BUREAUCRATIC AND POLITICAL INFLUENCES

IN NEIGHBORHOOD CIVIC PROBLEMS

Jane E. Robbins, M.D., Neighborhood House Association, Denver

The general subject of local leadership in politics and among office-holders certainly corners those of us who are salaried people with the neighborhood as our job. Our reaction to this leadership-how we can cooperate with it, what we can learn from it, and what we can do to improve it-sends our thoughts back over a variety of experiences. Someone has defined a leader as a person who has followers. We, the social workers, a superior kind of leaders, are never satisfied unless our followers are moving up.

No one would think of denying that we are a part of what President Coolidge refers to as "the determined upward movement in behalf of the social welfare." We are, therefore, at some disadvantage in competition with the politicians, as they are not specially concerned with leading their followers to better things. They can, therefore, take a more practical and everyday view of life. They have fewer ultimate objects in view than we have.

I remember well a group of big boys on the East Side of New York who took me to task for speaking of electing a good man to office. "Being good and being in politics have nothing to do with each other," sternly remarked one iron-jawed young man. I explained that I was talking about electing a man who would be honorable in public life, but still I thought that if a man could also be honorable and upright in private life it was a real addition to his service to the community. I soon found that I was arguing in vain. The boys knew their particular part of the East Side, and politics and any kind of being good had nothing to do with each other.

Those of us who have lived our lives in sordid surroundings have often been much impressed by the service given by the local politicians, service given freely, wisely, and often without any special return in votes. The boss can help out a youth under arrest, because he has the necessary money, whereas a settlement worker may be obliged to stand idly by for lack of financial resources. "Oh, to have money to do once what our boss does all the time,” sighed an efficient head worker.

We of the settlements are always troubled by the slowness with which we accomplish changes for the better. "It is like throwing snowballs into hell," said one impatient young man. But the politician is not so impatient. So long as he can count his voters and deliver them at the polls on election day he is doing well. I was once walking with a small girl when she spoke to a man whom we met. I asked her who he was, and she answered promptly, "That is Tony Scotto-puts you into jail, and takes you out again." He was the local boss and very powerful in this new foreign neighborhood. I found that his superiors, one of whom is now a great ambassador, thought very highly of him as a reliable man who never doublecrossed them but faithfully produced at election time the

number of votes that he had promised. Later, when I came to know Tony Scotto, I told him what the little girl had said, and he at least had the grace to blush. The obedience given by the police and the courts to the local boss and his lieutenants is of course a fundamental evil. Some settlement men in New York told me that they were going home, late one night, along the Bowery, when they noticed ahead of them a policeman with two men, apparently under arrest. Suddenly another man stepped up, tapped the policeman on the shoulder, and the two arrested men floated away. Our immediate mental reaction to this story is well based, for the policeman was undermining the fundamental rules of political society. Justice is destroyed where the personal influence of the politician and his lieutenants has such undue weight.

As we look about us in the modern city to see on what the good life of the neighborhood is to be based, we are impressed with the need of rules for our mutual restraint. We are moderns, and so given over to athletics, and we can see our neighborhood life as a boxing match, and those who break the rules are not "good sports." Some politicians constantly defy the necessary rules of mutual restraint. The most sinister combination in the foreign colonies of our big cities is the alliance between police and vice. It will go on sometimes for twenty or thirty years in a particular neighborhood. The leaders want money, and easy money and the protection of vice go together. I know one such neighborhood where for years and years the politicians have planted and grown vice as carefully as any scientists have ever planted bacteria in a laboratory. Sometimes everything seems to go against such a neighborhood. In this one, when the foreigners moved in the school principal was old, and resented having her peace disturbed and her school upset by the irruption of a lot of miserable children.

The school principal, as a leader in a neighborhood, can either do or leave undone much social work, and the neighborhood will show for years how active or how inactive she has been. My sympathies go out to a school principal in a bad neighborhood, who takes her stand for her children against the powers of evil. I know one such principal who fought the cigar stores to compel the storekeepers to obey the laws against selling cigarettes to minors. At the end of the year I found her in tears. She had been promoted to a better school in a better neighborhood. This principal had been insistent; the school authorities were none too courageous and had not wanted to be disturbed, and the political powers were friends of the cigar store people.

Among the leaders in our neighborhoods the judges of our courts stand out prominently. It is amazing to see how the record of a judge, with all its details, spreads around in the vicinity of his court. Our New York police courts often give just judgment day after day, and to the extent that they do justice, they are of course a tremendous power for good. There are so many true criticisms that can be launched against New York that it is a comfort to think that in the courts we sometimes do relatively well. Occasionally we have had a dull and

stupid judge, and the smallest East Side boy will tell you disrespectfully, “Judge A-ears up to here," giving the gesture of a donkey's ears.

The recommendation of one well-known chief of police, that a high type of policeman be sent into our congested neighborhoods, comes with authority and is an encouraging thought. If Berkeley can get college men to serve on its police force, then other cities can do something toward making positions on the force more attractive. The policemen are in charge of conduct on the street, and the streets are where the children live and get much of their breeding-their slant toward life.

I remember that a policeman was once telling me how much impressed he was by the close observation of the preschool-age child. He was in citizen's clothes, and I had never seen him before on the playground. While we were talking, a little four-year-old Slovenian girl came up and said to him, "You are a teckative." The policeman on the beat is the one who knows about the child's first delinquency. He could do a real public service by steering the child to the right organization for guidance, and by actually doing the real preventive work of which we often talk.

In one neighborhood where I lived, a kindhearted, right-minded policeman was one of the best social workers that I have ever known. He sized up a situation correctly, and knew that if a man worked and supported his children, the thing to do was to encourage and protect them and to see them through emergencies. I have known him to appear several times during Saturday night, if the man was on one of his occasional sprees.

As leaders coming in from the outside, it is up to us to prove to the local leaders, to the police, and to the political club that we can be of real help. Once, while at the summer camp, I was called up by long distance from our stationhouse on the lower East Side. The captain had been told by the commissioner to organize a street playground. It was a tough neighborhood near Chatham Square, and the captain had troubles enough of his own without having kindergarten games added to them. When I told him to close off a convenient block, and that we would take care of the games, his voice certainly sounded relieved. The police sergeant may easily be as deeply concerned in regard to the fate of some old couple that he knows as one of us would be. I remember just such a case. During a winter of terrible unemployment and hunger we were limiting the emergency relief work to families with children. We made a few exceptions, however, and one exception was an old friend of the police sergeant's. For years, as we had dealings with that police station on behalf of our neighbors in trouble, our interest in the old man and his wife continued to be a bond of union, and I believe that bond of union helped along the cause of justice.

As social workers, we may become of special value to the community as soon as we have accurate and important and first-hand information. We are people who have many friends, and from them we gain facts that can be profitably used. I once gave Mr. Jacob Riis and Mr. Roosevelt a carefully prepared

description of what was going on in a rather out-of-the way and very laxly disciplined station-house. The facts had been given to me by one of our club girls who had moved into a new neighborhood. Mr. Roosevelt, who was police commissioner at the time, dropped in one night to see for himself, and with telling effect.

I mentioned once in a committee meeting that a policeman had told me that he was not allowed to do the right thing. The day after the committee meeting, a tall and impressive-looking official representing the police department came to make a formal call of inquiry. If we know our facts and are moderate in our statements, carefully avoiding any exaggerations, they are sensitive to what we think.

Within recent prohibition times I found, in a neighborhood where I was living, that things were improving steadily in many respects, but the neighborhood had fallen under the curse of booze. Judges came at midnight to sit drinking in the cafés, and the streets were lined with automobiles containing well-dressed, but badly behaved, drunken men and women. On two occasions mothers meeting me on the street whispered to me, "Do something, do something." After consultation with well-informed people, with the help of leading citizens, I began to protest to other organizations and to the various authorities.

I had not gone very far before the captain, accompanied by a group of policemen and detectives, paid us a visit at a picture show one night on the playground. The captain talked in a loud voice, apparently with the purpose of letting the foreign men in our rather violent neighborhood know that I had been interfering. One of the detectives had been one of the old club boys, and I really could not imagine him letting any personal harm befall me, but I knew that the visit was intended as a threat, and ever since that episode I have been interested in policewomen and in plans for the college man as a policeman.

In one respect the professional politician markedly excels the professional social worker. He is what the boys call "a wise guy," and gives a close observation to the daily life of the neighborhood that we could well imitate. A modern case worker coming in one morning said irritably, "So many men are on the street! I don't believe that any of them want to work!" It had been raining heavily, and the day laborers could not work. It was Monday, and the peddlers had no market garden stuff for their wagons. No local politician would ever have failed to know these facts. Worldly wisdom seems to be his birthright, but it comes too slowly to the social worker. It is this wisdom that we must learn to appreciate and to acquire if we are ever to be as effective and resourceful in our line as the politician is in his line. He could give us many points. For exhortation he cares little, but in tolerant understanding he is strong. We think of tolerance as a modern virtue, but it was Chrysostom, in the fourth century, who said (presumably to the tired and nervous social worker of his day), "Why do you question the poor inquisitively-inquire their native land, and their manner of life. If we investigate the lives of men too carefully, we shall never have pity

on anyone." We all really like the politicians. There is the genial feeling that everything is all right between friends. But to the man without a job, the politician is like a messenger from heaven. We cannot approve of the system by which votes are rewarded by a job for son or brother or friend, but it is a very human institution and we must remember that to a man lost in the city wilderness friendliness is priceless. When we try to think out what does give the park laborer a right to his job, we find, I believe, that it is with him as with us; the ability to serve gives the right to serve. Does not this principle apply to all-to the street sweeper, the politician, and the social worker? If service is not given, then one has no rights in the neighborhood.

In looking at our neighborhood life to see how much the community organizations have accomplished in cooperation with the politicians, we are sometimes uncertain about our conclusions. On the recreation program, however, we have no doubts. You may recall the man in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, who said, "Before that tall skinny guy came to live here, the only sports a small boy around here had were to heave a brick at a stranger and to cry himself to sleep at night." But when we come to our other aims, not recreational ones, we have failed terribly. The housing of the working people is still our despair. Then too, we have worked out plans with the street department, with the health department, with the tenement house department, for a clean city, and yet we are not clean. After thirty years of effort it is not encouraging to escape, by an inch or two, a bundle of chicken bones that comes flying out of a sixth-story window. But in New York the hand that threw the garbage thirty years ago is now several miles away, wears diamonds, and has learned better methods. Though the neighborhood as a whole seems the same, or even much worse, the individuals pass on into better conditions.

As a result of our local leadership we have several privileges and duties. One is the privilege of bringing up an occasional public-spirited boy or girl who will help along the good life of the future. We teach fair play in the gymnasium, and fair play can be courageously carried over into public life. One of my old club boys is an inspector of painting on the fireboats, and I believe that he is a good inspector.

Another privilege is that of going into politics ourselves, as some of the best of us have done. One thing I have noticed is that after anyone has tried to do a bit of public work perfectly he is seldom heard denouncing other people's failures.

We have a big job ahead of us. The church, the school, the state, have yet to put at the service of our neighbors the sum of human knowledge. When everyone gets the benefit of the best that there is in humanity, then we will have the true democracy. We must stand by our neighborhoods, stay with them until the politician, the office-holder, and the neighbors together can achieve the good life.