Many of us are feeling strongly at the present moment the importance of neighborhood life, the importance of the development of a neighborhood consciousness, the paramount importance of neighborhood organization as the most effective means of solving our city and national problems. What our political life needs today is to get at the will of the people and to incorporate it in our government, to substitute a man-governed country for a machine-governed country. If politics are to be no longer mysterious and remote, but the warp and woof of our lives, if they are to be neither a game nor a business, far different methods must be adopted from any we have hitherto known.

Where do we show political vitality at present? In our government? In our party organization? In our local communities? We can see nowhere any clear stream of political life. The vitality of our community life is frittered away or unused. The muddy stream of party politics is choked with personal ambition, the desire for personal gain. Neighborhood organization is, I believe, to be the vital current of our political life. There is a widespread idea that we can do away with the evils of the party system by attacking the boss. Many think also that all would be well if we could separate politics and business. But far below the surface are the forces which have allied business and politics; far below the surface we must go, therefore, if we would divorce this badly mated couple.

Neighborhood organization is to accomplish many things. The most important are: to give a knockout blow to party organization, to make a direct and continuous connection between our daily lives and needs and our government, to diminish race and class prejudices, to create a responsible citizenship, and to train and discipline the new democracy; or, to sum up all these things, to break down party organization and to make a creative citizenship the force of American political life.

An effective neighborhood organization will deal the death blow to party: (1) by substituting a real unity for the pseudo unity of party, by creating a genuine public opinion, a true will of the people,84 (2) by evolving genuine leaders instead of bosses, (3) by putting a responsible government in the place of the irresponsible party.

First, there is at present no real unity of the people.

It is clear that party organization has succeeded because it was the only way we knew of bringing about concerted action. This must be obtained by the manipulation of other men’s minds or by the evolving of the common mind; we must choose between the two. In the past the monarch got his power from the fact that he represented the unity of his people⁠—the tribal or national consciousness. In the so-called democracies of England and America we have now no one man who represents a true collective consciousness. Much of the power of party has come, therefore, from the fact that it gave expression to a certain kind of pseudo collective consciousness: we found that it was impossible to get a common will from a multitude, the only way we could get any unity was through the party. We have accepted party dictatorship rather than anarchy. We have felt that any discussion of party organization was largely doctrinaire because party has given us collective action of a kind, and what has been offered in its place was a scattered and irresponsible, and therefore weak and ineffective, particularism. No “independent” method of voting can ever vie with the organized party machinery: its loose unintegrated nebulosity will be shattered into smithereens by the impact of the closely organized machine.

The problem which many men have wrestled with in their lives⁠—whether they are to adhere to party or to be “independent”⁠—is futile. Personal honesty exhausts no man’s duty in life; an effective life is what is demanded of us, and no isolated honesty gives us social effectiveness. When we go up to the gates of another world and say, “I have been honest, I have been pure, I have been diligent”⁠—no guardian of those Heavenly gates will fling them open for us, but we shall be faced with the counter thrust: “How have you used those qualities for making blossom the earth which was your inheritance? We want no sterile virtues here. Have you sold your inheritance for the pottage of personal purity, personal honesty, personal growth?”

To make our “independence” effective, to vie successfully with party organization, we must organize genuine groups and learn in those true collective action. No particularistic theory of politics will ever be strong enough to take the place of party. The political consciousness of men must be transferred from the party to the neighborhood group.

We hear discussed from time to time how far public opinion governs the world, but at present there is no public opinion. Our legislatures are supposed to enact the will of the people, our courts are supposed to declare the will of the people, our executive to voice the will of the people, a will surrounding men like a nimbus apparently from their births on. But there is no will of the people.85 We talk glibly about it but the truth is that it is such a very modern thing that it does not yet exist. There is, it is true, an overwhelming chaos of ideas on all the problems which surround us. Is this public opinion? The urge of the crowd often gets crystallized into a definite policy ardently advocated. Is this public opinion? Certain interests find a voice; one party or another, one group or another, expresses itself. Is this public opinion? Public opinion is that common understanding which is the driving force of a living whole and shapes the life of that whole.

We believe that the state should be the incarnation of the common will, but where is the common will? All the proposed new devices for getting at the will of the people (referendum etc.) assume that we have a will to express; but our great need at present is not to get a chance to express our wonderful ideas, but to get some wonderful ideas to express. A more complete representation is the aim of much of our political reform, but our first requirement is surely to have something to represent. It isn’t that we need one kind of government more than another, as the image-breakers tell us, it isn’t that we need honest intentions, as the preachers tell us, our essential and vital need is a people creating a will of its own. In all the sentimental talk of democracy the will of the people is spoken of tenderly as if it were there in all its wisdom and all its completeness and we had only to put it into operation.

The tragic thing about our situation in America is, not merely that we have no public opinion, but that we think we have. If I have no money in my pocket and know it, I can go to work and earn some; if I do not know it I may starve. But I do not want the American people to starve. The average American citizen says to himself, “It doesn’t matter very much what I think because American public opinion is sound at the core.” It is our Great Illusion. There has been much apotheosizing of the so-called popular will, but not every circle is a halo, and you can’t put a wreath round “the popular will” and call it democracy. The popular will to mean democracy must be a properly evolved popular will⁠—the true will of the people.

Who are the people? Every individual? The majority? A theoretical average? A compromise group? The reason we go astray about public opinion is because we have not as yet a clear and adequate definition of the “people.” We are told that we must elevate the “people.” There are no “people.” We have to create a people. The people are not an imaginary average, shorn of genius and power and leadership. You cannot file off all the points made by talent and efficiency, and call the dead level that is left the people. The people are the integration of every development, of every genius, with everything else that our complex and interacting life brings about. But the method of such integration can never be through crowd association. We may come to think that vox populi is vox Dei, but not until it is the group voice, not until it is found by some more intimate process than listening to the shout of the crowd or counting the votes in the ballot-box.

The error in regard to public opinion can be traced to that same sociological error which is the cause of so many confusions in our political thought: that the social process is the spread of similarities by suggestion and imitation. Any opinion that is shared, simply because it is shared, is called public opinion. But if this opinion is shared because it has spread among large numbers by “unconscious imitation,” then it is not a genuine public opinion; to be that, the process by which it has been evolved must be that of intermingling and interpermeating. Public opinion has been defined as the opinions of all the men on the “tops of busses,” or the opinion made by “banks, stock-exchanges and all the wire-pullers of the world,” or the opinion “imposed on the public by a succession of thinkers.” All this is, no doubt, true of much of our so-called public opinion at present, for public opinion today is largely crowd opinion. But there is less of this than formerly. And we must adopt those modes of living by which there shall be less and less infection of crowds and more and more an evolving of genuine group thought. When reforms are brought about by crowds being swept into them, they can be undone just as easily; there is no real progress here.

Political parties and business interests will continue to dominate us until we learn new methods of association. Men follow party dictates not because of any worship of party but simply because they have not yet any will of their own. Until they have, they will be used and manipulated and artificially stimulated by those who can command sufficient money to engage leaders for that purpose. Hypnosis will be our normal state until we are roused to claim our own creative power. The promise for the future is the power for working together which lies latent in the great rank and file of men and women today, and which must be brought clearly to their view and utilized in the right way. If we see no fruitful future for our political life under the present scheme of party domination, if we can see no bearable future for our industrial life under the present class domination, then some plan must be devised for the will of the people to control the life of the people. Fighting abuses is not our role, but the full understanding that such fighting is a tilting at windmills. The abuses in themselves amount to nothing. Our role is to leave them alone and build up our own life with our power of creative citizenship. We need today: (1) an active citizenship, (2) a responsible citizenship, (3) a creative citizenship⁠—a citizenship building its own world, creating its own political and social structure, constructing its own life forever.

Our faith in democracy rests ultimately on the belief that men have this creative power. Our vital relation to the Infinite consists in our capacity, as its generating force, to bring forth a group idea, to create the common life. But we have at present no machinery for a constructive life. The organization of neighborhood groups will give us this machinery.

Let us see how neighborhood groups can create a united will, a genuine public opinion.

First, neighborhood groups will naturally discuss their local, intimate, personal concerns. The platitudes and insincerities of the party meeting will give way to the homely realities of the neighborhood meeting. These common interests will become the political issues. Then, and not till then, politics, external at no point to any vital need, will represent the life of our people. Then when we see clearly that the affairs of city and state are our affairs, we shall no longer be apathetic or indifferent in regard to politics. We all are interested in our own affairs. When our daily needs become the basis of politics, then party will no longer be left in control because politics bore us, because we feel that they have nothing to do with us.

Already the daily lives of people are passing into the area of government through the increased social legislation of all our states during the last few years. In 1912 a national party was organized with social legislation as part of its platform. The introduction of social programs into party platforms means that a powerful influence is at work to change American politics from a machine to a living thing. When the political questions were chiefly the tariff, the trust, the currency, closely as these questions affected the lives of people, there was so little general knowledge in regard to them that most of us could contribute little to their solution. The social legislation of the last few years has taken up crime, poverty, disease, which we all know a great deal about: laws have been passed regarding child labor, workmen’s compensation, occupational disease, prison reform, tuberculosis, mothers’ pensions, the liquor question, minimum wage, employment agencies etc.

Tammany is built up on the most intimate local work: no family, no child, is unknown to its organization. And it is founded on the long view: votes are not crudely bought⁠—always; the boy is found a job, the father is helped through his illness, the worn-out mother is sent for a holiday to the country. As politics comes to mean state employment bureaus, sickness and accident insurance, mothers’ pensions, Tammany is being shorn of much of its power.

We are sometimes told, however, that while it is conceded that campaign issues should be made up from our intimate, everyday needs, yet it is feared that on each question a different split would come, and thus politics would be too confusing and could not be “handled.” Neighborhood organization is going to help us meet this difficulty. In nonpartisan neighborhood associations we shall have different alignments on every question. Moreover, we shall have different alignments on the same question in different years. Thus the rigidity of the party organization disappears. The party meeting is to the neighborhood meeting what the victrola is to the human voice: the partisan assembly utters what has been impressed upon it, you hear the machine beating its own rhythm; the neighborhood meeting will give the fresh ever-varied voices from the hearts of men. The party system and the genuine group system is the difference between machine-made and man-made. And this may be true of a good government organization as well as of a Tammany organization⁠—it is true wherever the machine is put above the man. We can get no force without freshness, and you cannot get freshness from a machine, only from living men. Just the very thing which costs the party money⁠—keeping its members together⁠—is its condemnation. Men will make up their minds on question after question in their neighborhood groups. Then they will vote according to these conclusions. Party dictation will never cease until we get group conviction. If our political life is going to show any greater sensitiveness to our real wants and needs than it has shown in the past, there must be some provision made for considering and voting on questions irrespective of party: you can not join a different party every day, but you can separate political issues from partisanship and vote for the thing you want. The reason more of our real wants have not got expressed in our politics is just because people cannot be held together on many issues.

Again, if neighborhood organization takes the place of party organization each question can be decided on its own merit: we shall not have to ask, “How will the management of this affect the power and prestige of our party?”

Also neighborhood groups can study problems, but the study of problems is fatal to party organization. The party hands out the ephemeral comings-to-the-surface of what will help the party, or the particularistic interests dominating the party. Every question brought forward at all is brought forward as a campaign issue.

Moreover the group discovers and conserves the individual. A party gathering is always a crowd. And party methods are stereotyped, conventional. Under a party system we have no spontaneous political life. The party system gives no exercise to the judgment, it weakens the will, it does away with personal responsibility. The party, as the crowd, blots out the individual. Mass suggestion is dominating our politics today. We shall get rid of mass influence exactly as fast as we develop the group consciousness. Men who belong to neighborhood organizations will not be the stuff of which parties are made. The party has prevented us from having genuine group opinion; or if we do by any chance get a group opinion now, it can usually speak only in opposition to party, it cannot get incorporated in our political life.

Every one of us will have an opportunity to learn collective thinking in the small, local, neighborhood group. No one comes to his neighborhood group pledged beforehand to any particular way of thinking. The object of the party system is to stifle all difference of opinion. Moreover, in partisan discussion you take one of two sides; in neighborhood groups an infinitely varied number of points of view can be brought out, and thus the final decision will be richer from what it gains on all sides. The neighborhood group which makes possible different alignments on every question, allows ultimate honesty in the expression of our views. If we get into the habit of suppressing our differences, these differences atrophy and we lose our sensitiveness to their demands. And we have found that the expression and the maintenance of difference is the condition of the full and free development of the race.

But we want not only a genuine public opinion, but a progressive public opinion. We cannot understand once for all, we must be constantly understanding anew. At the same time that we see the necessity of creating the common will and giving voice to it, we must bear in mind that there should be no crystallizing process by which any particular expression of the common will should be taken as eternally right because it is the expression of the common will. It is right for today but not for tomorrow. The flaming fact is our daily life, whatever it is, leaping forever and ever out of the common will. Democracy is the ever-increasing volume of power pouring through men and shaping itself as the moment demands. Constitutional conventions are seeking the machinery by which the reason and justice which have existed among us can be utilized in our life. We must go beyond this and unseal the springs which will reveal the forms for the wisdom and justice of their day. This is life itself, the direct and aboriginal constructor. We meet with our neighbors at our civic club not in order to accumulate facts, but to learn how to release and how to control a constructive force which will build daily for us the habitation of our needs. Then indeed will our government be no longer directed by a “body of law,” but by the self-renewing appearing of the will of the people.

The chief need of society today is an enlightened, progressive and organized public opinion, and the first step towards an enlightened and organized public opinion is an enlightened and organized group opinion. When public opinion becomes conscious of itself it will have a justified confidence in itself. Then the “people,” born of an associated life, will truly govern. Then shall we at last really have an America.