, without extreme urban com- petition for power and leadership. These conditions are most completely met over the natural prairies of the Middle-West where the little-town's people approximate one-fourth of the total population, and dominate the life of at least a half more. Iowa and New York, roughly speaking, have an equal number of people in their little towns (some six hundred thousand each) ; but there are twice as many little towns in Iowa as New York has, and in New York they include but one-eighteenth of the total population. Manifestly, then, the little town is much more influential relatively in Iowa than in New York. Its outlook and characteristic thought have a larger weight in directing the destinies of the state. A Determining Factor in Civilization. From this standpoint the East is urban, the South rural, and the farther West composed of cities and little towns without a continuous agricultural basis. It is Iowa, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Kansas and Nebraska, and the rural coun- ties of Illinois and Missouri, with parts of Indiana, Michi- RELATIONSHIPS AND PROSPECTS 37 gan and Wisconsin, which constitute the pre-eminent little-town area of the United States. Any adequate social view of the nation must recognize this as a deter- mining characteristic of a definite type of civilization. In contrast with over-lapping series of metropolitan areas, as in the Northeast, or the occasional occurrence of town and city in the midst of waste and empty ''liin- terland, " as in the far West, the close neighbourhood of towns — most of them small — with over-lapping service- areas covering together the entire surface of the land, furnishes still one of the typical conditions of American life. Here most fruitfully, within the next decade, the great experiment of reorganizing rural life around its natural centres will be tried out. ECONOMIC CLASSIFICATION OF TOWNS General Dependence upon Agriculture. Up to this point the discussion has been treating the little town as essentially a social phenomenon attached to rural life ; as created by, dependent upon and serving the country. It is true that the vast majority of all towns are thus created and supported : but it is necessary to note certain exceptions. Not all towns originate by the thickening-up of rural life at certain spots. Urban Overflows. Sometimes the city turns around upon the land. Having become over-large, it spills over into town forms again. Thus one finds the suburbs — residential and manufacturing; the resort and amuse- ment towns surrounding the city within week-end dis- tance. These constitute a satellite type of collective life. Every metropolis has a group of surrounding de- pendent cities and between them less concentrated popu- 38 THE LITTLE TOWN lations. These less concentrated populations are im- posed upon old town or township areas. Many of them still remain towns in form and in law, but not in domi- nant character. They cease, for example, to be trade centres for their own surrounding country. Farm prod- uce is first shipped to the larger city and then sold back to them at two profits. Town Form — City Fact. The New York metropoli- tan area shows dozens of examples of these pseudo-towns. One is just over the river from a manufacturing city. The factories which dominate it do not want to pay city taxes. Probably they prefer to have a "free hand" in labour troubles rather than to deal with a developed in- dustrial consciousness of a modern city. Consequently they maintain their own fire departments and supplement the village constable with the hired watchman. In case of strike they ignore the town police and call in profes- sional strike-breakers as deputies. The old village popu- lation submits, through inertia and a willingness to let corporations pay their taxes. Calling this a town in the census reports does not make it so. It is simply the spill-over of a distinctively urban situation into an area not yet organized into proper urban forms. County Form — City Fact. The urban spirit creates pseudo-country as well as pseudo-towns. A queer com- bination of transplanted New England tradition and urban snobbery explains the existence of some of the largest unincorporated places of America on Long Island near New York. Rather than make common cause with poorer neighbours, the ultra-rich refuse the obvious bene- fits of incorporation. Police and fire protection are largely in private hands. Only sanitation triumphs over RELATIONSHIPS AND PROSPECTS 39 selfishness and compels organization of sewer districts. Metropolitan Areas. Recognizing such facts, the last Census studied the metropolitan areas surrounding most of the larger cities. Within these areas, whatever the civil designation or the legal status of a given area, life is essentially urban, reflecting the city or its immediate reactions — such as the residential suburb is. Thus the metropolitan area around Albany, New York, includes about fifty thousand people living under what may be classified as rural or small-town conditions, but all funda- mentally affected by the proximity and accessibility of the city which robs all the other units of their original character. Towns Created by the Primary Industries. An in- teresting variation in towns is presented by those which grow up as centres of the mining or lumbering indus- tries. They are true towns in many of their characteris- tics. They are supported by their respective primary industries which occupy a surrounding area, just as the farm centre is supported by the outlying farm lands. They have perhaps half their populations working in small groups in comparative isolation from the centre. These outlying populations use the centre as their eco- nomic and ideal focus just as the farmer uses the town. On the other hand mining and lumbering differ from agriculture in that they cannot be permanent on a given area. When they have robbed it of its first values they are done with the land for ever. The towns which they create, therefore, are likely to be transient, lasting only so long as the limited raw material of the industry, and disappearing when it is exhausted. While they last, as Professor Carver has shown, they follow the law of the 40 THE LITTLE TOWN city as to population, rather than that of the typical town. Manufacturing Towns. Beside the thickly populated metropolitan areas immediately surrounding the larger cities, larger forms of concentration are to be noted. These are mapped and studied by commercial geography. One-half of the population of the United States is massed in the northeastern one-sixth of its area. Most of the manufacturing is done here and the rest is confined to quite definite and relatively small regions which re- main strikingly permanent. "Within these areas exist many little centres of population — towns in size and in major characteristics — which do not depend chiefly upon agriculture for their living. They are in the country but not of it. These manufacturing towns in a rural setting must be recognized as a permanent and special problem. Often they have large natural but forgotten alliances with the country. Frequently their material betterment is easy under the benevolent despotism of the corporation which owns them, while from the stand- point of genuine civic virtue and democratic progress they are of all towns most miserable. Railroad Towns. Created by the location of the re- pair shop or division station, they have many charac- teristics common with this last type. They are arbi- trarily distributed over the area of the nation by the necessities of another type of economic activity than farming ; they are thrust into the open country. Here is a railroad town in the arid South-West. Absolutely nothing is produced by the country for miles around, and not a carload of material has ever been shipped EELATIONSniPS AND PROSPECTS 41 out; yet here are hotel, stores, amusements and trans- portation agencies, homes and even churches; all bear- ing no more relation to the area in which they are lo- cated than a Bedouin camp with its camels resting in the desert. A Mixed Type. It is clear that there is radical economic difference between the agricultural town, de- pendent upon and serving only its immediate farming area, and the urban and industrial town existing for all the world and sending its products everywhere. So great a difference might almost exclude the latter group from any common classification with the former, except for the existence of a large number of towns of a very mixed type, where industry has merely permanently superimposed upon agriculture, modifying without overthrowing its distinctive ways. These are the com- mon denominator of the little-town group. Their prob- lem links them essentially with both extremes. Here, however, urban activities generally induce at last em- bryonic urban conditions, such as the presence of for- eign population, with acute class-consciousness, and probably special problems of housing, recreation, educa- tion and religion. Such towns are towns and more; they must drive together and abreast all elements and aspects of rural and urban reconstruction. Proportions of Various Classes. No one knows ex- actly how many towns there arc in any of the above classes, nor even their vague proportions, the facts be- ing ungathered or buried in untabulated data of the Census Bureau. But the vast majority of the little towns of the nation still depend upon agriculture and 42 THE LITTLE TOWN the businesses growing directly from agriculture. The relatively few which do not, belong, as has been shown, rather to the urban sphere. County Seats and School Towns. Within the domin- ant type itself interesting sub-orders appear, — as when the function of local government or of ideal leadership lifts itself above the market function. The first case is conspicuously that of the county-seat. The history of its bad and good, its oscillation between exploitation and real leadership, might well become a chapter of itself. Of the second type the little school-town is the most conspicuous example. Growing up with the academy or small college, it has taken on a distinctive life, often to the sad neglect of the specific interests of the near-by open country. But American civilization is for ever the debtor to this little Athens and its type. They were the earliest environment of higher educa- tion and still furnish homes to the majority of our colleges. These more than any other type or variety of places have brought the full range of American oppor- tunities near to the rural boy and girl, and have given the nation the majority of its leaders. They exem- plify the little town at its best. THE town's prospects Imbedded thus in the structure of the American na- tion, confined between their mightier neighbours, urban and rural, and with such inner differences as have been described, what are the prospects of the little towns as a group? What chance have they of growth and large prosperity ? ^ 3 Vogt, "Rural Sociology," p. 358. RELATIONSHIPS AND PROSPECTS 43 Scant Prospects of Becoming Cities. The State of Kansas has for its motto, "Ad astru per aspera. " Ac- cording to a local wit this means; "Property will be higher in the spring." The expectation of rapid growth through the coming of the people from somewhere else, has been justified for the American nation as a whole, as, state by state, it has possessed the continent from east to west. It has therefore been successively the expectation of each minor division ; and especially is it the familiar spirit of the little towns. The pos- sibility to which half of them at least are giving most devoted attention, is that of becoming a city ; and this in most cases is an impossibility. "Chicago, Arizona," or "Baltimore, Oklahoma," or "Boston, Wyoming"! The presumptuous spectacle presented by such towns is keenly satirized by Professor Frank A. Waugh. "They are like old maids, forsaken by opportunity but still simpering and smiling as though commanding a fecund future. The Western states are especially burdened with such still-born metropoli. Every cross roads is going to become a county seat; every county seat aspires to be the state capital. ]\Iean- while no town has the inspiration and dignity to be itself. ... In ninety-nine villages and towns out of ev- ery hundred throughout the United States — more espe- cially in the South and West — the first work of com- munity improvement lies in killing the poison of a false ambition and establishing a patriotic self-respect." * In other words, the little towns except in rare instances — are not going to become cities. They might as well make virtue of necessity and graciously accept their 4 Waugh, "Rural Improvement," p. 161. 44 THE LITTLE TOWN limitations, as one learns to accept any of life's inevi- tables. Limited Prospects Even With Exceptional Advan- tages. This judgment is confirmed by a study of county-seat towns in representative states of each sec- tion. As a group, county-seats are more evenly dis- tributed geographically than any other group of towns which can be selected; and they must represent some- thing more than an average of town success or they would never have become county-seats. As a group therefore, their prospects should be distinctly better than those of the towns as a whole. The East. New Jersey is typical of the Atlantic sea, board. A small state between two great cities, its re . cent little-town growth is almost exclusively a spilling, over of urban life into suburbs — residential, resort anci/ manufacturing. All these populations are really mobile ized by the city. They may be in the towns; they ar(^ not of them. Apart from these by-products of urbar/ growth, there is no movement toward the little towns iii New Jersey. In the rural counties their population;; are either stationary or declining. The South. Until recently this section has been eX' cessively rural. It is now experiencing simply normal urban growth, which naturally includes a fair measure of growth in the little towns. Their average increase, however, is anything but striking. In Alabama for example, one-sixth of the county-seats lost population in the decade previous to 1910. The Middle-West. The North-Central States furnish the most disillusionizing data concerning little-town prospects. These have the largest proportion of little RELATIONSHIPS AND PROSPECTS 45 towns and in their life the town factor is most influen- tial. Most of their county-seats have less than five thousand population, and far more of these lost than gained population in the decade under consideration. Thus in Michigan, twenty-six declined or were stationary to nineteen which gained ; in Illinois thirty-five to thirty which gained. Iowa's case is the worst: of seventy-five county-seats of the little-town class, eighteen were sta- tionary and thirty-eight lost; that is, two-thirds of them saw the prospect of becoming a city definitely receding. Selling Lots in Anamosa. A New Yorker who inher- ited Iowa town property spends his days wondering why he cannot sell his lots in Anamosa. The answer should be fairly obvious : nobody is selling lots in Anamosa; nor in seven thousand other like places in the nine states stretching from New York and Pennsyl- vania to Missouri and Iowa." These seven thousand towns had fewer people in them in 1910 than they had ten years before. They constitute well over a half of the little towns of the nation : they justify the pre- sumption (nobody has actually counted) that probably two-thirds of the total number are without justifiable hope of numerical increase. No wonder the bond buyer looks askance at their municipal securities. Four states of this group reported loss of rural population in the last Census decade: Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and Missouri. But ''rural," in the statistical sense, includes all towns of twenty-five hundred population or less. The actual loss of population in these states was largely in the little towns. 6 See Gillen, "Community Development and the State Univer- sity," in Toum Development, XII, p. 99. 46 THE LITTLE TOWN Mountain and Pacific States. The regions of little rainfall, if populated at all, must become so by means of irrigation; which ordinarily means the cultivation of land in small tracts, and the grouping of popula- tions in towns. The Mountain and Pacific Coast states, therefore, reveal the little towns as a group enjoying rapid growth. This condition is, however, by no means uniform or invariable. All the older areas of this region are already subject to the same tendencies as prevail in the rest of the country. One-third of Colorado's county-seats of the little-town class lost population — some of them strikingly — between 1900-10. Country towns in the earlier-settled valleys of California and Oregon tell the same tale. Competition within the Class. And even where the little town is growing there is no reason to suppose that individual places will continue to grow. Unborn rivals will spring up, as they have been doing everywhere in older sections during the last Census decade. Virtually one-sixth of all the little towns of America — over two thousand in all — came into being during that period. At the same time, the growth of rural population was greatly checked and the larger cities took mighty strides. The little-town group has indeed equalled the second- class cities in growth and surpassed the smaller cities; but almost everywhere the individual town has experi- enced greatly sharpened competition. Competition of the City. From the standpoint of numerical growth, then, the prospects of the little town are far from bright. Beside the fact of competition within its class, there are two farther reasons for this : first, of course, the competition of the city. This is not RELATIONSHIPS AND PROSPECTS 47 so obvious nor irritating as that of the town's immedi- ately rival neighbours; but it is e(|ually fundamental. The city's tentacles are for ever lengthening to rob the little town of its very life, — namely, its trade. Mail- order houses sell directly to the farmer by the million dol- lars ' worth of goods. Parcels-post facilitates the process, aided and abetted by the rural free delivery. The good roads movement, as planned chiefly by and for the cities, tends to regard the little towns as incidental. The machinery of civilization, in brief, gravitates into the hands of their over-grown rivals. Prestige runs in the same channel; the lure of the city conquers the little- townsman first, because he cherishes incipient contempt for his own sphere of life. His ampler ambitions al- ready lie in an urban direction. Limits Set by Extensive Agriculture. And quite apart from the acute competition of other little towns and of the great city, economic forces set straight limits to the growth of little towns under any system of ex- tensive agriculture. Disguised and forgotten so long as the nation had an abundance of free land which was being rapidly occupied, these forces nevertheless operate relentlessly; they force themselves upon atten- tion especially now that our good land is substantially all pre-empted. Their operation is traced by the eco- nomist as follows: agricultural populations tend to spread out thinly upon the land so long as there is any open land of similar quality elsewhere to which migra- tion may go. There is yet fertile land in the temperate portions of the globe; for example, in Canada. The Western farmer therefore migrates to Canada. He might have divided his farm between his boys ; he does 48 THE LITTLE TOWN not do so because extensive farming yields more valuable product per worker — and hence a larger reward — than intensive farming. Agriculture could easily work a smaller unit of land more thoroughly and thus support more people per square mile. But there is no tempta- tion to do it so long as it means merely that each worker involved would work harder for no greater reward. "We do not find, therefore, and are not to look in any near future, for substantial increase of rural popula- tion in the older states. But little-town population cannot possibly grow faster than rural population. Except in the small minority of cases where it depends upon manufacturing, it has no function save to serve the country as a centre for trade and ideals. City growth follows another law: it is as rapid and as limit- less as the multiplication of human desires. The coun- try is growing, normally perhaps; but slowly, as it must. There is absolutely nothing that the little towns as a group can do to hasten their independent growth. If therefore, their number largely increases, as it is do- ing, many of them cannot grow at all; and many must actually lose in population. This corresponds with the facts, and reveals the little town's handicap as funda- mental and permanent, — at least until we enter upon some radically different system of agricultural economy. Nothing can make it grow except to get more people upon the land, and this is not generally in prospect in any of the well-settled regions of the country. The other conceivable alternative — namely, to get manufac- turing generally diffused — flies in the face of the equally stubborn fact that manufacturing, for strong and per- sistent reasons, tends to concentrate. RELATIONSHIPS AND PROSPECTS 49 Self-Discipline. Nothing sane can be done by the little towns till they conform their spirits to this pros- pect of narrowly limited growth. This is at total outs with their characteristic mood of booming bumptious- ness. They were projected as rivals of Chicago or Seattle. Their streets are too wide and therefore full of weeds; their "Grand Hotel" is too big and therefore moulders in decrepitude ; their churches are too many and therefore starve out a miserable career of rivalry; their stores also are too many, — but fortunately rival stores are not kept alive by denomination subsidies. Rows of unoccupied store buildings however, complete the picture of mal-adjustment to actual possibilities. To the little towns of America therefore, one scrip- ture comes with peculiar force and aptness; that which counsels against thinking of oneself "more highly than he ought to think," and which exhorts, "So to think as to think soberly." This does not preclude a tem- perate enthusiasm which has a right to become exuber- ant whenever it finds good cause in a given case, and which does find good cause generally in the considera- tion of the fairer possibilities of the little town as a little town. Within the limits of its typical character — not in the futile attempt to escape from it — many of the better destinies of America are to be shaped. Ill THE TOWN'S COUNTRY THE ARTIFICIAL DIVIDING OF A CONTINENT George Washington was a farmer and a surveyor. To these two characters his title as Father of his Coun- try is more justly due than to political wisdom or mili- tary exploits. The farmer and the surveyor stretched forth their rod over our whole land : we received a con- tinent from them. The surveyor conceived it for the convenience and potential occupancy of the farmer as consisting of so many rectangles, larger or smaller (sec- tions, half-sections, quarter-sections, and their small sub- division), to be divided from one another by clear and explicit boundary lines. It is recognized that our sys- tem of land surveying was one of the greatest of Ameri- can social inventions; an immeasurable aid to the actual settlement of the continent by the farm owners on small holdings; the mechanical expression of the deep instinct which made America a nation of homes. In this interest, a remarkable and far-sighted policy cut up the entire continent back from the Atlantic sea- board.^ Politically, it covered most of this area by townships, usually six miles square. Physical features were generally ignored, and social considerations were ordinarily not even considered in creating these basal civil units. Even the counties generally became rec- 1 Carver, "Principles of Rural Economics," p. 74. 50 THE TOWN'S COUNTRY 51 tcangular areas, sliowinj^ nothing informing as to social structure Avithin, nor as to larger social relationships. In short the land was divided artificially and geometri- cally; its local units did not recognize the natural politi- cal and social areas, nor show the actual working rela- tionships and human groupings of the people who occupied it. "rurbanism": the town the country's capital Natural Social Units. When one starts out to trace the actual social structure of the smaller units of popula- tion, namely neighbourhoods and primary communities, — he discovers facts in greatest possible contrast to a geometrical scheme. The continent, as viewed by social analysis, is covered by a more or less over-lapping series of city- and town-centres, each with, a dependent and supporting rural area. Any fundamental social view- point must concern itself with these natural areas, and the forces which create them, which organize their in- ner life, set their limits and determine their relation- ships. A social judgment of America cannot be writ- ten in terms of existing civil-government units. The Rural Regions Organized Around Centres. To challenge definite and adequate attention to the exist- ence of natural social units and especially to signify the organization of the rural regions around small cen- tres, the social students of the University of Wisconsin have coined the term "rurbanism.'' A "rurban" com- munity consists of the village or towTi-centre with its surrounding farm population which uses the centre as its economic and ideal focus. Such a community always occupies a relatively definite area which can be outlined 52 THE LITTLE TOWN and charted. Its limits are not the hard and fast limits of town or county lines as fixed by law. They are as fluctuating as human purposes, yet they maintain sub- stantial permanence through long series of years. Prof. Charles J. Galpin calls attention to the fact that ''the farm families making up the trade population of the same centre are more closely related to each other than to any other group of farmers ; and more closely related to the population of their centre than to that of any other centre, or even to any other group." ^ If this is true we ought not to think of homogeneous rural popula- tions in general contrast with town populations ; for each particular farming community has larger identification with the town people at its centre than with the farmer of the next community. It is these other farmers who are alien — not the people of his own town in whose streets the farmer walks daily, and whose economic and moral fortunes are common with his. A Human Definition of a Little Town. Adopting this viewpoint, a Wisconsin educator offers the following as the working social attitude of his community: "Sauk City has a population of nine hundred people. The business men of our village have a human definition of Sauk City. The articles of incorporation confine us to a small portion of this earth at the bend of the Wiscon- sin River consisting of about 120 acres. The community which the business men recognize as Sauk City sweeps out into the country for miles about the village, including everybody that has a common interest with us. " ^ 2 "Rural Relations of tlie Village or Small City," Wisconsin Bulletin No. 711, p. 37. 3 Wisconsin Bulletin No. 711, p. 42. THE TOWN'S COUNTRY 53 The Little Town's Imperialism. The opening chapter of this book has alrcatly discussed some of the charac- teristics of the little town as a natural centre, and as- serted that its chief function is that of rural leader- ship; it now remains to present the detailed evidence for these earlier assumptions. The evidence actually warrants far more than has been claimed. Instead of the modest statistical identification of the little-town problem with the fortunes of the twelve million or so people who live in incorporated places of five thousand or less, the philosophy of "rurbanism" implies that most of the problems of rural life are to be solved through the development of little-town centres and the utilization of their vital relationships with the open country. The little town has its imperialism as well as its modesty; in its keeping are the destinies of half the nation. FUNDAMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS 1. The Little Town the Primary Trade Centre. This is its first fundamental characteristic. The town's country is the area which trades with it; which makes common cause with it in buying and selling, in credit and transportation facilities. Its typical functionaries are the retail merchant, the middleman — who takes the farmer's produce and turns it over to the city for consumption — the banker, the post-master and the rail- way and express agents. 2. The Little Town a Centre of Ideals. The town's country is the area wliich comes to it for play, educa- tion and worship. Here are the country's moving pic- tures, its baseball diamonds, and its Chautauquas. The 54 THE LITTLE TOWN country's high schools are ordinarily here, and most of its ministers of religion live here, — though many of them would do better in immediate neighbourhood to the farmer whose religious life they interpret. Here, though the farmer may not directly share in them, are those social groups and activities which he imitates and envies. The little town is his school of fashion and of social propriety. Most of the voluntary social organiza- tions to which he may belong, centre here. 3. The Little Town a Concentrated Neighbourhood. It may fairly be called the residuary possessor of neigh- bourliness, which primitively belongs to the whole com- munity. Neighbourhood is a narrower term than com- munity ; it stands for a closer set of relationships. But, as concerns the town and the country, the distinction is largely the result of arbitrary forces, — particularly of the artificial physical basis of the farm community in America. The rectangular boundaries of its farm hold- ings; the consequent relations of the farm homes to one another; the geometrical pattern of its roads and means of communication all tend to make neighbourhood diffi- cult in the open country. Here isolation rules. The primitive social arrangements of our English forefathers on the contrary, avoided such division between town and country. There were few centres in which the people did not immediately live by agriculture, and no farms which were remote from the centre. Thus in the typical manor, the cultivated land was divided into narrow plough-strips, assigned to families in rotation. Each plough-strip centred in the village; the end of every other furrow brought the farmer back into the thick of community life. Neighbourhood and agrieul- THE TOWN'S COUNTRY 55 ture were synonymous. The gulf of feeling between the townsman and tlie faniuT could not exist. The Terrible Loss of Neighbourliness. Tlio American continent theoretically might have been divided in a similar way, — as it virtually was in many New England villages. Their farm holdings were relatively small, stretching back in narrow fields from a street on which all the houses fronted. Neighbourhood was not at war with agriculture; the distinctive quality of New Eng- land life grows largely out of this fact. But through- out most of the nation, extensive farming and the sur- veyor's section lines divorced agriculture from neigh- bourhood, decreeing isolation for the average farmer, and preserving the more definite experiences of neighbour- hood only to the closely built-up town centre. Under pioneer arrangements, the economic independence of the single family left it small practical need of a town ; its spiritual need continued unabated. The loss of neighbourliness was humanly terrible and caused the pioneer's life to verge on savagery. An Incomplete Recovery. When the pioneer had turned fanner and began to exchange his products for the goods of the city and of foreign lands under modern industrial economy, ho was compelled to create town- centres to stand between him and his distant markets. His dealings with them, however, have remained primar- ily practical. True, the major institutions of the com- mon community ideals focus here, but this does not bring a complete recovery of neighbourly experience. Compared with the sense of natural comradeship with his immediate farm neighbours, the countryman's at- titude towards the townsman is one of estrangement, 56 THE LITTLE TOWN and the townsman reciprocates. The chief moral prob- lem of the town and country is to find a spiritual equiva- lent and expression of their newly-knitted economic fortunes. The Town's Treasure. The townsman, however, kept for himself and his own town-group the strongest and completest version of neighbourly experience which ex- ists. This remains one of the town's central character- istics. On this account the town presents the most human type of existence. The open country lost by isolation; the city loses by congestion. Through close neighbourhood the little town is the remaining seed-bed of the primary social virtues, which grow up about simple, direct and personal inter-relationships and ex- change of services between people. The social value of preserving this character cannot be over-stated. It has fundamental religious significance and is susceptible of revolutionary expression in behalf of social ideals. The little town has it ; the entire nation needs it. May one not trust that the town is simply its keeper against a day of its full realization for the whole people? THE town's evolution Grain Elevator and Cattle Pens. A study of the evo- lution of the typical small town substantiates these char- acterizations and shows how they came into being. In the newer West, for example, town beginnings are in- dicated by the grain elevator and cattle pens. They arise even before the permanent railroad station and are in use only during the shipping season. The em- bryonic town functions are performed seasonally; most I o 1-^ o a. a. o « i a CO c i o o j3 a o o THE TOWN'S COUNTRY 57 of the year everybody is a fanner. For a little while, however, some farmer must detach himself from the fields to attend to the grain and cattle shipments, and the railroad must send a man from elsewhere to per- form the technical duties of a transportation agent. The farmer who lives nearest to the station "keeps" the transient town-man and gets in the habit of furnish- ing lodging for those farmers who come from such a distance that they cannot drive back home the same night. The First TowTisman. Next comes the permanent railroad agent wlio regularly boards with this farmer. His coming constitutes the first definite break with a purely rural situation. Here is one man who gains his livelihood otherwise than from the soil; and another who gains his by lodging and feeding the first. It then occurs to the next nearest farmer to move his house to the other end of his farm, — so as to be near the track — and to put a little stock of goods in his dining-room. His women folks begin to hand out occasional blocks of tobacco and plough points, while he himself farms as usual. But as the farm lands of the surrounding area become occupied, store-keeping becomes more remun- erative for him than farming, and he takes his place as a permanent townsman. The corporation which main- tains a "string" of lumber yards and implement ware- houses along the railroad, starts a branch at the new centre. Its employes must be fed and lodged, which justifies farmer Number One in turning his house into a hotel. Some provision for amusement, generally in the .shape of a pool hall, follows next ; then one of the lumber yard employes marries, boards for a while, but 58 THE LITTLE TOWN with the coming of a child, builds the first distinctively town home in the community. Institutions. After a little there are enough town children to suggest moving in the country school from its old location to the town centre; after agitation and disagreement the project carries. Already the denom- inational missionary has come to hold religious service in the schoolhouse, and to organize a church. The loca- tion of buildings now gets attention. Main Street is laid out parallel to or at right-angles with the railroad and one or two side streets, along which houses come to arrange themselves. Down the track at the edge of the marsh the railroad builds cheap cabins for its sec- tion hands and the first breath of class distinction en- ters the community. The little town is now fairly de- fined and enters upon its typical career, with unbounded confidence in itself and in sharp rivalry with its neigh- bours. Regional Variations. This is the essential story of ten thousand American communities varied only in out- ward aspect. In the South its beginnings are the cot- ton gin and the country store; in the farther West, the irrigation ditch; but the essential processes of town building are the same, and the fundamental identifica- tion of the fortunes of town and surrounding country are almost never absent. Influence of Speculation. It must be confessed that the actual life-history of the newer little towns fre- quently reverses the typical story in important respects. With the spectacular westward movement of our civiliza- tion — that most marvellous and conspicuous fact in American history, — and particularly with the unpar- THE TOWN'S COUNTRY 59 alleled rise in land values, came an exploiting spirit with respect to the land, which largely expressed itiielf in speculative town building. Under such circumstances, to start a town was essentially to gamble on the rapid filling up of a territory and the rise of its land values. The townsman no longer waited till rural development had called his functions into being, but rushed ahead to be ready with his functions when the farmer arrived, — all in hot rivalry with other towns and with his fel- low-townsman, as to who should be there first. Fre- quently, after the opening of a new Indian reservation, the first town-agents across the border were an auto- mobile with a bank safe in it, and another with a stock of liquors. Speculative town building naturall}' exag- gerated the difference between the townsman and the farmer. Instead of being partners in a legitimate en- terprise, the townsman came with the purpose of ex- ploiting the farmer; and the farmer responded with distrust and dislike. This poisoned from the beginning the natural attitudes of the two; it obscured the es- sential mutuality of their fortunes; and especially it forgot the total dependence of the town upon the pro- ductive country for life and prosperity. Normal Effect of Growth. Even without the virus of the speculative spirit, the town which reaches perhaps twenty-five hundred population tends to forget its funda- mental land-basis. Many of its inhabitants go through life never having guessed it. Thus in a typical com- munity recently surveyed, about five thousand people are getting their mail from a town post office directly, or by carrier, and are trading at the town stores. These constitute the "rurban" community. About half of the 60 THE LITTLE TOWN trade comes from the farmer; the other half from the townspeople themselves. The farmers have the larger half of the local bank deposits. Pour-fifths of the farm- ers belonging to any church in the region, belong to the town churches. Such is the closeness of their identical interests. But two or three grocery and dry goods stores have already begun to cater to the townsman's peculiar tastes, particularly in their method of display- ing goods. There is a large group of business places in which townsman and farmer do not meet. The farmer raises his own meat, gets along with limited furniture and wears next to no jewellery. Stores deal- ing in these commodities are patronized only by the townsman. The farmer has the vehicle and implement warehouses chiefly to himself. The electric light plant, the water-works and the sewers serve the town popula- tion exclusively, and the employes of these enterprises have no direct dealings with the farmer. Consequently the two halves of the community begin to lose conscious- ness of each other. One or more churches acquire urban pretensions and lose most of their rural membership. In the end a relatively complete order of town life arises, which follows its own ends narrowly and for- gets, even if it ever knew, that it produces absolutely nothing and could not live even for a week without the farmer and his toil. The "Black Belt." Perhaps the most appalling aspect of the division of town and open country from one another, concerns the area immediately surround- ing the town. Just beyond its limits, as typical surveys have discovered, lies a belt of farm lands inhabited by a group of farm people less adequately furnished with the THE TOWN'S COUNTRY Gl neighbourhood spirit and less effectively served by the institutions of civilization than those farther from the centre. They could go to town — they are near enough; but they do not feel welcome nor at home. Yet, in sight of the church spires and within sound of the school bell, they do not feel forced to develop their own institutions as the remoter farmers do. Hence they remain in tragical stalemate, — not truly of the town nor yet of the country. The first exercise of the town's broader spirit of neighbourliness should be in their behalf.* THE TOWN IN THE SOCIAL PATTERN OF THE NATION What is a County? Turning now^ from the consid- eration of the particular centre and its surrounding country, to study the contacts and over-lappings of these natural communities within larger areas, one finds the best concrete evidence in the social surveys of typical counties. Take Walworth County in Wisconsin, for example : ^ its vital relations are not indicated nor so much as suggested by a mere map w^hich locates every farm, every road, every store, every church, school and social institution. Humanly and vitally it consists of twelve civic centres or little towns, each with its sur- rounding service-area. Their edges frequently over-lap, because the farmer remotest from the centres has a choice of two or more towns at which to trade or to worship. He fluctuates from one to the other in response to the 4 Wilson, "Church at the Center," p. 81. sGalpin, "A Social Survey of Walworth County, Wis," in The Social Anatomy of an Agricultural Community, University of Wisconsin Research Bulletin No. 34, p. 2. 62 THE LITTLE TOWN competitive bids from town merchants or ministers for his patronage. Yet organization around twelve centres is the essential and permanent feature of the county's social life. Fluctuating Boundaries. Naturally the area within which a town performs a given function is not exactly the same as that in which it performs a different one. A trade centre is also a banking centre, but to a some- what larger area; because of course, there are many country stores which limit the trade area, while there are only town banks. Its newspaper zone is still larger than its banking area ; but its milk zone is smaller. The newspaper does not sour as the farmer carries it home, though the milk may sour if he tries to carry it an equal distance to town. Consequently the creamery must be nearer than the post ofBce. A man will go farther to trade than he will to pray; consequently the church zones of these twelve centres are smaller than their trade zones, — strictly rural churches filling up the gaps be- tween. The high school zones are even more extensive, but they are less universally used by country people than are the town's economic or even religious facilities. In this respect the town functions very imperfectly; it is nevertheless a school centre and also a library centre for a definite farm area surrounding it. No picture of its life is complete or even conceivable which does not in- clude the fact of its manifold out-reach into the open country. The Actual Community. "When one has mapped each of the service zones surrounding the little town and placed map upon map, he gets the general area within which the town is the country's centre and capital. The THE TOWN'S COUNTRY 63 outlines of the area are not completely distinct ; thin- nings-out and over-lapping characterize the edges. But consider the county as a whole, and all the farm land is seen to belong to some town or other. The country is the town's country, and the town in every case is the country's town. This is the discovery of the actual as over against the legal community. It is the revelation of the essential social pattern of the American nation. Most of the areas of the United States consists of just such over-lapping series of adjacent town centres with their supporting land areas. In them "the apparent entanglement of human life is resolved into a fairly unitary system of inter-relatedness. The fundamental community is a composite of many expanding and con- tracting feature-communities, possessing the character- istic pulsating instability of all real life."*"' "Fairly Unitary." The qualification expressed in this quotation needs farther attention. The social sys- tem of town-and-surrounding-country is only "fairly unitary"; first, as has been seen, because the dominance of the older centre is frequently challenged by the growth and ambitions of the incomplete civic centres, which generally lie in the margins of its territory and already duplicate some of its institutions. As they wax strong enough, they compete for its farther ad- vantages one after another. Their legitimate claims and rights of development have to be allowed for in any reasonable plan of community progress. "Scrambling." Again, the older regions accumulate many exceptions to the unitary tendency. Thus a typi- cal community of the Middle Atlantic States, cut by 6 Wisconsin Research Bulletin No. 34, p. 18. 64 THE LITTLE TOWN class stratifications of long standing, presents a far less simple situation than the average community of the Middle West. Here a typical survey ^ finds the suc- cessors of the old landed aristocracy and of the ''mean white," of former Negro slaves and of more recent alien immigrants. These four classes live within a com- mon area but in striking degree fail to use common institutions. The lines connecting homes with church, school and store cross and recross. There is a violent over-lapping of service-areas among people whose nat- ural and convenient way would be to use common facili- ties. Conditions are highly uncentralized ; the investi- gator calls them "scrambled." So effectively do they disguise the fact that a county consists of an over-lap- ping series of natural communities, that it escapes the investigator altogether. He presents a plan for its theoretical reorganization of entirely artificial lines. Yet the county contains a remarkable centre — a historic Quaker village whose ancient meeting house, school, lyceum, library and bank illustrate with absolute apt- ness the power and function of the natural as over against the artificial centre, — only in this case the centre functions for but one social class. Beginnings of like conditions are already multiplying in the Middle-West, where successive layers of foreign immigration intro- duce race and class distinctions, and where tenancy is increasing. ''Scrambling" is on the way and needs to be checked. 7 A Rural Survey in Maryland, Department of Churcli and Country Life, Presbyterian Board of Home Missions. THE TOWN'S COUNTRY 65 CAN THE TOWN PERFORM ITS TASK IN BEHALF OP THE COUNTRY? A nation which is made up on this plan is certainly more interesting to live in than one which consists of legally defined areas largely rectangular, and which conceives of a given area as either rural or urban. In such a nation the effort to unify the divergent viewpoint of town and country populations, by making them con- scious of their common under-lying relationships, rises to the dignity of social statesmanship and religious mediation. It presents issues fitted to thrill prophets and provoke evangelists. Yet no one will go very far in trying to work out the practical unification of town and country without bitter experiences which will drive him back into the horrors of fundamental doubt. Can the town really serve the country loyally and well? Doubts: 1. Can the Town be Converted? In some of the most earnest minds of the nation fundamental doubts exist concerning the possibility of making the town genuinely serve the country. The issue is drawn in its most practical form over the use of the town school by country children, as already suggested in the first chapter. Many of the most influential leaders of the rural betterment movement express complete dis- gust with the town, and hopelessness for its educational future with respect to the country child. They think that to send him to the town school means certainly to alienate him from the country ; and that consequently there should be a complete duplicatory system of rural high schools to avoid such catastrophe. How Good is the Country's Case? The "rurban" 66 THE LITTLE TOWN viewpoint will naturally raise the question whether this distrust is not essential distrust of the rural life pro- gram? So far as the town goes, the country child is already spoiled. It is to the town that he looks for most of his ideals. To the town, as analysis shows, his family goes for trade, for play and for worship. Doubt- less the town's school needs conversion and redirection. It will take a revolution to bring it to the point where it genuinely feels its duty equally to the country and to the town populations. It will take revised legisla- tion in most states to enable the town to include the entire country area which it properly serves, in one high school district. But if the rural betterment gospel is sound and convincing, cannot the farmer be trusted to see the place of the school in a unifying view of town and country relations? The alternative of town or country is already acutely before his boy and girl. Will not a school which fairly sets before them the possibili- ties of both, which concretely proves the undoubted eco- nomic advantages of farming, and stresses the ideals of rural life, keep as many of them permanently in the country as ought to stay? Will not the deliberate ef- fort to segregate rural education in a corn-field environ- ment, react against itself? Thoroughly to convert the town to a fair and helpful emphasis on rural life will not be easy. Fine and successful beginnings, however — like that of the Clinton (Iowa) Commercial Club — have already been made; and in the end self-interest will be seen to unite with altruism to make general suc- cess inevitable. 2. Is the Townsman Worth his Price? The second fundamental doubt as to the little town's usefulness con- THE TOWN'S COUNTRY 67 cerns the validity of the retailer's and ruiddleraan's functions in the social order. It should be possible to solve this theoretically by economic analysis; but only concrete studies of the results of co-operation, and added years of business experience will probably convince the farmer that the townsman on the whole is worth his price. The fanner's expert advisers, in the main, are trying to demonstrate to him that the middleman has value, and the increasingly specialized process of scien- tific agriculture are helping him to an appreciation of the expert in other realms. Doubtless hundreds and even thousands of little towns have no economic justifi- cation; but the town type, in its economic position be- tween city and the farmer, ought not at this day to be brought into fundamental question.^ 3. Will Ideals Prevail? The deepest doubts on any problem are always moral and spiritual. They ask whether man is not essentially selfish ; his terms of as- sociation dictated merely by economic necessity or by profit; his assumed satisfactions in ideals transient or deceptive? In this respect the relation of the little town and the country is like any other fundamental human problem — say that of class or race. Either the better natures of men will respond to any vital vision of true and helpful possibilities, or they will not. If they will all things are possible; if not, nothing is. FORCES MAKING FOR THE UNIFICATION OP TOWN AND COUNTRY In view of these deep doubts it is well to note some of the strong forces which work with one who is trying 8 Carver, "Principles of Rural Economics," p. 173. 68 THE LITTLE TOWN practically to unify the thought and life of town and country. 1. The Farmer's Wider Outlook. On the farmer's side a new type of business experience has already been noted. Co-operative business enterprises undertaken by the farmer involve the employment of agents. The co-operative creamery or elevator needs a manager. He does not work in the fields as his farmer employers do ; but because he is their man by whose directing ability they immediately profit, he is appreciated; while the townsman doing the same service is disliked and his profits grudgingly paid. In the more prosperous farm- ing regions the farmer himself frequently invests in town business. An unpublished study made through one of the offices of the United States Department of Agriculture concerns an Iowa town of nine hundred population in which — following experiments in rural co- operation — the bank and leading store have come to be owned outright by farmers' stock companies. They have no idea of extending rural credit, or of catering to the farmer, or of selling at retail on a co-operative basis. They are sheer capitalists grown rich by farming, and now seeking profits by old fashioned town methods. They have learned and are turning the townsman 's trick. Specialized farming again, which required expert care in the handling of products, attractive methods of crat- ing or packing, and a display element in selection, be- gins to initiate the farmer into the art of retail selling, and to convince him that brains and taste have market value. 2. Good Roads and Their Social Consequences. From the side of the townsman forces are multiply- THE TOWN'S COUNTRY 69 ing to heal the breach between him and the open coun- try. There are many old ties which are being strength- ened as new ones are added. At worst, the difference be- tween the two types of life may easily be over-stated. The forms of town life are urban, but town character was always essentially rural. IMerchant and farmer stood on opposite sides of the counter, but the merchant has often been brought up on the farm and between the two men generally there was no essential difference of understanding. Now such barriers as have grown up are being removed by new co-operative activities. The good roads movement typifies the moral and social high- way which is being smoothed between the town and its country. Practical co-operation in road building is symbolic of deep spiritual forces. Thus the business men of DeKalb, Illinois, the other day shovelled gravel to furnish a strip of country road; the farmers did the teaming; the county bought the gravel. Thus the "Washington (Pennsylvania) Board of Trade has opened a Community House equipped with conveniences, as a place of resort and rest for farmers who come to town to trade, — in the confessed purpose of off-setting the printed attractions of the mail order catalogues. It has remained for an Indiana commercial club to guarantee a hundred patrons from its town to any chicken supper prepared by a country church in its neighbourhood ! Such episodes are frequently repeated in many sections, and their combined significance is great. 3. Rural Rapid Transit. All writers on country life insert at this point in the discussion a rhapsody upon the automobile. Given good roads, cheap fuel and the gas engine, the distinction between town and country 70 THE LITTLE TOWN largely disappears. The farmer in his car gets into market quicker than the suburbanite can reach his city office. Add to this, increasing prosperity which enables the farmer to purchase the automobile, and every ex- ternal difficulty disappears which forbids him to master both modes of life. He is no longer a countryman; he is a countryman with an automobile — a very different person — and the town is as much his as it is the towns- man's. 4. Town Investments in the Country. Even the much execrated absentee landlord may be a unifying link between town and country. The tenant has less stake in the welfare of the farm than the owner has, even if the latter lives in town. The retired farmer is frequently of no benefit to the town because he was never of any benefit to the country. He was non- progressive there, and non-progressive he remains. But as townsman with a stake in the country, he keeps the roads open between the two and may be a valuable off- set to the tendency of the farming class to segregate mentally as well as socially. Some of the profounder lessons of agriculture — such as the value of permanent fertility above this year's profits — come more easily to the town-dwelling farm owner than to the farmer actu- ally upon the soil. Because of his ability to put in- telligent pressure upon the farmer both in the matter of industry and methods, the country banker — or in the South, the merchant who gives the farmer credit — are in position to be of great service as links between town and country.^ In the case of the banker a more rational agriculture 9 Carver, "Principles of Rural Economics," p. 276. THE TOWN'S COUNTRY 71 is showing that it is because the farmer farms specula- tively that he is charged speculative rates of interest. When he diversifies his crops and begins honest book- keeping with himself he finds that there is a reason for the money lender's point of view. Every intel- ligent town investor in farm lands supplements the human forces which make for mutual understanding and ultimate good will. The merchant is experiencing to his sorrow the farmer's newly discovered business ability and effective plans for eliminating the retailer and middleman. Under this pressure he begins to un- derstand that both parties to a bargain must be satis- fied, and that he must cease to be a mere exploiter of the farmer for his own profit. Thus is laid the eco- nomic foundation which moral and social enthusiasm must utilize and perfect. 5. Intensive Agriculture. The reclamation enthusi- ast's glowing vision of irrigated regions as new Gardens of Eden is often partly realized and largely solves the antagonism of town and country by identifying the two. Utterly dependent upon the collective control of water, almost necessarily practicing co-operation in marketing; specializing in production; living in close social contacts, and often in intelligence and luxury, on thirty or forty, and often on even five- or ten-acre holdings, the irrigation farmer has town life in all essentials.^^ Intensive agriculture without irrigation, though not destined to be general in America, has some of the same possibilities. 6. Legislation. In the interest of town and country 10 Hess, "Socio-EcoTiomic Aspects of Irrigation," in "Cyclopedia of American Agriculture," p. 167. 72 THE LITTLE TOWN unification, legislation must go much farther than yet dreamed, but significant beginnings have been made — chiefly as yet in school matters — the details of which will appear in later paragraphs. In the long run, if the analysis of this chapter is correct, we must reach an entirely new type of local government based upon the natural and actual community as over against the geometrical and artificial one. The New England town has always been such a natural community; and ulti- mately the whole nation should have the right to deter- mine by actual surveys the boundaries of its natural communities and to constitute them legal political units. THE POTENTIAL MISSIONARY SPIRIT OP THE LITTLE TOWN Foreshadowings. No general idealistic movement in behalf of the little towns — especially in the light of their social solidarity with and potential leadership of the open country — is yet to be discerned in America. That one is needed is the essential plea of this book. There are to be sure the well defined and widely useful Village Improvement Societies of New England — some two hundred of them. A multitude of experiments in all parts of the country show that the newly acute social spirit has invaded the little-town realm also. Many townsmen are becoming aware of the needs and promise of their immediate home fields. Some of these better- ment movements definitely seek to link town and open country. The enthusiasm and moral insight of the rural life movement ought everywhere to be available in this behalf, and its recognition of the little town as the effective centre of its operation is at least fore-shad- THE TOWN'S COUNTRY 73 owed." Yet nowhere is there anything like a general consciousness of response to the specific vision and proc- ess of "rurbanism" as outlined above. The towns as a group are ignorant of their anointing for service and are as yet unbaptizcd with the missionary spirit. Re-kindling Old Fires. Yet the town form of civili- zation is peculiarly susceptible of use by the mission- ary spirit. A striking group of them were founded with the definite purpose of being centres of morality and intelligence to the surrounding country and the prospec- tive commonwealth. Definite convictions tend to ex- press themselves in compact communities and in the town order of life. In contrast with the scattering, inchoate life of the frontier, the constructive states- manship of western settlement concerned itself largely with the founding of towns. It was by compact com- munities that Mormonism conquered the desert ; their dominance from the first over the outlying rural regions has made Utah the first state to abolish utterly the un- graded district school. It was his genius for founding towns which made the Yankee the social school-master of the frontier, often in regions where the dominant populations numerically were of other stocks. Often he transplanted towns bodily, picking up church, academy and community organization and setting them down with undiminished power as evangelizing centres in the midst of the prairie. There are such towns in which the tra- dition of definite missionary vocation to the larger com- munity still lives. Certainly nothing could so lift the n Bridging the Gap of Indifference between City and County — pamphlet of the Clinton (Iowa) Commercial Club. The Ameri- can City, VIII, p. 398. 74 THE LITTLE TOWN entire group of them out of disillusion, the sense of failure and of frequent self-contempt as the clear per- ception that it is largely the little town which is to solve the rural problem of the nation. Not Necessary to Become a Foreign Missionary. The most stupendous moral loss to any community is from failure to find scope within its immediate sphere for the latent ideals of its people. This cup the little town has drunk to the dregs. Most of its finer youth has gone away — virtually all of them have thought it neces- sary to go — for the realization of their dreams of serv- ice to significant and heroic causes. It was the tears of a girl who wanted to be a foreign missionary and could see no outlet for her devotion in her own little town, which inspired one of the most notably revolu- tionary cases of civic advance recorded in this book. The town is little in itself, but great through its po- tential leadership and service of the country. The mere opening of the mind to that fact assures the flow of mighty and regenerating tides of purpose and adventure through many a stagnant Littleton. IV THE TOWN'S PEOPLE CONTRASTING ENVIRONMENTAL TYPES If the heavens rained literal blood and the earth opened once a year to release apocalyptic beasts, mankind would be different ; but less so than he has become under the steady pressure of the less striking phenomenon of home surroundintrs and conditions of labour. Effect of Isolation. The farmer breakfasts with no evidence of neighbours but the distant crowing of cocks and baying of dogs. His family' separates silently to its tasks, themselves often remote from one another. Pos- sibly two men and teams may be working in the same field, but commonly beyond the range of conversation. For other human society there is just a chance that the neighbouring farmer will be ploughing or cultivating across the fence, or that one will reach the end of the corn row at the highway while a team is passing. But the day may come and go — many days do — without essen- tial break in the family isolation of the farm home and its labouring group. Effect of Congestion. The city tenement dweller on the other hand, falls to sleep in an unnoted Babel, and rises to one. The sights, noises, smells and physical pressure of thousands of fellow mortals are thrust upon the toughened senses. Floor space costs money and he 75 76 THE LITTLE TOWN may therefore work in the reeking proximity of the Ghetto sweatshop. In a cigar factory in Tampa two thousand operators of both sexes and all races and colours mingle indiscriminately, are seated back to back, shoul- der to shoulder and knee to knee with narrow benches between. What wonder that their lives come to bear the stamp of mass-thinking as well as mass-action. The Happy Medium. The little townsman has al- ready greeted his fellow this morning as he splits the kindling or feeds his chickens in the back yard. His wife has called a "good morning" to her neighbour dur- ing domestic processes, or compared notes on infant dis- eases over the fence. As the man starts "down town" he is sure to find and fall in step with another man, breathing friendliness — and possibly the diverse interests of another calling. All day the incidental contacts of life continue, varied and shifting. There is leisure for humour, for human intercourse for its own sake. The rear of some store becomes an informal club of village notables. There is pause in the day's work; noon, with the school children trooping home; the return of the business man to dinner ; the comings and goings of women to market or club ; the daily exodus of half of the inhab- itants when the train comes in; the equal interest in the base ball club ; the concourse of the whole town at fight or fire. This is social richness and complexity as com- pared with farm environment; on the other hand, it is an open formation of life and informality in contrast with the city's regimentation. These make the little townsman what he is, giving him his well-marked char- acteristics as the man of the minor centre. THE TOWN'S PEOPLE 77 THE townsman's CHARACTERISTICS 1. The Townsman Walks. Cataloguing the more ob- vious of these eharaeteristies, — those directly due to pecu- liar town environment, — the first fact to demand notice is that walking distance constitutes the limit of neigh- bourhood in the little town, just as team-haul distance does in the open country and rapid transit facilities do in the city. Tliis is curiously affirmed by the social isola- tion of people living just between walking and driving distance. The characteristic "black belt," described in the third chapter, is a strip around the town beginning one or two miles from the centre. Only the energetic will walk so far to enjoy full social relationship as offered by the town, yet hitching up a horse to go .so short a distance hardly seems reasonable. The consequence is that just beyond easy walking distance there lies a Rob- inson Crusoe type of life. The most crucial question of location for every little-town home is, "How far is it to the centre?" "When the pressure of population forces town limits beyond walking distance the street car comes and the little town ceases to be little. 2. The People of the Little Town Work Indoors. Labour is not in first hand contact with nature. As protected from weather its conditions are more controlled and regular than those of the country. Work is not done seasonally, nor daily from sun to sun, "With arti- ficial light men not only choose their hours, but contrive to have shorter hours for labour. In the little town most of them do not work at manual labour. ' ' Seed time and harvest, summer and winter, cold and heat," hardening the hands and forcing a daily response from the linea- 78 THE LITTLE TOWN ments of the human face have not wrought their corre- sponding deep impress upon character as they have in the farmer's case. Yet the challenge of nature is not entirely absent from the little townsman 's life. He must shovel his own snow before he can go to work in winter, and there is no public vehicle to carry him about in case of cold or heat. He escapes nature less than the city man does, though far more than the farmer. 3. The Little Townsman's Life is Bi-focal. It has two centres, — home and ' ' down town ' ' — the latter mean- ing shop, store or office. The farm has but one centre, the home. The work of the surrounding open fields can- not be centralized but must be followed from place to place. But analyse the consciousness of any member of the little-town group and one finds ' ' down town ' ' deeply written within. The merchant shuttles between his two centres of life twice or three times daily. The woman of any freedom or energy gets "down town" several times a week at least, and thus keeps in touch with her other world. The child comes home from school via "down town" if he dares. No other type of existence revolves so completely about two familiar and definite centres. The devoted monotony of it bores the city man inexpress- ibly. "Main-Street and home-again" is almost a com- plete formula for the little town. 4. Some Variety of Occupation. There is no such solidarity of the family group in labour in the little town as on the farm. Members of one family may have different jobs, different sources of income. In the rural home all work, practising the minor divisions of agri- cultural labour, the lighter tasks falling to women and children; but much of farm work is relatively inter- HOME AXD "down town" — POOR DISTRIBUTION OF PUBLIC UTTLITIES The town "has" electric lights and sewers but the majority of its homes are not connected THE TOWN'S PEOPLE 79 changeable, and at a pinch all pitch in at any task. The townsman's wife may rarely stand behind his counter (usually her place is home), but his son or daughter may often find livelihood in work different from their father's. 5. Woman's Widening Sphere. The most significant aspect of this change is tliat which relates to woman and her outlook. The little town's version of woman's employment outside the home is narrow compared with the city's. It affords her quite enough, however, to cause radical differences of thought and feeling and to initiate many new attitudes. To become clerk, stenog- rapher or telephone operator is the potential resource of any unmarried woman who does not relish the do- mestic round or who seeks economic independence, Belleville's fourteen per cent, of gainfully employed women are quite enough to introduce a mild version of feraininism. 6. Beginning- of Public Utilities. The town home has surrendered many of its economic functions to the com- munity. Particularly many of its "chores" are done collectively. The townsman does not carry his lantern ; his streets are electric-lighted. He no longer "totes" water; it runs from the hydrant. Wliether purchased over the counter or ordered by telephone, his groceries come to the door in the delivery wagon. The disposal of garbage and sewage are yet in debate as between town and home ; these functions may or may not have become municipalized. On the woman's part, the electric light- ing of the home dispenses with the disagreeable burden and danger of kerosene lamps. The steam laundn' re- lieves the wash tub and the bakery and kitchen range. 80 THE LITTLE TOWN These tend to offset the fact that the little town can neither afford nor secure household service, and that members of the family must do most of the domestic labour. The home still carries fuel for thousands of stoves and goes to the post office for its own mail. From the farmer's standpoint, however, an enormous amount of labour has passed from the home to the shoulders of the community collectively. 7. Frequent Community Enterprises. The little town's people are accustomed to collective action in the common interest. In most directions this is the poten- tial capacity rather than one continuously exercised. In the mercantile sense, however, there is a fairly steady exercise of town enterprise, particularly in the interest of nearby trade. Most of the time it is inefficiently ex- pressed, and is often fitful in the extreme; but a new plan of advertising, a fair, a subsidy for a new factory or the erection of a new church or public building, finds characteristic response in the business community of the little town. Voluntary initiative takes care of such mat- ters most of the time. Often there is little organization or acknowledged leadership within the commercial group. The same interests support a base ball team as a means of advertisement and of relaxation. This is little enough ; yet co-operation in the furtherance of community purposes occurs fifty times among townsmen to once among farmers; and this co-operation is far more im- mediate and personal than are the more systematized and regular communal forces of the city. 8. Variety with Democracy. The little town's people have the flavour of occupational variety in their habitual contacts, especially through the familiar presence of the THE TOWN'S PEOPLE 81 professional classes. No other community enjoys such close daily fellowship with men of so wide a range of vocation or calling. The former's typical day includes no man who is not a farmer. The minister's or doctor's visit to him is an event ; the visit to a lawyer a catastro- phe. Contracts with the professional classes are equally absent from the city artisan's daily experience. They are available within the prosperous city circles through the church and social intercourse, yet limited and hedged about by distinctions of wealth and class. In the little town, on the other hand, all sorts and conditions of men are known intimately and familiarly. Wealth and pov- erty are near enough together to call one another by their first names. This adds range to the average human experience. 9. Recreation Institutionalized. The little town pos- sesses the specialized institutions of play as well as of work, and worship ; — witness the statistical record of Belleville's recreation in the first chapter. Only the city, of course, gives to play equal dignity with or superi- ority over the sober aspects of life. The farm allows it nothing but incidental and grudging expression. While it remains puritanical compared with the city, the little town directl}' institutionalizes play, daring to call its barren public hall an opera house and regularly sup- porting a moving picture place. The lyceum courses or Chautauqua, in which recreation is given respectability under the mantle of ''improvement," find their special field here. Moral heart-searchings in matters of social amusement characterize such communities : their inde- cisive attitude toward the whole realm of recreation cre- ates many of the most difficult issues of little-town life. 82 THE LITTLE TOWN In this, as in all the characteristics so far catalogued, the little town occupies a definitely intermediate posi- tion, though one balancing toward the urban side. On the whole it is more like the city than like the country in the external forms of its life. So far, then, as the aver- age little townsman is able to understand himself, his sense that his life is a miniature edition of the city is natural and indeed inevitable. VARIATIONS WITHIN LITTLE-TOWN POPULATION Of course the people of the little town are not entirely homogeneous in character. There are minor differences of elemental human stuff. Its diverse elements yield in differing ways and degrees to environmental pressure. As a whole, the townspeople show a residual rural in- heritance incompletely conquered by an environment tending to urban forms. Together they constitute a mediating type — and will continue to do so. The Townsman Born. Naturally the most perfect expression of his type is the native son of the little town. Hundreds of thousands of Americans live and die know- ing no other environment. When they move about it is within their native stratum of population. They are keenly sensitive to their difference from the farmer ; yet the equilibrium of rural life is simply disturbed in them ; they have never really acquired urban traits. No radical readjustment of capacity and temper has been effected. The unmarried woman, for example, has no such recog- nized, assured and permanent place in the social and economic order as the city gives her. There is scant provision for the permanently unmarried man. Con- trast the little-town boarding house with the urban THE TOWN'S PEOPLE 83 bachelor's club! Yet in the little-townsman a relatively stable type is presented. While under American condi- tions all types are fluid, this one is as specific and per- manent as any other. The Accidental TowDsman. The ruralist is espe- cially represented by the retired farmer/ and by other recruits from the open country. Often he constitutes a majority of the population in ^Middle-Western town- communities. Although he has come to town all his life for trade and worship, he finds living in town an entirely different matter. His natural reaction is toward the ways of the open country. He insist.^ on keeping pigs and poultry. Psychologically speaking, his mind is more traditional than that of the native townsman, and when he retires to town it is with habits hardened to adamant. Taxes for public purposes outrage him, and to pay cash for food is a night-mare. Along with younger genera- tions escaped from the country, in the persons of farm boys and girls who enter town life through matrimony or business, he constitutes a most serious problem for the little town's digestive capacities. As already suggested, this invasion of the town by country people ought to be utilized for the unification of the two halves of the natural community. At present it often operates to their further estrangement. The Town's Professional Leadership. Frequently it is city-bred or at least city-trained. Naturally it pulls in the opposite direction from the farmer's, and it is responsible for much of the town's aping of the city — so characteristic and unfortunate. The doctor, la\\-\'er, teacher, librarian and minister get their clues to life and 1 See Vogt, "Rural Sociology," p. 410. 84 THE LITTLE TOWN their interpretation of success from their wider oppor- tunities of education and travel. Who that has ever served a little town in any of these capacities can escape the charge of having misled the community in some at least of its more general ambitions and ideals ? The am- bitious professional man uses the little town, as he does the country, as a stepping stone to higher things, mean- while infusing his own spirit of impermanence and un- rest into the younger generation. Since the city-trained leadership represents the innovating spirit in the little town, it constitutes an especially subtle appeal to youth. Youth is for innovation as against old ways. It is not necessary, however, that the innovators speak for the city. Let the rural movement become eager and confident, let it show energy and initiative, and it will get the boys and girls as surely as the city does. It is the direction rather than the fact of leadership which is at fault. The professional classes need most of all to have the astig- matism of their wider opportunities corrected and to catch the vision of the town 's own possibilities and of its splendid outreach into the open country. The Town and the Foreigiier. Alien groups imposed upon the little town are left largely undigested by the social order. The occasional family of another nation- ality or race is indeed taken in without great embarrass- ment to most of the privileges of the community; but let any considerable number of such people present them- selves and they are quickly formed into an almost im- penetrable clan on the town 's outskirts. In spite of their small numbers, the process of their assimilation is rela- tively slower than in the city. The world war has shown that some of the most un-American communities in THE TOWN'S PEOPLE 85 America are small towns in the Middle-West. There is not that keen sense of life-and-death struggle either to assimilate or to be submerged by the alien mass, which the city knows so well. Hence the town's assimilating processes are feeble and unsteady. Under the stimulus of the frontier, where all comers start life in essential equality, the alien of nearer lineage, like the Scandina- vian in the Northwest, assimilates in a generation. Even under these favouring circumstances the Slav may remain alien indefinitely. Old towns especially prove utterly in- adequate to the task of making over into their own like- ness any new group entrenched in a mass-life of alien sort. As a class also, the little town strangely fails to achieve the higher and more spiritual unity of the city. In spite of its seething differences of population, a city somehow manages to get itself a collective character and to make a forceful individual impression. One can al- ways tell pretty definitely what a given city is like. The little town frequently remains an indistinguishable member of an undistinguished class. FORTUNES OP AGE AND STATUS GROUPS WITHIN THE POPULATION The unique and intermediate character of the little town is further evidenced by its utilization or failure to utilize its people according to their age and status. Omitting fractions, thirty-one per cent, of the American population are children under fourteen years of age. About nineteen per cent, are adolescents. Forty-three per cent, are in the years of maturity and only about four per cent, are classified as old. About fifty-five per cent, of marriageable men are married, and fifty-eight 86 THE LITTLE TOWN of marriageable women. It will be interesting to note how the little town treats each of the classes here dis- tinguished. Childhood. The fortunes of childhood reflect the intermediate nature of the little town's whole situation. There are no such extensive "chores" on the one hand as furnish significant and appropriate labour to the farm boy and girl; and on the other hand, no massed and systematized child-labour such as the city imposes upon immature life. The little town has a bad reputation as a place to bring up children. The chief vocational im- pulse which their environment brings is one of drifting and delaying decision as to life work. This is in sharp contrast with economic seriousness which the average country or city child alike draws from its earliest breath. The little town cannot furnish normal oppor- tunities of work to its children. Play taken seriously — which means educative play, supervised and adequately paid for — is a partial solution, though one very rarely furnished by the little town. But nothing can supply its lack of serious vocational atmosphere as it affects childhood. Youth. For youth the little town furnishes a few economic opportunities, but too few, and too poorly paid. In spite of the unusual advantage of having railroad shops, Belleville paid more than seventy per cent, of the unmarried men less than $12.00 per week. Indeed there are not enough jobs in all the little towns put together to utilize their adolescent vigour. The farm boy may have to go elsewhere to farm, but the farm has work for him somewhere — in Canada if not at home. Not so the little town with respect to its sons. They are forced to THE TOWN'S PEOPLE 87 go to another kind of place to find opportunity. For this reason it is utter folly to try to segregate them with the farm population, which is already relatively heavy enough. The little town can out-breed its opportunities, and the city must take its surplus. The educational viewpoint of the little town must therefore be broad enough to include both urban and rural prospects. On the other hand, the lack of immediate summons or allure- ment keeps the average youth of the little town longer in school than under any other American environment. This is great gain and permits the little town to furnish, as it always has done, a disproportionate number of the nation's professional leaders. The prospect of staying through high school and going to college is far more general here than for young people of any other circum- stances or class. In spite of its narrow resources, Belle- ville sent half its high school graduates to higher insti- tutions. Detached Womanhood. Her fortunes have already been referred to. The little town makes a beginning in giving opportunity outside of the home; but woman's utilization is very incomplete. There are few jobs and a surplus of unmarried women. The town's boys, whose larger freedom of movement takes them more numerously to the city, do much of their mating there. On the other hand, the conditions of town economy do not compel universal matrimony which is a fundamental condition of rural life. Neither bachelor nor unmarried woman can exist long in the open country. Conse- quently, as another evidence of its betwixt-and-between character, the little town harbours more than its share of "old maids." For this reason no other type of commun- 88 THE LITTLE TOWN ity can command so large a voluntary force for its ideal- istic purposes. Church, women's clubs and all pursuits of ideals find an army of women with some measure of leisure and desire to be useful, ready to be mobilized for service. This constitutes one of the choicest assets of the little town in solving its immediate problems. Here is the most plentiful and unhurried supply of workers — if not the most competent — for every good work. Old Age. And what of age? The little town is its paradise; but to confess this is hard on the little town. Here the scale of life is reduced to suit the waning powers. The home is near enough to the centre for even the feeble to walk. There are just enough ' ' chores, ' ' enough ground for a little garden, a scheme of life just right for the aged. Society is simple and leisurely enough to appreciate old people, personal enough to love and cherish them. The hoary head is conspicuous in town assemblies as it is conspicuous for absence in the city. FORTUNES OP INSTITUTIONS Combining now the total characteristics of the little town population and of its sub-groups, as they unite to effect institutions, one finds that institutions are gen- erally under-valued and that their operation is neither prompt nor efficient. No institutional stitch is in time. Evils crowd on to be cured when they ought to be pre- vented through the positive functioning of social proc- esses. Institutions Incomplete in Scope. Thus, economic institutions seldom cover the entire area of the town. It is said to "have" water works and a sewer system, THE TOWN'S PEOPLE 89 but half the people are not using these agents of col- lective life. None of the outlying families except the wealthy are roaclied. Electric lights cost too much, both in initial installation and monthly charges. Many a little town which counts itself very up to date would be appalled by an actual survey of these points. This gen- eralization holds for every section of the nation without exception. Institutions Inefficient in Operation. When public facilities are provided they are inefficiently operated and poorly kept up. Nobody is well served by them. Elec- tric lights have a habit of going out; the water supply fails ; the sidewalks are in bad condition ; years pass with- out the overhauling of plant. IMoney is not put aside annually to cover depreciation ; there are no standards of efficiency reflecting a keen sense of the vital depen- dence of the closely settled community upon these agents of collective life. The city must keep up its utilities or perish. The town is content to fall back periodically upon the cistern and kerosene lamp. Institutions Inadequate in Social Strength. Social organization in the little town fails to utilize the indi- vidual whom town economy has freed from family soli- darity. There is more change in human character than is registered in institutions, albeit that institutions are numerous enough and that the little townsman is the champion "jiner" of America. What he has, however, is multiplicity of organization rather than aptness and adaptation. His institutions simply repeat old patterns. Exceptional individuals and partly differentiated groups, whether above or below the town's average, do not find vital expression through them. 90 THE LITTLE TOWN Failure of Institutions with Respect to Social Classes. Wealth, nationality and social history frequently divide the little town sharply ; yet it does not organize its social classes effectively when it has them. Thus industry, even on the little-town scale, often separates its oper- atives into an alien group on the physical outskirts of the community and beyond the pale of social privilege. The first resource of democracy faced by class distinction is to raise class consciousness to a higher pitch ; to give each group of people class organs and institutions; to evoke group-purpose and to make it capable of group-action. Through these processes each class is able to make space in which to grow and find chance of development, parallel at least, with that of the more favoured groups. In the largest cities, even the newest comer falls into a large use of common institutions. There come to be more and more equal contacts between leaders. Finally through the steady pull of assimilative forces, all groups achieve large participation in the fundamentals of civilization. In the little town, on the contrary, the classes who are not in possession of the social machinery remain voiceless, their masses inchoate, their conditions unprogressive, un- perfected. They are soon thought of as degenerate and come actually to be so through physical and mental in- breeding. Compare the hopeless aspect of the Negro group within the small town anywhere with the progress which it frequently shows in the open country and large city. Failure of Institutions with Respect to Social Inter- ests. The fitful and occasional character which has al- ready been discovered in the business enterprise of the SOCIAL SEGREGATION OF IXDfSTKIAL I'UPl l.A TlUNb WITHIN i^M-U-L COMMUNITIES THE TOWN'S PEOPLE 91 small town, exhibits itself in other spheres. Nowhere are fundamental instincts steadily served. Social inter- ests, as expressed in entertainments and diversions, flare up and flicker. Their flres burn under forced draught for awhile, then die down altogether. In its "speedy" moments the little town goes faster than the city itself. Then a social languor seizes it and dulness reigns su- preme. Religious and civic interests follow the same law. The formula of life is revival and back-sliding. The Fortunes of the Professional Classes. In com- mon with the institutions which they serve, the profes- sional classes experience spasmodic treatment from the little town. They are personally regarded but func- tionally under-rated. People know them too well as in- dividuals. It is impossible to keep up professional "bluff." Their appreciation varies as the whims of in- dividuals and communities. Their failures are known to everybody. The city surgeon can hide his unsuccess- ful operations. The city pastor has a longer tenure than a minister of the small town, largely because the people are too busy to elaborate upon his weaknesses; also be- cause they are too much interested otherwise to make his capacity to amuse or inspire of large personal con- sequence. Little townspeople become rapidly partisan over their leaders and the causes they represent, — their denominationalism, their politics, their commercial rival- ries. In the city all the functions of life are performed steadily and in large measure, anonymously, their rea- sonable average of success or failure being assumed with- out bitterness and without special pity or affection. In capacity for love and hate Littleton has no equal. 92 THE LITTLE TOWN THE ASCENDANCY OF THE PERSONAL OVER THE SOCIAL All told, there is more human nature to the square mile in the little town than anywhere else in America. Every- where in it the personal overshadows the social. In- stincts and passions dominate. Social forces and insti- tutions are not yet strong enough completely to civilize or socialize the little townsman. They have not had him away from the country long enough nor have they had urban opportunity to work their work upon him. Cer- tain infelicities of town life grow out of this situation; it explains, on the other hand, some of its major ad- vantages. Exaggeration of Personality. The little town toler- ates all manner of cranks and eccentrics. The social rebel is not overborne but amiably allowed for and cher- ished. Types whom the city would immediately banish to asylum and penitentiary are permitted to flourish. Individual vagaries break up town monotony and have large market value. The fool is a town institution. It could not get along without him. Too Much Human Nature. The accumulation, con- centration and inbreeding of human cross-purposes in the little town result in a moral situation for which "petty cussedness" and ''cussed pettiness" is the only adequate formula. "Within a deadening traditionalism the little round of life goes on, obscured and misshapen by personal humours and passions. There is too much human nature and too little escape for it into the larger and more ennobling avenues of human endeavour. Superficial Interpretation of Personality. With all the town 's large allowance for the personal so long as its TPIE TOWN'S PEOPLE 93 vagaries keep within the established social tradition, there is little patience for it when it wanders in untried ways. In the city, it is a normal attitude to regard life as a venture in which stakes should be offered and risked. The reality and solemnity of personal responsibility for novel decisions is well recognized. The little town will have none of this. The serious issues of life are not to be questioned. The individual may be eccentric and per- verse, but he must not make novel choices nor depart essentially from the ways of the fathers. Society is es- sentially unadventurous and non-initiating. Personality in its profoundest aspects is not respected. THE ABIDING ADVANTAGES OF LITTLE-TOWN LIFE Desirability of Life Freighted with Personal Signifi- cance. Of native ability — apart from occasional degen- erate strands in its texture, — the little town undoubtedly affords a first-rate human average. A majority of the people who live in such towns, live there because they belong there, because they instinctively prefer the pace and manner of its life. They are not less intelligent or able than others, but they enjoy life in moderation and detail. They like to take its one-thing-after-another without haste or abstraction. They may put greater curiosity and intellectual earnestness into the study of existence on a smaller scale than the masses of either country or city bring to their environments. ^luch of a fundamental sort is to be said in favour of the life which is most freighted with personal significance. In this respect the little town has clear advantage. The city man must forever run here and there to find his satis- faction. The little townsman is more of a philosopher 94 THE LITTLE TOWN and discovers more of the meaning of life within; yet without the numbing isolation of all more remote rural life. The Chance of the Average Man. Still farther on the credit side : the little town affords to the average man an unusual opportunity for leadership. Being an average man, he could not hope to move the city or the nation. The little town, however, reduces the demand for active life to the scale of the average man's mature capacities just as its less exacting demands fit in with the limited powers of the aged. Real leadership is just as necessary in the small as in the larger. In limited but fruitful fields, such as the little town presents, daring, patience, tact and loyalty in moderate degrees yield more than average rewards and may even hope for conspicuous successes. Mediation a Great Human Office. Finally, just such a character as has been described is needed to serve as mental middle-man between the city and the open coun- try. The little townsman is not so unsocialized as to feel fundamentally at outs with the city environment. He is aware of his temporary disadvantage with respect to it, yet confident of his ability to learn promptly and to use whatever the city has to offer. On the other hand, he is not too socialized in his inner character to serve the man of radical isolation. He is near enough to the farmer to understand him. Thus he may be and is use- ful in both directions. He has a definite affinity for both types and his character is complementary to each. The Little Happinesses. With respect to the city the little townsman must doubtless remain a follower. He cannot reach heights gained only by complete concentra- THE TOWN'S PEOPLE 95 tion and specialization. lie must give himself personally to the whole detail of business or profession. The great captain of industry, student or artist, delegates this to others in order to free his own mind for the formula- tion of policies, or for creative activity. The townsman cannot keep his hands clean nor free himself from the large necessity of manual labour. From the standpoint of the farmer's training, however, he enjoys a large measure of specialized education and the opportunity of concentration which means capacity for leadership. His is the more originating and directive habit of life. This the farmer actually recognizes ; most of his immediate leaders, social, economic, religious, political, — are little townsmen. He will follow them when he will acknowl- edge no leader of his own kind. The townsman has also versatility which the countryman lacks, and may project himself in many directions : he has leisure as well to make himself relatively the master of this or that field. The world is too much with the city man. The townsman, standing off a little from it, may get the better perspect- ive, share it the more unhurriedly and judge it the more wisely. Thus he leads a balanced, moderate life, a life yielding not only great rewards in personal satisfaction, but affording also great opportunities for social serv-ice and for philosophical insights. He may be both a happy man and a useful one. THE TOWN'S POSSIBILITIES: STRUCTURAL FUNDAMENTALS STANDARDIZING COMMUNITIES The judge rises to pronounce sentence upon the crim- inal; the school master marks away with his blue pencil at a pile of examination papers; the factory inspector scrutinizes a manufacturing plant for ventilating de- vices, safety appliances and fire precautions; the ac- countant sifts the firm 's books ; the preacher takes a text from the Ten Commandments; the housewife counts the missing buttons of her neighbour's children and scans the family washing as it hangs in their back yard. Sup- pose they all were constituted a committee and went up and down a state judging not individuals — but com- munities. What Constitutes a Good Town? This, almost liter- ally, it what has happened to Kansas.^ In 1914-15, forty of the larger towns and smaller cities entered a contest in civic excellence for first and second prizes of $1000 and $500 respectively. After sifting written argu- ments, a committee, including the President of the State Teachers' Association and the State Sanitary Inspector, actually visited and graded the fifteen most promising 1 Harger, "What Makes a Model Town," Independent, July 12, 1915, p. 53. 96 STRUCTURAL FUNDAMENTALS 97 contestants, and awarded the honours. Winfield won, with Independence second. A similar contest for 1!)15- IG wa.s limited to the smaller towns. The movement originated and is carried out by the Extension Division of the State University. Kansas has already begun to answer offieially, ''What constitutes a good town?" Inadequacy of Popular Conceptions of Progress. Rigidly scientific standards and methods for judging communities belong doubtless some distance in the future. Enough, however, is surely established to demolish the standards of self-complacency and conceit which char- acterize the average towns, and which supply matter for endless wrangling between their rival weekly newspapers. This particular place, for example, chooses to call itself "The Bread and Butter Town," and advertises the fact by a "booster" sign at the railway station. There are anti-tuberculosis ])lacards in tlie post ofHce and anti- saloon posters on tlie telephone poles. On a vacant lot between business buildings there is a school garden where the whole community may see it. One of the churches has recently been enlarged. There is a new concrete "lock-up." The commercial club has issued a glowing descriptive booklet setting forth the virtues of the town. On the outskirts is a fair ground, and may not one hear the town band practising in the "K. P." hall? A vast amount of civic "good" is going on after this fashion in America. The instinct toward it is fairly indigenous, though its expressions are largely imitation. ' ' I read it in a magazine ; let 's try it here, ' ' is the usual formula. Specific organization for community better- ment is still the exception. Its cases number by hun- dreds, while the towns are thousands. The results in 98 THE LITTLE TOWN the large present an incoherent and Topsy-like picture. Science Applied to Civics. The attempted precision of judgment involved in the Kansas contest as described above, was sought by the use of a system of scoring by points. Assuming that a good town is one which is good to bring up children in, six fundamental aspects of child welfare were set up as tests of excellence and formulated as follows: (1) opportunities for play and athletics; (2) school work and industrial training; (3) social and recreational activities; (4) physical and moral safe- g-uards; (5) activities of child-fostering clubs and socie- ties ; (6) attendance at Sunday school and kindred organ- izations. These six major tests were then elaborated into about forty subordinate points. The town which aver- aged highest on points was declared the best town. No one will dispute the correctness of the Kansas instinct in making child welfare a fundamental criterion of civic excellence; yet certainly it is not the only one. A good town to bring up children in, which cannot keep them alive while being brought up, lacks something of final goodness. The Texas "cleanest town" contest is there- fore a necessary supplement to the Kansas scheme of judging communities. A completely developed scheme would include all the major civic interests now prac- tically before American towns, — possibly thirty or forty in all — and might discover two or three hundred score- points worth weighing. The variety of civic improve- ment movements recorded in the current magazines at least approximates these figures. By analysing their re- lations and combining them upon proper principles an approximate science of community excellence may ulti- mately be reached. STRUCTURAL Fl'NDAMENTALS 99 Limitation of Civic Possibilities by Size and Wealth. In using any such standard as an actual test, it is mani- fest that the size of the community and its economic resources will have to be considered. The particular form in which a town's possibilities can be realized de- pends upon the number and wealth of its people, the taxable values of the community and ultimately upon the prosperity of the supporting country area. The case of twenty-five families organized into an incorporated village in a rich farming country is not the same as that of a similar number of families in a depleted or unde- veloped country. The ease of one hundred families is not the same as that of two hundred. Generic Possibilities. Nevertheless there are certain excellencies available for the whole group of little towns as contemplated by this discussion. "With respect to their common conditions certain current methods of im- provement are open. In their application they vary with the character and size of the community, but so far as they grow out of its essential character they apply to all little towns and are capable of generalized statement. Such a statement is attempted in this and the two following chapters. First of all come the fundamental considerations of the town's control of its physical environment and of itself as the economic and social environment of its people. However large or small it may be, it can strive toward certain basic virtues in these relations. THE town's PHYSIC.VL PLAN The Ordinary Checker Board Arrangement. The lit- tle town may have a good physical plan. Except that 100 THE LITTLE TOWN it is traditionally laid off into rectangular blocks regu- lated by streets, and that it is generally bisected by a railroad with a series of grade crossings giving a maxi- mum of inconvenience, ugliness and danger, the little town is essentially unplanned. It grows by indefinite extensions of the checker board arrangement of geo- graphical units. When this method is necessarily modi- fied by the physical features of the town site these features are rarely made to function in its plan. They remain barriers and accidents. If there is a river it soon becomes a sewer. A hill remains merely a hill through which an ugly cut must some day be made. Hundreds of new towns have sprung up in the last decade without intelligence enough in location to secure natural drainage or to avoid a slough or a sink hole at the very centre. A Few Well Planned Towns. Some of the ancient towns of the Atlantic seaboard brought over European traditions of good town planning, and rare examples survived westward migration. One who knows a certain Western state intimately remembers just one little town which from the beginning arranged its public buildings adjacent to a central green, which in turn fronted its business centre. The three leading churches, high school, public library, hotel and railway station are in blocks facing or touching this central open space. While no one ever set down a general plan on paper, the good sense of the community managed to preserve and accen- tuate its exceptional beginnings. But probably the whole state does not present a second example even ap- proximately as good. The same ratio would hold state after state for whole sections of the nation. STRUCTURAL FINDAMENTALS 101 Recent Model Towns Usually Non-typical. The most perfectly planned American towns are those created within a few years by corporations employing expert engineers and scientific knowledge, and combining effi- ciency with ideals. In the main these are non-agricul- tural and essentially non-typical. Good examples are model towns of the United States Steel Corporation, or the notable achievement of the Sage Foundation at Forest Hills, L. I. Occasional real estate projects, chiefly in suburban areas, show the same excellencies ; but Amer- ica is almost without an example of a recent little towTi combining good plan with democracy. These model places were created by corporations or promoters, not by the collective intelligence and ideals of the people of com- munities. They do not often combine private owner- ship and enterprise with civic unity and beauty. And physical plan, however excellent, cannot have great com- munity significance until it is really a democratic achieve- ment. Civic Architecture. Town planning opens new pos- sibilities to American communities as well as to benevo- lent corporations. In its lowest terms it consists merely of designing and creating a logical and beautiful group of homes and business structures, with streets connecting them and leading out into the open country, as con- veniently, economically, and attractively as possible in the light of the best knowdedge and taste of our age. There must be a civic centre visibly expressing the spirit- ual unity of the community; around this the main insti- tutions will be located. In location as well as in design and architecture the distinction between the principal and subordinate features will be everywhere maintained. 102 THE LITTLE TOWN The average new town makes its Main Street wider than Fifth Avenue, and in general utterly disregards scale and proportion. Streets of model corporation-towns vary in width according to the use which will be given them. Some of the United States Steel Corporation plans call sixteen feet wide enough for most of the resi- dence streets of the village. The average town dedicates three or four times as much space as this, — chiefly to weeds and mud. Along with, or if necessary in stead of, the formal park, is a centrally located community play- ground of ample size. So far as possible the entire town becomes a park by virtue of suitable home grounds, the proper planting of trees and such building restrictions as help to secure the largest possible open spaces every- where. A first condition of a good plan is the provision of adequate public utilities, and a second, their control. They are now almost the chief foes of communal beauty. A colour scheme for the whole town is not thought im- possible, carried out in the materials of surfacing the roadways, in the tinting of concrete sidewalks, of foliage and house painting. The main thoroughfares and gate- ways of the town, both from its residential portions to its civic centre, and from its outskirts to its country roads, are particularly designed and emphasized. Every- where such natural beauty as exists is cherished and de- veloped. Finally the entire town has become a work of art. Spiritual Unity Throug-h Proper Plan. The sig- nificance of this ideal is far more than aesthetic. A planless city gets to be impossible. It blocks its side- walks with human bodies and makes its streets impassable with masses of goods, vehicles and people, vainly seeking — ^^^\N BANK. ; I I I I \ I. STRUCTURAL FUNDAMENTALS 103 to meet and pass without collision. It crushes, smothers and wrecks the nerves of its citizens. A planless little town does not thus literally turn and take its people by the throat ; but it does them subtler wrong. Apart from the wear and waste of centuries of inconvenience from ill-planned streets and facilities, there are those terrific barriers to moral unity and those devices of class selfish- ness which physical sectionalism always seize upon. Be- ing born across the tracks comes to be like being born blind or black. The simple accident of living in the less favoured part of town acts as a permanent handicap. As well belong in another world as live across the river ! Thousands of Americans know this to their sorrow. On the other hand, a well-planned town with its civic centre, is both means and impulse to social integration, and to the realization of the common life of its people. Physical plan to the town is thus as fundamental as the skeleton to the human orfranism. Directing the Inevitable. A city can afford to re- build itself according to its ideals because of the enor- mous growth of its taxable property values, A little towTi can afford to rebuild itself because its property values generally do not increase. Its flimsy buildings are sure to go in half a century. Its roadways over much of the continent may at least be narrowed and tree-lined. The question is not whether the to^vn shall re-erect itself, but whether it shall build planlessly the second time. With general prosperity and the rising standards of living, new buildings are springing up everywhere, particularly such public structures as schools, churches and town halls. A little foresight and radical action at the right time, — especially as the law 104 THE LITTLE TOWN comes to authorize town-planning commissions — can gradually work over thousands of planless little towns into fairly unified and not unbeautiful condition. Thus a small Middle-Western community within the last fifteen years has erected its high school, public library, govern- ment building and three churches, and has done all its street improvement. At an unappreciable additional cost — perhaps $30,000 — used to purchase a block and a half of land with nine dwellings and to move one church to a new site, this town may even now obtain a civic centre on which will face nine of its ten accidentally placed public buildings. In hundreds of communities it is not yet too late to take radical and far-reach- ing action, while almost every little town in America can decidedly improve itself by making the inevitable changes of its next quarter-century according to a definite plan. THE town's economic PLAN It is possible for the little town to determine with something like scientific precision the nature and range of its economic possibilities. By considering its rela- tions to the open country and the basis of its life in the soil, and other natural wealth, it has the means of dis- covering how large it is likely to get, what it should chiefly and permanently work at, and how much wealth its people may properly expect. Knowledge is Partial. It must be confessed that only relative precision in these matters is possible. There is no escaping the adventure which inheres in life itself, and no guaranteeing of fulfilment even to the orderly dreams of men. Yet there is a large area of dependable information ready to be utilized. o n □ B □ 01 n '. 3c ^ 'TTTOry) o I^YS^ • 1^ D M t^ B CT (^ L2J a tl to 'a 55 g a o < o z •< ES O n ^ QIP & □ D n m D bi^ h D Q £:] g3 □ O -I o I r r r 9 o S?: I I I r S Xo.il_ozuvJOtJ EZZ3 D m a STRUCTURAL FUNDAMENTALS 105 The extent of the soil which the little town occupies has already been determined by the land survey; the contours and physical features of the land by the geo- logical survey ; while there exists certain meteorological records, typical soil surveys, water supply investigations and the like which serve as a guide to the permanent values of the soil as a basis of sustenance and life. The various agricultural experiment stations have shown what can be done by the farmer. The timber and mineral resources have been surveyed. Private initiative has estimated the values of land and natural resources and the possibility of markets. Hundreds of men have tried the still more convincing experiment of making a living in various ways. It ought to be possible to strike a fair average between the optimists and pessimists, between the scientists and the ''boosters" as to the economic pos- sibilities of the community. Knowledge vs. Impulsive Action. Instead of steadily using such knowledge as exists to suggest and control rational ventures and experiments, the average little town repeats an economic career consisting of successive exhibitions of mob-miudedness. Thus a comparatively staid Iloosier village recently studied in detail,^ has a virtually unbroken record of collective economic folly for seventy-five years. It has never understood the dom- inant forces within which its destinies are involved and has always followed the wrong clues to progress. In its spasms of special enthusiasm it has never been clear headed. It has experienced two booms which burst and between them has always had an itching palm for un- substantial gain and an open ear to the allurement of 2 Sims, "A Hoosier Village." p. 27 f. 106 THE LITTLE TOWN fake oil and mining stock or similar devices. Once it was victimized out of two hundred thousand dollars by a single lying insurance scheme. Within a few years it has suffered almost universal madness of investment in a factory which never opened. Time after time its collective capital has been dissipated and a sad number of individuals impoverished through its habitual eco- nomic folly. Not all towns are as bad as this one, but some are infinitely worse. Whenever their economic imagination is stirred it goes wild ; this is the well estab- lished badge of the class. Even when their activities fall in with great economic movements they bear the marks of mind crazed and stampeded rather than of rational obedience to the probable. It means a complete reversal of habit for such communities to use exact or approximate knowledge when it exists. Agricultural Resources. Broadly speaking three things are known about agriculture which are basic for the economic policy of the little town. First, agricul- tural experience, though gained in the expensive school of trial and failure, is always more right than wrong. It has determined the staple crops of any given area, and the fundamental methods of handling them. Their aver- age value through a series of years is easily determinable. These staples may change but if they do, the change will be distributed through a rather prolonged cycle of time. Meanwhile novelties will naturally be adopted gradually, after being proved out by conservative experiments. Second, scientific agriculture provides the almost uni- versal possibility of reasonable advance in profits through the improvement of existing types of farming and the gradual discovery and working out of exact STRUCTURAL FUNDAMENTALS 107 local adaptations, so that ultimately each area may be farming in what is, for it, the most advantageous way, considering all the factors involved. Scientific agri- culture can perform miracles, but its general value to rural populations depends chiefly upon patience, common sense and the social virtues which blend in the com- munity spirit. Third, land values and agricultural prices are likely to keep on rising and the farmer both to want and to be able to pay for increasing comforts and luxuries. Rural prosperity, on the whole, is certain but it will be modest both as to scale and rapidity. A share in this prosperity, proportionate to its essential services to the country, is the lower limit to what the little town ought rationally to expect. Industrial Resources. For that majority of little towns which was created by agriculture, there is there- fore a certain guarantee of modest good fortune along the line of least resistance. The case is far different when such towns try to add a second economic basis in indus- try. Few were directly created by industry, and the attempt to reach prosperity through acquired industries is attended with much risk. This would be inevitable in any venture involving so complete a break with former economic habits and outlook. It is doubly inevitable in that it means passing over to a sphere in which the chance of success is much more narrowly limited than in agriculture. The fields of agricultural prosperity spread out broadly ; those of industry are narrow patches between smoking hillsides. Brigham summarizes the fac- tors whose coincidence in a given place make it a likely industrial centre as follows: "the locality and origin of the raw material, the possibility of quick and cheap 108 THE LITTLE TOWN transportation, the presence of power, the neighbour- hood of supplementary materials, the resources of mar- ket, the supply of labour, the taxes and imposts of gov- ernment, whether local, national, domestic or foreign, and also the business skill and inventive genius of the people."^ Returning to the Hoosier village mentioned above, it is evident that it never possessed these advan- tages in sufficient number to warrant any expectation of becoming an industrial town. Especially does its case show the utter unfitness of a little-town population acting impulsively and en masse, to cope with the prob- lems of industrial development. There is something pathetically splendid in the repeated industrial efforts and failures of small communities the continent over; and there has been a sufficient percentage of success to keep them trying. No one wants their economic re- sources to remain undeveloped. Yet in this day of massed capital, equipped with expert agents and all available knowledge, exploring the ends of the earth for economic openings, it is surely sane for the little town to wait for the development of its local resources upon movements sure to come in time, if and where there is anything worth coming for, all things considered. It is surely saner than for it to hazard its collective all in a realm of major risks in which it is inexpert and to which it is unequal. Local capital has its part to play, but the glory of failure should be reserved for indi- viduals, not imposed upon whole towns by the action of the mob-mind. Meanwhile, the city is reaching out for the towns fast enough. Industry will succeed in them as fast as the urban regime, with its organization and 3 "Commercial Geography," p. 98. STRUCTURAL FUNDAMENTALS WJ control of wealth, reaches them ; but not much faster. Commercial Resources. It is (|uite possible to dis- cover the size and legitimate demands of the present trade area dependent upon the little town, and efficiently to express and minister to the advanced standard of living made possible by the new agriculture and the con- sequent improvement of farming and of rural society. A fairly definite statement is possible of what the little town ought to supply to the farmer who lives within its trade area. To be sure the case is not exactly simple. The average little town has not an exclusive area of de- pendent country. It has rivals, near and remote. The countryman today has alternatives, especially in the direction of trade in the city through the mail-order house. The growth of minor centres continually renders the retail business of many a little town superfluous. The increase in the number of retail merchants — over fifty per cent, in ten years — is probably more rapid than that of the purchasing power of the population, in spite of all its new and more luxurious demands. The pos- sibility which is open to many a merchant and many a town is the possibility of death. Competition between towns apparently can be settled only by the survival of the fittest. As yet no effective application of public in- telligence seems available as a substitute for trade war. Better Merchandising. At the same time in all the older sections of the country, the little town may fairly estimate the amount of trade which it is able to hold and the margin within which it may increase its trade by enterprise and the service of new needs. Within it- self, it can determine approximately the number of retail enterprises in each given line which can survive and 110 THE LITTLE TOWN prosper. When it begs its people to ''stick to our mer- chants" it ought to be able to give a defensible reason based on reasonably exact statistics of the needs and usefulness of its local enterprises. Popular opinion will speedily become decisive in favour of the enterprise which is really serving the people and which keeps abreast of the times. Flagrant waste in duplicatory overhead charges such as the maintenance of rival de- livery wagons, has already been obviated in small pro- gressive communities by the organization of joint de- livery systems. Many of the lines of retail business, through trade journals, operate correspondence schools in the art of retail selling which enable the little-town merchant to rival the city in efficiency of organization and attractiveness of display. The University of Wis- consin through its extension department has been holding institutes especially intended to develop the latent pos- sibilities of retail merchandising in small places. Com- mercial ideals and standards are quite within control of any community, through up to date and intelligent organization. Unquestionably the little-town merchant must brace up. The American people wish to have fun while they spend their money and they must be satisfied. This means that economic consumption has come to be dominated more largely by social ideals, and not by sheer necessity. Americans ought not to have to go outside of their immediate communities to find these ideals recognized and gratified. Standards and Technique of Commercial Organiza- tion. A commercial club or similar organization in a little town should take itself seriously and perform its functions upon the basis of scientific knowledge. That STRUCTURAL FUNDAMENTALS 111 will determine the lines of its efforts for publicity and promotion. Many a town is still suffering from the re- action which is sure to follow from inflated claims. Entire states might be mentioned which are cursed by stranded "soreheads" who have been lured to their bor- ders by lying advertisements, but who remain as a per- manently disgruntled element in the population. It is far better not to attract new enterprises than to attract failures. One hears of the agricultural department of a great state university protesting against the employ- ment of bright graduates of its school of commerce to tell official falsehoods in behalf of officious towns. There is ultimate satisfaction in not only telling the truth but in knowing the truth and not fooling oneself. Notable improvement is taking place in the breed of commercial club secretaries and in the spirit of community adver- tisements. And in notable instances commercial organ- izations have discovered their own idealistic possibilities and become the agents of town improvement on the gen- eral and especially the finer sides. The rural Y.M.C.A. has been particularly successful in aligning some of these organizations with its plans for civic betterment. Co-operation of Town and Country. Crucial in the plan of economic advancement is the inclusion of the farming population with the business men in some com- mon organization. Clinton, Iowa, has been notably suc- cessful in bridging the gap of indifference between town and country by the promotion of agricultural intelligence and the development of the rural resources of its trade area.* It is not enough merely to instruct the farmer; instruction has been going on for a good while. It is 4 Cubberley, "Rural Life and Education," 156. 112 THE LITTLE TOWN the conscious identification of fortunes which is lacking. The thousand or so farm producers who occupy the trade area of the little town are as much parts of it as though they were operatives working in a factory within its borders. They must be recognized on this basis in eco- nomic organization. The farmer on his part is clannish, suspicious, and slow to include the town business man in his rural betterment movements. But somehow the V.J. DEP'T Of AOILICULTUILE tOWA JTATE COLLEGE OF AGIUCULTUIt£ The Clinton Plan for Agricultural Betterment combining town and country into one unit. leaders at least of the two groups must get together. This is the peculiar strength of the Clinton plan. It brings the country and townspeople into actual organ- ized co-operation. The Commercial Club has a com- mittee of thirty on agriculture; twenty of its members are farmers. This committee has organized the twenty contiguous townships and subdivided them into two hun- dred neighbourhood groups. The leaders of these town- STRUCTURAL FUNDAMENTALS 113 ship organizations and smaller groups become members of the Commercial Club. The Club ollicers in tuiii are members of the farmers' organizations. Clinton is a small city in size, but its method is directly available for the little town. THE town's HEiU^TH PLAN Through the adoption ol" definite standards of civic hygiene the little town may have what amounts to a health plan. It is certainly its duty to see that the mass- ing of human lives in its limited area does not take additional toll of them in safety and health. No statis- tics exist which show exactly to what extent ri.sk is added from contagion and contamination even in the smaller village community. The sanitation of the open country was bad enough, but the little town with the country's habits and without the city's remedies may easily be the most dangerous place of all. Certain minimum demauds of the civilized conscience ought everywhere to be made the basis of collective life. First, an adequate and un- impeachable water supply ; second, a method for the dis- posal of sewage and waste without soil contamination or the breeding of disease carriers ; third, efficient fire pro- tection, especially for life and property in the more con- gested centre of the town and the places of public resort ; fourth, the proper lighting of public places, particularly of school buildings. All these requirements apply with particular force to the school building as housing the town's chief treasure. In all these matters nothing costs like failure to provide adequately for them. Civic Hygiene. Stated concretely, the open well, the unmitigated privy, the manure pile, and alley rubbish 114 THE LITTLE TOWN heap must go — in all towns. The right to have them must be regarded as a rural luxury. At these points town life must come definitely upon the communal basis. There are no individual rights in such matters. A com- munity water supply both for domestic use and for fire protection is not only more sanitary but on the whole more economical than the multiplicity of individual wells with their pumps, repairs, and up-keep can possibly be. The incinerator or preparation of garbage for agricul- tural fertilization are available even for the little town, at surprisingly low cost. The septic tank or standard- ized and properly kept earth closet should be universally required for the individual home where a sewer system is not yet possible. Some method of inspection and of collective disposal of waste is inevitable. The United States Steel Corporation and similar agencies have shown how to bring efficiency with little cost even in transient mining towns of low grade population. Economics of Sanitation. A thorough understand- ing of the economics of this whole field is fundamental to the community health plan. The apparently extrava- gant first cost of proper methods may frequently be dem- onstrated to be smaller than the cost of perpetuating existing unsanitary nuisances. So profoundly vital is this requirement of a health plan, that the state might well condition the privilege of incorporation upon the provision of standard methods for meeting the essential sanitary problems of a community. No body of people ought to be allowed to set up municipal housekeeping without the decencies of collective life. STRUCTURAL FUNDAMENTALS 115 THE town's moral PLAN It is possible for the little town to have a moral plan, approximated through conscious standards of social con- trol. As everywhere, human conduct is determined chiefly by the natural acquiescence of the human spirit in the ways of the social order into which it is born. In the main these ways satisfy the individual ; even the rebel is too unoriginal to depart from them. ]\Ioral senti- ment and social convention do most of their work without need of law or police. Conflicting Traditions. The control of conduct through social tradition is, however, not so simple as the formula sounds; there are traditions rather than a tradition. Not only is there still a dash of frontier wild- ness surviving as lawlessness in the little towns of much of the country, but the little towns as a group are peopled largely by those who formerly lived in the country and who are still largely dominated by the countryman's point of view. In brief, they are in- completely socialized. Their people cling to country ways in spite of new environment. Thus in matters of sanitation, the maintenance of the barnyard manure pile is a sacred private right worth dying for, as a symbol of our liberties; or on the other hand, as the little town grows there come to be those who want to push on prematurely into city ways for the freedom of which they contend as martyrs to new light. In short the struggle is always on between existing conditions and advancement. Now, any group of people w'hich is dis- tinctively at outs with environment presents a serious moral problem. Just as the spirit of youth is inevitably 116 THE LITTLE TOWN at war with the necessary limitations of the city streets, so the rural mind is at war with little-town conditions. Hence the necessity of vigorous moral control in order to conform the individual to the requirements of collec- tive life. Social Control a Reality. The minor struggle be- tween traditions, the give and take of moral sentiments in search of equilibrium, the clash between tempera- ments, ages and views of life will go on normally for ever. But no community can do anything in the direc- tion of its ideals till the fact and main tendencies of social control are settled. The little town may as well face its battle and have it over. The necessary ordi- nances of safety and decency are to be obeyed. Pigs and poultry will be the most frequent issue. Their economic value under town conditions must first be determined. If it is best to keep them at all, the whole wearying round of issues must be pursued — ^agitation, education, a contest in local politics, a suit at law or two, a clash at wills and of personal sentiments all along the line. Pedagogy of Law Enforcement. While all moral bat- tles must be waged on every front at once, it is possible to discern a sort of pedagogical order in which the offen- sive should be undertaken. It would be foolish to make the first issue that of closing cigar stands on Sunday, which at best would only stir the conscience of a frac- tion of the community, or that of enforcing liquor laws, which always involves a contest with formidable in- terests from outside the community. Rather the battle should be drawn on some community issue pure and STRUCTURAL FUNDAMENTALS 117 simple, in which the enforcing of the collective against the individualistic viewpoint involves some broadly fundamental hut localized field. Wheii the battle is fought to a finish here other victories will come more easily. Influence of Alien Commercial Interests. The most difficult yet necessary piuises of the little town's strug- gle for moral standards are those involving outside in- terests not directly amenable to the community con- science. They are often said to "interfere" with the community ; if so they must be made to interfere help- fully as well as harmfully. The most frequent and in- sidious of these interests is the organized liquor tralific, although often the interests of alien corporations cla.sh with those of the community and interfere in a similar way. In these eases the essential nature of the problem is that it is not local in character. Local tools are used, but the principals to the conflict are too remote to feel local pressure. Under such circumstances the only re- source of the little town is to combine with other com- munities using the resources of state-wide publicity, or- ganization and political action. The unromantic, per- petual, straight-away pull of law-enforcement with all it costs in time, money and personal discomfort, is the inevitable price of community morals in their wider set- ting. Standardized Social Customs. Even more difficult than law enforcement, but all'ccting more people in more ways and entering more subtly into community life, are the problems of social control in the round of social in- tercourse; of amusements, particularly for youth; the 118 THE LITTLE TOWN problems of standards of consumption registered by the expenditure of money, and of the use of leisure. The concrete forms in which these issues confront the little town are the party, the dance, theatre and amusement place; dress, travel, Sunday observance and the like. The Social Referendum. Probably the most rational method of precipitating a body of agreements in these debatable fields is that of the voluntary referendum, which has been tried out in a number of communities. It is proposed usually by the federation of women's organizations and consists simply in a systematic canvass of the most influential and earnest members of all classes and tendencies in the community, to see what they think the reasonable standards for ''our town" are. At what hour should the parties of high school young people close? How many times a week should growing boys and girls be away from home at night? What is a reasonable scale of entertainment at club functions? How much should the cost of graduating dress and attending functions be? What are the reasonable terms of social association between adolescents of the two sexes? When the results of such questions are generalized and announced a considerable range of choice is still open, but weak-kneed parents are strength- ened to enforce some kind of a standard. It is easier for the poorer hostess not to spend more than she should. The ultra-puritanical are restrained and the way to ra- tional agreements is open. Surely this is better than the eternal anxiety of the little town as to what is right and proper in social matters, the harsh judgments of the stricter upon the less strict, the internal difficulties by which a man's foes are often they of his own house- STRUCTURAL FUNDAMENTALS lllJ hold. "Spoon River" is a most realistic picture of tragic possibilities on this point. In some such ways as the above the steadying force of social standards may be thus vitally evolved without hardening into unyielding, clashing and non-progressive traditions. Foundation vs. Structure. So far the discussion has concerned the logical fundamentals of little-town better- ment. It is quite another thing to make a constructive program of social advance. All merely formal direc- tions, and especially negative ones for the control of life, will and ought to fail. The most vitalizing pos- sibility of the little town is that of having a positive program secured by the continuous activities of the in- stitutions of education and service, and by the direct pursuit of wholesome ideals by individuals. One who sees life steadily and sees it whole will not attempt to deal compulsorily with structural fundamentals without at the same time creating an atmosphere in which whole- some community choices may take place. He will not dare to specialize on law enforcement until he has created the playground and appreciated the spiritual aspects of recreation. He will not attempt to make social stand- ards for his fellows except as he can prevent a vision of normal life compelling in its attractiveness. But on the other hand, and equally, the most idealistic and spon- taneous community movements will wander far without a well planned physical basis of town life; without a well ordered economic program through which people can win a livelihood and pay the cost of their collective enterprises; without a firm basis in human health through the facilities of public safety and sanitation; 120 THE LITTLE TOWN and without a substantial though flexible moral frame- work within which individual destinies may be wrought out. On these greatest civic commandments hang all the law and the prophets of community welfare. VI THE TOWN'S POSSIBILITIES: INSTITUTIONS No possibility of the little town is so obviously promis- ing as that of improving its existing institutions in the light of modern ideals and standards of social service and efficiency. Plenty of fragmentary and disconnected movements in this direction are already under way. It is a poor town indeed which is not doing something in the direction of better homes, better schools, better churches and better civic agencies. BETTER HOMES The Town's Homes. The home has a fundamental civic significance. It is a private concern, but it is also a public institution established by law; and it is easily the chief social agency of civilization. In the little town particularly, many social functions for which the city evolves separate institutions, are still performed by the home. More than elsewhere therefore, its civic aspect rivals its domestic aspect in importance. Thus the home of Donald and Dorothea is the sanctuary of the Smith family, but the homes of Littleton, collec- tively considered, are the chief environment of the next generation. As such they are Littleton's chief concern. The health, the education (especially on its play side), the taste, the reverence of the whole town during the next fifty years are in the keeping of the home of to- 121 122 THE LITTLE TOWN day. The home is also still the largest factor in the environment of youth, however youth may seek wider fields. Beside this, it performs the fundamental social functions of feeding and lodging the bulk of the adult population and caring for its occasional ailments, as well as providing for the aged in weakness and decrepi- tude. In brief it is the kindergarten, the playground, the high school fraternity, the hotel and restaurant, the playhouse, hospital and old people's home of the little town. In these capacities it is incumbent upon the little- town home to acquire a most serious attitude towards civic interests and to secure the most progressive and educative methods of self-improvement. Through the school, more immediately through the voluntary organi- zation of women, and rarely of men, its better possibi- lities are most likely to be advanced. Placed on the background of community responsibility, motherhood and home-making acquire new dignity. The supple- mentary agencies which give an equal chance to the child of the less favoured home, and especially to those of alien speech or despised race, are also necessary in the little town and constitute a fundamental department of its community service. Chief of them are the social centre and its adjuncts, — the neighbourhood playground, the story-hour and the teaching of gardening and ele- mentary handicraft. The Noroton (Conn.) garden city for children is an excellent example of the extension of the home spirit to the neediest elements of the commun- ity.^ Economic Significance. Again, the home is the little town's most important agent of economic production. 'i- American City, X, p. 161. — ' _,— ^ TREASURE HOUSE AND TREASURE INSTITUTIONS 123 In the large it is the farm which produces, — the town buys and sells ; but even the town has its home garden with its allies or enemies — the cow and the chickens. They supplement not inconsiderably the townsman's in- come, besides being good for his health and rural sym- pathies. The H. C. Frick Coke Company in awarding prizes on the six thousand six hundred and thirty-three vegetable gardens kept by its mill hands, estimated the total value at $142,536.20, an average of $21.48 per garden. The Home an Industrial Enterprise. Still more sig- nificant is the economic function of the kitchen and wash tub. Every misapplication of human energy is challenged by the awakening social consciousness, and these are flagrant spheres of such misapplication. It is of the highest importance to the American nation and its civilization, that the domestic tools of the little town become modernly effective. Many a sympathetic voice vibrates for the farmer's wife now-a-days, still toting water for her wash and turning her wringer by hand, when her husband has running water for the stock, and a gasoline engine for the barn. The housewife of Lit- tleton is under an equal handicap, "Downtown" has its plumbing, its electricity, its gas, and the commercial club boasts that Littleton "has" these facilities; while as a previous paragraph discovers, they are ordinarily not available for the majority of homes. Their first cost frightens the poor even when it is not utterly im- possible. Collective responsibility should therefore in- tervene by public ownership or otherwise, providing opportunity for payment for such facilities in instal- ments at low interest. Frequently ordinary business 124 THE LITTLE TOWN intelligence on the part of local utility companies would largely solve the problem. Apparently they have given almost no attention to efficiency in merchandising their services. During many years spent in little towns, the author can remember but one occasion of real enterprise in this direction. It took many years for a privately- owned electric light plant in an Iowa town of few in- dustries to realize the waste of allowing an expensive investment to lie idle during the hours of daylight. It costs but little more to turn the wheels throughout the day and to furnish electricity for cooking and ironing during prescribed hours at lower rates. This policy has filled the town homes with labour-saving electric appli- ances. The municipal lighting plant at Independence, Mo. — a small city — has a similar notable record. It supplies over four-fifths of its homes and sells electricity for light at seven cents per kilowatt hour and for cook- ing at three cents. Even when the general extension of modern improvements is beyond little-town possibili- ties, beginnings may still be made. So vital is the con- servation of human energy to its higher uses, that no educator, social reformer or spiritual leader need find it beneath his dignity to initiate a movement for extend- ing sewers or for municipal water or light. Efficient civilization is an idle word so long as its benefits pass by the average American home. At this point the little town has common cause with the home of the open country. Home and Neighbourhood. Homes occupy most of the area of the little town and constitute the chief visual environment which so largely dominates life. What goes on behind their doors is of indirect concern, but INSTITUTIONS 125 their front-yard and their back-yard doings, with the total picture and impression of the town's streets lined with homes, are shared perforce by the whole commun- ity. These shared, external aspects of the home depend chiefly for their finer possibilities upon the development of community taste in lawns, shrubbery, tree planting, home gardens, domestic architecture and refined colour sense. For most of the community, imitation will chiefly govern in such matters. The crucial point there- fore is the starting of a few good examples. Their imi- tation should then be stimulated by community garden competitions, with prizes offered for excellence in the keeping of home gardens and grounds of various sizes. Civic Beauty. Rivalry in the beautification of the home as well as in productive gardening may be made one of the most joyous aspects of little-town life. Art study, as now standardized for the better high schools, includes the elementary principles of landscape garden- ing and of domestic and civic architecture. Interest in these matters is popularized by a host of magazines; and one rejoices in the growth of American taste until much travel gives him ocular demonstration that the majority of American little towns are still utterly un- touched by the hand of beauty. In the matter of do- mestic architecture the worst, on the whole, is between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. Here fashions were set after the good old Colonial traditions had run out and before new ideals had arisen to take their place. Toward the West improvement begins. Dakota has bet- ter domestic architecture than Illinois, and Montana than Dakota. The bungalows of the Pacific Coast are as good in their way as the village homes of New Eng- 126 THE LITTLE TOWN land, and the town dwellings of the Colonial South and Middle States. Throughout the continent, trees happily redeem many a town from utter ugliness, but they even have been planted tastelessly, as wind-breaks rather than as trees. They were largely of the quick-growing and short-lived varieties. Civic landscape requires a patient and appreciative sympathy for naturalness and harmony in tree forms, which is pained at overcrowding and the mingling of incongruous species. The vicious hack- ing of trees by electric light corporations or professional trimmers is a most flagrant sin. Even when formal pretence at professional landscaping is made, the virtues of simple planting, restrained colour schemes and the predominant use of native material are rare. A jury of real artists were moved to inextinguishable laughter at the expensive landscape gardening of one of New York's most pretentious suburbs; they derided its clipped shrubbery as so many ' ' apple dumplings. ' ' Taste is not cheaply won even now when the landscape fashion plates compete with fashions in dress on the pages of popular magazines. In this realm, modesty is the super- lative virtue, and of this virtue the little town has al- most everything to learn. Yet perhaps nowhere would the conquest of sham and pretence, the achievement of essential proportion in life, and the dignified acceptance of the little-town lot be so effectively registered as in domestic architecture and in the setting of trees. They/ make or mar the peculiar atmosphere and charm of the village community. Home and Social Life. The home is the chief me- dium of social intercourse in the little town. The club house is exceptional, the hotel dinner for the entertain- INSTITUTIONS 127 mcnt of guests rare. Even the ladies' parlour in the church is not generally adequate for the sewing and missionary society, nor regularly heated in winter. Churches indeed afford some housing to their organiza- tions, and the lodges have their halls; yet for the most part, meetings, entertainments, parties and dances, which constitute the chief stream of social life, are held from house to house. This inclusion of society within home walls largely identifies social standards with home standards, and gives the home compelling advantage in the process of social control as described in the last chap- ter. The mistresses of the home are the censors and leaders alike in the social field, and the better and the worst are in their hands. When social life reaches the club-house stage, as in the city, it is taken for granted that it will be regularly planned and organized. Plan and organization are equally necessary, while it remains in the house-to-house stage. A constructive attitude toward social activities in the little town will mitigate and largely remove most of its evils of flashiness, snob- bery and the cheap aping of city ways. BETTER SCHOOLS The second great institutional possibility of the little town is school improvement. This must be both in- tensive, pertaining to the school's spirit, internal organi- zation and methods; and extensive, expressing its out- reach into the life of the community. Adaptation to Childhood and Youth. Avoiding pedagogical technicalities, the short way of stating the new life and spirit which has come over the American school is to say that it is based in a better appreciation 128 THE LITTLE TOWN of child life. This involves not only the adaptation of school methods to the natural stages of human develop- ment — infancy, childhood and youth, with their crises and minor phases — but particularly the recognition of a multitude of interests and incentives not recognized in the older school practice. "If the school must choose between schoolhouse and playground," says Dr. Woods Hutchinson, "let it choose the playground." Even the smallest school should in its measure minister to the entire life of its pupils in each stage of their expanding powers. Vocational Definiteness. The second great field of the internal improvement of school life is its growing vocational definiteness. This is the strong point of the rural-life educational propaganda. It proposes to teach country boys not only in the terms of country life, but largely through its experiences, giving the school the visible environment which education is to interpret, and making better farming the test of its educational suc- cess. A School Program for the Little Town. The school program of the little town is all this and more. The insistence of this book upon the essential identity of the interests of the small centre and open country, enables it enthusiastically to agree that the town high school should have its ample garden plots, its orchard, barns and stock, and if possible, its small farm. In the smaller village it is possible to have these newer school facilities in immediate conjunction with the school building. In the larger little-town, the physical difficulties are greater but the resources are also better, and the problem of dis- tance must be met by some arrangement for the trans- INSTITUTIONS 12'J portation of pupils. The farm with its various branches of agriculture and its kitchens and shops is not an ad- junct of the school but a vital centre of the essential school process. It is through these activities that the most convincing teaching is secured. ^ But the little town's school cannot stop here. Its vocational adapta- tion must extend to all its people. It must train those who are to buy from and sell to the farmers. Nothing can be better for the future merchants and professional men than to be educated in the closest sympathy with rural life; but the technical demands of their vocations must also be met. Furthermore, as has been previously urged, the little town is bound to have a surplus popula- tion, for which neither it nor its surrounding country has room. Its education must furnish scope and out- look also to its young people who will go and ought to go to the city. Many of them will go by way of college and the professional school, and necessary preparations for these institutions must be provided. Thus three per- fectly definite vocational emphases are necessary. The well-balanced school of a little town will provide all three. The educational systems of the most progressive states already make this possible, and state agencies and subsidies are available in many of them, especially for the agricultural adaptation of education. Community Service. In its outreach toward the community, the school must extend itself to match the entire geographical community and to serve all ages and all classes of its people. How these demands maj' be met on a modest scale appears in the ease of a small Wisconsin high school as summarized in a Bulletin of 2 Cubberley, "Rural Life and Education," p. 278 f. 130 THE LITTLE TOWN the State University. "In 1906 a literary society was organized among the alumni of the high school at Sauk City, an incorporated village of 900 people, with meet- ings attended by the students and a few adults. This grew into a vigorous meeting, by the assistance of the school teachers, held every two weeks, with programs filled with 'everybody that could talk, sing, play, or dance.' This became a platform for the coming out of anybody who was found to have a special gift. Feature programs were popular. The 'German program' was a great success. Then 'outside' speakers were introduced. Concerts were given. Some money was made and 'things began to be done.' At this point the literary society was transformed into 'The Sauk City Social Center,' and the organization largely officered by the business men." The recent community activities of the school are outlined as follows: a lecture course, the school board assisting financially; a series of cooking lessons and demonstrations for the women of the com- munity, attended by from fifty to seventy-five varying in ages from sixteen to sixty years ; a play centre, made possible by an appropriation of $100 for playground ap- paratus; literary society meetings, continued as at the beginning; a community institute, held in co-operation with the Extension Division of the University of Wis- consin, and consisting of a four-day school particularly on the problems of public health and recreation with reference to village and farm homes. This institute was conducted by University professors and state special- ists at a cost of $225, and was largely attended by farm- ers from within a radius of ten miles. The Sauk City school claims the following definite results from its ex- INSTITUTIONS 131 tension work; (1) creation of a community conscious- ness; (2) street improvement; (3) a clean-up day; (4) certain dubious practices in village halted; (5) Memorial Day rehabilitated; (6) a woman's club formed to aid the "Social Centre" enterprises.' Community Service on a Larger Scale. An aggres- sive town high school reports that its plant and facili- ties have been put at the service of eight voluntary so- cial agencies of the community. Organizations for charity, health, music culture and civic improvement have their headquarters in its building. It houses a community library and is the civic hall for popular en- tertainments and community business. It summarizes distinct civic gains through its initiative within the last five years as follows: the landscaping of the ceme- tery; the campaign for painting the houses of the com- munity according to a unified colour scheme worked out by the art department of the high school; a new park and band house; paving and anti-tuberculosis move- ments ; and the initiation of campaigns for playgrounds and for a system of municipal garbage collection. Schools for Special Classes of the Population. Beside such varied non-scholastic service of tlie community, the little town cannot escape its measure of the necessity which impels the city to provide so extensive and ap- pealing an array of schools for special classes of the population, — continuation and vocational schools for child labourers, classes for teaching English to adult foreigners, out-of-door schools for tubercular children, and special instruction for retarded, delinquent and other atypical pupils. The larger little town, at least, s Wisconsin Bulletin No. 234, pp. 13-14. 132 THE LITTLE TOWN may have some simple form of continuation school for children who drop out prematurely to go to work. It may do something for its illiterate adults. Within a few years the "Moonlight School" movement which opened the school doors principally to their large popu- lation of belated white citizens, has run like wildfire over the Southern states, and brought motley scores and hundreds of seamed and soiled workers to first acquaint- ance with the primer and spelling book. Nothing more romantic and pathetic has broken upon the educational world since the first thronging of contraband slaves to the Freedmen's schools at the close of the Civil War. As to atypical children, their relatively small numbers and the simplicity of little-town conditions permit in- dividual attention to all but the more flagrant cases, — and these require the care and expert handling of a state institution. The Town School and the Larger Community. Of course, in the light of previous study of the community as composed of town centre and surrounding anrht per cent, of the whole population is of German descent with a tradition of individual rather than of social virtues. The recent story of this community has been summarized by the 222 THE LITTLE TOWN Secretary of the Moravian Country Church Commis- sion. Co-operating for Coopersburg. In January, 1914, a group of citizens, originally brought together by one of the churches, issued a call for a community meeting to discuss plans for solving the problems presented by a little town of seven hundred and fifty souls. The meeting was unexpectedly enthusiastic; and in conse- quence a Neighbourhood Association was formed with the following committees : Industrial, Recreation, Civic Improvement, Health and Hygiene, Home and School, and Publicity. It was designed to have a central or- ganization working through committees, and flexible enough to meet any community need as it arose. Every- thing was to be co-ordinated in a strong community asso- ciation issuing only one financial appeal for all needs, on the basis of committee budgets. Churches, lodges, business men and school interests were represented on the various committees and thus all are bound together with a common purpose. The community had been strik- ingly narrow and sectarian and the formation of the Association was the first general socializing experience that it had ever had. The plain, unvarnished tale of the transformation of Coopersburg within about two years and of the meth- ods and fortunes of the sub-agencies which wrought it out, shows nothing which might not be duplicated in any town— except probably, unusual quality of leadership. The wealth of unused resources awaiting mobilization by the community is typical rather than exceptional. Conservative Economic Plans. ' ' The Industrial Com- mittee avoided the temptation to bring in new and not THE TOWN'S PROGRAM 223 too substantial manufactiirinf? concerns, knowing that the town liad an insunic-ient number of houses for its present needs. Efforts were put forward to secure more dwellings and these met with some success and still more houses are going up in the coming months. The com- mittee also organized a Building & Loan Association with a capital of half a million dollars. This is now success- fully at work. A special effort was made to enlist young men in the ranks of the stock-holders and in this way many have become regular savers." The committee has also "performed the usual functions of a Board of Trade, advertising the community, seeking to bring the farmers to it, making it more of a centre for the ship- ping of produce, and similar things. A public spirited citizen placed at its disposal a large tract of land that is being offered for free factory sites. In this way the Association can largely control the type of industries hereafter to be admitted to the community. It is also wisely aiding present industries to expand instead of bringing in new concerns too quickly."^ Finding a Basis in Facts. The Civic Improvement Committee's tirst and comprehensive work was to take the social census of the community. This task was car- ried out by an expert of the Presbyterian Department of the Church and Country Life in close co-operation with the Moravian Country Church Commission. The facts discovered were such as any divided and socially neglectful little town might have expected. They made Coopersburg cringe. The Association leaders, however, felt new strength through precise knowledge of condi- tions. "A village surveyed." they declared, "is a vil- 3 Brunner, 'To-operation in Coopersburg." 224 THE LITTLE TOWN lage unafraid." The Civic Improvement Committee turned especially to the erection of a hopeful communal spirit. The very formation of the Association had helped this greatly. In addition, the committee car- ried on contests for a Coopersburg slogan, a community motto, a hymn, and town colours. Coopersburg has now the symbols to express the faith that is in her. When the railroad station was slightly damaged by fire the committee, co-operating with the station agent, was en- abled to secure additional conveniences in the repaired depot as well as the promise of a new station in the near future. Obvious Relations Rediscovered. The Home and School Committee soon came to perform all the func- tions of a Parent-Teachers' association. Its meetings have been most helpful in the creating of co-operative feeling between the school and the town. Electric lights were installed in the schoolhouse by community gifts. A May Day celebration arranged by this committee in connection with the Recreation Committee, marked an epoch in the town's social history, and will be an an- nual affair. Difficulties from Traditionalism. The Recreation Committee soon found that a revolution would be neces- sary in the established views of the community before the profounder phases of its program were possible. "If it's exercise you want, why don't you go and chop wood? That's all I used to play when I was a boy," was reported as expressing the typical attitude. The committee has not been idle, however, in following some of the immediate suggestions in the survey. It has co- operated closely with the orchestra, band. Boy Scouts, THE TOWN'S PROGRAM 225 and glee club. A number of home talent minstrel shows and plays were held and a few star outside attractions brought into the town. The baseball team was assisted and a large tract of land adjoining the High School leased, with privilege to buy, as a baseball field. A community picnic ground of several acres donated by a public-spirited citizen, has also been developed through this committee. Opposition of Individualism. The Health and Hy- giene Committee also found a large task of education ahead of it before much of its program, in its larger features, could be accomplished. This educational work, however, has been carried on consistently. Clean up days have been held each spring, wuth the enthusiastic co-operation of the Boy Scouts. Health items are printed weekly in the town's newspaper and health litera- ture is distributed free, especially that dealing with rural sanitation and starving the fly. There have also been lectures on health topics by members of the State Health Board. The Springs of Motive. The functions of the Relig- ious and ilorals Committee have been performed thus far by the Executive Committee of the Association. Its work has been one of the most worth-while features of the Association's activity. Noted rural workers have spoken at community mass meetings. Life decisions have been made as a result of some of the addresses made. The constant effort is to keep strong and clear the religious impulse and motive that is back of the whole work. It is held that there can be no completely saved community life that does not include every fea- ture of the community's work and play; that it is as 226 THE LITTLE TOWN important to Coopersburg that it has the right sort of industries, houses, health, recreation and schools, as that it has the right sort of churches. The committee does not believe it can have any one v^ithout having all the others. The New Spirit. The chief result of this experiment in neighbourhood work, as judged by one of its leaders, has been "the welding together of the community. Coopersburg was once branded even by its own citizens as 'slow,' 'conservative,' 'hopeless,' 'pessimistic' To- day the spirit is decidedly optimistic. The citizens are really true to their motto, 'Co-operate for Coopersburg.' They have small patience for criticism that is not con- structive. They believe in the slogan that character- izes the community as 'The Town of Possibilities.' This message to similar communities that may chance through these pages to learn of this work is, 'Go, and do likewise.' 'All things are possible to him that be- lieveth.' 'This is the victory even our faith.' "^ In- terpreting the deeper realms of motive, the writer of the above account adds that, while a church initiated the community movement, co-operation between the churches as such had been and was impossible. It be- came possible only in terms of community service. Re- ligion indeed was the inspiration, but it had to enter a new sphere before it could reach and convert the churches as distributors. If not more religious than the churches, the community was at least more religious in certain important ways which the churches could not realize for themselves nor command for others, ex- cept through the medium of a community program. The 4 Brunner, "Co-operation in Coopersburg," p. 94. THE TOWN'S PROGRAM 227 right program released the new spirit, combining com- munity loyalty, relif^'ion and service. Civic Monuments to the New Spirit. The experience of Coopersburg shows finally how inevitably quickened community life demands external expression in some cen- tral place of beauty and of common ideals, — a civic cen- tre with its buildings and facilities, a temple of religion in its community aspects. Thus Mr. Brunner con- tinues, — "The Association as such is looking forward to two steps as the crown of the program — steps by means of which much of what is now planned for may be easily accomplished." Park and Playground. ''The possibilities for a com- munity park of rare beauty and usefulness can be read- ily seen by even the casual observer of the High School grounds. To the left of the school is the baseball field already leased by the Association. From it, on the left, is a view of beautiful farm lands bounded by a low range of mountains which receives a nightly kiss from the westering sun. Back of the school is a meadow with its large pond on one shore of which is a cluster of trees. Here the boys and girls could swim and skate under proper supervision. On the right side of the school are the tennis courts, volley ball and croquet fields, as well as space for a Neighbourhood House. Someday soon the Association hopes to own this land or to secure it for the school and have its possibilities for recreation and study used to the full under the auspices of the Board of Education practically all of whom are members of the Association." The Neighbourhood House. ' ' This will stand near to 228 THE LITTLE TOWN the school — its constant assistant and complement. The sketches for this building have already been pre- pared. It will be a simple but spacious and substantial building containing place for basket ball and other win- ter recreations, the floor space for these to be convertible into the floor of an auditorium for lectures, plays, etc. There will be a small but complete stage at one end. Committee rooms, dressing rooms, reading rooms, and a rest room for farmers' wives will be provided. In the basement there will be a place for Domestic Science and Manual Training. The building will also furnish a place for band and orchestra practice and a wing can be built for the fire company. To the rear will be free horse sheds for the farmers. The location near the school, the baseball field, playground and pond is well nigh ideal." ^ Coopersburg's Five Year Program. It is the privi- lege of every little town to receive its own kiss from the westering sun. The foregoing story has been told largely in quotation in order to preserve its human qualities, its fine flavour of devotion and enthusiasm without which no program can avail. At the same time Coopersburg would be first to confess that much of its success, and much indeed of the permanence of the new and fine community spirit, is directly due to a defi- nite program based upon the survey of 1914, which is expected to be accomplished within five years; as fol- lows, — Industrial Committee. (1) Secure more houses. (2) Secure more industries of the right sort. (3) En- courage and advertise present industries. (4) Provide 5 Brunner, "Co-operation in Coopersburg," p. 80. THE TOWN'S PROGRAM 229 an attractive label to be placed on all goods that are shipped. (5) Organize a local industrial fair. (6) Open a market for farmers and try to make Coopers- burg a city source of supply for products. (7) Provide horse sheds for farmers. (8) Provide rest rooms for farmers' wives. (9) Call public attention to industrial anniversaries. (10) Push Building & Loan. (11) Es- tablish school bank to cater to children's accounts. (12) Interest trolley and railroad companies in Coopers- burg. Recreation Committee. (1) Plan for the supervision of play to a certain extent. The object of this is to ob- tain recreation together with physical development and to teach co-operation and morals. (2) Fit up a small playground with swings, tennis courts, quoits, etc., and make provision for swimming and skating. (3) Make a program for the year. Divide the year into months, have all the organizations work together and distribute their social efforts through the year, not neglecting sport days, picnics, suppers, patriotic days, church socials, and the like. Home and School Committee. (1) Co-operating with school board tiuish and enlarge both school and grounds. (2) Introduce night school courses. (3) Push plans to have a Public School library. (4) Plan a community reading course. (5) Make school worth while for farm children. (6) Suggest and provide mottoes for homes and school. (7) Emphasize higher education. Civic Improvement Committee. (1) Develop a loyal borough spirit, getting a Coopersburg yell, song and pennant. (2) Write up history of town. (3) Get to- gether a good collection of views. (4) Beautify homes 230 THE LITTLE TOWN and streets. (5) Plan for Farmers' Institute. (6) Have an Old Home Week. (7) Celebrate borough an- niversaries, as coming of railroad or trolley, founding of Neighbourhood Association, etc. Health Committee. (1) Continue to print health articles in paper. (2) Continue clean-up days. (3) Guard water supply and wells. (4) Plan for sewage disposal. (5) Introduce physical culture into school. (6) Enforce quarantine regulations. (7) Guard food supplies, sources of meat and vegetables, condition of shops, etc. (8) Secure health displays. (9) Have pub- lic health talks. (10) Get literature from state and national governments for distribution. Religious and Morals Committee. (1) Seek to unify church efforts. (2) Cultivate church attendance. (3) Enlarge religious investment. (4) Celebrate religious anniversaries, sometimes with Union services, getting out attractive programs. (5) Hold country church confer- ence for the many churches near here. (6) Publish religious monthly, possibly taking over Moravian News and printing news from churches. Neighbourhood Asso- ciation, etc. (7) Organize ministers' association. (8) Organize laymen's organization of the boards of the local churches. Perhaps this committee should be the men on these boards. ORGANIZING A COMMUNITY PROGRAM How to Go at It. When the men of Coopersburg sat down to organize their list of nearly fifty common tasks into a comprehensive program, how did they proceed? Naturally in the habitual American fashion, by appoint- ing committees for each of the outstanding departments THE TOWN'S PROGRAM 231 of civic endeavour, each corresponding to a dominant social aim. But how did they know that they were right? How did they answer the questions: What sub-committees shall there be? What shall each be called? What shall their duties be? Where will one assign this or that task which does not obviously belong to any of them? Of course Coopersburg did not work in vacuum. Civic betterment never does. Its tools are largely already forged for its hand. It deals with de- partments and agencies of already existent government and largely with long-established institutions, which it attempts to work with in practical ways. There are established habits in civic processes. In practice, their departments of endeavour will indirectly reflect these facts. On the other hand, logic is power in the long run. The unequal yoking of incongruous lines of activ- ity means permanent friction and strain. Any program maker will at least try instinctively to keep like things together. Criticizing Coopersburg. In view of these considera- tions it is possible to ask whether the Coopersburg method of organizing its community program was best even for Coopersburg. Including the total program within six or seven comprehensive departments was clearly right, and the choice of and division of work be- tween departments is immensely suggestive. At the same time it is not quite an ideal program. Many current community betterment interests have not yet emerged in Coopersburg. Does not the work of the Civic Improve- ment Committee seem a sort of catch-all for miscel- laneous interests? What obvious affinity is there be- tween the mood which makes a scientific survey and that 232 THE LITTLE TOWN which invents a Coopersburg yell? The Farmers' In- stitute project, which this committee assumed, had to do with economic development and more naturally belonged in a common department with the work of the Industrial Committee. In brief, there is a real problem of classifi- cation which has more than theoretical importance. A Model Program. The following suggestion is of- fered as a fair compromise between logical division and experience based upon habit and convenience. Anything the little-town civic program should include may be made at least to come within seven departments: (1) Community plan and public improvements. (2) Economic welfare; agricultural, commercial, in- dustrial. (3) Health, sanitation and housing. (4) Public morals, law enforcement; charity and cor- rection. (5) Education. (6) Recreation. (7) Religious co-operation and civic worship. These departments are intended to cover the entire range of little-town possibilities set forth in chapters five, six and seven. It will be observed that the first four correspond to the four "structural fundamentals" of chapter five. If they are really fundamentals, this is of course natural. They could not avoid being direct and permanent objects of endeavour. They use all agencies, touch all institutions, involve all ideals. Edu- cation, recreation and religion are groups of practical activities and institutions which gather together and sum up the further interests which men ought to have in common. The ideals discussed in chapter seven concern THE TOWN'S I'K()(}KAM 233 all departments of endeavour and will attach themselves especially to one or another by natural affinity or present convenience. Tiiere is no sanctity, however, about the above formulation. All that is urged is that, as a prac- tical basis for org:anized effort, everythin}? the little town wants to undertake community-wise must be systematic- ally comprehended in a snuill Tiinnbor of working cate- gories. THE STATE AS THE TOWN'S PROGRAM-MAKER A Universal Community Program. The helpful serv- ice of the town 's world to local development has already been noted in two phases. In the first place, it affords the towns a varied, though often indiscriminate, array of the tools of community progress. Second, it offers and necessitates certain established modes of social activ- ity making in the same direction. But the world has now gone beyond these phases. It has now reached a comprehensive social purpose which makes communities as such the objects of its constructive politics and seeks to realize a unified and complete program of development in each one of them. It has definitely emerged as a function of the modern socialized state to be a program- maker for its towns. It is the state's business to cover the country with Coopersburgs. The University. The natural eye of the state for seeing the community vision steadily and seeing it whole, is the University. Several of the more progressive mid- dle and western states, usually through various bureaus of the extension departments of their universities, have gone far toward becoming program-makers for their towns. They have passed over from the teaching of 234 THE LITTLE TOWN individuals to the teaching of communities. It is indeed a far cry from the correspondence studies of the aspiring student here and there, which was the first service of these departments, through the stage of sending out a miscellaneous lot of informing and popular lecturers, to the inspiring and ambitious program of schooling the towns as such in all the better lessons of collective life. What Wisconsin is ready to undertake by way of their education in all things municipal has already been cata- logued.^ It includes charters, ordinances, finance and accounting, engineering, and sanitary matters; and equally in the realm of community betterment through voluntary organizations of citizens, — social centres, the wider use of the school plant, rural life organization, and the like. This state has begun, through a series of local institutes, to offer community instruction in advertising and the display of goods for the sake of the thousands of little-town retail merchants and aspires to play the part of a commercial club secretary to its smaller com- munities.'^ She is prepared to furnish the information necessary both by specific replies and advice for all in- quirers, and by sending out package libraries on public questions, and is seeking to follow up information by inspiration through the promotion of community music as a power to melt and fuse the hearts of men into one. Summary of Services. In 1911-12, one hundred and twenty-eight Wisconsin cities were thus supplied with municipal guidance and one thousand six hundred and seventy-eight subjects, and two thousand four hundred 6 Chapter VIII, p. 189. 7 Gillin, "Community Development and the State University," — Town Development, August, 1914, p. 99. THE TOWN'S PROGRAM 235 and fifty package libraries on public questions were sent out to three hundred and thirteen communities. Two hundred and twenty-five requests for information and advice concerning social centres and constructive com- munity betterment plans were answered, fifty Boards of Education and like administrative bodies conferred with, and hundreds of addresses delivered in behalf of community progress. In 1915, the ^Municipal Research Bureau of the University of Kansas served one hundred and sixteen towns — one-half of the number having less than two thousand population each — on three hundred and thirty-three matters. Forty-four ordinances were drafted, one hundred and eight legal questions answered, and engineering data furnished in all cases, and the campaign for larger legal powers for small municipali- ties was vigorously backed. Washington and Oregon have less developed but similar agencies. What with these and the frequent e<.lucative and administrative pressure of state boards of health upon the little towns, — what with increasing control and definiteuess of pro- gram on the part of state departments of education, the growing purpose of the modern state is manifest to help, supervise, and exact standard results from the communities upon which it confers corporate powers. To all of them, it will doubtless grant wider and wider privileges of self-government and new spheres of action ; but the larger cities will doubtless seek their own way, while it remains to the state directly and especially to be the civic shepherd of the little towns. Requirements for Incorporation. There is no logical reason why the state should not demand of new towns that they show their ability at the outset of municipal 236 THE LITTLE TOWN careers to meet the minimum requirements of community life. A speculator, assuming inside information as to the plans of a railway, has no inherent right to buy up a series of town sites, to attract a few settlers by false representations, and to acquire easy municipal powers from the state for a series of experimental communities lacking all sound economic basis. Not even a town com- munity growing naturally out of the country and needed to serve the country, is entitled to organize with special civic powers under the state's authority, without a rea- sonable conception of its municipal duty, some use of the experience of others, a rational plan approximating some definable model as to scale and type, proper sani- tary facilities and regulations, and other adequate ordi- nances and resources of municipal housekeeping. The state already conditions incorporation, usually upon the number of inhabitants ; but there are considerations which come far ahead of mere size. As to these, the state has every reason to erect tests and to exact guar- antees. A Commission on Incorporation empowered to examine and pass upon the fitness of conmiunities de- siring incorporation would logically complete the state's exercise of its function as program-maker for its towns, THE CHURCH AS THE TOWN's PROGRAM-MAKER The Shepherding of Communities. The state has passed over from the exclusive educating of individuals to the educating of communities as such. Should not the church likewise pass over from the exclusive saving of individuals to the saving of communities as such ? If, having saved them, the constructive task of the church local is the shepherding of individuals, may not the con- THE TOWN'S PROGRAM 237 structive task of the church collective be the shepherding of the communities; or shall the state shepherd the little towns, and the church harry them ? It has harried them in the past — by sectarian rivalry, by social divisiveness, by economic exploitation. IIow can it be otherwise so long as the state is one and the churches many and competitive, and so long as denominational aims and ambitions are in direct conflict with a unified program of community advance? Of course, no one in America wants a religious counterpart of the political state, — an authoritative church, however right and up to date, wielding the spiritual sword, and reducing communities as individuals to unquestioning obedience. But this is not the alternative. What is necessary and possible is that there be some democratic, voluntary, and effective expression of the common stock of impulse, ideals, and methods, which are actually possessed by the churches collectively. These must be organized and expressed in such a way as shall offer a common Christian evangel and a common Christian program to communities as such. Whatever group of forces and agencies actually affords such an evangel and such a program may fairly and deliberately be called the church, at least in tlie social sense. The Social Gospel. Now, such a church is actually in the making as a shepherd to the community. First, by its better theology, — because the religious thinking of the age not only permits but compels the Christian man to regard the community as a specific object of his concern. It is such an object to him because he feels it is such an object to God. Christianity has always strongly insisted that the family is a 238 THE LITTLE TOWN divine institution ordained and consummated by God. The same logic insists on the divine institution of the city, and — within the field of our discussion — of the town-and-country. He who set the solitary in families, set families also in communities, and indissolubly welded the little town and its surrounding farm land into one natural unit of community and religious experience. First, then, by a social gospel the church is becoming a shepherd to the communities. Co-operative Organization. This is the second great contribution of the modern church to its towns. The co- operative and federative movements of American Protes- tanism have their most effective expression in the Home Missions Council, an organization including more than thirty denominational boards of national scope. These boards control five-sixths of the missionaries working in the fifteen northwestern and western states, which in- clude practically all of our remaining frontier, and constitute the most rapidly developing area of the nation. Beneath the specific agreements as to policy declared by this Council and accepted by its constituent denomina- tional boards, is the fundamental principle that the good of the local community gives the law to all religious organizations working within it. The State as a Parish. How it actually works out in practice on a large scale is illustrated in western Wash- ington, where the co-operating Mission Boards are united in a district organization of the Home Missions Council. The district covers nineteen counties of the state, and the policies determined for it are based upon a religious survey taken in 1912 of about one thousand of the one thousand one hundred and sixty-five school districts in THE TOWN'S PROGRAM 239 these counties. The survey concerned a school popula- tion of 169,5'J8 children, and a total population of 7:i2,- 291. The results of the survey indicated that approxi- mately seventy thousand people in the area studied were without ade(|uate religious privileges, but that on "the other hand there were some villages and towns, and even country communities, which were over-churched ; com- peting churches freiiuently being sustained by missionary money and engendering strifes in their communities."* As a result of the survey a Continuation Committee was appointed to readjust and reapportion overlapping ter- ritories between co-operating denominations. The com- mittee is, of course, purely advisory, but in 1915 the committee reports several cases of readjustment of com- petitive churches and that in no case has there been fail- ure to comply with its recommendations. The Community Church. The constructive achieve- ment of the committee is the first clear definition by a joint agency of the Protestant denominations of a com- munity church in connection with some particular de- nomination but so broadened in its terms of member- ship and its work "as to include all Christians living in that community without estranging or violating any conscience." "Specifically the community church is understood to be a body of Christians worshipping in a certain district, representing all denominations co-operat- ing with the Home Missions Council, and affiliated with one of the separate denominations but alTording fellow- ship and Christian privilege for every Christian within its reach." Christians, who by reason of conscientious 8 "Statement of Principles," Home Missions Council of Western Washington. 240 THE LITTLE TOWN adherence to the peculiar doctrine or polity of their own denomination cannot unite in full membership are to be- come associate members. ' ' By this plan, persons may re- tain membership in their own denomination, be regularly reported to it, send their benevolent contributions to its boards, and yet co-operate with the local work and help sustain it, both with service and financial support. The interests of the community should not be injured nor hindered by our differences of opinion ; the religious life of the community is as important as any other factor, and every person ought to promote it. An associate member does not necessarily endorse the doctrines of the denomination carrying on the enterprise, nor assume official responsibility in the local organization, but as it is convenient and opportunity affords should work on committees, in the Sunday School and elsewhere." Any community church organized on this basis is prom- ised recognition and support by the Home Missions Council against possible sectarian rivalry. In towns where an over-supply of denominational churches al- ready exists, the committe recommends a plan for a sys- tematic and co-operative working of the entire surround- ing rural area in essential harmony with the suggestions of chapter six of this book. Thus, the over-churched town ceases to be over-churched by including its tribu- tary country in its aggressive religious ministries. Still More Inclusive Federation. The Federal Coun- cil of the Churches of Christ in America, through its Commission in Federated Movements, has inaugurated a still more comprehensive plan for federating in the local community not merely for the denominational churches but the interdenominational agencies like the Y. THE TOWN'S PROGRAM 241 M. C. A. and Y. W. C. A. and the interdeuominuiional Sunday School movements. Ultimately it hopes to work down to the small communities with practical measures along this line. The restraining and directing power of the ideal, however, outruns the creation of maciiinery to express it. The most that can be said is that the adequate idea is well established in a thinking of American Protestantism, that conspicuous and successful examples of its application to large areas are now available, and that the agencies for its further development and appli- cation are in the making. The church, in so far as it has embraced the community as such as an object of religious service, is in the way of standing side by side of the state as a program-maker for its little towns. THE TOWNS THE MAKERS OF THEIR OWN DESTINIES A Farm Under Every Farm. The first general evi- dence of mental maturity in the American people has been their recent sudden realization of the superficial character of the preliminary conquest of their land. So far, it has been the hasty taking of first values. Agri- culture and industry skimmed the surface of the con- tinent. The plow but scratched the soil. Millions of precious metal? went into the dump heap. An untold wealth of forest was burned as an obstruction — merely to clear the land. The first comer took what was easily gotten and passed on to other virgin fields. But now the free land is exhausted and the mood and habits which its presence wrought are as out-of-date as the ichthyosaurus. To the nation under this perplexing necessity of changing its whole attitude toward natural wealth, the great word of the new agriculture sounds out: **Go deeper. 242 THE LITTLE TOWN There's a farm under every farm." The entire con- tinent is to be conquered anew — intensively. We are to re-mine the tailings, to utilize every by-product, to "gather up the fragments," human as well as material. The coftgervationist's conscience has arrived, and with it the conservationist's enthusiasm. The Town Under Every Town. The social re-con- quest of the continent is no less universally necessary than its material reconquest. No ancient moral value is equal to the needs of the present hour ; all must take on profounder versions. The cup of cold water only which neighbourliness gave in such beautiful simplicity must now, we insist, be pure water in a clean cup. Friendliness is hedged about with social responsibility and can only free herself again by going deeper into human relations and finding spontaneity and joy on pro- founder levels. On such levels the heart thrills again with new vision of old lands ; energizes at the task of re- building old commonwealths ; rejoices in the re-direction of ancient forces. There is new capacity of enthusiasm for old causes and romance in the re-discovery of old continents. This is the second phase of our American battle for civilization. It holds the destinies of our smaller communities as it holds those of the nation itself. There's a town under every town. To find it is no superficial task. Really to get down into it, to unlock its possibilities, to release its powers is the meaning of community betterment. A Faith Affirmed. Those who mean by a community betterment precisely the making over of the American people — and no less — must confess that they stake their all upon the capacity of the nation for a general and THE TOWN'S PROGRAM 243 genuine civic revival. The question is, can the impulse to make the common life better be universalized and fixed as a dominant characteristic of our land and our time'/ Can it be democratized, so that, whoever initiates it, whether state or church ; by whatever advocates and experts it is mediated, the communities will seize upon it and make it indigenous, stamping it with their own spon- taneity and originality ? To answer affirmatively is an act of sheer faith. Evidence for this faith is not, how- ever, wholly unseen. It rests partly in the clearly marked civic movement now going on in limited spheres, but also in the remarkable and surprising response to civic motive on the part of most unpromising communi- ties whenever it is adequately and enthusiastically pre- sented. Whenever one has said in his heart of some sodden Littleton, "Here at least it will not work," his doubts have been given the lie by some man of courage who tried and made it work. Those who have tried longest and most devotedly are sure that the surface phenomena of our community life are underlaid with vitalities waiting to be released. There is strength in the sub-soil of the common life. Where Uncle Robert and Aunt Mary lived so truly and died so devoutly — and both so futilely had they to do it over again in the same way — there are roots of personal character which may be cultured into civic virtue. The general revival of civic life waits only upon efficiently organized and universalized presentation of the ideal to the communities of America. The Consecration of Youth. There is no more certain social force than the idealistic hunger of each new gen- eration of young men and women. Youth is synonymous 244 THE LITTLE TOWN with the power of a glowing vision. It has no power not to respond. Here is something to count on, to tie to. "Its going forth is sure as the morning." Like the widow's cruse of oil it does not fail. Nothing which pertains to man is more beautiful or dramatic than the great procession of young lives, a fair proportion of whom are always eager to devote themselves to altruistic adventure if the call comes timely and clear. There is no more marked nor heartening aspect of American civil- ization than this. The only question is of the specific direction of these self-devoted lives. Of them the little town furnished a disproportionate share. They have gone forth mostly to far fields, to the social service of the city, to foreign missions. To such, this book would like to believe that it presents a direct challenge and appeal. Home is the nearest spot of missionary ground. The little town is a field for altruistic service of thrilling importance. Here stands greatness humbly clad; here patriotic labour is involved with charm ; here deep social processes are bound up with intimate personal contacts; here especially the high fortunes of the open country are to be centred and inspired ; here lies the pleasant middle- ground through which if one will have it so the Garden of Eden merges into the City of God. SELECT BIBLIOORAPHY Note. — Much of the tollowinj,' material bears only indirectly upon the problems of the little town. \\ iiat is appiicaljle must be sifted out. No body of authoritative literature specifically con- cerning the little town exists, except in faintest beginnings. I. American Social Evolution Carver, Principles of Rural Economics (Boston, 1911). Cubherley, Rural Life and Education (Boston, 1914). Ross, "The Agrarian Revolution in the Middle West," North American Review, V. 190, p. 377 (Sept., 1909). Small and Vincent, Introduction to the Study of Society (New York, 1894). Turner, The Rise of the New West (New York, 1906). *Vogt, Rural Sociology (New York, 1917). Devotes several excellent chapters to the village and its human iypQ. Fears tliat "failure to recognize the place of the village in relation to the rural community has already led in many instances to erroneous and costly policies of organization of educational, social and re- ligious life in unnatural and passing rural centres." Wilson, The Evolution of the Country Community (Boston, 1912). 2. The Little Town Anderson, The Country Town (New York, 1915). *Farrington, Community Development (New York, 1915). "Primarily for the use of the small town." Largely from the commercial club standpoint. *Galpin, The Social Anatomy of a Rural Community, Uni- versity of Wisconsin Research Bulletin, No. 34. * Twenty of the best books are marked with a star. 245 246 THE LITTLE TOWN The most important single work for our understanding of the little town. Galpin, Rural Relations of the Village and Small City, Uni- versity of Wisconsin Bulletin, No. 411. Gillin, "Community Development and the State University," Town Development, V. 12, p. 99. *Hart, Educational Resoui'ces of Village and Rural Communi- ties (New York, 1914). Hartman, "Village Problems and Characteristics," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, V. 15, p. 234. *McVe7j, The Making of a Town (Chicago, 1913). Brief, systematic, philosophical — confined to the town itself; ignores its essential rural relationships. Excellent on administration of town government. 3. Surveys and Social Studies a. Survey methods. *Aronovicij Knovsdng One's Own Community; Suggestions for Social Surveys of Small Cities and Towns (American Unitarian Association, Boston, 1912). Comey, A Schedule of Civic Surveys — (Massachusetts Home- stead Commission, Bulletin, No. 5, 1916). Felton, A Survey of a Rural Community Prepared in Out- line (Board of Home Missions of the Presb3^erian Church, New York, 1915). Galpin, Method of Making a Survey of a Rural Community, University of Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Sta- tion, Circular No. 29 (1912). Wells, A Social Survey for Rural Communities (New York, 1911). "A practical scheme for the investigation of the struc- ture, problems, and possibilites of rural, village and other communities from the point of view of the church and its work." SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 247 b. Studies of Actual Communities. *Brunner, Co-opcratiou in CooixTsburfj (New York, 1016). Dunn, An Analysis of the Social Structure of a Western Town (Chicago, 189G). An illuminating study of the development of Galesburg, 111. Morrison, Coopersburg Survey (Moravian Country Church Commission, Pension, Pa, 1914). Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, Department of Church and Country Life and University of Oregon, Extension Division, A Rural Sui^ey of Lane Co., Oregon (1916). Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, Department of Church and Country Life, A Rural Survey in Maryland; A Rural Survey in Indiana (1911) ; A Rural Survey in Kentucky (1911^ New York). *Sims, A Hoosier Village: A Sociological Study (New York, 1912). Holds that the village must constantly lose its progressive elements, and must itself depend for progress upon exter- nal sources. 4. Regional, Economic and Occupational Background of Little Town Fortunes Brigham, Geographic Influences in American History (Bos- ton, 1903). Brigham, Commercial Geography (Boston, 1911). Hunt, How to Choose a Farm (New York, 1906). Powell, Co-operation in Agriculture (New York, 1913). Van Hise, Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States (New York, 1910). Warren, Farm Management (New York, 1914). 5. The Country Life Movement Bailey, The Country Life Movement (New York, 1911). Butterfield, Chapters in Rural Progress (Chicago, 1908). 248 THE LITTLE TOWN Country Life Commission, Report of (Government Printing Office, 1909). Carver, "The Organization of a Rural Community" (Year- book U. S. Department of Agriculture, 1914, pp. 89-138). Israel, Unifying Rural Community Interests (New York, 1914). Plunkett, The Rural-Life Problem of the United States (New York, 1910). Sociology of Rural Life, Publication of the American Sociolog- ical Society, v. 11 (1917). Symposium on Bural Problems, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, V. 15 (Phila- delphia, 1912). Wisconsin Country Life Conference, Annual Reports (Bulle- tins of University of Wisconsin). 6. Literary Studies of Little Town Character Fitch, Homeburg Memories (Boston, 1915). A genial view of the old home, humorously expressed, but none the less sound. *Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York, 1915). Recognized as one of the most important American autobiographies. Its central interest concerns the transi- tion of a iy^'icaX American from country to little town, and from town to city. A human document of the greatest value but of little sympathy for town and country. Masters, The Spoon River Anthology (New York, 1915). A well remembered literary sensation. A marvellous characterization, in verse of high merit, of every man, woman and child who ever lived in a little town — except the good ones. The work of a rebel against little-town narrowness, who sees chiefly its mean, petty, hypocritical and evil side. Necessary perhaps, but not nice. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPnY 249 7. Civic Improvement a. General. * American City, The, Town and Countrj' Edition (Monthly, New York). The host current record of civic progress in all lines. 'Farwell, Village Improvement (New York, 1913). A story of lotig experience in the New England village improvement societies, with a wealth of concrete illustra- tion from all parts of the country. Ritchie, "Building a Community Through Its Resident Forces" (American City, v. 17, p. 42). *Waugh, Rural Improvement (New York, 1914). Tlie principles of civic art applied to rural conditions, including village improvement. Interesting and im- portant. Deals principally with betterment of external conditions. b. Town plan and heautification. *Bird, Town Planning for Small Communities (New York, 1917). Ft. I, a general sur\'ey of the subject in twelve chapters; Pt. II, the planning surveys and organization of Walpole, Mass. Culpin, The Garden City Movement Up to Date (Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, London, 1914). Stark, Steel Corporation's Industrial Community Develop- ment (Reprint from the Iron Trade Review, Cleveland, 1914). A description of the United States Steel Corporation's model town, Fairfield, Ala. c. Health and Sanitation. Bailey, School Sanitation and Decoration (New York, 1809). Hunter, Laboratory Manual of Civic Biology (New York, 1916). 250 THE LITTLE TOWN Gulick and Ayers. Medical Inspection of Schools (New York, 1914). Lumsden, A Sanitary-Privy System for Unsewered Towns and Villages, U. S. Public Health Service,. Bulletin No. 89 (Washington, 1917). Waters, Visiting Nurses in the United States (New York, 1909). d. Homes and Child Life. Bosanquet, The Family (New York,. 1906). nail, Youth, Its Education, Regimen and Hygiene (New York, 1906). Holt, Care and Feeding of Children (New York, 1909). Kinne and Cooley, Food and Household Management (New York, 1914). Kinne and Cooley, Shelter and Clothing (New York, 1913). *McKeever, Farm Boys and Girls (New York, 1912). Rose, Feeding the Family (New York, 1917). e. ScJiools and Civic Education. Bloomfield^tThe Vocational Guidance of Youth (Boston, 1911). Betts and Hall, Better Rural Schools (New York, 1914). Brown, The Readjustment of a Rural High School to the Needs of the Community (U. S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin, No. 20, Washington, 1912). *Cubherley, Riiral Life and Education (Boston, 1914). Dressier, Rural School Houses (U. S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin 585). Johnson, County Schools of Agriculture and Domestic Econ- omy in Wisconsin (U. S. Department of Agriculture, Of-" fice of Experiment Stations, Bulletin No. 242, Washing- ton, 1911). Holmes, Backward Children (Indianapolis, 1917). Knorr, Consolidated Rural Schools and the Organization of a County System (U. S. Department of Agriculture, Office SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 251 of Experiment Stations, Bulletin No. 232,, Washington, 1910). Foght, The American Rural School (New York, 1910). Eobinson and Jencks, Agincultural Instruction in High Schools (U. S. Bureau of Education, Bulletin No. 6, Washington, 1913). Tarbell, A Village Lihrar>', Publications of Massachusetts Civic League (Boston). /. Churches. Athearn, The Church School (Boston, 1914). A comprehensive program of religious "xiucation, in- volving the internal reorganization of the local church. Beard, The Story of John Fredrick Oberlin (Boston, 1909). The classic example of community betterment through the church, interestingly narrated. Brunner, The New Country Church Building (New York, 1917). "Intended as much for the church of the rural village as for the church of the open country'." Gives many plans of buildings and discusses equipment for the socially-minded church. Douglass, The New Home Missions (New York, 1914). An account of the social re-direction of ecclesiastical statesmanship. Home Missions Council of Western Washington, Statement of Principles (Seattle, 1915). Interdenominational Commission of Maine, The Country Church (Lewiston, 1914). Outlines four types of federated churches — discusses community aspects of religion. Macfarland, The Progress of Church Federation (New York, 1907). •Mills, The Making of a Country Parish (New York, 1914). The story of the religious reorganization of Benzie Co., 252 THE LITTLE TOWN Mich., around Benzonia as its natural centre. A notabl* example well described. Bitchie, Community Work of the Y. M. C. A. (New York, 1917). Wilson, The Church at the Center (New York, 1914). A partial recognition that its problems are different from those of the church of the open country. g. Commercial Organization and Retail Merchandising. Brand, Commercial Organizations; U. S. Department of Com- merce and Labor, Bureau of Manufactures, S. P. Series, No. 60 (1912). Harvard University/, Bureau of Business Research, publica- tions. "Huntington Plan of Organizing a Community" (American City, V. 16, p. 21, Jan., 1917). The compacting of a disintegrating community upon its natural agricultural basis. *Neystrom, Retail Selling and Store Management (New York, 1914). A practical text book prepared in the Extension De- partment of the University of Wisconsin. 8. Development and Enrichment of Community Life. a. Recreation and Social Life. * Curtis, Play and Recreation for the Open Country (Boston, 1914). Bancroft, Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gym- nasium (New York, 1909). * Johnson, Education by Plays and Games (Boston, 1907). Lee, Play in Education (New York, 1915). (See also Perry, under c, below.) 6. Civic arts. Community Music and Drama, University of Wisconsin, Ex- tension Division Bulletin, G. S. No. 638 (1917). SELECT BIHLKXJKAPHY 253 Farnsworth, Folk Songs, Chanteys and Singing Games (Gray, 191(3). Pageant of Thetford, Book of words, etr. Tanner, Pageant of tlie Little Town of X (Publications of the Massachusetts Civic League). (See also Waugh, under 7, above.) c. Community Centers. *Perry, Community Center Activities (New York, 1916). Preston, The Community Center (State of Washington De- partment of Education, Bulletin No. 20). "Rural Social Centers," University of Wisconsin, Bulletin No. 234. Thoma.'^on, Suggestions for Community Centers (State of Washington Department of Education, Bulletin No. 26). Ward, The Social Center (New York, 1913). 9. Local Government. Dunn, The Community and the Citizen (Boston, 1907). "The Advance of the City Manager Movement" (American City, V. 17, pp. 533-548). A s^Tnposium on the movement as it existed at the end of 1917, with complete list of to\\Tis and cities wliich have adopted it. 'Fairlee, Local Government in Counties, Towns and Villages (New York, 1906). INDEX Abnormal types in little towns, 92, l.n. 152 Agriculture: dependence of towns on, lOG; intensive and extensive, 47, 71; primitive in England, 54 Agricultural fairs, 24 Albany, N. Y., 3fl American City (periodical), 5 Amusements, 24 Anamosa, Iowa, 45 Architecture, public, 173 "Association Men," 146 Automobile, elTect of, 70 Bankers, social value of, 70 Baseball, HI, 24 Bellcviile, Kansas, 21 Benzonia, Mich., 145 "Black Belt." 60 Boy Scouts, 190, 206, 208 Camp Fire Girls, 190, 208 Canada, 47 Census, U. S., 4, 41 Charity, 24, 153 Chautauqua courses, 24, 81 Childhood. 86 Churches: architecture of, 174; community service of, 139; denominational exchange of, 143; farmer's relation to, 60; internal reorganization, 133, 137 ; non-competitive organi- zation of, 148; social gospel of. 237; standards for, 13S Cities: competition with towns, 46; congestion in, 75; distri- bution, 26; influence of, 12; overtlow into towns, 37 Civic anniversaries, 109 Civic architecture, 101, 175 Civic centres. lUl, 104 Civic improvement, agencies of, 156, 180, 189; contests, 96; inefTiciency in, 205; leader- ship in, 180, 220; principles of, 99, 215; program of, 162, 184 Civic forum, 160 Clinton, Iowa, 66, 111 Commercial organization, 80, 101 Commission government, 194 Community church, 239 Community, method of discov- ering, 62 Co-operation, between town and country. 111; of farmers. Country : organized around cen- tres, 62 Coopersburg, Pa., 221 Country-life movement, 6 Counties, 61, 187 County seats, 42 Dakotas, the, 36 Dancing, 24 De Kalb, 111., 69 Denominationalism: evils and remedies, 143 255 256 INDEX Democracy, 81, 175, 177, 243 Density of population, 27 Douglas County, Minn., 201 Eastern states, 33, 44, 62 Educational policies, 7 Exhibits, civic improvement ex- perts, 175, 181 Farmers: isolation of, 55, 76; retired, 83; widening outlook of, 68 Federal Council of Churches, 240 Foreigner, in little towns, 84 Forest Hills, Long Island, 101 Frontier, 55 Galpin, C. J., 51 Genius, 178 Good roads, 68 Hartman, 217 Homes: beautification of, 125; industries in, 123; public as- pect of, 121; social activities in, 126 Home gardens, 123 Home missions, 190 Home Missions Council, 238 Health, of school children, 25 Hutchinson, Dr. Woods, 128 Illinois, 29, 36 Iowa, 29, 36, 45 Income of town families, 22 Incorporation of towns, 9; in- fluences determining, 33; method, 14; powers conferred by, 15, 197; requirements for, 235 Indiana, 45, 105 Individualism, a hindranc* to social progress, 92, 225 Industries, as cause of towns, 39; localization in United States, 107; conditions of success, 107 Institutions, 88 Inter-denominational adjust- ments, 143 ; organizations, 240 Irrigation, 71 Kansas, 36, 189 Land surveying, system of, 50 Law enforcement, 117 Leagues of municipalities, 191, 199 Legislation: recent, relating to towns, 71, 197, 199 Le Grand, Oregon, 196 Libraries, 158 Lindsborg, Kansas, 170 Liquor traffic, 117 Little towns: advantages of life in, 76, 93; appearance, 78; attitude toward city, 12; toward country, 14, 59 ; city's attitude toward, 5 ; character- istics, 53, 77; conditions of influence, 35; country's atti- tude toward, 6; defined by population limits, 11; dis- tinctive character of, 9; dis- tribution of, 26, 31; economic classification of, 37; educa- tion, 23; function of rural leadership, 10; improvement of, 97 ; limitations of, 47, 99 ; multiplication of, 32; natural history of, 56 ; occupations in, 22, 78; prospect of growth, 43, 48; reputation of, 3; sec- INDEX 257 tiuiial vuriution l)i'twi'i'ii, liH, 58, HuppurU-d liy upriculture, 28; surveys of artual townn, 20, 221 , typos of. Kl Local j^overnment: defpcts of, 1!I2; lu't'tl of new unit of, JU.'J Louiciiaua, 29 "Main Street," 78 Massachusetts, 1!)7, 1!KS Mental characteristics of town people, 12 Merchaiidizin<^, 10!) Metropolitan areas, 39 Middleman, 07 Middle western states, 18, 34, 30, 44, 03, 83 Minnesota, 36 Missionary impulse, 72 Mississippi, 29 Missouri, 30, 45, 152, 197 Moving pictures, 24 Model towns, 101 "Moonlight schools," 132 Moral control, 115 Moravian Country Church Com- mission, 223 Mormons, 73 ]^Iunicipal government, 194 Music, social and civic signifi- cance, 170; illustration of, 172 National Social Unit Organiza- tion, 214 Nebraska, 36 Xeighhourliood, 54, 103 New England, 8, 33, oo, 72 New Jersey, 32, 44 New York* 36. 45, 197 North Carolina, 29 Ohio, 45 OUJahoma, 32 Old age, 88 Oregon City, Oregon, 148 Organizations for civic lietter ment: example of, 222, prin- cijjles of, 2ti0, 213; suggested eclieme of, 232; when are new organizations needed': 155 Pageants, 176 Parent Teachers associations, 208 Pennsylvania, 45 Personality: exaggerations, 92; place in little town, 5>4; superficial interpretations of, :J3 Physiography, Play Ground and Hecreatioa Association of American. 190 Play, social significance of, 157 Professional classes, 81, 83, 91 Public health, 25, 113 Public utilities, 79 Railroads, 40 Recreation, 81, 157 Religion, as civic force, 16C Retired farmer, 83 Richland Center, Wis., 203 Ruralism, philosophy of, 8; consequences for education, 7 Rural leadership, 10 "Rurbanism," 51, 61, 166 Saluda, N. C, 177 Sanitation, 114 Sauk City, Wis , 52 Schools: adaptation of, 127; administration of, 201 ; com- munity service by, 129; con- solidation of, 201; use of 258 INDEX school plant, 198, 209; voca- tional emphasis in, 128 School district: national unit for 200 Science, applied to civics, 98, 104 Sector and zone plan of church organization, 149 Social classes, 90 Social centres, 164 Social control, 116, 118 Social life and standards, 115 Social surveys, 161, 223 Social units, natural vs. arti- ficial, 51, 200 Southern states, 34, 44, 70 Speculation in land, 58 "Spoon River Antliology," 157 Spring Valley, Wis., 199 South Carolina, 29 States: civic activities of, 188, 233 Sunday schools, 134, 241 Survey methods, 259 Taxation, 15 Texas, 98 Thetford, Vt., 177 Town manager plan, 195 Town planning, 100 University: civic service of, 233; of Kansas, 189, 235; of Oregon, 235; of Wisconsin, 8, 51, 110, 189, 234 "Urban" vs. "Rural," 4, 9 Urban superiorities, 12 U. S. Steel Corporation, 101, 102, 114 Utah, 73 Village Impro\ement Societies, 72 Walworth County, Wis., 61, 202 Washington, State of, 238 Washington, Pa., 69 Western states, 32, 35, 46 Wibaux, Mont., 141 Wisconsin, 200, 234 Woman: sphere in little town, 79, 87 World movements, town's part in, 181 Y. M. C. A., Ill, 187, 199, 208, 241 Youth, 86, 243 Printed in the United States of America. :^»^i I v^^E