Part 3

Simple though this idea is, it has not been an easy one to inspire in the hearts of New York and Connecticut farmers (for Amenia is less than three miles from the state line). The rural population is admittedly composed for the most part of conservatives, unimpressionable, and slow to arouse to anything which savors of innovation, and which does not bring in its train anything of palpable, material benefit. For generations past, they have had their county fairs, with concomitant cattle and poultry exhibits, horse-racing, fakers, and side-shows of rather more than a questionable nature. They have had farmers’ picnics, for the most part small affairs, of purely local interest. But the Amenia idea was conceived in a spirit bigger and broader, and, it is believed, more truly democratic and more representative of what public spirit in a rural community ought to be. To quote from the program of the fourth annual Amenia Field Day, “The Amenia Field Day offers, as a substitute for the commercialized fair, a free day of wholesome enjoyment, supported by the united efforts of a whole community. One day a year the people of Amenia invite the whole countryside to such a day of clean and simple recreation, without gamblers, fakers, intoxicating liquors, or vulgar sideshows. Admission to our festival is free to all.”

This year, the committee strained every nerve towards including in the day’s entertainment features that should take in everyone, young and old, of both sexes. For boys, they planned a series of athletic events, running and jumping contests, open to all comers, without limitation save as to age. Prizes were generously donated by a leading citizen of Amenia, but the committee is seriously considering doing away with all prizes next year, except the simplest of silk badges, commemorative of the event.

The scope of athletic sports, in which it is wise for girls to participate, is so limited that this year for the first time folk-dancing was instituted. The committee imported a teacher from the Bureau of Recreation, Department of Parks, New York City, and entrusted to her not merely the task of teaching the graceful and quaint dances, that have been imported from over the seas, to the maidens of Dutchess County, but the far more difficult task of organizing the classes, of getting the girls to join, of persuading the mothers to allow their daughters to join. Nowhere are social strata so well-defined, nowhere religious and racial lines so closely drawn as in the country community; nowhere are barriers of caste so hard to break down. To level the ranks of prosperous and poor, to bring about harmony between Catholic and Protestant elements, requires a very large measure of diplomacy and tact, combined with human sympathy.

For small children of both sexes, under mature leadership, were arranged the games which city children for generations past have known and loved, and in turn handed down to their smaller brothers and sisters; games such as “cat and rat,” “farmer-in-the-dell,” etc., which for some inexplicable reason seem never to have penetrated the school playgrounds of Dutchess County.

On Field Day, August 19, for miles around Amenia, the holiday spirit was in the air. Everybody with his wife and family, in automobile, farm wagon, or on foot, took the road that led to Amenia Field; even those who professed no interest in the events of the day, came “just to see who was there!” Everybody brought lunchbaskets and spread the contents under the trees, in true picnic style, since nothing but soft drinks and sandwiches were sold on the grounds.

Throughout the day, a band of musicians played patriotic and popular airs. The old folks gathered together contentedly in groups, listening to the music, while keeping an admiring eye on the prowess of their athletic sons, the grace of their daughters dancing on the sward. Young and old participated in the grand march that took place immediately after lunch-hour.

Afterwards, in a tent-covered auditorium, men and women of national prominence addressed an attentive audience on subjects chosen for their interest to a rural population. Suffragists, from Poughkeepsie and New York, by way of propaganda, presented an open-air pageant portraying the advance of women’s education in modern times. Meanwhile, a demonstration of alfalfa-growing, under the supervision of the Dutchess County Farm Bureau, and the State Department of Agriculture, was given in a neighboring field. Enthusiastic “fans” of Dutchess County were given an opportunity to cheer at a baseball game between two local teams.

The day finished with a band concert held in the Post Office Square, of Amenia, which had been decked with hundreds of lighted Chinese lanterns, strung from adjoining buildings. The expense of this concert, as of all the other features of the day, was met by popular subscription. Everybody was invited, nobody solicited, to contribute, according to his means.

On every program of Amenia Field Day has been printed these principles:

“You have got to make the country as attractive socially as the city if you want to keep the young folks on the farms.

“There’s a good deal of work in the country, but most of our boys and girls have forgotten how to play.

“Baseball is a splendid game, but it isn’t the only one. Every healthy boy should be interested in at least half a dozen others. Don’t merely watch others play games; play them yourself.

“You can’t drink strong drink and be an athlete. Get your boys interested in honest and healthy sports, and save them from drink and dissipation.

“Contests and competitions are not the main thing. ‘The strong compete and grow stronger; the weak look on and grow weaker.’ The main thing is play. Learn the great lesson that play is just as necessary for your sons as work.

“The community should help to run its own recreations. Its festivals should be, not only for the people, but of and by the people.”

MODEL HOUSING AS A COLLEGE COURSE

Some of the concrete results of the Tuskegee experiment in reconstructing the interior of the Negro rural home, were told in THE SURVEY of August 30. Paine College, Augusta, Ga., a school for Negroes, supported for thirty years by southern white people, who feel that the Negro question can only be solved when the white descendants of slave owners set their hearts and heads to the task, is endeavoring to experiment on the reconstruction of the Negro city home by change of material environment If a $50,000 endowment can be raised the college will put into effect a plan of housing designed to prove it profitable, not only morally but financially, to provide the Negro an exterior environment which shall make the task of educating him for life easier. The scheme and the demand for better housing on which it is based is described by Mrs. John D. Hammond, wife of and co-worker with the white president of Paine College.

The whole plan is based upon the belief that the Negro is himself eagerly striving for a decent living. The Negroes’ own fight, individually, for better homes is said to be little short of heroic. All through the South, in city and country, Negro-owned homes witness to the increasing prosperity of a large class, and to the effort and self-denial of thousands more, whose income would seem to many of us, to put house-owning utterly out of the question.

But most Negroes belong to that economic class which, the world over, pays the heaviest rent in proportion to its income and yields the landlord the largest return on his investment, yet which receives in return little which is compatible with health or decency.

This is the tragedy of the Negro slum. Nobody is trying to abolish it, because nobody believes it can be done. We believe the Negro breeds the slum--instead of the slum breeding many of the Negro’s defects. Everywhere else people are re-creating the slum-dweller by abolishing the slum. We make no effort, partly because, as yet, few of us know of the widespread struggle for better housing the Negro is himself making.

What is needed, Mrs. Hammond believes, is an experiment station in Negro housing in the South. When it is proven, as it surely can be, that Negro day laborers and washerwomen can be decently housed at a fair profit to the landlord, southern money will be invested in houses of the right kind. But somebody must prove it, and advertise the proof far and wide.

The plan by which Paine College hopes to prove it is, in brief, to buy a city block of about six acres in Augusta, Ga., and build on four acres little three-roomed houses, such as day-laborers and washerwomen rent. The houses are to have a sink in every kitchen (water in the house is to this class a luxury unknown), and a toilet, ample window space, closets, and the porch so necessary to family comfort in a warm climate. By building double houses, and four acres full of them at a time, they can be put up for $850 per double house.[1] The rent would be two dollars the room per month, the current rent for that district. The lot for each family would be 20 x 105, which would afford a little garden-space in the rear--a privilege highly esteemed by many of the poorer Negroes, and one which, under the plan proposed, would be a powerful aid in the upbuilding of home and family life.

Four acres of the six-acre block would give room for forty double houses. The other two acres Mrs. Hammond designs to use as a playground for the children, and a site for a community house. This house should contain a kindergarten room and a room for boys’ clubs which could be thrown together at night and used for the recreation and the instruction of the grown people. It should have a room for cooking classes, one for sewing classes, a few free baths for men and women; and a small laundry and drying room, like those in the East End of London, a small weekly payment for the use of which would relieve the mothers from the heaviest of their drudgery, and set free much of their time for home-making. It would also make possible a war of extermination against the accumulations of trash about the ordinary Negro home, where so many abominations are claimed to be necessary for the sake of the pot and fire in the yard “to boil de clo’es.”

Rent would be collected on the Octavia Hill plan, with its concomitant thrift clubs, mothers’, men’s, children’s, and home-improvement clubs, and these clubs would do for the tenants just what it does elsewhere for slum-dwellers of other races. They would, Mrs. Hammond believes, be built up in character, the houses would be saved from the usual degeneration of property rented to this economic class, a good return would be realized on the investment, and the children ultimately turned over to the community as self-respecting and law-abiding instead of furnishing, as is inevitable under present conditions, their full quota of paupers and criminals, to be carried by the taxpayers of the city.

Three rooms would be reserved for the Negro worker, who would not only keep them as a model home, but would use them to train the girls in housework. This would leave seventy-nine three-roomed homes for rent, at six dollars each monthly, a yearly total of $5,688.00. This sum would pay the salary of the social worker, who is a necessity to the success of the plan, and yet yield 10 per cent gross on the investment, though two acres of the land and the settlement house, representing one-fifth of the sum invested would he unproductive from a commercial point of view. This is on the basis of an expense of $9,000 for land, $34,000 for forty double houses and $7,500 for the settlement house, a total investment of $50,500.

Rentals from Negro property now yield a larger gross return than this, as do rentals from similar property elsewhere; but the houses deteriorate so rapidly from misuse that the landlord feels that only an extraordinary profit while they last can insure him against actual loss. A gross return of 10 per cent where the buildings suffered only the depreciation caused by rational use would be as attractive to the ordinary business man here as elsewhere.

Mrs. Hammond’s scheme would be considered part of the educational system of Paine College. Good housing and good living as taught in the settlement and practically applied in the model housing plan would become a part of the school curriculum. The raising of the endowment fund is the present problem of Paine College. The peculiarity of this, as of all other Negro schools, is that the more students it has the poorer it is. Few of the pupils can pay the full amount asked of them, which is itself less than the actual cost of their board and tuition. Some work is furnished them--in kitchen, laundry and household for the girls, in grounds and garden for the boys--by which they partly pay their way. The plan is to have the income from the model housing endowment used to pay poor students for work done and so provide with an education many whom the college is forced now to turn away.

The homes, playground and settlement would furnish a practical field where young Negro women could be trained as social workers in order to meet the growing demand from white people in several southern states for trained Negroes to work among the poor of their own race.

[1] The houses would be of wood, as local conditions make the expense of brick or cement prohibitive.

=BOYS’ “PETITION FOR INDEPENDENCE”=

A “Petition for Independence,” signed by representatives of the boys and girls of Ithaca, expresses the principles of the Junior Municipality organized in that city the latter part of June by William R. George, director of the National Association of Junior Republics. The object of the “municipality” is the practical training of younger citizens in their rights and responsibilities by the formation of a government of junior officials who shall act in matters of the public welfare in co-operation with the city officials. Already the mayors of Cortland, N. Y., and Jersey City have asked Mr. George to start like organizations.

“We, the undersigned, being the youth of Ithaca, N. Y., between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, do respectfully call to the attention of our elders that, although not of age, we nevertheless feel we have reached the point where we could and should actively participate in the government of our city.

“We regard as merely a legal fiction the assumption that we are infants in all matters relating to the government of the community.

“We respectfully call attention to the fact that in time of war boys between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one are sent to the front to fight for their country and are frequently as officers placed in positions of peculiar responsibility and danger. Is it not self-evident that if youths can thus honorably acquit themselves in time of war, they could and should assume the less dangerous and onerous responsibilities of peace?

“We find in the annals of history that from time immemorial youths of our age have, when placed in positions of trust, acquitted themselves creditably. Before the age of twenty-one Alexander the Great was not only the ruler of Macedon, but the dominant power in all Greece; Charles James Fox became a member of the British Parliament before he was of age, and the younger Pitt became Prime Minister of Great Britain when he had scarcely passed his majority. In short, there is abundant evidence both in the past and the present that youth can and will rise to responsibility when it is placed upon them.

“Such being the case, we do hereby resolve to accept the suggestion of William R. George, the founder of the Junior Republics, and the invitations of Mayor Reamer and the Common Council and organize ourselves into a Junior Municipality in order that we may at once actively serve our city as junior citizens and thereby prepare ourselves for more efficient citizenship as adults.

“We hereby pledge ourselves to assist in the enforcement of all the laws and ordinances of the city, particularly those directly relating to boys and girls and their interests.

“We further pledge ourselves that when elected to any office in the Junior Municipality we will give our full and faithful co-operation to the adult official holding the corresponding office in the city government and will discharge our duties solely with reference to the welfare of the whole city.”

=WHAT ONE SMALL TOWN IS DOING=

Zona Gale in a pamphlet, Civic Improvement in the Little Towns, tells how first the women and then the men and women of one small community inaugurated an unusually successful campaign in the field of public social service. This town is described as one of 6,000 inhabitants, probably Portage, Wis., where Miss Gale lives.

In her opinion the civic problem of the small town is threefold: first to get into touch with the current of new understanding that the conservation of physical and moral life is largely economic; second, to find practical ways of applying this understanding to the present and future of the town; and third, to do all this with exceedingly little money.

The Women’s Club called a meeting at the City Hall of all women interested in town development. At this meeting the constitution of the Wichita, Kan., Improvement Association was adopted and work mapped out for five committees: sanitary, educational, art, children’s auxiliary, and streets and alleys.

Among the concrete results obtained through the work of these committees were the inauguration of a system of garbage disposal; the grading and planting of a small park at the end of a bridge at the turn in a river; the establishment of a rest room in the town for farmers’ wives from the surrounding country, although owing to a misunderstanding permission to use a small committee room in the City Hall was revoked by the Town Council; the establishment of a charity co-ordination committee; a town lecture course; public bath houses; a sane Fourth, and medical and dental inspection of school children.

=PERSONALS=

The recent action of Congress and President Wilson, under the specific encouragement of both railroad managers and employes, in placing industrial mediation and arbitration on a wider and stronger basis, is a long step toward the realization of a definite ideal which has been cradled in the mind of Charles P. Neill, the former commissioner of labor.

Former President Roosevelt discovered Mr. Neill. Mr. Neill discovered the Erdman Act, which platted a narrow pathway through the industrial jungle in the United States. Congress put the Erdman Act on the statute books, but Charles P. Neill placed it definitely in the imagination of the American people and focused upon it the hope of the nation for industrial peace. It is to Mr. Neill’s credit that he found and took advantage of the possibilities of the Erdman Act in spite of its limitations.

From 1898, when the Erdman Act was passed, to 1906, only a single attempt was made to utilize its provisions in industrial warfare. That attempt, which was in June, 1899, failed. Mr. Neill became commissioner of labor in 1905. Within the five years, December, 1906, to January, 1912, the provisions of the law were invoked in nearly 60 interstate commerce disputes. Between 1908 and 1912 there was but one period as long as three months during which mediation was not sought in a railroad dispute. The threatened strikes which were averted during these five years involved over half a million miles of railroad and 163,000 railroad employes. These figures include duplicates since the same railroad was sometimes involved more than once.

In all this work as mediator Mr. Neill enjoyed the unlimited confidence of railroad managers, and employes alike. Whatever the bitterness, the differences in codes of industrial ethics, and the misunderstandings of fact which separated into bitter opposition the railroad managers and their employes, there was no time when both parties failed to give absolute confidence to Commissioner Neill and to rely with unquestioning trust on his judgment, on his personal character, and the practical wisdom of his suggestion. This extraordinary tribute to him was primarily a tribute to his character, but it was earned in part by the marvelous accuracy with which his imagination seized situations and all their parts, and enabled him to talk the minutely technical language of railroad operation. The rare assemblage of mental and moral gifts which characterize Mr. Neill was fully recognized and nothing clouded that recognition during his term of service. These extraordinary features of his career will offer but little consolation to the few lonely critics whose voices were recently heard in high circles.

Mr. Neill was made commissioner of labor in 1905. He was re-appointed in 1909. His third nomination was sent to the Senate by President Taft in January, 1913. Confirmation was withheld because of the Democratic policy toward President Taft’s nominations in general. Mr. Neill’s name was sent back to the Senate by President Wilson but it was not acted upon at the short session. It was again sent to the Senate at its extraordinary session. Meantime Mr. Neill’s term of office had expired, and on February 1 he surrendered his office. Confirmation was delayed, apparently because certain southern Senators seemed to have views of the humanities of industry which were not in accord with those of Commissioner Neill. His appointment, however, was finally confirmed and Mr. Neill resumed his office. After a few weeks of service he resigned to take the position of director of welfare with the American Smelting and Refining Company. He has taken charge of the welfare of approximately 20,000 laboring men in the employ of this corporation. The delay of the confirmation of Mr. Neill’s appointment brought forth from the labor press generally, from the railroad managers of the United States and from the American press generally, tributes to his character, to his power, and to his achievements which have been rarely equaled and more rarely exceeded in the industrial history of the nation.