The Neighborhood Group
Chapter XXV
Neighborhood Organization vs. Party Organization

Leaders or Bosses?

NEIGHBORHOOD organization will prove fatal to party organization not only through the creating of a genuine will of the people, but also through the producing of real leaders to take the place of the bosses.

American democracy has always been afraid of leadership. Our constitutions of the eighteenth century provided no one department to lead, no one man in the legislature to lead. Therefore, as we must have leadership, there has been much undefined, irresponsible leadership. This has often meant corruption and abuse, bad enough, but worse still it has meant the creation of machinery for the perpetuation of corruption, the encouragement of abuse. Under machine politics we choose for our leaders the men who are most popular for the moment or who have worked out the most thorough system of patronage, or rather of course we do not choose at all.
We have two kinds of leaders under our party system, both the wrong kind: we have our actual leaders, the bosses, and our official leaders who have tended to be men who could be managed by the party. Our officials in their campaign speeches say that they are the "servants of the people." But we do not want "servants" any more than we want bosses; we want genuine leaders. Now that more and more direct power is being given to the people it is especially necessary that we should not be led by machine bosses, but that we should evolve the kind of leadership which will serve a true democracy, which will be the expression of a true democracy, and will guide it to democratic ends by democratic methods.

We hope through local group organization to evolve real leaders.
There should be in a democracy some sort of regular and ceaseless process by which ability of all sorts should come to the top,. and flexibility in our forms so that new ability can always find its greatest point of usefulness, and so that service which is no longer useful can be replaced by that which is. In neighborhood groups where we have different alignments on different questions, there will be a tendency for those to lead at any particular moment who are most competent to lead in the particular matter in hand.
Thus a mechanical leadership will give place to a vital leadership.
Suppose the subject is sanitation. The man who is most interested, who has the clearest view of the need and who is its most insistent champion, will naturally step forth as the leader in that. The man who knows most about educational matters will lead in those, will be chosen eventually for the school committee or for the educational committee of the state legislature. Thus the different leaders of a democracy appear. Here in the neighborhood group leaders are born. Democracy is the breeding-ground of aristocracy.
You have all the chance the world gives. In your neighborhood group show the clearness of your mind, the strength of your grip, your power to elicit and to guide cooperative action, and you emerge as the leader of men.

No adequate statement can be made in regard to leadership until it is studied in relation to group psychology. The leadership of the British Premier, of President Wilson, will become interesting
studies when we have a better understanding of this subject.
Meanwhile let us look briefly at some of the qualities of leadership.

The leader guides the group and is at the same time himself guided by the group, is always a part of the group. No one can truly lead except from within. One danger of conceiving the leader as outside is that then what ought to be group loyalty will become personal loyalty. When we have a leader within the group these two loyalties can merge.

The leader must have the instinct to trace every evil to its cause, but, equally valuable, he must be able to see the relative value of the cause to each one of his group -- in other words, to see the total relativity of the cause to the group. He must draw out all the varying needs of the neighborhood as related to the
cause and reconcile them in the remedy. A baby is ill; is the milk perhaps too rich for babies? But probably the rest of the neighborhood demands rich milk. All the neighborhood needs in regard to milk must be elicited and reconciled in the remedy for the sick child. That is, the remedy cannot be thinner milk, but it may be a demand that the milkman have separate milk for babies.

In other words the leader of our neighborhood group must interpret our experience to us, must see all the different points of view which underlie our daily activities and also their connections, must adjust the varying and often conflicting needs, must lead the group to an understanding of its needs and to a
unification of its purpose. He must give form to things vague, things latent, to mere tendencies. He must be able to lead us to wise decisions, not to impose his own wise decisions upon us. We need leaders, not masters or drivers.

The power of leadership is the power of integrating. This is the power which creates community. You can see it when two or three strangers or casual acquaintances are calling upon some one. With
some hostesses you all talk across at one another as entirely separate individuals, pleasantly and friendlily (sic), to be sure, but still across unbridged chasms; while other hostesses have the power of making you all feel for the moment related, as if you were one little community for the time being. This is a subtle as well as a valuable gift. It is one that leaders of men must possess. It is thus that the collective will is evolved from out the chaos of varied personality and complex circumstance.

The skillful leader then does not rely on personal force; he controls his group not by dominating but by expressing it. He stimulates what is best in us; he unifies and concentrates what we feel only gropingly and scatteringly, but he never gets away from the current of which we and he are both an integral part. He is a leader who gives form to the inchoate energy in every man. The person who influences me most is not he who does great deeds but he who makes me feel I can do great deeds. Many people tell me what I ought to do and just how I ought to do it, but few have made me want to do something. Who ever has struck fire out of me, aroused me to action which I should not otherwise have taken, he has been my leader. The community leader is he who can liberate the greatest amount of energy in his community.

Then the neighborhood leader must be a practical politician. He must be able to interpret a neighborhood not only to itself but to others. He must know not only the need of every charwoman but how politics can answer her call. He must know the great movements of the present and their meaning, and he must know how the smallest needs and the humblest powers of his neighborhood can be fitted into the progressive movements of our time. His duty is to shape politics continuously. As the satisfaction of one need, or the expression of one latent power, reveals many more, he must be always alert and ever ready to gather up the many threads into one strand of united endeavor. He is the patient watcher, the active
spokesman, the sincere and ardent exponent of a community consciousness. His guiding, embracing and dominant thought is to make that community consciousness articulate in government.

The politician is not a group but a crowd leader. The leader of a crowd dominates because a crowd wants to be dominated.
Politicians do not try to convince but to dazzle; they do not deal with facts but with formulae and vague generalizations, with the flag and the country. If our politicians and our representatives are not our most competent men, but those who have the greatest power of suggestion and are most adroit in using it, the proposal here is that we shall develop methods which will produce real leaders. We are aiming now in the reorganization of our state constitutions at responsible official leadership instead of the irresponsible party boss system which was necessary once because we had to have leaders of some sort. How far this new movement shall succeed, will depend on how far it has back of it, or can be made to have back of it, the kind of organization which will develop group not crowd leaders.

Through neighborhood organization we hope that real leaders instead of bosses will be evolved. Democracy does not tend to suppress leadership as is often stated; it is the only organization of society which will bring out leadership. As soon as we are given opportunities for the release of the energy there is in us, heroes and leaders will arise among us. These will draw their stimulus, their passion, their life from all, and then in their turn increase in all passion and power and creating force.

The Neighborhood Group
Chapter XXVI
Neighborhood Organization vs. Party Organization

A Responsible Neighborhood

WE have said that neighborhood organization must replace party organization by evolving a true will of the people, by giving us leaders instead of bosses, and by making possible a responsible government to take the place of our irresponsible party government.
Let us now consider the last point: the possibility of an integrated neighborhood responsibility.

Under our party organization the men who formulate the party platform do not have the official responsibility of carrying it out. Moreover at present representative government rests on the fallacy that when you delegate the job you delegate the responsibility. Most of the abuses which have crept in, business corruption and political bossism alike, are due in large measure to this delegating of responsibility. What we need is a kind of government which will delegate the job but not the responsibility.
The case is somewhat like that of the head of a business undertaking, who makes the men under him responsible for their own work and still the final responsibility rests with him. This is not divided responsibility but shared responsibility -- a very different thing.

Consider what happens when I want to get a bill through the legislature. I may feel sure that the bill is good and also that "the people" want it, but I can work only through party, and at the state house I have to face all the special interests bound up with party, all the thousand and one "political" considerations, whether I succeed or fail. But of course I recognize the humor of this statement: I ought never to try to get a bill through the legislature; special and partial groups have to do this simply because there is at present no other way; there must be some other way, some recognized way. We do not want to circumvent party but to replace party.

Our reform associations, while they have fought party, have often endeavored to substitute their own organization for the party organization. This has often been the alternative offered to us -- do we want good government or poor government? We have not been asked if we would like to govern ourselves. This is why Mitchell lost last year in New York. One of the New York papers during the campaign advised Mr. Mitchell "to get nearer the people." But it is not for government to "get nearer" the people; it must identify itself with the people. It isn't enough for the "good" officials to explain to the people what they are doing; they must take the people into their counsels. If the Gary system had ever been properly put up to the fathers it is doubtful if they would have voted against it. Then a good deal of this advice in regard to city officials "explaining" their plans in all parts of the city leaves out of account that the local people have a great deal to give.
Some of the most uneducated, so-called, of the fathers and mothers might have had valuable points of view to offer in regard to the practical workings of the Gary system.

Tammany won in New York and we heard many people say, "Well, this is your democracy, the people want bad government, the majority of people in New York city have voted for it." Nothing could be more superficial. What the election in New York meant was that "the people" are cleverer than was thought; they know that the question should not be of "good" government or "bad" government, but only of self-government, and the only way they have of expressing this is to vote against a government which _seems_ to disregard them.

To say, "We are good men, we are honest officials, we are employing experts on education, sanitation etc, you must trust us," will not do; some way must be devised of connecting the experts and the people -- that is the first thing to be worked out, then some way of tailing the people into the counsels of city administration.
All of us criticize things we don't know anything about. As soon as we see the difficulties, _as soon as the responsibility is put upon us_, our whole attitude changes. Take the popular cry "Boston positions for Boston people." This seems a pretty good principle to superficial thinking. But when we know that we have an appropriation of $200,000 a year for a certain department, and are looking for a man to administer it, when we go into the matter and find that there are only two or three experts for this position in the United States, and that not one of these lives in Boston, the question takes the concrete form, "Shall we allow $200,000 of our money to be wasted through inept administration?" It might be said, "But city governments do have the responsibility and yet this is just what they are all the time doing." Certainly, because their position rests on patronage, but I am proposing that the whole system be changed.

Neighborhood organization must be the method of effective popular responsibility: first, by giving reality to the political bond; secondly, by providing the machinery by which a genuine control of the people can be put into operation. At present nearly all our needs are satisfied by external agencies, government or
institutional. Health societies offer health to us, recreation associations teach us how to play, civic art leagues give us more beautiful surroundings, associated charities give us poor relief.
A kind lady leads my girl to the dentist, a kind young man finds employment for my boy, a stern officer of the city sees that my children are in their places at school. I am constantly being acted upon, no one is encouraging me to act. New York has one hundred municipal welfare divisions and bureaus. Thus am I robbed of my most precious possession -- my responsibilities -- for only the active process of participation can shape me for the social purpose.

But all this is to end. The community itself must grip its own problems, must fill its needs, must make effective its aspirations.
If we want the latest scientific knowledge in regard to food values, let us get an expert to come to us, not wait for some society to send an "agent" to us; if the stores near us are not selling at fair prices, let us make a cooperative effort to set this right. If we want milk and baby hygiene organized, our own local doctors should, in proper cooperation with experts on the one hand and the mothers on the other, organize this branch of public service. The medical experts may be employees of the government,
but if the plan of their service be worked out by all three -- the experts, the local doctors and the mothers -- the results will be: (1) that the needs of the neighborhood will really be met, (2) much
valuable time of the expert will be saved, (3) a close follow-up will be possible, (4) the expert can be called in whenever necessary through local initiative, and (5) the machinery will be in existence by which the study of that particular problem can be carried on not as a special investigation but as a regular part of neighborhood life.

Take another example. The Placement Bureau is also a necessary public service: it needs the work of experts and it needs pooled information and centralized machinery; a parent cannot find out all
the jobs available in a city for boys of 16 in order to place one boy. But as long as the secretary of the Placement Bureau appears in the home and takes this whole burden off the parent, and off the
community he is serving, his work will not be well done. For the boy will suffer eventually: he cannot be cut off from his community without being hurt; community incentive is the greatest one we
know, and somehow there must be worked out some community responsibility for that boy, as well as some responsibility on his part to his community for standing up or falling down on his job.
I say that the boy will eventually suffer; his community also will suffer, for it also has need of him; moreover, the community will greatly suffer by the loss of this opportunity of connecting it, through the parents, with the whole industrial problem of the city.
The expert service of the Placement Bureau, whether it is administered by city or state, should always be joined to local initiative, effort and responsibility.

And so for every need. If we want well-managed dances for ourdaughters, we, mothers and fathers, must go and manage them. We do not exist on one side and the government on the other. If you go to
a municipal dance-hall and see it managed by officials appointed from City Hall, you say, "This is a government affair." But if you go to a schoolhouse and see a dance managed by men and women chosen
by the district, you say, "This is a community affair, government has nothing to do with this." These two conceptions must mingle before we can have any worthy political life. It must be clearly seen that we can operate _as_ government as well as _with_ government, that the citizen functions through government and the government functions through the citizen. It is not a municipal dance-hall regulated by the city authorities which expresses the right relation between civics and dancing, but dances planned and
managed by a neighborhood for itself.

It is not the civic theatre which is the last word in the relation of the drama to the people, it is a community organized theatre. Art and civics do not meet merely by the state presenting art to its members; the civic expression of art is illustrated by locally managed festivals, by community singing, a local orchestra or dramatic club, community dancing etc. Those of us who are working for civic art are working for this: for people to express themselves in artistic forms and to organize themselves for that
purpose. The state must give the people every opportunity for building up their own full, varied, healthful life. It seems to be often thought that when the state provides schools, parks, universities etc., there you have the ideal state. But we must go beyond this and find our ideal state in that which shows its
members how to build up its own life _in_ schools, parks, universities etc. [1]

1. The war has shown us that our national agricultural program can best be done on a cooperative neighborhood basis: through the establishment of community agricultural conferences, community labor, seed and implement exchanges, community canning centres, community markets, etc.

The question which the state must always be trying to answer is how it can do more for its members at the same time that it is stimulating them to do more for themselves. No, more than this, its doing more for them must take the form of their doing more for themselves. Our modern problem is not, as one would think from some of the writing on social legislation, how much the increased activity of the state can do for the individual, but how the increasing activity of the individual can be state activity, how the widening of the sphere of state activity can be a widening of our own activity. The arguments for or against government action should not take the form of how much or how little government action we shall have, but entirely of how government action and self-action can coincide. Our one essential political problem is
always how to be the state, not, putting the state on one side and the individual on the other, to work out their respective provinces. I have said in the chapter on "Our Political Dualism" that the state and the individual are one, yet this is pure theory until we make them one. But they can never be made one through schemes of representation etc., only by the intimate daily lives of all becoming the constituents of the life of the state.

When a Mothers' Club in one of the Boston School Centres found a united want -- that of keeping their children off the streets on Saturday afternoon and giving them some wholesome amusement -- and
decided to meet this want by asking the city of Boston for permission to use the moving-picture machine of the Dorchester High School for fairy-story films, the mothers to manage the undertaking, two significant facts stand out: (1) they did not ask an outside agency to do something for them, for the men and women of Dorchester, with all the other men and women of Boston, _are_ the city of Boston; (2) they were not merely doing something for their children on those Saturday afternoons, they were in a sense officials of the city of Boston working for the youth of Boston.
These two conceptions must blend: we do not do for government, government does not do for us, we should be constantly the hands and feet, yes and the head and heart of government [1].

1. I do not mean to imply that I think it is easy to learn how to identify ourselves with our city, especially for those who live In large cities. The men of a small town know that if they have a new town-hall they will have to pay for it. In a large city men ask for a ward building because they will not have to pay for it, they think. It is all this which neighborhood organization and the integration of neighborhoods, of which I shall speak later, must remedy.

A most successful effort at neighborhood organization is that of the East Harlem Community Association, which set East Harlem to work on its own problems: first to investigate conditions, and then to find a way of meeting these conditions. The most interesting point about the whole scheme is that the work is not done by "experts" or any one else from outside; there are no paid visitors, but a committee of twelve mothers -- one colored woman, two Italian, two Jewish, two Irish, three American, one Polish, and one
German -- are doing the work well. As a result of the activities of the East Harlem Community Association there are now in a public school building of the neighborhood organized athletic clubs,
industrial classes, orchestra, glee, dramatic and art clubs, concerts, good moving pictures, dances, big brother and big sister groups, Mothers' Leagues, Parents' Associations, physical examination of school children etc. Of course these community associations must use expert advice and expert service. Exactly how this relation will be most satisfactorily worked out we do not yet clearly see [1].

1 The plan of Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Phillips for community organization and for the connection with it of expert service is too comprehensive to describe here, but based as it is on their actual experience, and planning as it does for the training of whole neighborhoods and the arousing of them to responsibility and action, it should be studied by every one, for such plans are, I believe, the best signs we have that
democracy is yet possible for America.

I give this merely as one illustration out of many possible ones.
The necessity of neighborhood organization as the basis of future progress is seen by many people to-day. In New York there is a vigorous movement for "Neighborhood Associations"; there are four
already in active working order. If the main idea of some of these is services rendered rather than neighborhood organization; if others see too great a separation between needs and the satisfaction of the needs, that is, if the neighborhoods are always to ask the questions and the experts to find the answers, still these Associations are an interesting and valuable part of the neighborhood movement [1].

1. How much we are all indebted to the settlements as the pioneer neighborhood movement I do not stop to consider here.

The acute problem of municipal life is how to make us men and women of Boston feel that we _are_ the city, directly responsible for everything concerning it. Neighborhood organization, brought into existence largely by the growing feeling of each individual that he is responsible for the life around him, itself then
increases and focuses this sense of responsibility. Neighborhood association is vivid and intimate. Whereas the individual seems lost in a big city, through his neighborhood he not only becomes an
integral part of the city but becomes keenly conscious of his citizenship.

In a word, what we hope neighborhood organization will do for the development of responsibility is this: that men will learn that they are not to _influence_ politics through their local groups, they are to _be_ politics. This is the error of some of the reform associations: they want to influence politics. This point of view will never spell progress for us. When we have the organized neighborhood group, when every man sees the problems of political and social reorganization not as abstract matters but as constituting his daily life, when men are so educated in politics as to feel that they themselves are politics functioning, and when our organization is such that this functioning recoils on them, they will so shape their conduct as to change the situation. Then when they are conscious of themselves as masters of the situation they will acknowledge their responsibility.

We see many signs around us to-day of an increased sense of responsibility, of a longing for a self-expression that is not to be an individual self-expression but community self-expression.
Take the women's clubs: in their first stage their object was personal development; in the second they wished to do something for their town; in the present or third stage women are demanding through some of the more progressive clubs, through women's municipal leagues etc., a more direct share in community life. They are joining together not to benefit themselves, not to benefit others, as others, but because all together they wish to express their community -- no, they wish to _be_ their community. They are
not satisfied with serving, but gathering up the service of all in a common consciousness, each feels herself the whole and seeks to express the whole.

But I do not mean that this greater realization of community is confined to women. How often in the past we have heard a man say complacently, "Well, I suppose I must do my duty and go to the polls and vote to-morrow," or "I must show myself at that rally tonight." But a nobler idea than this is now filling the minds of many men. They go to their civic club not because it is their duty, but because just there working together with their fellows for the furtherance of their common aims, they find their greatest
satisfaction. In neighborhood groups men can find that self-realization which becomes by the most wonderful miracle life can offer us community realization. That is, I can learn through my neighborhood group that I am the city, I am the nation, and that fatal transference of responsibility to an invisible and
non-existent "they" can be blotted out forever. When neighborhood organization begins to teach that there is no "they," that it is always we, we, we, that mothers are responsible and fathers are responsible, and young men are responsible, and young women are responsible, for their city and their nation, it will begin to teach its chief lesson.

Do I thrill with the passion of service, of joyful, voluntary surrender to a mighty cause as I sail for France to serve the great ends of the Allies? Social and political organization are fatally at fault if they cannot give me the same elation as I go to my Neighborhood Centre and know that there too the world has vital
need of me, there too am I not only pouring myself out in world service, but that I am, just in so far, creating, actually building, a new and fairer world.

This is the finest word that can be said for neighborhood organization, for my finding my place through my response to every daily need of my nearest group. For the great word I believe on this subject is not that I _serve_ my neighborhood, my city, my nation, but that by this service I _become_ my neighborhood, my city, my nation. Surely at this hour in our history we can realize this as never before. The soul of America is being born to-day. The war is binding together class and class, alien and American, men and women. We rejoice that we are alive at this moment, but the keenness of my joy is not because I can serve America but because I am America. I save food in my home not in order that my family income can meet the strain of the higher prices, not because I can thereby help to send more food to the Allies, but because I, saving the food of America for the Allies and the world, am performing
America's task, _am_ therefore America. This is the deeper thought of neighborhood organization: that through performing my humblest duties I am creating the soul of this great democracy.

Neighborhood organization must then take the place of party organization. The neighborhood group will answer many of the questions we have put to a party organization which has remained deaf to our importunities, dumb to all our entreaties. We have asked for bread and received the stone times without number. The rigid formality of the party means stultification, annihilation.
But group politics, made of the very stuff of life, of the people of the groups, will express the inner, intimate, ardent desires of spontaneous human beings, and will contain within its circumference the possibility of the fullest satisfaction of those desires. Group organization gives a living, pulsing unity made up of the minds and hearts and seasoned judgments of vital men and women. Such organization is capable of unbroken growth. And when this vine of life, which sends its roots where every two or three are gathered together, has rooted itself in the neighborhood, faithful care, sedulous watching, loving ministration will appear with it, will be the natural way of living. Its impalpable bonds hold us together, and although we may differ on countless questions, instead of flying asunder we work out the form in political life which will shelter us and supply our needs. Faithfulness to the neighborhood bond must take the place of allegiance to party. Loyalty to a party is loyalty to a thing -- we want a living politics in which loyalty is always intrinsic. And from the strength of this living bond shall come the power of our united life. Always the actor, never the spectator, is the rule of the new democracy. Always the sharer, never the giver or the receiver, is the order of our new life.

Do you think the neighborhood group too puny to cope with this giant towering above us, drunk with the blood of its many triumphs?
The young David went out to conquer Goliath, strong in the conviction of his power. Cannot our cause justify an equal faith?

Is our daily life profane and only so far as we rise out of it do we approach the sacred life? Then no wonder politics are what they have become. But this is not the creed of men to-day: we believe in
the sacredness of all our life; we believe that Divinity is forever incarnating in humanity, and so we believe in Humanity and the common daily life of all men.