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Title: The social center a means of common understanding
An address delivered by the Hon. Woodrow Wilson, Governor of New Jersey, before the First National Conference on Civic and Social....
Author: Woodrow Wilson
Release date: December 2, 2023 [eBook #72293]
Language: English
Original publication: Madison: The University of Wisconsin, 1894
Credits: Bob Taylor, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.
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Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
BULLETIN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
Serial No. 470: General Series, No. 306.
EXTENSION DIVISION
OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
GENERAL INFORMATION AND WELFARE
THE SOCIAL CENTER
A MEANS OF COMMON UNDERSTANDING
An address delivered by Hon. Woodrow Wilson, Governor
of New Jersey, before the First National Conference
on Civic and Social Center Development, at Madison,
Wis., October 25, 1911.
PRICE 5 CENTS
MADISON
Published by the University
December, 1911
Entered as second-class matter June 10, 1898, at the post office at
Madison, Wisconsin, under the Act of July 16, 1891
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to any address on request.
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to any address on request.
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Reference, Civic and Social Center, and Vocational Institute work,
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The University of Wisconsin
UNIVERSITY EXTENSION DIVISION
Department of General Information and Welfare
MADISON, WIS.
OFFICERS OF ADMINISTRATION
CHARLES RICHARD VAN HISE, Ph. D., LL. D. President of the University
LOUIS E. REBER, M. S., Sc. D. Dean, University Extension Division
EDWARD J. WARD, M. A. Adviser, Bureau of Civic and Social Center
Development.
THE SOCIAL CENTER
A MEANS OF COMMON UNDERSTANDING
An address delivered by Hon. Woodrow Wilson, Governor of New Jersey,
before the First National Conference on Civic and Social Center
Development, at Madison, Wis., October 25, 1911.
I do not feel that I have deserved the honor of standing here upon
this occasion to make what has been courteously called the principal
address, because five months ago I did not know anything about this
movement. I have taken no active part in it, and I am not going to
assume, as those who have preceded me have assumed, that you know what
the movement is. I want, if for no other purpose than to clarify my own
thinking, to state as briefly as possible, what the movement is.
The object of the movement is to make the schoolhouse the civic center
of the community, at any rate in such communities as are supplied with
no other place of common resort.
Ready for Use—The Means of Concerting Common Life
It is obvious that the schoolhouse is in most communities used only
during certain hours of the day, those hours when the rest of the
community is busily engaged in bread-winning work. It occurred to the
gentlemen who started this movement that inasmuch as the schoolhouses
belonged to the community it was perfectly legitimate that the
community should use them for its own entertainment and schooling when
the young people were not occupying them. And that, therefore, it
would be a good idea to have there all sorts of gatherings, for social
purposes, for purposes of entertainment, for purposes of conference,
for any legitimate thing that might bring neighbors and friends
together in the schoolhouses. That, I understand it, in its simplest
terms is the civic center movement—that the schoolhouses might be made
a place of meeting—in short, where by meeting each other the people
of a community might know each other, and by knowing each other might
concert a common life, a common action.
Spontaneous Development
The study of the civic center is the study of the spontaneous life of
communities. What you do is to open the schoolhouse and light it in the
evening and say: “Here is a place where you are welcome to come and do
anything that it occurs to you to do.”
And the interesting thing about this movement is that a great many
things have occurred to people to do in the schoolhouse, things social,
things educational, things political,—for one of the reasons why
politics took on a new complexion in the city in which this movement
originated was that the people who could go into the schoolhouses at
night knew what was going on in that city and insisted upon talking
about it, and the minute they began talking about it, many things
became impossible, for there are scores of things that must be put a
stop to in our politics that will stop the moment they are talked of
where men will listen. The treatment for bad politics is exactly the
modern treatment for tuberculosis—it is exposure to the open air.
Now you have to begin at the root of the matter in order to understand
what it is you intend to serve by this movement. You intend to serve
the life of communities, the life that is there, the life that you
cannot create, the life to which you can only give release and
opportunity; and wherein does that life consist? That is the question
that interests me. There can be no life in a community so long as its
parts are segregated and separated. It is just as if you separated
the organs of the human body and then expected them to produce life.
You must open wide the channels of sympathy and communication between
them, you must make channels for the tides of life; if you clog them
anywhere, if you stop them anywhere, why then the processes of disease
set in, which are the processes of misunderstanding, which are the
disconnections between the spiritual impulses of different sections of
men.
Common Center Essential to Community Life
The very definition of community is a body of men who have things in
common, who are conscious that they have things in common, who judge
those common things from a single point of view, namely, the point of
view of general interest. Such a thing as a community is unthinkable,
therefore, unless you have close communication; there must be a vital
inter-relationship of parts, there must be a fusion, there must be a
coördination, there must be a free intercourse, there must be such a
contact as will constitute union itself before you will have the true
course of the wholesome blood throughout the body.
Therefore, when you analyze some of our communities you will see just
how necessary it is to get their parts together. Take some of our great
cities for example. Do you not realize by common gossip even, the
absolute disconnection of what we call their residential sections from
the rest of the city? Isn’t it singular that while human beings live
all over a city, we pick out a part, a place where there are luxurious
and well-appointed houses and call that the residential section? As
if nobody else lived anywhere in that city. That is the place where
the most disconnected part and in some instances the most useless
part of the community lives. There men do not know their next-door
neighbors; there men do not want to know their next-door neighbors;
there is no bond of sympathy; there is no bond of knowledge or common
acquaintanceship.
I am not speaking of these things to impeach a class, for I know of no
just way in which to impeach a class.
It is necessary that such portions of the community should be linked
with the other portions; it is necessary that simple means should be
found by which by an interchange of points of view we may get together,
for the whole process of modern life, the whole process of modern
politics, is a process by which we must exclude misunderstandings,
exclude hostilities, exclude deadly rivalries, make men understand
other men’s interests, bring all men into common counsel, and so
discover what is the common interest.
That is the problem of modern life which is so specialized that it is
almost devitalized, so disconnected that the tides of life will not
flow.
Means to the Unity of Communities
My interest in this movement, as it has been described to me, has
been touched with enthusiasm because I see in it a channel for the
restoration of the unity of communities. Because I am told that things
have already happened which bear promise of this very thing.
I was told what is said to be a typical story of a very fine lady, a
woman of very fine natural parts, but very fastidious, whose automobile
happened to be stalled one night in front of an open schoolhouse where
a meeting was going on over which her seamstress was presiding. She
was induced by some acquaintances of hers whom she saw going into the
building, to go in, and was at first filled with disdain; she didn’t
like the looks of some of the people, there was too much mixture of
the sort she didn’t care to associate with—an employe of her own was
presiding—but she was obliged to stay a little while, it was the most
comfortable place to stay while her automobile was repaired, and before
she could get away she had been touched with the generous contagion of
the place. Here were people of all sorts talking about things that were
interesting, that revealed to her things that she had never dreamed of
before with regard to the vital common interests of persons whom she
had always thought unlike herself, so that the community of the human
heart was revealed to her, the singleness of human life.
Worth Any Effort to Promote
Now if this thing does that, it is worth any effort to promote it. If
it will do that, it is the means by which we shall create communities.
And nothing else will produce liberty—you cannot have liberty where
men do not want the same liberty, you cannot have it where they are
not in sympathy with one another, you cannot have it where they do not
understand one another, you cannot have it when they are not seeking
common things by common means, you simply cannot have it; we must study
the means by which these things are produced.
In the first place, don’t you see that you produce communities by
creating common feeling? I know that a great emphasis is put upon
the mind, in our day, and as a university man I should perhaps not
challenge the supremacy of the intellect, but I have never been
convinced that mind was really monarch in our day, or in any day that
I have yet read of, or, if it is monarch, it is one of the modern
monarchs that rules and reigns but does not govern.
Common Feeling Essential to Free Government
What really controls our action is feeling. We are governed by the
passions and the most that we can manage by all our social and
political endeavors is that the handsome passions shall be in the
majority—the passion of sympathy, the passion of justice, the passion
of fair dealing, the passion of unselfishness, (if it may be elevated
into a passion). If you can once see that a working majority is
obtained for the handsome passions, for the feelings that draw us
together, rather than for the feelings that separate us, then you
have laid the foundation of a community and a free government and,
therefore, if you can do nothing else in the community center than draw
men together so that they will have common feeling, you will have set
forward the cause of civilization and the cause of human freedom.
As a basis of the common feeling you must have a mutual comprehension.
The fundamental truth in modern life, as I analyze it, is a profound
ignorance. I am not one of those who challenge the promoters of special
interests on the ground that they are malevolent, that they are bad
men; I challenge their leadership on the ground that they are ignorant
men, that when you have absorbed yourself in a particular business
through half your life, you have no other point of view than the point
of view of that business and that, therefore, you are disqualified by
ignorance from giving counsel as to the common interests.
A witty English writer once said: “If you chain a man’s head to a
ledger and knock off something from his wages every time he stops
adding up, you can’t expect him to have enlightened views about the
antipodes.” Simply, if you immerse a man in a given undertaking, no
matter how big that undertaking is, and keep him immersed for half a
life time, you can’t expect him to see any horizon, you can’t expect
him to see human life steadily or see it whole.
Means to Liberal Education
I once made this statement that a university was intended to make young
people just as unlike their fathers as possible. By which I do not mean
anything disrespectful to their fathers, but merely this, by the time a
man is old enough to have children in college, his point of view is apt
to have become so specialized that they would better be taken away from
him and put in a place where their views of life will be regeneralized
and they will be disconnected from the family and connected with the
world. That, I understand to be the function of education, of the
liberal education.
Now a kind of liberal education must underlie every wholesome political
and social process, the kind of liberal education which connects a
man’s feeling and his comprehension with the general run of mankind,
which disconnects him from the special interests and marries his
thought to the common interests of great communities and of great
cities and of great states and of great nations, and, if possible,
with that brotherhood of man that transcends the boundaries of nations
themselves.
Those are the horizons to my mind of this social center movement, that
they are going to unite the feelings and clarify the comprehension of
communities, of bodies of men who draw together in conference.
Conference Always Modifies and Improves Thought
I would like to ask if this is not the experience of every person here
who has ever acted in any conference of any kind. Did you ever go out
of a conference with exactly the same views with which you went in? If
you did, I am sorry for you, you must be thought-tight. For my part I
can testify that I never carried a scheme into a conference without
having it profoundly modified by the criticism of the other men in the
conference and without recognizing when I came out that the product
of the common council bestowed upon it was very much superior to any
private thought that might have been used for its development. The
processes of attrition, the contributions to consensus of minds, the
compromises of thought create those general movements which are the
streams of tendency and the streams of development.
Will Make Easier Solution of Great Problems
And so it seems to me that what is going to be produced by this
movement,—not all at once, by slow and tedious stages, no doubt,
but nevertheless very certainly in the end,—is in the first place a
release of common forces now undiscovered, now somewhere banked up,
and now somewhere unavailable, the removal of barriers to the common
understanding, the opening of mind to mind, the clarification of the
air and the release in that clarified air of forces that can live in
it, and just so certainly as you release those forces you make easier
the fundamental problem of modern society, which is the problem of
accommodating the various interests in modern society to one another.
Adjustment Necessary to Liberty
I used to teach my classes in the university that liberty was a matter
of adjustment and I was accustomed to illustrate it in this way; when
you have perfectly assembled the parts of a great steam engine, for
example, then when it runs, you say that it runs free; that means that
the adjustment is so perfect that the friction is reduced to a minimum,
doesn’t it, and the minute you twist any part out of alignment, the
minute you lose adjustment, then there is a buckling up and the whole
thing is rigid and useless. Now to my mind, that is the image of
human liberty; the individual is free in proportion to his perfect
accommodation to the whole, or to put it the other way, in proportion
to the perfect adjustment of the whole to his life and interests.
Take another illustration; you are sailing a boat, when do you say that
she is running free, when you have thrown her up into the wind? No,
not at all. Every stick and stitch in her shivers and you say she is
in irons; nature has grasped her and says: “You cannot go that way;”
but let her fall off, let the sheet fill and see her run like a bird
skimming the waters. Why is she free? Because she has adjusted herself
to the great force of nature that is brewed with the breath of the
wind. She is free in proportion as she is adjusted, as she is obedient,
and so men are free in society in proportion as their interests are
accommodated to one another, and that is the problem of liberty.
Analysis Accomplished—Now Assembled
Liberty as now expressed is unsatisfactory in this country and in
other countries because there has not been a satisfactory adjustment
and you cannot readjust the parts until you analyze them. Very well,
we have analyzed them. Now this movement is intended to contribute
to an effort to assemble them, bring them together, let them look one
another in the face, let them reckon with one another and then they
will coöperate and not before.
You cannot bring adjustment into play until you have got the consent of
the parts to act together, and then when you have got the adjustment,
when you have discovered and released those forces and they have
accommodated themselves to each other, you have that control which is
the sovereignty of the people.
There is no sovereignty of the people if the several sections of the
people be at loggerheads with one another; sovereignty comes with
coöperation, sovereignty comes with mutual protection, sovereignty
comes with the quick pulses of sympathy, sovereignty comes by a common
impulse.
You say and all men say that great political changes are impending in
this country. Why do you say so? Because everywhere you go you find
men expressing the same judgment, alive to the same circumstances,
determined to solve the problems by acting together no matter what
older bonds they may break, no matter what former prepossessions they
may throw off, determined to get together and do the thing.
Enlightened Control in Place of Management
And so you know that changes are impending because what was a body
of scattered sentiment is now becoming a concentrated force, and so
with sympathy and understanding comes control, for, in place of this
control of enlightened and sovereign opinions, we have had in the field
of politics as elsewhere, the reign of management, and management is
compounded of these two things, secrecy plus concentration.
You cannot manage a nation, you cannot manage the people of a state,
you cannot manage a great population, you can manage only some central
force; what you do, therefore, if you want to manage in politics or
anywhere else is to choose a great single force or single group of
forces, and then find some man or men sagacious and secretive enough to
manage the business without being discovered. And that has been done
for a generation in the United States.
Now, the schoolhouse among other things is going to break that up. Is
it not significant that this thing is being erected upon the foundation
originally laid in America, where we saw from the first that the
schoolhouse and the church were to be the pillars of the Republic? Is
it not significant that as if by instinct we return to those sources
of liberty undefiled which we find in the common meeting place, in the
place owned by everybody, in the place where nobody can be excluded, in
the place to which everybody comes as by right?
And so what we are doing is simply to open what was shut, to let the
light come in upon places that were dark, to substitute for locked
doors, open doors, for it does not make any difference how many or how
few come in provided anybody who chooses may come in. So as soon as you
have established that principle, you have openings, and these doors are
open as if they were the flood gates of life.
Faith In People Justified
I do not wonder that men are exhibiting an increased confidence in the
judgments of the people, because wherever you give the people a chance
such as this movement has given them in the schoolhouse, they avail
themselves of it. This is not a false people, this is not a people
guided by blind impulses, this is a people who want to think, who want
to think right, whose feelings are based upon justice, whose instincts
are for fairness and for the light.
So what I see in this movement is a recovery of the constructive and
creative genius of the American people, because the American people as
a people are so far different from others in being able to produce new
things, to create new things out of old.
This Movement Fundamentally American
I have often thought that we overlook the fact that the real sources
of strength in the community come from the bottom. Do you find
society renewing itself from the top? Don’t you find society renewing
itself from the ranks of unknown men? Do you look to the leading
families to go on leading you? Do you look to the ranks of the men
already established in authority to contribute sons to lead the next
generation? They may, sometimes they do, but you can’t count on them;
and what you are constantly depending on is the rise out of the ranks
of unknown men, the discovery of men whom you had passed by, the
sudden disclosure of capacity you had not dreamed of, the emergence
of somebody from some place of which you had thought the least, of
some man unanointed from on high, to do the thing that the generation
calls for. Who would have looked to see Lincoln save a nation? Who that
knew Lincoln when he was a lad and a youth and a young man—but all the
while there was springing up in him as if he were connected with the
very soil itself, the sap of a nation, the vision of a great people, a
sympathy so ingrained and intimate with the common run of men that he
was like the People impersonated, sublimated, touched with genius. And
it is to such sources that we must always look.
No man can calculate the courses of genius, no man can foretell the
leadership of nations. And so we must see to it that the bottom is
left open, we must see to it that the soil of the common feeling of the
common consciousness is always fertile and unclogged, for there can be
no fruit unless the roots touch the rich sources of life.
And it seems to me that the schoolhouses dotted here, there, and
everywhere, over the great expanse of this nation, will some day prove
to be the roots of that great tree of liberty which shall spread for
the sustenance and protection of all mankind.
Transcriber’s Notes
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