Dwight Sanderson

“ Why should not the church and Sunday school adopt similar methods and undertake a definite system of encouraging the home to give moral and religious education in an adequate fashion, rather than attempt to give homeopathic doses to children en masse? Why should not the church, or the school, or both, give parents instruction and inspiration as to how to educate their children in matters of sex, about which they are in the best position to gain their confidence? ”

“ Finally let us remember that community organization is not an end in itself, but that it is merely a means whereby conditions in the community may be made such that every individual in it may have the best possible chance to develop his personality and to enjoy the fellowship of service in the common good. The aim of all social organization is personality, but personality is achieved and can find its own satisfaction only through fellowship. The ideal community but furnishes the social environment in which the human spirit realizes its highest values. ”

“ It is difficult for any one woman, no matter how able or strong-minded, to maintain a status much in advance of that of her neighbors; but let the women of a community get together and discuss their problems and ideals and the group spirit strengthens each of them in the pursuit of the common ideals. It is such a desire for mutual support—even though they are not conscious of it—which has drawn farm women together into clubs and which has given such an impetus to the Home Bureaus, or women's departments of the county Farm Bureaus. ”

“ When one compares a village which is merely strung along a main roadway, or two crossroads, with one which has such a civic center, he cannot but feel that the latter has a physical structure which gives it an identity and a common interest which is lacking in the former and which must mean much in the maintenance of community pride and which must give much better opportunity for outdoor gatherings of all sorts. ”

“ But more important is the fact that social welfare depends more largely upon a proper understanding of its problems by the local community and a willingness to grapple with them intelligently and sympathetically, than upon the remedial treatment afforded through professional workers, courts, institutions and other public agencies. Social welfare is like health, for which sanitation and hygiene are more important than doctors and medicines. ”

“ Unless we can establish democracy in our own local community, how can we expect it in the state or nation?
A second factor in community life is the age of its people. How often do you find a community composed chiefly of elderly people which is progressive? In the more progressive communities are not the middle-aged and young married people in control? The younger people desire better advantages for themselves and particularly for their children, and so they stand for better schools, better churches, and better facilities for all phases of community life. ”

“ The willingness to assume leadership is the acid test of community loyalty, for only through the development of a maximum of leadership can the best life of the community be achieved. Every citizen has some ability which qualifies him to lead some group, however small it may be, or however humble the cause. ”

“ I will assert that there never can be any progress in rural districts or any real prosperity without such farmers' organizations or guilds. Wherever rural prosperity is reported in any country inquire into it, and it will be found that it depends on rural organization. Wherever there is rural decay, if it is inquired into, it will be found that there was a rural population but no rural community, no organization, no guild to promote common interests and unite the countrymen in defence of them. ”

“ Any system of rural social work which is to be permanently successful must be one which is established by the people themselves from a realization of their needs, and progressively developed as they appreciate its worth. As Dean A. R. Mann recently said, "In dealing with rural affairs it has long been a common mistake to underrate the validity of the farmer's own judgment as to what is good for him." "Superimposed organizations are usually doomed to failure because they express the judgments of those without the community rather than those within whom they are intended to serve." ”

“ It is my experience that in the most successful communities, the farmers speak of "our" town, they are proud of "our" bank, and "our" stores, school, and churches are the best in the region. Such loyalty is the best of evidence that the business men of the town have devoted themselves to supplying the farmers' needs, and that there is mutual understanding between them. Only by a common loyalty to mutual service can the true community exist. ”

“ What is needed in the rural community is a transformation of the old-time family hospitality and neighborliness into a feeling of responsibility for the unfortunate within the community with whom there may not be immediate contact, but who nevertheless affect the moral and social life of all its people. It needs the spirit and devotion of the Good Samaritan on the part of the people, but it also needs the public health nurse and the social worker who, like the inn-keeper of the parable, can give adequate care to the unfortunate. ”

“ The core of the community idea, then—as applied to rural life—is that we must make the community, as a unit, an entity, a thing, the point of departure of all our thinking about the rural problem, and, in its local application, the direct aim of all organized efforts for improvement or redirection. The building of real, local farm communities is perhaps the main task in erecting an adequate rural civilization. ”

“ On the other hand, if by pooling their buying power a group of farmers can throw their business to one merchant in consideration of his selling at a specified profit, even if only for a particular line of goods, they get the advantage of their collective purchasing power and have none of the responsibility for maintaining the business. Although it is my belief that the coöperative principle is essentially sound and must ultimately dominate our business life, yet it will need to find means of giving larger incentive to its managers if it is to compete with the best individual business men. ”

“ The community can compel only through the power of public opinion and its success must depend upon the voluntary loyalty of its people.
Thus the strength and the weakness of the community lies in the loyalty of its people. No community can permanently succeed whose people associate in it merely for the advantages which they may gain. There must be a genuine willingness to give as well as to receive, a real desire to do one's share for the common life. Human association cannot succeed on a basis of organized selfishness. ”

“ The life of rural people in America is no longer threatened by the invasion of human foes, but it is constantly threatened by disease. It would seem that the first public concern would be for the maintenance of the health—the very life—of its people, but as yet we have given much less thought to health than to education. The New York State Department of Health has as its slogan: "Public health is purchasable. Within natural limitations any community can determine its own death rate." ”

“ Nor can we expect marked progress in other phases of rural life as long as the economic question is acute. It is not true that economic prosperity in agriculture will of itself ensure the higher culture of the countryside; but it is true that so long as the farmer is compelled to devote all of his strength and time to making a competence for his family, that his attention must necessarily be fixed on economic ends and that he will have neither the means nor the time for those satisfactions of life which are possible to one with some leisure. ”

“ Rather we must estimate the Grange value of the future by its quiet, steady, unfaltering efforts, continued year after year, in thousands of local communities—many of them far removed from the busy activities of men—to bring the rural people together, to teach them the fundamentals of coöperation, of efficiency, of teamwork, of practical educational progress, and of the value of a forward-looking rural program, into whose accomplishments all the people of a locality may conscientiously enter.... ”

“ If the community is to escape ugliness and inconvenience, it will sooner or later come to the time when it must definitely plan the arrangement of its streets and roads, its public buildings and its open spaces, so as to best serve all parts of the community. Community planning is as essential to satisfactory "community housekeeping" as the plan of a house is for the convenience of the home. An architect is needed to plan a home for the community, a community structure which is mechanically sound and efficient and withal both beautiful and comfortable, just as much as for designing a house. ”

“ The pageant grips both actors and audience with a common loyalty to their forefathers. Such an historical picture of the development of a community brings to its people an appreciation of their common heritage and they come to a new realization of their present comforts and their responsibility for the community's future. All sorts and conditions of people will work together in a pageant and enjoy the association. Any rural community which really makes up its mind to do so can produce an historical pageant of its own, which will give new meaning and inspiration to the common life. ”

“ Just as the character of an individual is determined by his life purposes and the degree to which he conforms his behavior to them, so the highest type of community is that in which its people are consciously loyal to the common welfare and are "coming to act together" for the common good. Like the character of an individual, the community is in process of becoming; it necessarily exists on an unconscious basis, due to locality and heredity, but the strength of the community is measured by the degree to which its members become voluntarily loyal to common purposes. ”

“ Community loyalty will give rise to a true provincialism which will do much to give smaller communities a satisfactory status and to make them more independent in their standards and purposes. It is common to deride provincialism, but what we deprecate is the inability of the provincial to associate with the outside world, and the city man may be as "provincial" as the farmer from the back hills. True provincialism, on the other hand, is essential to the progress of civilization. The tendency of city life is toward imitation and reducing life to a dead level. ”

“ The rural community has all the natural advantages in its favor and will ever have the most healthful environment, but it must recognize that if preventable disease—with all its attendant evils to the family and to the individual—is to be reduced, this can be accomplished only through education and public health agencies. Better health is a matter of the hygiene of the home and the individual, but it has also become a concern of the common life—a community problem. ”

“ Play is a normal process of the child's growth through spontaneous activity. Joseph Lee, the president of the Playground and Recreation Association of America, goes so far as to say: "Play is thus the essential part of education. It is nature's prescribed course. School is invaluable in forming the child to meet actual social opportunities and conditions. Without the school, he will not grow up to fit our institutions. Without play he will not grow up at all. ”

“ If we are to have a marketing system which is truly functional, which is built on the principle of the greatest service at the lowest cost, rather than on the principle now implicit in business of sufficient service to secure the maximum of profit which the traffic will bear, then it must be a coöperative system, the primary unit of which is the local coöperative association, whose success depends upon the loyalty of its members to the coöperative principle. So coöperation is a community problem. ”

“ A minister cannot become well enough acquainted with a new parish to do effective pastoral work in less than a year, and many ministers who have seemingly good programs of work fail to realize them because they attempt to force progress and to secure results more rapidly than is possible. One of the chief duties of the rural pastor is to train leadership. A church is no stronger than its permanent resident leadership. No matter how brilliant the work of the minister, if he has failed to develop local leadership, his work is soon dissipated when he leaves. ”

“ Farmers do, however, belong to many organizations which meet in the village and more and more farmer and villager mingle in the associations devoted to various special interests. The farmer's loyalty has, therefore, been primarily to organizations rather than to the community as such, but as these different organizations have multiplied he has become increasingly aware that most of them, each in its own field, are devoted to the interests of the common good. Through the common interests of organizations in the life of all the people is arising a new conception of the community. ”

“ The peasant or little farmer, who is a member of one or more of these societies, who helps to build up their success and enjoy their benefits, acquires a new outlook. The jealousies and suspicions which are in most countries so common among those who live by the land fall from him. Feeling that he has a voice in great affairs he acquires an added value and a healthy importance in his own eyes. ”

“ It is necessary, therefore, to have some appreciation of how the characteristics of its population influence community life.
In the first place, a community of people of different nationalities or races, or sometimes even of people from different states, find it much more difficult to secure a common loyalty than if they were of one stock. It is, of course, quite true that many an old community of a single stock is divided by family, religious or political feuds; yet usually there is more solidarity between people of common traditions and culture. ”

“ Indeed, it may not be too much to claim that the largest value in the agricultural industry is in the possibility of the most satisfactory type of home life. The millionaire farmer is so rare as to be negligible, and although farmers as a class doubtless have as wholesome and satisfactory a living as they would in other pursuits, yet no one engages in farming as a means of easily acquiring large wealth. The highest rural values cannot be bought or sold. ”

“ Certainly we would think a man queer who placed the back-door of his house to the street, but the railroad station is usually the back-door of the community instead of the main entrance as it should be. On the other hand, on alighting at a well-kept station, with a neat lawn, good walks and roads, which is not surrounded by the village rubbish heaps and dilapidated buildings, the newcomer feels that here is a place which invites further acquaintance, while the native has a sense of satisfaction rather than of apology. ”