THE NEW STATE
by Mary Parker Follett

The Neighborhood Group:
Chapter XXVI
Neighborhood Organization vs. Party Organization

A Responsible Neighborhood

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 tailing 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 follow-up
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. [1]

     1. The war has shown us that our national agricultural program
     can best be done on a cooperative neighborhood basis: through
     the establishment of community agricultural conferences,
     community labor, seed and implement exchanges, community
     canning centres, community markets, etc.

  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 [1].

     1. I do not mean to imply that I think it is easy to learn how
     to identify ourselves with our city, especially for those who
     live In large cities. The men of a small town know that if
     they have a new town-hall they will have to pay for it. In a
     large city men ask for a ward building because they will not
     have to pay for it, they think. It is all this which
     neighborhood organization and the integration of
     neighborhoods, of which I shall speak later, must remedy.

  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 any one 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 [1].

     1 The plan of Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur Phillips for community
     organization and for the connection with it of expert service
     is too comprehensive to describe here, but based as it is on
     their actual experience, and planning as it does for the
     training of whole neighborhoods and the arousing of them to
     responsibility and action, it should be studied by every one,
     for such plans are, I believe, the best signs we have that
     democracy is yet possible for America.

  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 to-day. 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 [1].

     1. How much we are all indebted to the settlements as the
     pioneer neighborhood movement I do not stop to consider here.

  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 to-day 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 to-morrow," 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
non-existent "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 to-day. 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 to-day: 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.
