We have said that neighborhood organization must replace party organization by evolving a true will of the people, by giving us leaders instead of bosses, and by making possible a responsible government to take the place of our irresponsible party government. Let us now consider the last point: the possibility of an integrated neighborhood responsibility.

Under our party organization the men who formulate the party platform do not have the official responsibility of carrying it out. Moreover at present representative government rests on the fallacy that when you delegate the job you delegate the responsibility. Most of the abuses which have crept in, business corruption and political bossism alike, are due in large measure to this delegating of responsibility. What we need is a kind of government which will delegate the job but not the responsibility. The case is somewhat like that of the head of a business undertaking, who makes the men under him responsible for their own work and still the final responsibility rests with him. This is not divided responsibility but shared responsibility⁠—a very different thing.

Consider what happens when I want to get a bill through the legislature. I may feel sure that the bill is good and also that “the people” want it, but I can work only through party, and at the state house I have to face all the special interests bound up with party, all the thousand and one “political” considerations, whether I succeed or fail. But of course I recognize the humor of this statement: I ought never to try to get a bill through the legislature; special and partial groups have to do this simply because there is at present no other way; there must be some other way, some recognized way. We do not want to circumvent party but to replace party.

Our reform associations, while they have fought party, have often endeavored to substitute their own organization for the party organization. This has often been the alternative offered to us⁠—do we want good government or poor government? We have not been asked if we would like to govern ourselves. This is why Mitchell lost last year in New York. One of the New York papers during the campaign advised Mr. Mitchell “to get nearer the people.” But it is not for government to “get nearer” the people; it must identify itself with the people. It isn’t enough for the “good” officials to explain to the people what they are doing; they must take the people into their counsels. If the Gary system had ever been properly put up to the fathers it is doubtful if they would have voted against it. Then a good deal of this advice in regard to city officials “explaining” their plans in all parts of the city leaves out of account that the local people have a great deal to give. Some of the most uneducated, so-called, of the fathers and mothers might have had valuable points of view to offer in regard to the practical workings of the Gary system.

Tammany won in New York and we heard many people say, “Well, this is your democracy, the people want bad government, the majority of people in New York city have voted for it.” Nothing could be more superficial. What the election in New York meant was that “the people” are cleverer than was thought; they know that the question should not be of “good” government or “bad” government, but only of self-government, and the only way they have of expressing this is to vote against a government which seems to disregard them.

To say, “We are good men, we are honest officials, we are employing experts on education, sanitation etc., you must trust us,” will not do; some way must be devised of connecting the experts and the people⁠—that is the first thing to be worked out, then some way of taking the people into the counsels of city administration. All of us criticize things we don’t know anything about. As soon as we see the difficulties, as soon as the responsibility is put upon us, our whole attitude changes. Take the popular cry “Boston positions for Boston people.” This seems a pretty good principle to superficial thinking. But when we know that we have an appropriation of $200,000 a year for a certain department, and are looking for a man to administer it, when we go into the matter and find that there are only two or three experts for this position in the United States, and that not one of these lives in Boston, the question takes the concrete form, “Shall we allow $200,000 of our money to be wasted through inept administration?” It might be said, “But city governments do have the responsibility and yet this is just what they are all the time doing.” Certainly, because their position rests on patronage, but I am proposing that the whole system be changed.

Neighborhood organization must be the method of effective popular responsibility: first, by giving reality to the political bond; secondly, by providing the machinery by which a genuine control of the people can be put into operation. At present nearly all our needs are satisfied by external agencies, government or institutional. Health societies offer health to us, recreation associations teach us how to play, civic art leagues give us more beautiful surroundings, associated charities give us poor relief. A kind lady leads my girl to the dentist, a kind young man finds employment for my boy, a stern officer of the city sees that my children are in their places at school. I am constantly being acted upon, no one is encouraging me to act. New York has one hundred municipal welfare divisions and bureaus. Thus am I robbed of my most precious possession⁠—my responsibilities⁠—for only the active process of participation can shape me for the social purpose.

But all this is to end. The community itself must grip its own problems, must fill its needs, must make effective its aspirations. If we want the latest scientific knowledge in regard to food values, let us get an expert to come to us, not wait for some society to send an “agent” to us; if the stores near us are not selling at fair prices, let us make a cooperative effort to set this right. If we want milk and baby hygiene organized, our own local doctors should, in proper cooperation with experts on the one hand and the mothers on the other, organize this branch of public service. The medical experts may be employees of the government, but if the plan of their service be worked out by all three⁠—the experts, the local doctors and the mothers⁠—the results will be: (1) that the needs of the neighborhood will really be met, (2) much valuable time of the expert will be saved, (3) a close followup will be possible, (4) the expert can be called in whenever necessary through local initiative, and (5) the machinery will be in existence by which the study of that particular problem can be carried on not as a special investigation but as a regular part of neighborhood life.

Take another example. The Placement Bureau is also a necessary public service: it needs the work of experts and it needs pooled information and centralized machinery; a parent cannot find out all the jobs available in a city for boys of 16 in order to place one boy. But as long as the secretary of the Placement Bureau appears in the home and takes this whole burden off the parent, and off the community he is serving, his work will not be well done. For the boy will suffer eventually: he cannot be cut off from his community without being hurt; community incentive is the greatest one we know, and somehow there must be worked out some community responsibility for that boy, as well as some responsibility on his part to his community for standing up or falling down on his job. I say that the boy will eventually suffer; his community also will suffer, for it also has need of him; moreover, the community will greatly suffer by the loss of this opportunity of connecting it, through the parents, with the whole industrial problem of the city. The expert service of the Placement Bureau, whether it is administered by city or state, should always be joined to local initiative, effort and responsibility.

And so for every need. If we want well-managed dances for our daughters, we, mothers and fathers, must go and manage them. We do not exist on one side and the government on the other. If you go to a municipal dance-hall and see it managed by officials appointed from City Hall, you say, “This is a government affair.” But if you go to a schoolhouse and see a dance managed by men and women chosen by the district, you say, “This is a community affair, government has nothing to do with this.” These two conceptions must mingle before we can have any worthy political life. It must be clearly seen that we can operate as government as well as with government, that the citizen functions through government and the government functions through the citizen. It is not a municipal dance-hall regulated by the city authorities which expresses the right relation between civics and dancing, but dances planned and managed by a neighborhood for itself.

It is not the civic theatre which is the last word in the relation of the drama to the people, it is a community organized theatre. Art and civics do not meet merely by the state presenting art to its members; the civic expression of art is illustrated by locally managed festivals, by community singing, a local orchestra or dramatic club, community dancing etc. Those of us who are working for civic art are working for this: for people to express themselves in artistic forms and to organize themselves for that purpose. The state must give the people every opportunity for building up their own full, varied, healthful life. It seems to be often thought that when the state provides schools, parks, universities etc., there you have the ideal state. But we must go beyond this and find our ideal state in that which shows its members how to build up its own life in schools, parks, universities etc.86

The question which the state must always be trying to answer is how it can do more for its members at the same time that it is stimulating them to do more for themselves. No, more than this, its doing more for them must take the form of their doing more for themselves. Our modern problem is not, as one would think from some of the writing on social legislation, how much the increased activity of the state can do for the individual, but how the increasing activity of the individual can be state activity, how the widening of the sphere of state activity can be a widening of our own activity. The arguments for or against government action should not take the form of how much or how little government action we shall have, but entirely of how government action and self-action can coincide. Our one essential political problem is always how to be the state, not, putting the state on one side and the individual on the other, to work out their respective provinces. I have said in the chapter on “Our Political Dualism” that the state and the individual are one, yet this is pure theory until we make them one. But they can never be made one through schemes of representation etc., only by the intimate daily lives of all becoming the constituents of the life of the state.

When a Mothers’ Club in one of the Boston School Centres found a united want⁠—that of keeping their children off the streets on Saturday afternoon and giving them some wholesome amusement⁠—and decided to meet this want by asking the city of Boston for permission to use the moving-picture machine of the Dorchester High School for fairy-story films, the mothers to manage the undertaking, two significant facts stand out: (1) they did not ask an outside agency to do something for them, for the men and women of Dorchester, with all the other men and women of Boston, are the city of Boston; (2) they were not merely doing something for their children on those Saturday afternoons, they were in a sense officials of the city of Boston working for the youth of Boston. These two conceptions must blend: we do not do for government, government does not do for us, we should be constantly the hands and feet, yes and the head and heart of government.87

A most successful effort at neighborhood organization is that of the East Harlem Community Association, which set East Harlem to work on its own problems: first to investigate conditions, and then to find a way of meeting these conditions. The most interesting point about the whole scheme is that the work is not done by “experts” or anyone else from outside; there are no paid visitors, but a committee of twelve mothers⁠—one colored woman, two Italian, two Jewish, two Irish, three American, one Polish, and one German⁠—are doing the work well. As a result of the activities of the East Harlem Community Association there are now in a public school building of the neighborhood organized athletic clubs, industrial classes, orchestra, glee, dramatic and art clubs, concerts, good moving pictures, dances, big brother and big sister groups, Mothers’ Leagues, Parents’ Associations, physical examination of school children etc. Of course these community associations must use expert advice and expert service. Exactly how this relation will be most satisfactorily worked out we do not yet clearly see.88

I give this merely as one illustration out of many possible ones. The necessity of neighborhood organization as the basis of future progress is seen by many people today. In New York there is a vigorous movement for “Neighborhood Associations”; there are four already in active working order. If the main idea of some of these is services rendered rather than neighborhood organization; if others see too great a separation between needs and the satisfaction of the needs, that is, if the neighborhoods are always to ask the questions and the experts to find the answers, still these Associations are an interesting and valuable part of the neighborhood movement.89

The acute problem of municipal life is how to make us men and women of Boston feel that we are the city, directly responsible for everything concerning it. Neighborhood organization, brought into existence largely by the growing feeling of each individual that he is responsible for the life around him, itself then increases and focuses this sense of responsibility. Neighborhood association is vivid and intimate. Whereas the individual seems lost in a big city, through his neighborhood he not only becomes an integral part of the city but becomes keenly conscious of his citizenship.

In a word, what we hope neighborhood organization will do for the development of responsibility is this: that men will learn that they are not to influence politics through their local groups, they are to be politics. This is the error of some of the reform associations: they want to influence politics. This point of view will never spell progress for us. When we have the organized neighborhood group, when every man sees the problems of political and social reorganization not as abstract matters but as constituting his daily life, when men are so educated in politics as to feel that they themselves are politics functioning, and when our organization is such that this functioning recoils on them, they will so shape their conduct as to change the situation. Then when they are conscious of themselves as masters of the situation they will acknowledge their responsibility.

We see many signs around us today of an increased sense of responsibility, of a longing for a self-expression that is not to be an individual self-expression but community self-expression. Take the women’s clubs: in their first stage their object was personal development; in the second they wished to do something for their town; in the present or third stage women are demanding through some of the more progressive clubs, through women’s municipal leagues etc., a more direct share in community life. They are joining together not to benefit themselves, not to benefit others, as others, but because all together they wish to express their community⁠—no, they wish to be their community. They are not satisfied with serving, but gathering up the service of all in a common consciousness, each feels herself the whole and seeks to express the whole.

But I do not mean that this greater realization of community is confined to women. How often in the past we have heard a man say complacently, “Well, I suppose I must do my duty and go to the polls and vote tomorrow,” or “I must show myself at that rally tonight.” But a nobler idea than this is now filling the minds of many men. They go to their civic club not because it is their duty, but because just there working together with their fellows for the furtherance of their common aims, they find their greatest satisfaction. In neighborhood groups men can find that self-realization which becomes by the most wonderful miracle life can offer us community realization. That is, I can learn through my neighborhood group that I am the city, I am the nation, and that fatal transference of responsibility to an invisible and nonexistent “they” can be blotted out forever. When neighborhood organization begins to teach that there is no “they,” that it is always we, we, we, that mothers are responsible and fathers are responsible, and young men are responsible, and young women are responsible, for their city and their nation, it will begin to teach its chief lesson.

Do I thrill with the passion of service, of joyful, voluntary surrender to a mighty cause as I sail for France to serve the great ends of the Allies? Social and political organization are fatally at fault if they cannot give me the same elation as I go to my Neighborhood Centre and know that there too the world has vital need of me, there too am I not only pouring myself out in world service, but that I am, just in so far, creating, actually building, a new and fairer world.

This is the finest word that can be said for neighborhood organization, for my finding my place through my response to every daily need of my nearest group. For the great word I believe on this subject is not that I serve my neighborhood, my city, my nation, but that by this service I become my neighborhood, my city, my nation. Surely at this hour in our history we can realize this as never before. The soul of America is being born today. The war is binding together class and class, alien and American, men and women. We rejoice that we are alive at this moment, but the keenness of my joy is not because I can serve America but because I am America. I save food in my home not in order that my family income can meet the strain of the higher prices, not because I can thereby help to send more food to the Allies, but because I, saving the food of America for the Allies and the world, am performing America’s task, am therefore America. This is the deeper thought of neighborhood organization: that through performing my humblest duties I am creating the soul of this great democracy.

Neighborhood organization must then take the place of party organization. The neighborhood group will answer many of the questions we have put to a party organization which has remained deaf to our importunities, dumb to all our entreaties. We have asked for bread and received the stone times without number. The rigid formality of the party means stultification, annihilation. But group politics, made of the very stuff of life, of the people of the groups, will express the inner, intimate, ardent desires of spontaneous human beings, and will contain within its circumference the possibility of the fullest satisfaction of those desires. Group organization gives a living, pulsing unity made up of the minds and hearts and seasoned judgments of vital men and women. Such organization is capable of unbroken growth. And when this vine of life, which sends its roots where every two or three are gathered together, has rooted itself in the neighborhood, faithful care, sedulous watching, loving ministration will appear with it, will be the natural way of living. Its impalpable bonds hold us together, and although we may differ on countless questions, instead of flying asunder we work out the form in political life which will shelter us and supply our needs. Faithfulness to the neighborhood bond must take the place of allegiance to party. Loyalty to a party is loyalty to a thing⁠—we want a living politics in which loyalty is always intrinsic. And from the strength of this living bond shall come the power of our united life. Always the actor, never the spectator, is the rule of the new democracy. Always the sharer, never the giver or the receiver, is the order of our new life.

Do you think the neighborhood group too puny to cope with this giant towering above us, drunk with the blood of its many triumphs? The young David went out to conquer Goliath, strong in the conviction of his power. Cannot our cause justify an equal faith?

Is our daily life profane and only so far as we rise out of it do we approach the sacred life? Then no wonder politics are what they have become. But this is not the creed of men today: we believe in the sacredness of all our life; we believe that Divinity is forever incarnating in humanity, and so we believe in Humanity and the common daily life of all men.