The New State · Part I · Chapter 14 (1/2)

XIV

The Group Principle at Work

Our rate of progress, then, and the degree in which we actualize the perfect democracy, depend upon our understanding that man has the power of creating, and that he gets this power through his capacity to join with others to form a real whole, a living group. Let us see, therefore, what signs are visible today of the group principle at work.

First, our whole idea of education is rapidly changing. The chief aim of education now is to fit the child into the life of the community; we do not think of his “individual” development except as contributing to that. Or it would be nearer the truth to say that we recognize that his individual development is essentially just that. The method of accomplishing this is chiefly through (1) the introduction of group classroom work in the place of individual recitations, (2) the addition of vocational subjects to the curriculum and the establishment of vocational schools, and (3) the organizing of vocational guidance departments and placement bureaus in connection with the public schools.

In many of the large cities of the United States the public schools have a vocational guidance department, and it is not considered that the schools have done their duty by the child until they have helped him to choose his life occupation, have trained him in some degree for it, and have actually found him a job, that is, fitted him into the community. It is becoming gradually accepted that this is a function of the state, and several of our states are considering the appropriation of funds for the carrying on of such departments.36

The further idea of education as a continuous process, that it stops neither at 14 nor 21 nor 60, that a man should be related to his community not only through services rendered and benefits received but by a steady process of preparation for his social and civic life, will be discussed later.37

The chief object of medical social service is to put people into harmonious and fruitful relation, not only because illness has temporarily withdrawn certain people from the community, but because it is often some lack of adaptation which has caused the illness.

Our different immigration theories show clearly the growth of the community idea. First came the idea of amalgamation: our primary duty to all people coming to America was to assimilate them as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. Then people reacted against the melting-pot theory and said, “No, we want all the Italians have to offer, all the Syrians can give us; the richness of these different civilizations must not be engulfed in ours.” So separate colonies were advocated, separate organizations were encouraged. Many articles were written and speeches made to spread this thought. But now a third idea is emerging⁠—the community idea. We do not want Swedes and Poles to be lost in an undifferentiated whole, but equally we do not want all the evils of the separatist method; we are trying to get an articulated whole. We want all these different peoples to be part of a true community⁠—giving all they have to give and receiving equally. Only by a mutual permeation of ideals shall we enrich their lives and they ours.

Again our present treatment of crime shows the community principle in two ways: (1) the idea of community responsibility for crime is spreading rapidly; (2) we are fast outgrowing the idea of punishing criminals merely, our object is to fit them into society.

First, the growing idea of community responsibility for crime. We read in an account of the new penology that “Crime in the last analysis is not to be overcome after arrest but before,” that crime will be abolished by a change of environment and that “environment is transformed by child labor laws and the protection of children, by housing laws and improved sanitation, by the prevention of tuberculosis and other diseases, by health-giving recreational facilities, by security of employment, by insurance against the fatalities of industry and the financial burdens of death and disease, by suitable vocational training, by all that adds to the content of human life and gives us higher and keener motives to self-control, strenuous exertion and thrift.” We of course do not exonerate the individual from responsibility, but it must be shared by the whole society in which he lives.

Secondly, the old idea of justice was punishment, a relic of personal revenge; this punishment took the form of confinement, of keeping the man outside society. The new idea is exactly the opposite: it is to join him to society by finding out just what part he is best fitted to play in society and training him for it. A former Commissioner of Corrections in New York told me that a number of people, including several judges, were looking forward to the time very soon being ripe for making the “punishment” of a crime the doing some piece of social service in order to fit the criminal into the social order. One man who had shown in his crime marked organizing ability had been sent to oversee the reclaiming of some large tracts of abandoned farm land, and this had worked so well that a number of judges wished to try similar experiments.

Thus criminals are coming to be shown that their crime has not been against individuals but against society, that it has divorced them from their community and that the object of their imprisonment is that they may learn how to unite themselves to their community. The colony system means that they must learn to live in a community by living in a community. This is the object of Mr. William George’s “Social Sanitarium,” where the men are to live in a graded series of farm villages, govern themselves, support themselves and also their families as far as possible, and pass from “village” to “village” on their way towards the society from which their crime has separated them.

This same principle, to make the life while under punishment a preparation for community life, underlay the work of Mr. Osborne at Sing Sing. Through his Mutual Welfare League he tried to develop a feeling of responsibility to the community, a feeling first of all that there was a community within the prison. All the men knew gang loyalty; it was Mr. Osborne’s aim to build upon this. He thought they could not feel responsibility to a community outside when they left unless they learnt community consciousness inside. He did not provide recreation for them solely for the sake of recreation; he did not allow them self-government because of any abstract idea of the justice of self-government; he tried to bring the men of Sing Sing to a realization of a community, to a sense of responsibility to a community. The two men who escaped from Sing Sing in 1916 and voluntarily returned had learned this lesson.38

Both these principles⁠—community responsibility for crime and the necessity of fitting the offender into the community life⁠—underlie the work of the juvenile court. The probation officer’s duty is not exhausted by knitting the child again into worthy relations; he must try to see that community life shall touch children on all sides in a helpful not a harmful way.

A future task for the juvenile court is to organize groups back of the child as part of the system of probation. All our experience is showing us the value of using the group incentive. The approval or blame of our fellow-men is an urgent factor in our lives; a man can stand any sort of condemnation better than that of his club. It was the idea of community punishment which was such an interesting part of the “Little Commonwealth” which Mr. Homer Lane established near Detroit for boys and girls on probation. If a boy did not work he was not punished for it, he did not even go without food, but the whole commonwealth had to pay for it out of their earnings. The whole moral pressure of the community was thus brought to bear upon that boy to do his share of the work⁠—an incentive which Mr. Lane found more powerful than any punishment.

A colonel of the American army says that fewer offenses are committed in our army than in the Continental armies, not because human nature is different in America but because our methods of army discipline are different: the custom in our army is to punish a company for the offense of an individual; the company, therefore, looks after its own members.

The procedure of our courts also shows signs of change in the direction of the recognition of the group principle. Until recently we have had in our courts two lawyers, each upholding his side: this means a real struggle, there is no effort at unifying, one or the other must win; the judge is a sort of umpire. But the Reconciliation Court of Cleveland (and some other western cities) marks a long step in advance. This does away with lawyers each arguing one side; the judge deals directly with the disputants, trying to make them see that a harmonizing of their differences is possible. In our municipal courts, to be sure, the principal function of the judge has long been not to punish but to take those measures which will place the individual again in his group, but this applies only to criminal cases, whereas the Reconciliation Court of Cleveland, following the practice of the conciliation courts of certain continental countries,39 deals with civil cases. The part of the judge in our juvenile courts is too well known to need mention.

In a jury I suppose we have always had an example of the group idea in practical life. Here there is no question of counting up similar ideas⁠—there must be one idea and the effort is to seek that.

In our legislatures and legislative committees we get little integrated thought because of their party organization; even among members of the same party on a committee there are many causes at work to prevent the genuine interplay we should have. The governors’ commissions, on the other hand, hear both sides, call in many experts and try to arrive at some composite judgment.

Nowhere has our social atomism been more apparent than in our lack of city-planning: (1) we have had many beautiful single buildings, but no plan for the whole city; (2) and more important, we could not get any general plan for our cities accepted because the individual property owner (this was called individualism!) must be protected against the community. City-planning includes not only plans for a beautiful city but for all its daily needs⁠—streets, traffic regulations, housing, schools, industry, transportation, recreational facilities; we cannot secure these things while property owners are being protected in their “rights.” The angry protest which goes up from real estate owners when it is proposed to regulate the height of buildings we have heard in all our cities. The struggle for enough light and air in tenements has been fought step by step. The “right” claimed was the right of every man to do what he liked with his own property. Now we are beginning to recognize the error of this, and to see that it is not a state of individualism but of anarchy that our new building laws are trying to do away with. No real estate owner is to be allowed to do that with his own property which will not fit into a general plan for the beauty and efficiency of the city. The keynote of the new city-planning is adaptation, adaptation of means to end and of part to part. This does not stifle individual initiative, but directs it.

And the interesting point for us here is that the real estate men themselves are now beginning to see that particularistic building has actually hurt real estate interests. The “Report of the Advisory Council of the Real Estate Interests of New York City” admits that “light, air and access, the chief factors in fixing rentable values, had been impaired by high buildings and by the proximity of inappropriate or nuisance buildings and uses.” It is impossible to talk ten minutes with real estate men today without noticing how entirely changed their attitude has been in the last ten or twenty years. Moralists used to tell us that the only path of progress was to make people willing to give up their own interests for the sake of others. But this is not what our real estate men are doing. They are coming to see that their interests are in the long run coincident with the interests of all the other members of the city.

The growing recognition of the group principle in the business world is particularly interesting to us. The present development of business methods shows us that the old argument about cooperation and competition is not fruitful. Cooperation and competition are being taken up into a larger synthesis. We are just entering on an era of collective living. “Cutthroat” competition is beginning to go out of fashion. What the world needs today is a cooperative mind. The business world is never again to be directed by individual intelligences, but by intelligences interacting and ceaselessly influencing one another. Every mental act of the big business man is entirely different from the mental acts of the man of the last century managing his own competitive business. There is of course competition between our large firms, but the cooperation between them is coming to occupy a larger and larger place relatively. We see this in the arrangement between most of our large printers in Boston not to outbid one another, in those trades which join to establish apprentice schools, in the cooperative credit system, worked out so carefully in some of the western cities as almost to eliminate bad debts, in the regular conferences between the business managers of the large department stores, in our new Employment Managers’ associations in Boston and elsewhere, in the whole spirit of our progressive Chambers of Commerce. When our large stores “compete” to give the highest class goods and best quality service, and meet in conference to make this “competition” effective, then competition itself becomes a kind of cooperation! There are now between thirty and forty associations in this country organized on the open-price plan. The Leather Belting Exchange, an excellent example of “cooperative competition,” was organized in 1915. Some of its avowed objects are: standardization of grades of leather, promotion of use of leather belting by scientific investigation of its possible uses, uniform contract system, uniform system of cost accounting, daily charts of sales, monthly statistical reports, collection and distribution of information relative to cost of raw material and to methods and cost of manufacturing and distribution.40 How vastly different a spirit from that which used to animate the business world!

Modern business, therefore, needs above all men who can unite, not merely men who can unite without friction, but who can turn their union to account. The successful business man of today is the man of trained cooperative intelligence. The world as well as the psychologist places a higher value on the man who can take part in collective thinking and concerted action, and has higher positions to offer him in the business and political field. The secretary of a Commission investigates a subject, is clever in mastering details, in drawing conclusions and in presenting them, perhaps far cleverer in these respects than any member of the Commission. But the chairman of the Commission must have another and higher power⁠—the power of uniting these conclusions with the conclusions of others, the power of using this material to evolve with others plans for action. This means a more developed individual and brings a higher price in the open market.

Another illustration of the group principle in the business world is that a corporation is obliged by law to act in joint meeting, that is, it cannot get the vote of its members by letter and then act according to the majority.