The Survey, Volume 30, Number 24, Sep 13, 1913

Chapter II: Part 2

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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.”

Give them Playgrounds Instead!

_From the Cleveland Humane Society Bulletin_]

=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.

In addition to the annual reports and bulletins issued by the Bureau while Mr. Neill was commissioner of labor, which publications form a very valuable contribution to the literature dealing with labor conditions, the bureau made a number of important special investigations at the direction of Congress, the results of which are embodied in various reports, notable among them are the Report of the Condition of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the United States (in 19 volumes), the Report on the Conditions of Employment in the Iron and Steel Industry, and the Reports on the Strike at Bethlehem and the Strike at Lawrence, Mass. Acting as special commissioner under Roosevelt Mr. Neill investigated the packing house industry and the Goldfield strike. In spite of the handicap under which he was placed by his mediation work, Mr. Neill gave most careful supervision to the planning and the executing of the work of the Bureau of Labor, and in many cases tested the accuracy and completeness of work of his agents by personally inspecting the fields in which they labored.

Mr. Neill was born in Rock Island, Illinois, in 1865. His college education was obtained at Notre Dame University, at the University of Texas, at Georgetown, and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where he took his Ph.D. in 1897. He served as an instructor at Notre Dame University from 1891 to 1894. He was professor of political economy at the Catholic University from 1898 to 1905. While occupying this position he prepared and installed an exhibit of the Catholic charities of the United States at the St. Louis Exposition. He was United States commissioner of labor from 1905 to 1913, vice-president of the Board of Charities of the District of Columbia, 1900 to 1908; assistant recorder of the Anthracite Strike Commission in 1902; recorder of the Arbitration Board for the Birmingham strike in 1903; member of the U. S. Immigration Commission, 1907 to 1910. As member of the International Institute of Statistics, he has actively furthered plans for the adoption of international standards for the compilation of industrial statistics and has been active in working toward international conventions to promote that end.

Nature, grace and environment conspired to prepare Mr. Neill for his work. Ideals governed him from his early boyhood and gave him the courage to overcome a typical range of obstacles in working them out. Everything taught Mr. Neill. He had the rare capacity and the temperament to profit by experience. His ideals of social service and his Christian sympathies have been so powerful that nothing frightened him and nothing side-tracked him from his path. There is no way of knowing fully the pressure that was brought to bear upon him, or the dust that was stirred up to obscure the practical ideals that governed him in his work as an investigator of the industrial battlefield. Whether in a congressional hearing where a none too kindly spirit sometimes cropped out, or in protecting the accuracy and good faith of his bureau reports, some of which aroused fierce antagonisms and were subject to bitter attack, Mr. Neill displayed the same intelligent fearlessness, the same restrained idealism and the same self reliance which his friends have always noted and admired in him. He has had severe academic training, yet he has remained a thoroughly practical man. He is a brave and honest fighter, without any love of fighting for its own sake.

A personal feature of Mr. Neill’s career remains to be noted. Under the law he, as commissioner of labor, was associated with Judge Martin A. Knapp in adjusting railway disputes. Originally Judge Knapp acted in his capacity as chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission. When he was transferred to the Court of Commerce a change in the law was made, permitting the President to select as second mediator any member of the Interstate Commerce Commission or of the Commerce Court. In this manner it was possible to continue Judge Knapp in the mediation work. Fortunately he remains to carry into the newer epoch just entered upon, the splendid traditions of the work as developed by himself and Mr. Neill. These two men worked together in a spirit of mutual understanding and trust which made their mediation work a happy experience for themselves, no less than for the railroads and the employes. It is impossible to separate them in attributing credit for the great results which have been achieved. Each has been most gratified when the public honored the other. Both will be associated in the discriminating memory of the nation as precursors of the era of industrial peace for which the nation’s heart is longing.

WM. J. KIRBY.

* * * * *

Charles Stelzle, pioneer in church social service, who was the founder and has for ten years been in charge of this phase of the work of the Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, will leave that board on October 1. Mr. Stelzle plans to set up offices of his own as consulting sociologist and efficiency engineer for national church organizations, social service agencies and industrial enterprises.

The broader field which he proposes to cover on severing his connection with purely denominational work Mr. Stelzle outlines as furnishing “Expert service with reference to Sociological and Religious Surveys; Exhibits; Social Service Campaigns and Conferences; Social and Religious Work among Immigrant, Industrial, and Rural Populations; Publicity, Educational, and Evangelistic Campaigns; Efficiency Methods for Local Churches and National Organizations; General Industrial Problems.”

Mr. Stelzle came to the church, when he was ordained minister about eighteen years ago, as a worker who in his twelve years in the machine shop had been made painfully conscious of the lack of understanding and co-operation between the church and the workingmen. He organized the Department of Church and Labor of the Presbyterian Church, and this was subsequently expanded into the bureau from which he is resigning. The Labor Temple in lower Second Avenue, New York, a religious labor center which he organized a few years ago, has so evidently responded to a need that the board has recently bought the property and put the temple on a permanent basis. Labor Sunday, a nation-wide campaign for temperance carried on through the trade unions and a press service on social, religious and industrial topics which is used by 350 of the principal labor papers, are other activities of the bureau. Mr. Stelzle has served as arbitrator in many industrial disputes and has established a permanent connection between the church and organized labor through ministerial delegates to the trade unions.

In addition to this industrial work he was for a year executive secretary of the Commission on Social Service of the Federal Council of Churches, had charge of the social service features of one of the Men and Religion Forward Movement teams and directed the surveys made by the movement in seventy cities. He conducted the recent publicity campaign for the Home Missions Council and the Council of Women for Home Missions.

Mr. Stelzle’s successor in the bureau has not yet been appointed.

* * * * *

The appointment of Louis F. Post, founder and for fifteen years joint editor with Alice Thatcher Post of _The Public_ and worker for many public causes in Chicago, to the assistant secretaryship of the Federal Department of Labor has been generally recognized, to use the words of a fellow journalist, as something more than the dropping of a plum into the gaping mouth of a hungry politician. Mr. Post is no politician and was by no means hungry for the position, which he at first peremptorily refused, feeling that he could not give up his work on _The Public_. He consented only after pressure had been brought to bear upon him from all sides and he had been brought to realize that a still larger duty called him to the service of the nation.

The ideals which animated Mr. Post as editor and which he brings to his work in the Department of Labor, he thus himself expresses in a recent valedictory editorial:

“In citizenship it has been my object and that of my
editorial associates through all those years, to inculcate
a realization of the larger citizen, the civic whole, whose
voice, when conflicting selfishnesses cancel one another,
is in a very real sense ‘the voice of God.’ As single
taxers, we have worked with the purpose on the one hand of
lifting single taxers out of a cult and broadening them
with visions of the ever-pulsating world of men wherein
their cause must flourish if it is ever to fructify, and
on the other of disclosing to all readers with democratic
ideals the subtle power of this reform in democratizing
industry as well as politics. With more comprehensive
scope we have inculcated fundamental democracy as the
social principle of which every social reform is at best
but a practical application; and with scope still more
comprehensive we have identified democracy with that
element of the universal which exhibits the physical
phenomena of life as product, instead of producer, of those
faculties which some of us call ‘intellectual’ and others
‘spiritual.’”

* * * * *

James Mullenbach’s appointment as superintendent of the great Cook County infirmary for the poor of Chicago at Oak Forest is as creditable to President Alexander A. McCormick of the Board of County Commissioners as it is to Mr. Mullenbach.

With his experience as settlement resident at Chicago Commons, as superintendent of the Municipal Lodging House, as assistant superintendent of the United Charities, as secretary of the Land, Labor, and Immigration Officials’ Conference, and as the representative of the social agencies reporting social legislation at the Illinois Legislature, Mr. Mullenbach is regarded as the ideal head for the greatest county institutions west of New York.

It is significant of the new times to find a college educated man who rounded out his professional training on a fellowship in a German University, being sought for and accepting a position, to which only a political appointee has hitherto been appointed. No higher token of the triumph of patriotism on partisanship has been registered in America than this, and many another, achievement of Mr. McCormick in rescuing the County of Cook from the spoils exploitation of his predecessor and in establishing the efficient business management and the humane social standards of his own administration.

* * * * *

The recent death of Edna P. Alter in a trolley wreck near Pasadena, Cal., removes one of the younger workers in the field of organized charity. Miss Alter knew every phase of work in the homes of the poor for she entered the Hudson district of the New York Charity Organization Society as district nurse in 1908, later rounded out her preparation for the work of organized charity by a summer course in the New York School of Philanthropy, and became assistant agent in that district. In the fall of 1910 she rose to the responsible position of secretary of the Associated Charities of Pasadena.

Leo G. MacLaughlin, president of that society, speaks of her work as “sympathetic, kindly, warm-hearted and keenly intelligent. She was one of the founders of the local Associated Charities and her work won favorable attention over a wide area.”

* * * * *

A few years of school dental clinics have made “toothbrush drills” a fairly familiar idea in many cities. It took the Toronto public nurses, or rather their supervisor, Lina L. Rogers, to originate another drill quite as unique and important.

Since last October the school children of Toronto, in squads of twenty have practised daily “nose-blowing drills” and the effect on the freshness of the atmosphere of the schoolrooms has been so noticeable that the teachers have become assiduous in seeing to it that no child comes to school unprovided with a pocket handkerchief. They often, indeed, themselves order the drills without waiting for the coming of the nurse. The effect of the drill is perceptible already on individual children, in cases of catarrh, and the doctors predict that it will have an appreciable effect in time in lessening adenoids and other throat and nose affections.

It was Miss Rogers, who has recently become Mrs. W. E. Struthers, who, when a nurse at the Henry Street Settlement in New York in 1902 was chosen to demonstrate at the expense of the settlement in four local schools the need of municipal school nurses. This she did with such success that within a month the Department of Health took over the financial responsibility and extended the work, making her supervisor.

With a subsequent seven years’ experience in this capacity she went to Toronto in 1909, where she has done pioneer health work in the schools. These are now fully equipped with school nurses and with dental care, one of the four clinics now carried on in connection with the school system having been equipped with a model outfit at the expense of the enthusiastic nurses themselves.

Besides nose-blowing drills Toronto has undertaken another departure in school health work, in establishing a real open-air school, on the model of the Forest School at Charlottenberg in Germany. To a private park on the outskirts of Toronto, which has been loaned for this purpose and equipped with shacks, fifty anaemic or delicate children were taken for three months last winter by special trolley cars each morning and not returned till twelve hours later, thus living and learning in the open air. No tubercular children were taken, sanatorium care being provided for them. Five meals are furnished, the trolley service is given free by the street railway company, a nurse is in attendance and three teachers, lessons are given for three and one-half hours in the open air. There is a great deal of outdoor play, and nose-blowing and toothbrush drills and a weekly bath form part of this school course, as well as a two-hour nap each day. The experiment has been so successful that the number of children will be increased next year to one hundred and the school term lengthened to six months.

As wife of Dr. W. E. Struthers, chief medical inspector of the schools, Mrs. Struthers will continue her interest in the physical care of school children. She will also have the direction of the work until her successor, not yet appointed, is broken in.

* * * * *

To make charity administration measure up to strict tests of business efficiency--this has been the ideal that Howell Wright has put in practice as superintendent of the Cleveland Associated Charities. He has succeeded so well that Mayor Baker has recently appointed him superintendent of the City Hospital, with instructions to use the same methods there.

Mr. Wright has no medical training. He is a social worker with a business twist. His new appointment illustrates the growing tendency today to put at the head of great specialized institutions, men who have a broad social outlook combined with executive power, but minus specialized training.

The City Hospital has been a bit too professional in the past. It has looked very closely to its diagnosis and temperature charts and instruments. But almost no thought has been given to the human and social background of its patients, and patients “cured” of physical ills have been turned out with all their social ills still festering, the inevitable result being that they speedily returned to the City Hospital to be “cured” again.

The hope is that Mr. Wright will make of the City Hospital a social institution, looking backward and forward into causes and effects.

Since Mr. Wright received his master’s degree from Yale University in 1907 he has served as special agent of the Massachusetts S. P. C. C. and as general secretary of the Norwood Civic Association. During the past year as superintendent of the Cleveland Associated Charities his chief move has been the abandonment of the general employment bureau for the unskilled, which had been conducted by the Associated Charities since 1886. After a searching study of the charitable field and a special study of such bureaus in other places it was decided to transfer this work to the State Employment Bureau in the city and the experiment has so far justified itself. Mr. Wright’s service has also been notable in bringing into use simple records, centralized purchasing and smoothly systematic office methods.

* * * * *

Sidney B. Bock, acting head resident of Pillsbury Settlement House, Minneapolis, has been elected head resident of Neighborhood House in Detroit, Michigan. This settlement is just completing a new building, having been in rented quarters since its founding in 1909.

* * * * *

Berkeley G. Tobey, until recently secretary of the National Council Boy Scouts of America, has become business manager of the Masses Publishing Company.

COMMUNICATIONS

VOCATIONAL SCHOOLS

TO THE EDITOR:

Recently the writer noticed several communications in THE SURVEY, in reference to the proposition of establishing a separate system of vocational schools, distinct from the existing traditional public school system.

As a reason for the establishment of this so-called “dual” system of vocational education the claim is advanced that, since manual training had been emasculated by being in contact with the public school, so likewise would vocational and industrial education be emasculated if these forms of education were to be carried on side by side with the other schools under the old organization.

The writer having seen the retarding effects of such a “dual” system in one of our larger industrial cities, and Massachusetts having tried and abandoned it, and since the writer is firmly convinced that such a divided system of education will, before long, react injuriously upon the social and ethical life of a state and her communities, and will plague the industries with its uneconomic and unsocial consequences, he is decidedly opposed to such a separated system of vocational schools.

It is a shrewd move to get entire control of the education of the masses of industrial workers, a mentally narrowing, mind killing education which, in its effects, would pull the intelligence of a community down to a lower level, being re-enforced by the ossifying influences of extreme specialization, which are noticeable in shop, store and office in all our industrial centers even now.

Manufacturers and business men do not take kindly to the idea that they should be made responsible for the mental, moral and aesthetic development of their employes and under these circumstances industrial education would soon degenerate into a feudal appendage of our industrial system. Manufacturers, corporations and business men are certainly entitled to a share in the management of our educational system and industrial schools and it is highly desirable that they should claim their share.

But they can accomplish all they need either as members of school boards, or as advisory committees on industrial education.

As to the danger of vocational schools being emasculated there is no such danger. No one who understands anything about the matter expects to have vocational or industrial schools articulated with the elementary or high schools in the manner manual training has been and is articulated, but have these lower schools separate in just the same manner as manual training high schools or technical high schools are separate from the academic schools, yet are under the same organization and management without any detriment to their usefulness.

It is true that, if specific industrial education is yoked together with academic education in the high school, industrial education will be emasculated. But then it is due to a managerial blunder of trying to straddle two horses and there is no excuse to make such a managerial mistake the pretext for the creation of an expensive separate system of education. Manual training, as we understand it, was never emasculated because neither by the originators, and the writer is one of them, nor subsequently, was manual training in the elementary and high school considered anything else but an adjunct to academic schools for cultural purposes and down to the N. E. A. meeting at Boston in 1903, Professor Woodward, the father of the American system of manual training, disclaimed any other but cultural purpose for manual training, without any distinct vocational aim.

At the above meeting Dean Woodward, in referring to the manual training work done at St. Louis said: “The secondary school should enable a boy to discover the world and find himself. I use the word ‘discover’ in the sense of uncover--that is lay bare--the problems, the demands, the opportunities, the possibilities of the eternal world. A boy finds himself when he has taken a correct inventory of his inherited and acquired tastes and capacities”. While many friends of manual training were disappointed in finding it did not revolutionize trade education, it never intended to do that and therefore was not emasculated.

PAUL KREUZPOINTNER.
[Chairman Committee on Industrial Education, American
Foundryman’s Association.]
Altoona, Pa.

=THE I. W. W.: AN OUTLAW ORGANIZATION=

TO THE EDITOR:

I wish to express my hearty appreciation of John A. Fitch’s article in THE SURVEY of June 7, on the I. W. W. It is illuminative. The I. W. W. is the one organization that is both hated and feared by our most eminent leaders in business, politics, and religion. There are good reasons for this. The I. W. W. pays no homage to heroes and great men of the past; it has little respect for the laws of the land, because it believes these laws were made to keep them in bondage; and it entirely ignores and repudiates the church, as it holds that the church has always been an instrument to keep the people in ignorance and subjection.

Small wonder it is that this “outlaw” organization receives the contempt and anathemas of conventional, respectable people, who have been taught that everything that makes civilization better than barbarism, is due to the genius and greatness and goodness of a few men, who in turn were but the instruments of Providence. The I. W. W. tells its members to stop bowing the head and the knee to great men and even to God, and to assert the right and power that is theirs, and to depend on themselves alone for the establishment of a new system of industry.

Sound and staid business, political and religious leaders are deeply concerned with what seems to be the trend of thought and action on the part of the “lower” classes. This trend appears to be decidedly in the direction of the very principles and methods of the I. W. W. The “better” class of people believe chaos and anarchy will result if the principles and practices of the I. W. W. predominate; the I. W.W. believe they will always be oppressed, and matters go from bad to worse, if our method of doing business is not fundamentally changed. They believe so fully in the justice of their cause that they willingly accept the scorn, the contempt, the inhuman treatment inflicted on them in jail and out, that is meted out mercilessly for their uncompromising speech and attitude.

This bitter feeling of the “best” people toward the I. W. W., and the dogged persistence of the I. W. W. in their revolutionary tactics, constitute the most acute phase of what the Socialists call the class struggle. This class war will continue till one side or the other is victorious. One reason that the whole matter is so generally misunderstood is that nearly all the newspapers distort and suppress most of the news concerning the activity of the I. W. W.

Mr. Fitch’s article radiates light rather than heat.

A. E. HOUSE.
Spokane, Wash.

=RIGHT IDEAS ON INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS=

TO THE EDITOR:

I have read the various contributions to your symposium on the work before the new Commission on Industrial Relations. In my opinion it is the duty of the employer to provide the necessary safeguards and protection for his employes, such for instance as good light and air, sanitary surroundings, protection against fire and other dangers, reasonable hours of labor, adequate wages, no child labor, facilities for education and self-improvement, healthful living quarters, opportunity for recreation, etc. These and other advantages should be supplied under all circumstances, and there should be co-operation and good feeling between employer and workingman. It seems to me quite probable that the better results which would thus be obtained through the greater efficiency of the employes would more than compensate the employer for any extra outlays which he may have to make to provide such protection, so that in the end it would cost him nothing. The hearty co-operation and friendly spirit which would thus be engendered between the employer and his workingmen would be apt to prevent strikes and other troubles and would decidedly be to the interest of both employer and employe. Any excuse that a manufacturer or other employer of labor might make that if he had to provide this protection to his employes he could not make his business pay seems to me similar to the excuse of one who contemplates putting up a building but says he cannot afford to make the necessary expenditures to provide for the safety of those who will occupy it because with such extra cost the income from the building would not be sufficient to pay a good interest. If he cannot make it pay he should of course not undertake it, but under all circumstances he must build safely. In the same way an employer should see that his employes and workmen receive the necessary protection and he should provide for their absolute safety and do the right thing by them all the time.

ADOLPH LEWISOHN.
[President General Development Company.]
New York.

=ALCOHOLISM=

TO THE EDITOR:

I am greatly pleased to see on the cover page of THE SURVEY issue of August 9, a copy of the first Municipal Poster against Alcoholism in the United States. I have wondered in reading THE SURVEY, that so very much attention was given to different phases of welfare by excellent writers, and the subject of liquor business was not emphasized. It is conceded to be the greatest economic problem of the age, and is the cause of the need of charity organizations, police courts, etc. It is estimated by scientific and prison boards that 75 per cent of the insane, and a greater per cent of criminals, and defectives are now at the mercy of the tax payers of the country as a result of liquor drinking, and liquor heredity. Certainly with such a preponderance of evidence against, and interest in, the subject of alcohol, it makes us rejoice that THE SURVEY has decided to give a front page to the publicity of municipality interest in this subject.

LUELLA F. MC WHURTER.
[President Indiana Federation of Clubs.]
Indianapolis.

=BIBLE STORY FILMS=

TO THE EDITOR:

While I was staying at Hull House, I saw in their theater a moving picture of the life of Moses. The dial of time turned back, we all became spectators of the events of that great life, almost as though we had been his contemporaries. From the basket in the river to Sinai and the golden calf, it was all there, vivid, true to the Bible story and reverent in tone. I left the theater with much the same feeling as though I had heard a great oratorio, and even today the picture which ran its course in fifteen minutes is more vivid than the story which I have read and taught from childhood.

At a lecture in the University of Chicago last summer, the pastor of a Congregational Church in Madison, Wisconsin, came to me and said that he would like to put the moving picture into his Sunday School room, if I could tell him where he could get the films. All that I could say was to get in touch with the film companies and endeavor to get the ones that he wanted, but I knew that he would have trouble.

There are a considerable number of churches that have already introduced the moving picture into their evening service or their Sunday School. But the difficulty is the same everywhere, it is hard to get films that are suitable. Undoubtedly all the Bible stories can be taught more effectively through the moving picture than in any other way. The church ought to teach its lessons by the most effective means at hand, and many churches would be using the moving picture if they could secure suitable films at a reasonable rate. Mr. Edison has already made a good beginning on a series of films to illustrate the work of the public school.

Inasmuch as the churches need a special type of films, why should not the church federations ask the film companies to produce films of this type and start a church exchange? The churches should indicate which pictures they wanted and furnish Bible experts to supervise the making of the films, so as to secure an accurate and reverent reproduction of the stories. These films might then go out with the approval of the federation like a Sunday School lesson leaf. The film companies would be merely the printers of the material furnished them by the federation.

Besides the Bible stories the great morality and passion plays, like Oberammergau, might well be given, and representations of the great social movements, such as recreation, child labor, tuberculosis, and the like, the films for which are largely available at the present time.

Transcriber’s Note

Words may have multiple spelling variations or inconsistent hyphenation in the text. These were left unchanged. Dialect, obsolete and alternative spellings were left unchanged.

Words and phrases in italics are surrounded by underscores, _like this_. Those in bold are surrounded by equal signs, =like this=. A dozen misspelled words were corrected. One duplicated word was removed. Footnote was moved to the end of the article. Final stops missing at the end of sentences and abbreviations were added.

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The Survey, Volume 30, Number 24, Sep 13, 1913Chapter II: Part 2

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