New York 
 
 State College of Agriculture 
 
 At Cornell University 
 
 Ithaca, N. Y. 
 
 The 
 
 Professor Dwight Sanderson 
 
 Rural Sociology 
 
 Library 
 
HF 294.W7'l92r'"'*"'' """'* 
 Community leadership, ... 
 
 3 1924 013 980 903 
 
The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924013980903 
 
COMMUNITY 
 LEADERSHIP 
 
 The cNie^u) Profession 
 "By LUCIUS R WILSON 
 
 Vice-President of the American City Bureau 
 
 American City Bureau, Inc. 
 New York 
 
Copyright, 1919 and 1921, by 
 LUCIUS B. WILSON 
 
 Published March, 1919 
 
 Second printing. May, 1920 
 
 Third printing (revised edition), June, 1921 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGK 
 
 Foreword v 
 
 I. Thb Extent of the New Profession . . i 
 
 II. What the New Profession Means ... ii 
 
 III. The Chamber of Commerce and "Indus- 
 
 trial Development" 30 
 
 IV. Principles the Chamber of Commerce 
 
 Must Teach 46 
 
 V. How THE Chamber of Commerce Must Lead 55 
 
 VI. Why the Secretary Must Plan Far Ahead 67 
 
 VII. What the Secretary Must Be ... . 78 
 
 VIII. A Few Things the Secretary Must Know i 10 
 
 IX. The Secretary in Relation to the Com- 
 
 munity 130 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 During the Great Conflict the American people 
 were told that food would win the war,; that ships 
 would win the war; and that guns and coal and air- 
 planes and other things would win the war. When 
 the fighting was over, it became evident that, essen- 
 tial as were these material things, it was leader- 
 ship and ideals and organization and morale that 
 really won the war. It was the spiritual, working 
 through the material, that gave us the victory. 
 
 Having attained a dominant influence in shaping 
 the world's destiny, the American people are entering 
 upon the most thrilling period in their history. To 
 the leaders of community thought and action have 
 come inspiring opportunities and profound responsi- 
 bilities. The strength of the Nation is the composite 
 strength of its thousands of urban and rural commu- 
 nities. And, as in the case of the Nation, the real 
 strength of each community is measured not so 
 much by the abundance of its natural resources nor 
 by its position on the map, as by its leadership and 
 ideals and organization and morale. Of these four 
 factors, the quality of the last three is determined in 
 no small degree by the character of the first. To 
 
vi FOREWORD 
 
 community leadership, therefore, must we look for 
 much of the motive power which shall guide America 
 and the world into a new era of peace and progress 
 and human happiness. 
 
 Leadership in community life is official and unoffi- 
 cial; it functions through governmental units and 
 through citizens' organizations. I^t is to unofficial 
 leadership that Lucius E. Wilson has given the title 
 of The New Profession. Himself a pioneer in the 
 modernizing of this profession in two important cities, 
 and for the last eight years an organizer of similar 
 movements in scores of other communities, he speaks 
 with authority both as a thinker and as a doer. The 
 success of his book will be measured not by the number 
 of copies sold, but by its effect in inspiring men of 
 ability to enlist for Community Leadership, and in 
 helping to greater efficiency those already enrolled in 
 The New Profession. 
 
 Harold S. Buttenheim. 
 
 Editorial Offices, 
 
 THE AMERICAN CITY, 
 
 New York, May, igzi. 
 
COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 The New Profession 
 
COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 The New Profession 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE EXTENT OF THE NEW PROFESSION 
 
 THERE are more than three thousand 
 towns and cities in America that have 
 chambers of commerce or organizations 
 resembling chambers of commerce. There 
 are forty large cities, possibly more, with 
 city clubs or civic clubs that are doing the 
 work which should be a part of the program 
 of the chamber of conunerce. There is a 
 rapid increase in the number of communities 
 that are endeavoring to advance them- 
 selves by such organized effort, and the 
 fine public spirit that is arising from co- 
 operative citizenship is shaping the Na- 
 tion's ideals. 
 
2 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 The salaried executive of a chamber of 
 commerce is usually called "secretary," al- 
 though his duties are far different from 
 secretarial functions in the ordinary ac- 
 ceptance of the term. He is the real man- 
 aging officer of his organization and can 
 make or break it. Of course there is a 
 board of directors and a president, as in 
 regularly organized bodies, but volunteer 
 officers and directors cannot be expected to 
 handle the actual administrative work that 
 has to do with from three hundred to five 
 thousand members that may be functioning 
 through dozens of committees. Some other 
 title must be found sometime that is more 
 descriptive than "secretary," but the wide 
 variety of tasks and responsibilities that 
 fall to the chamber of commerce sec- 
 retary makes the choice of a descriptive 
 name difficult. I'he man in question 
 must be the vitalizing factor in a sluggish 
 organization and the balance-wheel in a 
 radical one. He must be optimistic without 
 being visionary; a leader rather than a 
 driver; and he must have a working knowl- 
 edge of many things — hov'to raise a half- 
 
EXTENT OF THE PROFESSION 3 
 
 million dollars for community purposes, 
 how to rouse fifty thousand voters to bond 
 the city for new schools, how to lead busi- 
 ness men into fields of social welfare, how to 
 prevent human pests from talking good 
 projects to death, how to write a news- 
 paper story, make a speech, study much, 
 work prodigiously and live gladly. For all 
 this the chamber of commerce secretary is 
 paid tremendously in satisfaction and fairly 
 well in money. The salaries range from 
 as low as $1,500 a year to $12,000. The 
 greatest number of secretaries are in the 
 $2,400 to $3,600 class. These incomes com- 
 pare favorably with the earnings of other 
 professional classes such as physicians, den- 
 tists and attorneys, and the trend of secre- 
 tarial salaries is steadily upwards. The 
 responsibility resting on the commercial sec- 
 retary who administers the affairs and the 
 income of a community organization is far 
 greater than the load carried by a profes- 
 sional man in private life and, because the 
 secretarial field is broadening, the caliber 
 of men must become larger and the salaries 
 will have to attract such men. 
 
4 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 The public character of the work brings 
 men, in secretaryships, prominently before 
 large corporate and business interests, and 
 the ranks of the profession are constantly 
 drained of some of its ablest members, 
 who are induced to leave public work 
 by flattering offers from private employers 
 needing talent of the first class. This has 
 injured the new profession, as a profession. 
 Men who had learned the art of managing 
 public opinion have left for private voca- 
 tions without bequeathing their experience 
 in teachable form, and the loss of such 
 knowledge is not easily repaired. From the 
 standpoint of the beginner, however, the 
 large number of secretarial vacancies arising 
 from the above cause and others is a strong 
 attraction. There is not only " room at the 
 top," there is also room at the bottom and 
 in the middle of the ladder. 
 
 What can a man who has been attracted 
 by the title of "commercial secretary" 
 learn about the general character of the new 
 profession before entering upon it? What 
 are the essentials of success ? Are chambers 
 of commerce a« commercial as their names 
 
EXTENT OF THE PROFESSION s 
 
 imply? What are they aiming at ? Has the 
 experience of the best commercial organiza- 
 tions crystallized into a fundamental phi- 
 losophy of community action ? An answer — 
 even a partial one — to these questions will 
 do away with much blind groping and 
 many disappointments. 
 
 To go into the history of a few of the very 
 old boards of trade and trace their lives 
 minutely would entirely fail of the purpose, 
 because their numbers are too small to be 
 typical of the average modern American 
 city. The Chamber of Commerce of New 
 York boasts of a corporate life since 1770, 
 but its experience and policies would be a 
 poor guidance for Oklahoma City. The 
 hundreds of American cities built since 1776 
 felt the acute need of a promotive rather 
 than a directing force, and chambers of 
 commerce tried to supply it. All sorts of 
 blind alleys have been explored in these pro- 
 motive endeavors and all sorts of false gods 
 have been worshiped for a brief time. Yet 
 much that is strong, true and lasting has 
 come of it, and the mistakes have left their 
 modicum of truth by implication. At any 
 
6 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 rate the sharp line of demarkation between 
 the modern chamber of commerce and its 
 predecessors is the entry of this community 
 promotion spirit. The mental steps by which 
 men arrived at the desire for the modern 
 civic-commercial associations in their cities 
 are peculiarly natural and human. 
 
 Suppose you were a merchant in a self- 
 satisfied and sleepy city where the other 
 retailers were jealous and their stores 
 slovenly; the surrounding agricultural re- 
 gion pursuing a slipshod existence with bad 
 roads, poor schools, few churches, and as 
 httle fertilization of the community mind 
 as of the neglected soil ; the city government 
 comfortably incompetent and the citizen- 
 ship drowsily indifferent to advances and 
 improvements which every decade works 
 into the fabric of modern life; wha;t would 
 you do ? If your all was invested in such a 
 city, might not days come when you would 
 wish for the advantage of a "live town"? 
 And, pray, what is a live town? 
 
 If you were a manufacturer and found 
 the market for your product in California or 
 Maine growing so that the future of your 
 
EXTENT OF THE PROFESSION 7 
 
 industry called for a steadily increasing 
 number of employees in office, factory, or 
 on the road, is it not likely that you would 
 yearn for a town with a school system that 
 provided vocational training; a town with 
 plenty of moderate-priced houses to rent, 
 healthy recreation and an atmosphere that 
 was attractive to the best workmen; and a 
 community willingness to realize that indus- 
 trial progress is a matter of team work? 
 But where do these advantages come from ? 
 If you alone try to provide them, you will 
 find the job too big for profit or pleasure. 
 Some day you will ask, "Where is the root 
 of this intangible something that my city 
 needs ?" 
 
 If you are an attorney or a physician or 
 a dentist, you will find that all your indi- 
 vidual efforts, no matter how clever, cannot 
 disentangle you from the limitations of the 
 "dead town" where you live. Yet you can- 
 not remove to another city without sacri- 
 ficing thiat priceless public confidence built 
 up by all your preceding effort. Each pass- 
 ing year makes your own personal problem 
 increasingly difficult, because an active pro- 
 
8 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 fessional career may not be stretched in- 
 definitely. Your family and its future are 
 "invested" in the town. The one way 
 most advantageously to extricate one's self 
 from a dead town is to join with other men 
 and "liven" it up. 
 
 How can it be done? That is the ques- 
 tion chambers of commerce are learning to 
 answer. Pontiac, Michigan, saw its oppor- 
 tunity in the tremendous industrial develop- 
 ment of Detroit and determined to make 
 itself attractive to Detroit men. The Pon- 
 tiac Board of Commerce has a membership 
 income of some ^23,000 per year; Indianap- 
 olis has approached an annual budget of 
 $100,000, while Cincinnati devotes $131,000 
 to the same purpose. Only an estimate is 
 possible of the gross total expended each 
 year by American cities through their 
 chambers of commerce. The amount runs 
 into millions and is increasing rapidly. 
 
 A national federation was effected in 191 2 
 in the creation of the Chamber of Commerce 
 of the United States. Later the financial 
 necessities of this national organization 
 brought about the admission of a large 
 
EXTENT OF THE PROFESSION 9 
 
 number of individual memberships and 
 trade associations. The organization's work 
 is done through committees that frequently 
 submit important matters to the member- 
 ship by referenda. The accumulated issues 
 of a generation, so far as these issues affect 
 business, are coming before the national 
 chamber. However, the national chamber 
 is an institution by itself and does not 
 control the local organizations. 
 
 In 1909 the secretaries of a few chambers 
 of commerce met together in a convention 
 to talk over mutual problems and oppor- 
 tunities, and out of that gathering has grown 
 a national association which has been of 
 the greatest value to the new profession. 
 The conventions of the National Association 
 of Commercial Organization Secretaries are 
 now annual meetings, and the reports of the 
 discussions at these meetings have been 
 gathering form and substance with the pas- 
 sage of the years. The ideas and the ideals 
 of chambers of commerce are finding ex- 
 pression in a way that would have been 
 impossible otherwise. 
 
 From all these sources — the business or 
 
10 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 professional man in private life and the 
 national associations of commercial bodies 
 or chamber of commerce secretaries — there 
 is coming a steadily increasing mass of 
 thinking and trying and devising for the 
 public good. Much of the thinking and 
 planning of today will be obsolete tomorrow, 
 but it is laying the granite pedestal for 
 the golden statue. Money and time have 
 been wasted; bright hopes disappointed; 
 ambitious community schemes blasted; but 
 clear-minded men are coming to a funda- 
 mental philosophy of community action 
 that will steer cities free from blundering 
 in their future civic-commercial endeavors 
 and lead to achievements worthy of Amer- 
 icans in 1930. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 WHAT THE NEW PROFESSION MEANS 
 
 IDEALISM or materialism is a matter of 
 temperament; of spiritual insight or the 
 lack of it. Adherents of these opposing 
 philosophies of life are and ever will remain 
 in opposition to each other. Becoming a 
 commercial secretary will not change a 
 man's basic interpretations of life. 
 
 The natural idealist — and there is no such 
 thing as an artificially produced one — is 
 bound to view the world as a plastic thing 
 in the hands of human beings. He sees 
 men dominating matter. He knows that 
 copper is mined in Montana, manufactured 
 in Connecticut, and sold in Texas; that 
 mahogany logs are cut in Honduras, shipped 
 to New Orleans, freighted to Grand Rapids, 
 converted into furniture there, and sent 
 back to New Orleans for sale. He is not 
 
 II 
 
12 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 deluded by ponderous materialism masquer- 
 ading as the "economic basis of history," 
 nor will he concede that a city was ever built 
 by material things. 
 
 But there are many men who have not 
 clarified their economic or their social think- 
 ing even to the point of consciously under- 
 standing their own basis of judgment in 
 weighing the facts of city growth. When 
 such men happen to drop into the secretary- 
 ship of a chamber of commerce, they are 
 without chart or guide in their day's work. 
 They like the mental warmth and -suffusing 
 glow of inspirational speeches based on clear 
 idealism, but they muddle along in a hazy 
 effort to adapt their every-day thinking to 
 that utter materialism which says that a 
 city grows because of its possession of 
 material things. Quite naturally, civic- 
 commercial organizations under the direc- 
 tion of such men meander all over the 
 economic and sociological lot. There can 
 be no consistent administrative policy. 
 Sometimes the organization acquires a reac- 
 tionary reputation without intending to be 
 conservative, and just because it lacks a 
 
WHAT THE PROFESSION MEANS 13 
 
 definite intention of any sort. Public criti- 
 cism, once aroused, blindly slashes at the 
 secretary and his directors in a sort of fury. 
 As for himself, the secretary is confused by 
 what seems to be public ingratitude. He 
 has wanted to do the right thing, has tried 
 to do it, and finds himself misunderstood. 
 Yet the solvent for all his troubles would 
 be found quickly if he could bring himself 
 to analyze his own basic thinking. 
 
 The public is seldom as ungrateful as it is 
 pictured. Nor is it intentionally wrong. 
 Any group of Americans of average intelli- 
 gence may be relied upon to respond splen- 
 didly to the call of public duty, whether 
 they are named a cha!mber of commerce or 
 not, if the call is clearly made. When cham- 
 bers of commerce have failed to measure up 
 to high standards it is because the organ- 
 izations lacked a general philosophy — a 
 guiding religion of their work. The United 
 States could not have existed without the 
 clear statement of the aims and means of 
 national life that we call the Constitution. 
 Even the commonplace man could lay hold 
 of the great fact that "In Union there is 
 
14 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 Strength." But chambers of commerce 
 did not have a basic understanding of their 
 own aims, to say nothing of the means that 
 might be employed in achieving their ends. 
 
 Just as a man's character is the aggregate 
 of his thinking, so is the character, policy 
 and spirit of a chamber of commerce the 
 sum total of the team-thinking of its mem- 
 bers. But with one man — ^with an indi- 
 vidual — the thinking of tdday is the fore- 
 runner of tomorrow's thoughts, while with 
 an organization of many men there is no 
 such continuity. 
 
 The election of a new set of officers may 
 completely obliterate all the organization 
 policies that have been evolving for years, 
 unless these policies have been put into 
 written form. The records of committees 
 and directors' meetings supply an historical 
 background for the present; while a definite 
 program of activities provides a concrete 
 guide for the future. Yet very few cham- 
 bers of commerce have these organization 
 records in such physical shape as to make 
 them easily accessible. A still less number 
 of organizations possess a program of 
 
WHAT THE PROFESSION MEANS 15 
 
 definite activities sponsored by a substantial 
 portion of the membership. 
 
 If the voluntary associations of men — 
 chambers of commerce, or what not — are to 
 continue for many years, there must be 
 established a "habit of thought." This 
 habit will find expression in the minutes of 
 meetings, the published reports of forums 
 and analyses of committee tasks as well as 
 in a multitude of casual ways. The "habit 
 of thought," thus finding itself imbedded in 
 writing, will guide each changing adminis- 
 tration along a pathway of steady advance. 
 It is the one means to avoid utter anarchy 
 in group thinking. 
 
 A private corporation, in its business 
 gyrations, may point the same moral. It 
 is not "soulless" as is popularly supposed; 
 it merely changes its soul so easily that the 
 friends of the old soul find it absent upon 
 second call. Government — national, state 
 and local — would have been just as soulless 
 as the private corporation if the soul had 
 not been tied to the body by the thongs 
 of law. The reign of law came in the 
 world because mankind could not toler- 
 
i6 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 ate the daily loss of yesterday's hard-won 
 truth. 
 
 While the aggressive, promotional organi- 
 zations of the Middle West were groping 
 fiercely for material prosperity, they fur- 
 nished enough confusion of thought to serve 
 as the warning example for all time. Their 
 virile determination "to do something" led 
 them into all sorts of blind alleys and dis- 
 appointments. But in the midst of the moil- 
 ing there were certain economic and so- 
 ciological truths becoming clear, and it is 
 these truths with which the present-day 
 chamber of commerce may guide itself to 
 success. 
 
 For all practical purposes the reader may 
 concentrate his entire attention upon the 
 promotional civic-commercial organization. 
 The very few elderly and sedate commercial 
 bodies of Eastern cities that reverently bend 
 in obeisance before a charter "more than a 
 hundred years old, sir" and consider their 
 function to be that of a body-servant to 
 frock-coated Business, have no message for 
 the alert citizen of today who realizes that 
 all progress is a spiritual problem at bot- 
 
WHAT THE PROFESSION MEANS 17 
 
 torn. The old Board of Trade, that thought 
 its duty discharged by collecting a few sta- 
 tistics and holding a dress-suit annual ban- 
 quet, has eliminated itself. 
 
 The fundamentals of community progress 
 are finding a rapid acceptance whenever 
 and wherever they are put squarely and 
 courageously before a city. But what is 
 "community progress" ? Is it garnering the 
 nimble dollar? Or is it good government, 
 clean minds, and hearts, the spirit of service, 
 the alleviation of poverty, the end of unem- 
 ployment, the increase of cooperation, the 
 avoidance of human waste, the teaching of 
 efficiency? Or is it all these things, plus 
 the capture of the dollar, and yet more? 
 
 All the elements of community advance 
 are of one piece. That idea lies at the bot- 
 tom of all sound thinking about the future 
 of cities. If all the thinking and all the 
 acting of a city could be heaped up into two 
 great piles; so the industrial products, the 
 stores of merchandise, the newspapers and 
 public buildings and streets and schools and 
 houses and play-spots were in one moun- 
 tainous heap ; and the thinking of the people 
 
i8 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 made visible by some magic and raised into 
 another peak; the onlookers would very 
 quickly perceive that the thinking had not 
 only formed everything in the other heap, 
 but that thinking had absolutely determined 
 what should be in the heap. For instance, 
 it would be impossible to conceive of the 
 thought-mountain of the Hausa negroes be- 
 ing set beside the action-mountain of the 
 state of Indiana. 
 
 Clean-cut idealism is the guiding spirit of 
 the best commercial organizations on the 
 American continent, and its effect on public 
 thought is shown in a sounder conception of 
 the meaning of Wealth, Value and other 
 phrases employed by students of economics. 
 
 What is Wealth ? It used to be the popu- 
 lar notion that wealth was money, but, 
 thank God, the War has disposed of that 
 repulsive error. The reader of this book 
 need not be told that the production of 
 wealth is not so simple that revolutionary 
 banditti in Mexico may issue it on the 
 printing-press by millions or Bolshevik 
 "statesmen" in Russia turn out milliards 
 of roubles overnight. What is it? To the 
 
WHAT THE PROFESSION MEANS 19 
 
 classic economist wealth is more than paper 
 money; it is even more than real money; 
 it is any material thing possessing value. 
 But the economist of the future will give 
 the term an even broader meaning and will 
 include in the definition those intangible 
 spiritual values which, laying hold of the 
 material, are the real factors in human 
 progress. 
 
 Every man who passes your window is 
 seeking wealth — if he could but know what 
 it is in its best sense he would be more likely 
 to find it. From the close of the Civil War 
 to the era of Theodore Roosevelt, money- 
 getting almost obscured wealth - getting. 
 '^t3\x\i-cr eating, which is a step higher than 
 wealth-getting, was missing from the minds 
 of many captains of industry and leaders of 
 labor almost as completely as is the fourth 
 dimension. 
 
 To cap the climax, some of our American 
 universities were indoctrinating their stu- 
 dents with the grossly materialistic philoso- 
 phy of modern and militaristic Germany. 
 Consciously or unconsciously, Emerson was 
 becoming less than Nietzsche; Plato less 
 
20 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 than Hugo Miinsterberg. The science of 
 economics, no longer an inquiry into the 
 means that make for the welfare of the in- 
 dividual and the state, became a matter of 
 arithmetic; German professors assured us 
 that human motives and the moving force 
 they exert upon men must be reduced to 
 absolute figures like steam-power. The in- 
 herent coarseness of the Junker mind left no 
 ability to see the difference between phy^sical 
 and spiritual forces. Anything that could 
 not be added, multiplied, subtracted or 
 divided by the rules of mathematics did not 
 exist in the Prussianized mind. A day's 
 work by a factory operative became to these 
 economists a fixed quantity like a yard of 
 cloth or a pound of sugar. One day's work 
 and one more day's work was two days' 
 work — no more, no less — although a ma- 
 chinist who was paid seventy cents per'hour 
 in a certain American factory turned out his 
 product at lower unit cost than other work- 
 men at thirty cents per hour. The to-be- 
 expected result of this reversion to a philoso- 
 phy of materialism is apparent in the books 
 that are written by men who are claiming 
 
WHAT THE PROFESSION MEANS 21 
 
 public confidence as economists. Judge this 
 extract : 
 
 "Cities live by their business life with the out- 
 side world and on this foundation build whatever 
 superstructures of religion, culture and morals 
 their inclinations and their means allow." 
 
 Oh, Shades of the Puritan Fathers, who 
 waited until they had achieved business 
 prosperity and success, and then built 
 "whatever superstructure of religion, cult- 
 ure, and morals their inclination and their 
 means" allowed! And the ancient martyrs 
 of the Christian Church who followed in the 
 steps of Paul and Timothy to (so our mod- 
 ernists would have us believe) business 
 success first and spiritual development 
 afterward ! In the land of Washington and 
 Lincoln, we know better. In a nation that 
 was willing to spend its "last dollar and its 
 last man" in a World Wiar without the 
 slightest expectation of territorial gain or 
 material aggrandizement, we know better. 
 
 The World War has served one magnifi- 
 cent purpose in breaking the intellectual 
 serfdom that bound us to German materi- 
 alism. We were so blinded by German 
 
22 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 efficieincy that we did not stop to inquire 
 whether Germany had traded her soul for 
 a surface efficiency that was really amazing 
 inefficiency at bottom. For shall we call a 
 nation efficient that maintained vast swarms 
 of spies to supply the home government 
 with assurances that America "would not 
 enter the War if the U-boats did their 
 worst"? Or that thought England would 
 regard the treaty of Belgian neutrality as 
 "a scrap of paper"? The much-vaunted 
 efficiency of Germany got no farther than 
 the successful handling of insensate matter; 
 when it came to handling men in neutral 
 countries Germany made as many mistakes 
 of vital judgment as the occasion allowed. 
 All the business prosperity built up labori- 
 ously by Germany in half a century went 
 into the scrap-heap of War. 
 
 So Wealth, that object of universal en- 
 deavor, is not the product of the printing- 
 press nor of the doctrine of material re- 
 sources or brute power. The War shocked 
 us into a sudden realization that spiritual 
 qualities in a people are their greatest asset. 
 These qualities, of the right kind, can not 
 
WHAT THE PROFESSION MEANS 23 
 
 only re-create themselves, but they can 
 also re-create ruined towns, blasted farm- 
 steads, wrecked communities. As against 
 this, iron, petroleum, vast forests and a 
 fecund population of over a hundred mil- 
 lions did not save Russia from national 
 poltroonery. There was a time when a 
 chamber of commerce might have held that 
 the only wealth worth consideration was 
 land, improvements, goods, natural re- 
 sources; in short, that matter was the im- 
 portant thing and man its servant. 
 
 Community money-grubbing is not an 
 intelligent way to seek wealth. Nor will 
 real wealth ever be found by communities 
 that believe matter is all and spirit nothing; 
 that getting is as honorable as "creating;" 
 that the ethics of the wolf-pack is a satis- 
 factory substitute for the teachings of Jesus 
 Christ. Such a shameless policy may be 
 followed by a few individuals in a com- 
 munity, and, in the language of the street, 
 "they can get away with it," but a whole 
 community cannot. Some one must create 
 a surplus of product and service if another is 
 to "get" more than he creates. The Ar- 
 
24 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 kansas neighborhood that thought it had 
 discovered the universal secret of acquiring 
 wealth, calculated that if each neighbor 
 traded horses once with every other neigh- 
 bor and "beat" him out of ten dollars in 
 each transaction, the whole community 
 would "make" so many "ten dollars" that 
 it would be rich. Yet men who have 
 laughed at this crude idea have readily 
 fallen for the same fundamental error when 
 it was trimmed with a few high-sounding 
 frills. Less than fifty years ago Wichita, 
 Kans., had a boom. A boom is an inde- 
 scribable thing ; it has to be felt to be under- 
 stood. Corner lots were sold for a thousand 
 dollars this forenoon and were resold in 
 the afternoon for two or three or five thou- 
 sand dollars. Tomorrow the same process 
 of getting rich quickly proceeded. Mean- 
 time, there were no changes in the com- 
 munity that could support the artificial 
 prices of boom property. A slump was 
 inevitable. Millionaires of Monday were 
 the paupers of Tuesday. Twenty years 
 later Wichita had grown and developed as 
 a business and social center to the point of 
 
WHAT THE PROFESSION MEANS 25 
 
 maintaining permanently the boom prices 
 of real estate. The lesson is clear. There 
 was nothing in the "location" or the "cli- 
 mate" or the "natural resources" that 
 would sustain high prices for Wichita real 
 estate until men had created other business 
 values — ^which is another name for the need 
 of land — that had to be housed in Wichita. 
 Nor was there anything lacking in "loca- 
 tion" or "climate" or "natural resources" 
 that prevented still higher prices for real 
 estate, when, twenty years later, the enter- 
 prise of men had created reasons for the 
 existence of a city there. 
 
 Real estate is regarded as the most stable 
 and satisfactory of permanent investments. 
 A considerable part of the dynastic for- 
 tunes of America has been put into down- 
 town business property. It is a form of 
 wealth that has the stamp of approval of 
 great masses of capital and must be worthy 
 of the attention of the man or the com- 
 munity that seeks wealth. But what makes 
 the selling price of city real estate? Not 
 its agricultural productivity, surely, for the 
 site of the Equitable Building in New York 
 
26 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 would make a mighty small and sterile 
 potato patch. Another use than raising 
 potatoes has been found for that particular 
 plot of ground, and because the new use 
 affects the lives of hundreds of thousands 
 of people, while the potato crop would affect 
 only three or four families, the present value 
 of the Equitable Building site is much 
 greater than the potato patch. In short, 
 we have learned that the value of city real 
 estate lies in the use made of it. Therefore 
 we are laying hold of the hem of the garment 
 of Truth, and will eventually clothe, our- 
 selves in it. From the standpoint of the 
 Chamber of Commerce, the problem of 
 wealth-creation is beginning to clarify it- 
 self; for the use of land is dependent upon 
 what the vision of men can see in it, and 
 the courage of men plan for it. A coral 
 reef in the watery wastes off the coast of 
 Florida was worthless until the vision of 
 Plant saw it as the foundation of a con- 
 crete bridge to carry a railroad to Key 
 West. 
 
 The use of land — even agriculturally — 
 determines its selling - price. The black 
 
WHAT THE PROFESSION MEANS ^^ 
 
 lands in the Mississippi Delta do not bring 
 as much an acre as the stony lands in the 
 Housatonic valley of Connecticut. But if 
 the skilled truck farmers of Connecticut, 
 and the slipshod negro labor of the Missis- 
 sippi Delta were interchanged, the relative 
 selling-price of the two areas would like- 
 wise change. 
 
 Because land values depend upon the use 
 made of the land, it is apparent that the 
 vision, creative intelligence and enterprise 
 of the human group (which mental qualities, 
 in the group, set absolute bounds to con- 
 cepts of land use) determine the maximum 
 selling price of land in any locality. Land 
 is one necessary factor in the satisfaction 
 of human wants. If society in any region 
 is highly organized, it can and will create 
 high land values. On the other hand, if 
 society is primitive, land values will be low. 
 If the selling price of land depended merely 
 upon density of population, China would 
 be the leading real estate center. 
 
 Business, however, has grown in America 
 and Europe much faster than the popula- 
 tion, because the multiplication of human 
 
28 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 wants has proceeded faster than the mul- 
 tiplication of the race. 
 
 But the better use of land is only one of 
 the ways in which wealth is made: in- 
 ventiveness, enterprise, industriousness — 
 these qualities of character make them- 
 selves apparent in a myriad of ways. They 
 create new values in old products and 
 bring forth entirely new articles of daily use. 
 
 The chamber of commerce secretary who 
 finds himself the executive manager of an 
 organization of citizens that is seeking 
 community prosperity must know, with 
 certainty and conviction, that community 
 wealth is not come at by superficial or 
 bombastic means. Neither will dishonest 
 "getting" lead to community advancement 
 or satisfaction. The chamber of commerce 
 must be taught that real wealth is nothing 
 but the crystallized spirit of the community 
 and the age. Marshall said "Wealth . , . 
 is to be taken to consist of two classes of 
 goods — those material Goods to which he 
 has (by Law or Custom) private rights of 
 property and which are therefore trans- 
 ferable and exchangeable; (and) those im- 
 
WHAT THE PROFESSION MEANS 29 
 
 material Goods which belong to him and serve 
 directly as the means of enabling him to 
 acquire material Goods." 
 
 It is with these "immaterial Goods" that 
 "serve directly as the means of enabling 
 him to acquire material Goods" that the 
 chamber of commerce secretary has pri- 
 marily to deal. He who realizes this truth 
 is on the way to success, but he who clings 
 to materialism and attempts merely to 
 manipulate climate, or natural resources, or 
 location, will learn the lessons of defeat. 
 3 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 the chamber of commerce and 
 "industrial development" 
 
 THE fiery test of war burned up much 
 of the dross that encumbered the spirit 
 of the real American. "Welfare" and 
 "prosperity" are terms that have taken on 
 new — or old — meanings. Inventiveness, en- 
 ergy, enterprise, courage and patriotic ser- 
 vice are perceived as the very foundation of 
 prosperity as well as of security. When one 
 ship riveter, under the spur of patriotism, 
 drove three times as many rivets in a day as 
 another riveter, better equipped in another 
 shipyard, even the man who took his whole 
 stock of information from the pages of the 
 daily paper learned that the spirit of men 
 is the force that moves the industrial world. 
 A chamber of commerce that is saturated 
 with materialis munconsciously tries to 
 concentrate the thought and energies of the 
 
 30 
 
"INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT" 31 
 
 secretary upon attempted exploitation of 
 whatever natural resources may be around 
 the city. Generally this is gone about 
 with the same degree of intelligence and 
 finesse that distinguishes the purchases of a 
 Kentucky mountaineer at the Louisville 
 Fair. When the pressure of the uninformed 
 and undisciplined public thought of an 
 entire city is focused on the one man who is 
 secretary, it is not surprising that he seeks 
 safety in yielding to public clamor rather 
 than in standing out against it. But the 
 men who educate the public to a sound 
 community policy are rewarded by the 
 splendid way in which men of even com- 
 monplace minds eventually respond. The 
 secretary (or local business man) who de- 
 termines to lead his community to an under- 
 standing of the basic causes of city growth 
 will find all the casual thinking of even the 
 most intelligent citizens running in old 
 grooves. Classical economics as taught in 
 American colleges for a half- century had 
 little or no place for anything except physi- 
 cal factors. The promotional abilities of 
 men were disregarded. Economic history 
 
32 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 was utterly materialistic. Humanism was 
 not recognized in cataloging the elements 
 that made cities develop. For instance, 
 New York's growth was explained by refer- 
 ence to her harbor; Chicago's by her loca- 
 tion; St. Louis' by the Mississippi and Ohio 
 rivers. The dominant part that men played 
 was totally overlooked. No one took time 
 to reflect that Georgetown and Charleston, 
 South Carolina, both have excellent harbors 
 but somehow did not become great ports; 
 that Chicago's location was at least 30 miles 
 farther north than it should have been with 
 relation to Lake Michigan's southern shore; 
 that the Mississippi River as an important 
 highway of commerce is only a dream. 
 
 Little analytical thought was devoted to 
 general city growth, and even less sound 
 and critical thinking was given to the 
 causes that underlie industrial develop- 
 ment. Into this mass of community mis- 
 conceptions the secretary of a new chamber 
 of commerce found himself plunged. 
 
 Cities are built by men, not by location 
 or by natural resources. The secretary of 
 a local chamber of commerce must know 
 
"INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT" 33 
 
 this fact himself and must be able to explain 
 it to others. The community itself wants 
 to know. It must be taught that almost 
 no spot on the surface of the earth is 
 totally lacking in "natural advantages" of 
 one sort or other; even Timbuctoo finds 
 advantages in the Sahara Desert. Los 
 Angeles found her greatest advantage in 
 climate — blue sky and sunshine. Every 
 city has enough advantages to advertise or 
 exploit, providing, of course, that the com- 
 munity will furnish the imagination and the 
 vision that is needed to make a sales presen- 
 tation. The opening of the case for the 
 chamber of commerce secretary is the realiz- 
 ation that his city is to be built by its human 
 qualities, andthat plenty of material elements 
 to furnish talking points exist everywhere. 
 
 But the secretary must go farther than a 
 mere advertiser. The man who leads a 
 chamber of commerce should know a multi- 
 tude of business and community facts that 
 may be used sharply in the education of his 
 city. When the cry rises, "Give us more 
 smokestacks," there are plenty of men who 
 will wag heads wisely and assert that, if 
 
34 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 the chamber of commerce will give the city 
 more payrolls, everything else will take 
 care of itself. 
 
 What is it that builds factories, if not 
 men? The same thoughtless public that 
 talks about "natural resources" also shouts 
 for "more factories." The chamber of 
 commerce secretary must reach both de- 
 mands at the same time. He must be able 
 to show the public that factory-building and 
 the exploitation or capitalization of natural 
 resources are both dependent upon a finer 
 force than steam or electricity or water- 
 power. No sane public would attempt to 
 catch an elephant in a butterfly-net or dip 
 water from the lake with a sieve, but it 
 would undertake to establish new and un- 
 proved industries by giving bonuses. It is 
 a common notion that capital requirements 
 are the sole requisites for new industries; 
 hence the emphasis that has been laid upon 
 bonus-giving and stock-selling. But the 
 days of bonuses are, happily, about over 
 with, so far as chambers of commerce are 
 concerned, and organizations that refuse 
 to fork over big chunks of popular funds to 
 
"INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT" 35 
 
 "new factories" are no longer bitterly as- 
 sailed by their own members. The history 
 of bonus-giving is too recent and too dis- 
 tressing to attract emulation. About ten 
 years ago an Iowa city paid ^50,000 into a 
 new factory. It advertised the achievement 
 far and wide. Two years later the factory 
 was compelled to liquidate. That event was 
 not advertised. The fundamental error in 
 the bonus-giving idea is the supposition 
 that industrial success is guaranteed by 
 capital. The history of industry in America 
 and Europe for a thousand years is all to the 
 contrary. Inventiveness, skill, salesman- 
 ship — industrial brains, in short — make in- 
 dustry possible. Capital, the most timid 
 thing in the world, does not come to the 
 relief of industry in distress; capital comes 
 voluntarily to industry after industry has 
 made its own capital and ceased to need 
 outside help. 
 
 Here and there American cities have for- 
 saken the bonus-giving error for wiser plans. 
 One Pennsylvania city purchased the ser- 
 vices of the best efficiency engineers and 
 placed their brains at the disposal of local 
 
36 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 factories. Vocational training in the public 
 schools is beginning to provide the training 
 for young America in 191 8 that Napoleon 
 proposed it should give to France in 1806. 
 The manufacture of brass in the Naugatuck 
 valley of Connecticut is a clear illustration 
 of the part that industrial talent plays in 
 the establishment and development of a 
 great industry. There are hundreds of cities 
 where copper and zinc and fuel could be 
 assembled more cheaply than in Waterbury 
 or Bridgeport, but that advantage in ma- 
 terials-cost has never been sufficient to meet 
 the competition of the manufacturing brains 
 of the Connecticut cities. 
 
 The manufacture of leather in Newark, 
 N. J., can be explained by no "raw-material 
 or natural-resource" theory. The raw hides 
 that are tanned, dyed and finished in 
 Newark come from Montana or the Argen- 
 tine or Europe or Asia. They are assembled 
 in Newark and there made into leather 
 because the men who think in terms of 
 leather live in Newark. Did Brockton, 
 Mass., become the home of shoe-making 
 because «hoe-leather and findings grew on 
 
"INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT" 37 
 
 the bushes? Or was it the genius of men 
 who, possessed of an intangible power that 
 bent all material things to the end of mak- 
 ing shoes, lived in Brockton? The manu- 
 facture of cotton goods in Manchester, N. 
 H., far from the cotton-growing states and 
 equally distant from the American center 
 of consumption of cotton cloth, has been 
 explained in school geographies and college 
 economics as the natural result of the water 
 power afforded by the Merrimac River! 
 But does water power always result in a 
 large cotton mill? On the Oswego River, 
 in New York, water power is used to make 
 pulp and there the legend persists that 
 water power must result in pulp manufac- 
 ture. And in Spartanburg, S. C, where 
 there is no water power, the great cotton 
 mills are driven by electricity or steam 
 engines ! 
 
 Steel, the learned pedants told us, could 
 be made in Pittsburgh cheaper than else- 
 where because the coke, the ore and the 
 lime could be assembled there at less cost 
 than in any other place in America. That 
 was the secret! Low-material costs sup- 
 
38 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 plied the "scientific" explanation! There 
 were only two things the matter with this 
 explanation — first, the statement was not 
 true; and, second, it did not explain. At 
 Birmingham, Ala., the coal, iron ore and 
 limestone were taken from the same bed, 
 with no transportation charges in assem- 
 bling, but that did not prevent the Ten- 
 nessee Coal & Iron Co. from getting into 
 difficulties because of managerial policies 
 and being sold. And, lastly, Gary, Ind., 
 is far from coke, iron ore and limestone, but 
 it was chosen as the site of the Steel Cor- 
 poration's gigantic western plant. 
 
 The manufacture of automobiles in De- 
 troit; of furniture in Grand Rapids; of 
 cash registers in Dayton; of motor parts 
 in Elmira; — all these huge industrial suc- 
 cesses are explainable, not on the capital- 
 bonuses given them, or the "natural re- 
 sources " at hand, but by the brains-manage- 
 ment that went into them. The human 
 element is always the controlling factor. 
 Coal, copper, cotton, iron, hides — all these 
 things come when the right man beckons 
 to them. 
 
"INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT" 39 
 
 There are many other illustrations of the 
 same complexion to be used on the citizen 
 who denounces the chamber of commerce 
 because it fails to take a hammer and nails 
 and a board and build a factory. But the 
 blind cry for "more business" must also 
 be transformed into intelligent community 
 action. What is Business ? From the stand- 
 point of the chamber of commerce, Business 
 is the organized means of satisfying human 
 wants. As wants multiply, business in- 
 creases. Since the wants of mankind in- 
 crease much more rapidly than the num- 
 ber of people, business grows in geometrical 
 ratio while the population increases in 
 arithmetical ratio. Think, for a moment, 
 upon the new articles of every-day trade 
 that have come into existence within a gen- 
 eration; the phonograph, the telephone, the 
 gas stove, the amateur camera, a multi- 
 tude of rubber goods, steam heat, sanitary 
 plumbing, cheap clocks and watches, break- 
 fast foods, canned goods, ready-made cloth- 
 ing for men, women and children, the auto- 
 mobile, and scores of things of lesser con- 
 sequence. There is scarcely an item of 
 
40 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 merchandise on the shelves of a present- 
 day store that was sold by the merchant 
 of 1875. Trade increases but the articles 
 of trade take manifold new shapes and 
 characteristics. 
 
 Suppose all these new kinds of mer- 
 chandise were to be withdrawn suddenly 
 from the world; how many stores in your 
 town would be left vacant when the garages, 
 the auto-accessory stores, the phonograph 
 and electric appliances and plumbing and 
 women's apparel shops quit business ? How 
 many clerks would be out of work and 
 transfer men out of business ? In short, if 
 the plane of living that satisfied 1875 were 
 to be imposed upon 19 18, business would 
 be paralyzed. Or, to state the same truth 
 so the chamber of commerce secretary can 
 readily use it : if mankind wanted only the 
 same articles that were wanted in 1875, the 
 Woolworth building would have to come 
 down. The corollary is equally true: the 
 most dependable means of improving business 
 is to steadily raise the plane of living for 
 average men. 
 
 There used to be a great deal of fatuous 
 
"INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT" 41 
 
 talk about "considering the interests of 
 Business" whenever laws were to be made 
 or other changes were imminent. The 
 phrase got itself into bad odor through be- 
 coming a cloak for contemptible selfishness 
 and ultimately had to be dropped from use. 
 But while it was with us there arose a cur- 
 rent notion that "Business" was an insti- 
 tution quite apart from human life and pos- 
 sessed of some mysterious self-propulsion 
 known only to the elect. It surrounded 
 itself with the superstitious fear that the 
 medicine men of Borneo inspire in their 
 followers. A very few selfish men who pa- 
 raded themselves as captains of industry 
 assumed an air of prophecy and diligently 
 circulated the dogma that the human race 
 was created for the good of Business — and, 
 later, for the God of Business. These same 
 selfish men acknowledged, with becoming 
 ponderosity, that they were the high priests 
 of the newly discovered god. It is a reflec- 
 tion on the American sense of humor that 
 they were allowed to get away with it. 
 Demetrius, the silversmith of Ephesus, had 
 tried the same game eighteen hundred years 
 
42 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 earlier, without acquiring merit. It is 
 the interests of mankind that must be con- 
 sidered first, if the interests of business are 
 to be wisely handled. Because prohibition 
 decreased crime, vagrancy, non-support and 
 accidents, it was good for business although 
 it temporarily emptied some buildings that 
 had been occupied by saloons. Better 
 houses for workmen are good for business 
 because the occupants are encouraged to 
 maintain homes instead of hovels. Clean 
 back yards are good for business — no hard- 
 ware dealer ever sold a lawn-mower to the 
 occupant of premises covered with tin cans 
 and ashes. 
 
 This analysis of the true fundamentals of 
 business is far from being novel. Many 
 years ago Lord Macaulay, speaking in the 
 English Parliament, said: 
 
 "What is it, Sir, that makes the great difference 
 between country and country? Not the exuberance 
 of soil; not the mildness of climate; not mines, nor 
 havens, nor rivers. These things are indeed valu- 
 able when put to their proper uses by human in- 
 telligence; but human intelligence can do much 
 without them; and they, without human intelli- 
 gence, can do nothing. TJiey exist in the highest 
 
"INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT" 43 
 
 degree in regions of which the inhabitants are few 
 and squalid and barbarous and naked and starving; 
 while on sterile rocks, amidst unwholesome marshes 
 and under inclement skies, may be found immense 
 populations, well fed, well lodged, well clad, well 
 governed. Nature meant Egypt and Sicily to be 
 the gardens of the world. They once were so. Is 
 it anything in the earth or the air that makes Scot- 
 land more prosperous than Egypt, that makes 
 Holland more prosperous than Sicily? No; it was 
 the Scotchman that made Scotland, it was the 
 Dutchman that made Holland. Look at North 
 America. Two centuries ago the sites on which 
 now arise mills and hotels, and banks, and colleges, 
 and churches, and the Senate Houses of flourishing 
 commonwealths were deserts abandoned to the 
 panther and the bear. What has made the change? 
 Was it the rich mold or the reduiidant rivers? 
 No; the prairies were as fertile; the Ohio and the 
 Hudson were as broad and as full then as now. 
 Was the improvement the effect of some great 
 transfer of capital from the old world to the new? 
 No; the emigrants generally carried out with them 
 no more than a pittance; but they carried out the 
 English heart and head and arm; and the English 
 heart and head and arm turned the wilderness into 
 cornfield and orchard and the huge trees of the 
 primeval forest into cities and fleets. Man, Man 
 is the great instrument that produces wealth. Never 
 will I believe that what makes a population stronger, 
 and healthier and wiser and better, can ultimately 
 make it poorer." 
 
44 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 This, then, is the primary lesson to be 
 taught the citizen who will have more fac- 
 tories, willy-nilly, and more business in 
 spite of other considerations. Tell him 
 that men must take pains to inquire why 
 factories should come, or grow or exist in 
 his city. Communities used to take no 
 thought on that score — that was the job 
 of the fellows that owned the factories. 
 But manufacturers and their city are com- 
 ing closer together in these days and both 
 have learned that, although raw materials 
 may be assembled from the ends of the 
 earth, the labor supply must be procurable 
 in the home town. If competing manu- 
 facturers are in other cities that are keenly 
 alive to every advance in vocational train- 
 ing, low-cost housing, labor recreation and 
 encouragement — in all the things that make 
 life for the worker tolerable and hopeful; 
 the implacable logic of life will decide which 
 manufacturer is to permanently survive. 
 Nor are the inexorable laws that govern 
 business growth any less interwoven with 
 the advance of civilization. The modern 
 chamber of commerce knows that business 
 
"INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT" 45 
 
 is not an institution by itself, but is a part 
 of the life of every-day men. As life is 
 broadened, deepened and enriched, busi- 
 ness improves in quality and quantity. 
 Team-thinking is the only means a com- 
 munity has at hand to bring about changes 
 for the better. The chamber of commerce 
 leader must know that the first function of 
 the organization is to teach the community 
 the art of team-thinking. 
 
 This is a field not touched by the church 
 or the school. It is left, solely, to the 
 chamber of commerce. Civic Clubs, or 
 City Clubs, as they are sometimes called, 
 have quite generally failed to cover the 
 field even where they have tried, because 
 they could not see business as a legitimate 
 part of ordered life. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 PRINCIPLES THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE 
 MUST TEACH 
 
 THE advantageous interrelation of city 
 and city should be emphasized by the 
 modern chamber of commerce, rather than 
 the competition between cities. Competi- 
 tion is worth while between communities 
 only as it may be used to club apathetic 
 ones into action. It is the amazing inter- 
 dependence of men and cities that affords 
 chambers 6f commerce their greatest op- 
 portunities for constructive work. 
 
 Unlike the game of politics, where one 
 man must lose that another may win, com- 
 munity cooperation is essentially a game in 
 which the prospect of one man's winning 
 increases as others also win. A popular 
 philosopher has illustrated this truth by a 
 story that runs thus : One of three neighbors 
 owed the second one a dollar, and the second 
 
 46 
 
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PRINCIPLES 47 
 
 also owed the third a like amount. Taking 
 a silver dollar from his pocket, the first 
 neighbor paid the second, and the second 
 passed it on to the third, thus two dollars 
 of debt had been liquidated and the dollar 
 was still in the neighborhood ; but a greater 
 wonder might have happened, for, if the 
 first neighbor had given the second a good 
 idea, and it had been passed on to the third, 
 all three would have been possessed of it, 
 though it had traveled the same road the 
 dollar did. 
 
 When Henry Ford began building his 
 low-priced automobile in Detroit, the owner 
 of a vacant store in Marshalltown, Iowa, 
 did not perceive that Ford was really find- 
 ing a tenant for him! When the tenant 
 came and the rent was trickling into the 
 landlord's pocket it is doubtful if he ever 
 paused to acknowledge his debt to such an 
 abstraction as "inventiveness," especially 
 when it was so far removed from his own 
 bailiwick. Nor is it probable that he fairly 
 analyzed his debt to the general advance of 
 civilization that made the Iowa farmer's 
 son in 1915 a buyer of automobiles. No, 
 
48 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 the finding of the tenant doubtless relieved 
 the landlord of worry, and, after congratu- 
 lating himself upon his own shrewdness in 
 shoving up the rent, he relapsed into com- 
 fortable and selfish community somnam- 
 bulism. Yet if the chamber of commerce 
 was on the job, it might seize the opportu- 
 nity to teach that man a public lesson in 
 "what makes prosperity." 
 
 We are literally the heirs of time. When 
 Napoleon began his effort to develop France 
 industrially he was laying the foundation 
 for the prosperity of present-day silk mer- 
 chants in Chicago. The methods Napoleon 
 employed are worthy the study of the mod- 
 ern chamber of commerce. That marvelous 
 mind went direct to the vital force that 
 makes industry possible. Napoleon pro- 
 posed magnificent rewards to inventors, of- 
 fering ^200,000 to the man who would 
 invent a machine for spinning flax, and an 
 equal amount to the scientist who would 
 find a way to substitute beets for cane in 
 the manufacture of sugar. He pensioned 
 Jacquard, who invented an automatic loom 
 that wove silk in patterns. He established 
 
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PRINCIPLES 49 
 
 schools for arts and trades, and encouraged, 
 in every possible way, the production and 
 development of brains. This was over one 
 hundred years ago. Napoleon knew then 
 that industrial growth depended upon the 
 human unit. Anything that would add to 
 the intelligence of the people, he knew, 
 would act directly upon the whole mechan- 
 ism of life. The Jacquard loom gave France 
 supremacy in figured silks for generations, 
 yet the loom was merely the crystallization 
 in metal, wood, and paper, of the creative 
 spirit of a Frenchman. And his cheapening 
 of figured silks multiplied by thousands the 
 potential buyers of such goods, so retail 
 mei chants in western country towns put 
 the goods on their shelves and corn-fed 
 clerks drew wages for selling them. Of 
 Jacquard who had made this possible, per- 
 haps neither employer nor employee knew 
 so much as his name ! 
 
 It is the steady progress of civilization — 
 the constant upward striving of the best of 
 the race — that makes men and communities 
 genuinely rich, if they but have the good 
 sense to keep step. 
 
so COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 In America the growth of cities — if in- 
 crease of population is the index of growth — 
 proceeds with a regularity and sweep that 
 the public does not realize and fails to take 
 into account when engaging in rare moments 
 of introspection. Among that large class of 
 cities over fifteen thousand and under one 
 hundred thousand population, each ten- 
 year period brings an increase of approxi- 
 mately one - third. To experience this 
 growth all that a city has to do is to keep 
 step with the national procession. Nothing 
 unique or distinctive is required — only the 
 jog trot of mediocrity in business, education, 
 culture, enterprise. The individual business 
 man profits from all this growth if he does 
 no more than plant himself beside the high- 
 way of progress and be ready to handle the 
 commerce that comes his way. It is this 
 unearned profit, and sometimes undeserved 
 profit, that plays the culprit in coddling that 
 monumental, selfish egotism sometimes 
 found among rich men who are really "ac- 
 cidents." The chamber of commerce must 
 steadily point the public mind toward the 
 great fact that individual success is made 
 
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PRINCIPLES 51 
 
 possible by the advance of the world. It is 
 the group progress that makes individual 
 progress easy. If the group were to stop, 
 as happened in China a thousand years ago, 
 the progressive individual would be left 
 stranded. 
 
 The chamber of commerce is responsible 
 if the citizens of a city do not understand 
 and admit the debt they owe to their com- 
 munity and to the progress of the age. How 
 much would the street-railway system of 
 Topeka be worth if the people were to move 
 away and leave it there? What sort of 
 a gigantic monument of failure would Tif- 
 fany's store be if New York were taken 
 away ? Or what would a shoe-repair shop be 
 worth in Kankakee if the rest of the com- 
 munity were to go elsewhere? All these 
 institutions, big and little, could eminently 
 afford to contribute nine-tenths of their 
 capital toward preventing such a catastro- 
 phe as the "trekking" of their own com- 
 munity. It is only because men cannot 
 bring themselves to believe that a great city 
 will ever disappear, that they dare to refuse 
 to give service and money for the good of 
 
52 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 their community. Yet the history, that 
 fills to bursting the heads of school boys and 
 girls, is a record of the rise and fall of cities : 
 Nineveh, Tyre, Babylon, Thebes, Athens, 
 Rome, Florence, Pompeii. And in our own 
 day, the mining centers of Nevada and the 
 young "Chicagos" of southwestern Kan- 
 sas have taught the folly of depending 
 wholly upon material forces to maintain 
 communities. It is mankind that builds 
 cities, and tears them down again, whether 
 they be in the Sudan or Illinois; in Belgium 
 or Serbia or Michigan. 
 
 Business men are not at all adverse to the 
 reception of this truth if it is rightly pre- 
 sented by the chamber of commerce secre- 
 tary. The very nature of successful business 
 calls for the exercise of imagination, vision, 
 faith in the future and fellow-men. These 
 are qualities of mind that readily merge into 
 genuine idealism. 
 
 Gradually the citizenship of any city may 
 be brought to act upon the principle that 
 the intangible forces that shape human life 
 are the ones with which organized com- 
 munity endeavor should chiefly concern it- 
 
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE PRINCIPLES 53 
 
 self, for out of them flow all business growth, 
 all material advance, all culture, patri- 
 otism, vision and service. Whatever inter- 
 feres with the discovery and development 
 of men who have the will to create, build, 
 make, invent, undertake, act, is a com- 
 munity injury. "The eye cannot say unto 
 the hand, I have no need of you," wrote 
 Paul, and "Whether one member suffers all 
 the members suffer with it." The incom- 
 petent, the subnormal, and the defective 
 human beings of a community are a dead 
 load upon the shoulders of the rest. 
 
 Let us summarize: The modern chamber 
 of commerce must cast aside every trace 
 of German materialism and rest its efforts 
 upon the conviction that prosperity and 
 progress are purely human products, worked 
 out by men with whatever elements in na- 
 ture may be at hand, whether they are in 
 the desert or the fertile plains of the Mis- 
 sissippi. It must teach that a thing is as 
 valuable as the intelligent desires of men 
 for that thing make it. It must throw 
 overboard the threadbare phrase "intrinsic 
 worth" and the inutile doctrine that value 
 
54 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 depends merely upon (i) the amount of 
 labor required to produce or (2) the cost 
 of reproduction; because the Pyramids of 
 Egypt, judged by either fallacy, would run 
 into more money than any bank would 
 loan on them. It must have confidence 
 in the willingness of the average citizen to 
 embrace the finest truths of community 
 endeavor and act upon them. It must be- 
 come the schoolmaster of the community. 
 A city must think progress, must be guided 
 by its optimists, must value constructive men 
 more than destructive ones, must have a clear 
 idea of the demands and possibilities of fu- 
 ture city and national growth, and must have 
 the courage to live up to its ideals. This 
 is the foundation of a modern chamber of 
 commerce. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 HOW THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE MUST LEAD 
 
 THE War, with its enormous demand upon 
 citizenship for sacrifice and service, re- 
 stored the confidence of the pubUc in itself 
 — in its own innate patriotism, decency and 
 virtue. Chamber of commerce leaders were 
 given an unparalleled occasion to teach the 
 people that the only permanent foundation 
 for governments, cities, land values, busi- 
 ness, culture and human security is in the 
 spirit of men. "The flesh profiteth noth- 
 ing" when the pinch of war comes. Marshal 
 Foch taught his students in military college 
 that the morale of an army was more im- 
 portant than its numbers, and later proved 
 it in action. The poet Kipling sang, "It 
 ain't the guns nor the armament . . . 
 but the everlastin' teamwork of every 
 bloomin' soul." Business men eagerly ac- 
 knowledged themselves the servants of a 
 
 55 
 
S6 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 Cause greater than business, while labor 
 fell away from the teachers of the unholy 
 doctrine of treasonable class consciousness 
 and admitted its vital dependence upon 
 the whole body politic. 
 
 Never was there a time prior to the Great 
 War when America showed so unanimous 
 a desire to render public service. Never 
 was there a greater need than now for 
 community leaders to keep alive the spirit 
 of public service. There is every reason 
 why chamber of commerce leaders should 
 dare to throw aside every unworthy element 
 in an appeal for public support. 
 
 The much criticized business public will 
 respond to an appeal for service. The 
 criticisms of "uplift" organizations and 
 dilettante professional uplifters are unjust. 
 One must remember that the American 
 public is an enormous thing — more than a 
 hundred millions of people. Within this 
 mass, public-spirited business men are sup- 
 plying individual as well as group stimula- 
 tion to public service. While it is true that 
 the selfishness of some business men is so 
 unrestrained that it brings contumely upon 
 
HOW TO LEAD 57 
 
 business, it is equally true that as large a 
 percentage of uplift movements are open 
 to criticism. "The pot must not call the 
 kettle black." In fact, a business man who 
 allows his selfishness to make him con- 
 temptible does not destroy public faith in 
 plain, every-day rightness to any such de- 
 gree as an insincere uplifter. Shock to the 
 public trust is a regrettable thing. The true 
 end of philanthropy is to spiritualize the 
 giver while it benefits the recipient. It 
 blesseth him that gives and him that takes 
 — else it fails. 
 
 The chamber of commerce leader must 
 never forget that each public movement is 
 an opportunity to stimulate generosity, 
 beneficence, patriotism and sound enter- 
 prise; but playing th6 suckers is the short 
 route to public moral insolvency. A city 
 grows better only as there is increasing 
 confidence in the efficacy of fair play. There 
 is no profit in outraging intellectual or 
 moral honesty. 
 
 The chamber of commerce that exploits 
 the weaknesses of men is headed toward 
 spiritual bankruptcy. False pride, egotism 
 
S8 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 and glory-grabbing grow rapidly in groups 
 where cheap motives are given countenance. 
 Some gray day the organization will be 
 rudely awakened by the discovery that 
 fine-spirited men have left it. The process 
 of natural selection will have worked its re- 
 sults. 
 
 You may think that it requires a great 
 deal of courage to hazard the very life 
 of a splendid public movement upon the 
 willingness of the average man to serve 
 without reward — but the danger is apparent 
 instead of real. The fabric of civilization 
 will have rotted and fallen apart when the 
 common, every-day man ceases to feel 
 genuine joy in sacrificial service. Imagine 
 hiring Nathan Hale to be hanged as a spy ! 
 How many of the volunteers who fought 
 through the Civil War were induced to 
 mobilize because of the raise in pay that 
 the Government's $13 a month offered.? 
 
 This confidence in the civic conscience of 
 citizens is a fundamental principle of suc- 
 cessful public effort in a democracy. The 
 means employed is as important as the 
 end reached. The means is the end, if the 
 
HOW TO LEAD 59 
 
 chamber of commerce secretary believes he 
 must choose between playing upon the 
 weaknesses of men or accepting defeat. 
 Getting whipped in honorable fighting for 
 a legitimate cause never destroyed a good 
 organization, but winning unworthily has 
 written finis to many. The people expect 
 much of their leaders, and since the chamber 
 of commerce is the quintessence of leader- 
 ship, it must not fail in quality. 
 
 But leadership does not have to be narrow 
 in order to be honest. In a chamber of 
 commerce there may be a dozen groups, 
 each intent upon the accomplishment of 
 some public task, and each believing that 
 its cause should have priority over all others. 
 While differences of opinion are valuable 
 in promoting horse races, they are not so 
 desirable in the management of a voluntary 
 public organization, and the managing sec- 
 retary will have to find the greatest com- 
 mon divisor of the divergent community 
 ideas. Even in those cases of apparently 
 irreconcilable differences, there may be 
 found some spots of common ground. The 
 chamber must insist that both parties to 
 
6o COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 a controversy shall preserve a decent re- 
 spect for that fair play which grants one a 
 chance to be heard in defense of his cause. 
 The end of a fight is at hand when public 
 negotiations begin. Both parties cannot be 
 right if one is wrong, and the one in the 
 wrong will soon find himself unable to main- 
 tain his case before the public. 
 
 Such an issue as the strife between capi- 
 tal and labor (two words that have come 
 to possess a needlessly sinister meaning) 
 is not impossible of adjustment when the 
 great public consciously takes it up for 
 consideration. Here and there, where strikes 
 have interfered with the right of the public 
 to live tolerably, some public agency has 
 laid a heavy hand on the combatants and 
 has shaken them apart, as Roosevelt did in 
 the anthracite-coal strike. The street-car 
 strike in a mid-Western city was settled 
 weeks before a similar strike in an adjoining 
 city, affecting the same property and the 
 same men. On one side of the line organ- 
 ized public opinion operating through the 
 Chamber of Commerce refused to tolerate a 
 disruption of common conveniences. With 
 
HOW TO LEAD 6i 
 
 exactly the same matters at large on the 
 other side of the line the strike dragged 
 along for many weeks — because public 
 opinion was not conscious of its own rights. 
 
 There is no room for the pessimist in 
 public movements. American cities stand 
 ready to meet any legitimate call for ser- 
 vice that is honestly and fearlessly made 
 upon them. There was a time, prior to 
 the era of Roosevelt, when cynical selfish- 
 ness held the center of the stage. The men 
 talked of "Each man for himself and the 
 Devil take the hindmost." Most unfortu- 
 nately, some of the perverts of this school 
 of thought became prominent in Big Busi- 
 ness, and gave it a bad name. Perhaps 
 the Devil heard their talk and, acting on 
 it, began to gather the hindmost into his 
 ken. By 19 14 he had a large and noisy 
 contingent that called itself the I. W. W. 
 The effect of this upon industry, property 
 and enterprise has made itself apparent to 
 the blindest of business men. Wrong leader- 
 ship is infinitely more dangerous than a 
 wrong following. 
 
 It is this heritage of selfishness among 
 
62 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 the few that modern chambers of commerce 
 find their greatest handicap. We looked 
 upon Russia, prior to the revolution, as a 
 hotbed of anarchy, yet more dynamite was 
 systematically used in the United States for 
 the destruction of life and property in con- 
 flicts between "the classes" than in Russia.^ 
 Our one state of Pennsylvania has produced 
 more riqting and disorder in one year than 
 the whole of France in the same time. 
 Three Presidents slain in forty years is a 
 record not equaled by any other civilized 
 nation. Our failure to Americanize the im- 
 migrant left us with so little national spirit 
 that President Wilson had to feel his way 
 carefully in determining to protect our na- 
 tional honor. Letting the Devil pick off the 
 hindmost was a dangerous policy, for it was 
 tantamount to gi anting him the privilege 
 of taking over the whole line, if he would go 
 about it in reverse order. As Mr. Frederick 
 S. Chase said of the Bolsheviki, "They 
 stopped the Russian procession, turned the 
 individuals around in their tracks, and the 
 rear ones started to lead the line backward." 
 The Red Terror in Moscow justifies us in 
 
HOW TO LEAD 63 
 
 thinking that the Devil is still cynically 
 picking off the hindmost of this reversed 
 procession. 
 
 The antidote for false leadership in Amer- 
 ican cities is the modern chamber of com- 
 merce. Its organized machinery tests the 
 soundness and the hopefulness of men and 
 ideas as no other institution does. Among 
 students of criminology there is a generally 
 accepted theory that the best way to abort 
 crime is by the substitution of a moral 
 equivalent for evil. The boy who throws 
 stones through the factory window is in- 
 duced to join the juvenile ball team and 
 pitch for it. The World War brought for- 
 ward a moral substitute for the worst self- 
 ishness of peace times. The nation is com- 
 ing to declare, vehemently, that the man 
 who serves is a more valuable citizen than 
 the one who merely "gets." Every day the 
 War lasted altered the attitude of the public 
 mind toward great fortunes that have arisen 
 from unearned increments or the manipu- 
 lation of banking credits. Money does not 
 possess the power it once did over the 
 spirits of men. It is easily possible that 
 
64 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 such fortunes might fall under government 
 regulation or be taxed out of existence, if 
 they should be so short-sighted as to refuse 
 to serve the public good. The returned 
 soldier has brought a new element into the 
 thought of the body politic, and the mental 
 evolution through which he passes will tend 
 toward a higher valuation of man and a 
 lower valuation of property. Men who have 
 been required to risk life itself for the com- 
 mon good and whose comrades lie under the 
 poppies in Northern France will give short 
 shrift to law or custom that denies them a 
 fair participation in the prosperity of this 
 generation. Changes in the relationship of 
 men and property are certain to come. The 
 chamber of commerce can exercise its or- 
 dered direction of the public mind and 
 prevent anarchy or dissolution. Instead 
 of curb - stone leadership, it can provide 
 thoughtful and open-minded leadership, 
 willing to accept the eternal change that 
 the progress of civilization demands, and 
 articulate it with the best there is in the life 
 of today. But to resist change, merely be- 
 cause it is change, is to invite revolution. 
 
HOW TO LEAD 65 
 
 To refuse to adapt oneself to altered cir- 
 cumstances always leaves one in an absurd 
 position. A successful Michigan farmer de- 
 clared, twenty years ago, that he would quit 
 farming when he could no longer hire a 
 farm hand for sixteen dollars a month. 
 Fifteen years after the declaration was made 
 he was paying farm hands forty dollars a 
 month and making a larger profit on the 
 transaction than was possible with the 
 lower-priced help of years gone by. 
 
 The preservation of "the rights of prop- 
 erty" is frequently confused with the preser- 
 vation of some individual's right to property 
 acquired by questionable means and held 
 for anti-social purposes. Private property 
 must purge itself of misuse if it is to survive. 
 Trying times are ahead for free democra- 
 cies that are threatened with state socialism, 
 and the public will have to do some straight 
 thinking to perceive the essential difference 
 between a gradual and necessary increase 
 in human rights and social-political revolu- 
 tion. If the public gets muddled on the 
 issue and mixes evolution and revolution 
 together, there is no prophet so rash as to 
 
66 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 predict the outcome. To keep thinking 
 stl-aight, there must be an organized center 
 of community leadership in hundreds of 
 cities, where the clearest-headed and most 
 patriotic citizens may exert their influence 
 to the utmost. 
 
 The modern chamber of commerce, there- 
 fore, is the mechanism through which for- 
 ward-looking men may do their work for 
 their community; and such men are never 
 willing to play a Machiavellian part. The 
 means must be as clean as the ends sought. 
 There is no more room for the pessimist than 
 for dirty policies. Military service abroad 
 transformed the outlook of millions of young 
 Americans of voting age and is bringing 
 into our national life a new force. In the 
 midst of these mighty changes the modern 
 chamber of commerce finds its place as the 
 engine of intelligent democracy. A lesser 
 conception • of its opportunities and pur- 
 poses is unworthy of the times. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 WHY THE SECRETARY MUST PLAN FAR AHEAD 
 
 AFTER Detroit's fire in the early part 
 L of the last century the entire city was 
 re-plotted, and its great radiating thorough- 
 fares spread, like the spokes of a wheel, 
 from the city hall site. The planners cal- 
 culated that the city hall would be half 
 way between the river and the ultimate 
 northern boundary of Detroit. Within 
 ninety years the population of the city had 
 so utterly overrun the expected boundaries 
 that four-fifths of the people lived outside 
 them! Thus do we Americans utterly fail 
 to believe in our own future. We have been 
 called a boastful nation, and we have been 
 guilty of much talk on occasion, but the 
 wildest tales of the most valiant booster 
 seldom approached the substantial facts of 
 city growth. Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, 
 
 67 
 
68 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 Akron, Niagara Falls and half a hundred 
 other cities have grown amazingly in popu- 
 lation, wealth and civic advance. A thou- 
 sand smaller cities have outrun all plans 
 for their growth in a lesser measure. As 
 individuals, Americans possess imagination 
 and courage equal to the best, but we have 
 tragically failed to meet our community 
 needs or use our community opportunities. 
 
 Reason tells us that democratic govern- 
 ment must represent mediocrity, rather than 
 the highest community intelligence, because 
 there are more voters with commonplace 
 gray matter than with strikingly capable 
 minds. But reason ought also to tell us 
 that democracy, in action, must have gov- 
 ernment supplemented by a voluntary or- 
 ganization completely outside of the official 
 group, that teaches team-thinking, stimu- 
 lates community imagination, and is not 
 afraid to stand out boldly as the champion 
 of the unappreciated wonders that the future 
 offers to every healthy American city. 
 
 How is the modern chamber of commerce 
 
 to meet the need ? It must realize that its 
 
 ask is spiritual leadership of the city. The 
 
PLANNING FAR AHEAD 69 
 
 hard and practical trial of this doctrine 
 comes when a one-horse merchant grumpily 
 demands to be "shown." Then the chamber 
 of commerce leader is likely to recall George 
 Horace Lorimer's statement that "Trium- 
 phant America does not include the entire 
 one hundred millions." The idiot, the vil- 
 lage loafer, and the man who waits all day 
 for the whistle to blow do not belong. 
 Yet there is a way, nearly always, to stir 
 even the small-bore business man. If one 
 loses this faith, he has lost hope of de- 
 mocracy. In mechanics, the greater the 
 opposition is, the greater the power em- 
 ployed to overcome it; so in the more 
 intricate affairs of the spirit, the denser 
 the subject, the more persuasion and artis- 
 tic appeal must be used. Billy Sunday has 
 moved hundreds of drunks to reform, but 
 he did not accomplish the result by read- 
 ing aloud, in a droning voice, extracts 
 from Jonathan Edwards's "Freedom of the 
 Will." 
 
 When cities have been so blind as they 
 have to the most obvious city planning for 
 material needs of population-growth, it is 
 
70 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 not surprising that a considerable minority 
 of citizens fail to see the finer and deeper 
 spirit-changes that lie at the beginnings 
 of progress. To make any kind of prepara- 
 tion for the future always involves a present 
 outlay of money, and men hesitate about 
 spending the immediate dollar when they 
 cannot see the remote objective. In spite 
 of America's marvelous developments, we 
 can't quite convince ourselves that the 
 Golden Age is not past. Four years ago a 
 bank president in the mid-East argued that 
 the progress of civilization must slow down 
 " because so many things had been invented 
 that only a few more were left to invent in 
 the future!" Such an idea is sheer bone- 
 headedness, but so long as it is on earth it 
 must be met. What can the chamber of 
 commerce tell such a man? 
 
 Start with the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence — even this banker knew about it. It 
 took the English race six hundred years 
 from Magna Charta to write that document, 
 and a picked body of its sons had to migrate 
 to a new continent to finally put it into 
 words; but the South American nations, 
 
PLANNING FAR AHEAD 71 
 
 seizing upon our example, found a shorter 
 cut. In municipal government, Des Moines 
 went through the travail of years before the 
 " Des Moines Plan of Government " was in- 
 vented and put to use, but a himdred other 
 cities seized upon the idea and adapted it 
 to their own uses in eighteen months fol- 
 lowing. Dayton, with the knowledge of Des 
 Moines' experiment, was able, in a space of 
 eleven months, to develop and adopt a char- 
 ter with all the best features of the Des 
 Moines Plan and the city manager added 
 thereto. 
 
 It was a more difficult feat to invent the 
 first crude spinning-jenny than it is now to 
 completely equip a giant cotton-mill with a 
 half-million spindles. Franklin's experi- 
 ment with the kite and the door key was 
 the forerunner of the Niagara power com- 
 panies. 
 
 It is only good sense to assume that the 
 advancements, inventions and developments 
 in government, mechanics and sociology are 
 the beginnings and not the end of progress. 
 The modern chamber of commerce must 
 understand that 1910 was the dim and dis- 
 
72 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 tant future of the citizen of 1870. Who 
 among them was wise enough to plan city 
 streets for automobile traffic in 191 5 ? Recol- 
 lections of such recent failures of vision 
 chasten our egotism and lead us to think 
 that America has been a better conservator 
 of hindsight than of foresight. 
 
 The pessimist will point to our public 
 mistakes as a warning against extended 
 plans for the future, but the modern cham- 
 ber of commerce must not accept stories of 
 public failures without an analysis of the 
 reasons. For instance, the era of canal- 
 building with state money that opened 
 about 1825 is cited as evidence of popular 
 inability to handle internal improvements. 
 Yet the real trouble arose from the absence 
 of organized and intelligent leadership. The 
 fickle public mind, following the back-track 
 of the retreating politician, adopted state 
 constitutions forever forbidding the state 
 governments from engaging in any kind of 
 internal improvements again. State-built 
 canals and highways were taboo for a gen- 
 eration, although such avenues of communi- 
 cation were the greatest need of the people. 
 
PLANNING FAR AHEAD 73 
 
 Because state moneys were wasted or stolen 
 outright by unworthy state officers in canal 
 projects, the misled public concluded it was 
 easier to stop the state from serving its 
 citizens than to rouse the body politic to 
 demand honesty and efficiency in its officials. 
 It is extremely doubtful if America would 
 make the same mistake again. Had the 
 canal-building been well done and the water- 
 ways intelligently used, the War would not 
 have found us unprepared to meet its trans- 
 portation demands. J. P. Morgan once 
 said that no man could afford to be a "bear" 
 on the future of America. It is a truism. 
 China's mistakes of omission have always 
 been greater blunders than America's mis- 
 takes of commission. The balance of prob- 
 able success rests with the public that tries 
 new things. 
 
 There are bound to be mechanical suc- 
 cessors to the telephone, the automobile 
 and the aeroplane. Out of the boundless 
 mystery of the future will come social 
 inventions surpassing the mechanical won- 
 ders of today. Mankind has not reached 
 its limit of creative genius in social or- 
 
74 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 ganization or industrial product ; and one is 
 so completely a part of the other that cities 
 must be taught to stimulate the spiritual 
 values so that material values may exist. 
 
 With the eyes of the prophet, the modern 
 chamber of commerce must see human so- 
 ciety in its upward progress, as the Emer- 
 gence of the Divine. There is no place 
 where it will stop. 
 
 Let us dream of the America that might 
 be if we were united upon a program of 
 national advance ; if the wisest of her local 
 leaders in a thousand cities were heading 
 for certain fixed points in social strength, 
 labor, housing, government and patriotic 
 spirit to be reached in five years. There 
 is no likelihood of adopting a goal that 
 would not be outrun just as we have outrun 
 every other prophecy of progress. Every 
 public-spirited man in America would be 
 exalted in the atmosphere of public service. 
 It is only the lack of leadership and or- 
 ganized community followings that stands 
 in the way of this magnificent possibility. 
 
 In supplying the greatest need of the 
 nation, the modern chamber of commerce 
 
PLANNING FAR AHEAD 75 
 
 also provides the greatest local necessity. 
 For -chambers of commerce are chambers 
 of citizenship. They have to do with men. 
 They cannot supply a city with natural 
 resources if nature has omitted these things ; 
 but they can lead men to make the best 
 possible use of those things that Providence 
 has bestowed. In dealing with the infinite 
 variety of men that make up the world, 
 the chamber of commerce has need of a 
 clear, optimistic and sound philosophy at 
 every step. It is "commercial" when it is 
 doing the things that have to be done if 
 the community progresses. Only vision can 
 see the end of the most simple public policy. 
 It is commercial to make a city attractive. 
 What would you say if you knew that one 
 of Detroit's big factories came there be- 
 cause a woman thought the city a delightful 
 place to live in? Suppose, for a moment, 
 that some far-sighted commercial secretary, 
 in charge of the chamber of commerce in 
 a New City, were to lay hold of a Henry 
 Ford while he was yet a young man em- 
 ployed by the Edison Company; and a 
 Tom Edison while he was selling papers on 
 
76 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 a Grand Trunk train; and a Servern P. Ker 
 while a boy in Virginia, and a John Pat- 
 terson before he knew of cash registers — 
 suppose these and fifty others of similar 
 creative ability were attracted to this New 
 City while they were young, impressionable, 
 warm-blooded and responsive to a purely 
 human appeal. Then suppose they came 
 to maturity there, with their creative genius 
 finding its expression in great factories and 
 mercantile houses in New City. What, dear 
 cynic, would be the value of the corner lot 
 in the center of the city? 
 
 The time is not far distant when chambers 
 of commerce will see that community ex- 
 pansion (which is a broad term that includes 
 business, industry and civics as one unit) 
 must wait upon inventive minds; imagina- 
 tion; skill; uncanny wisdom in making labor 
 content with life; efficient municipal gov- 
 ernment; churches that feed the emotions 
 with strength and truth; schools that teach 
 dexterity to mind and hand; books; music; 
 pictures; oratory; sports; dramatics; hero- 
 ism; charity; patriotic and fearless papers. 
 
 Would an organization that gave its time 
 
PLANNING FAR AHEAD 77 
 
 to the stimulation of these things be " com- 
 mercial"? Ask another question: "Would 
 it pay?" Will the skeptic please tell the 
 probable price of building lots in a city 
 where every man was as skilful, enterprising, 
 inventive, service-ful, exuberantly happy 
 and healthy as Divine Providence wishes 
 its children to be? Even the cynic knows 
 that the civilized world would stand in line 
 for the privilege of bidding on a business 
 location, or a professional opening, or a 
 hearthstone in that city. All that men 
 live for would be there, because the spirit of 
 its people would produce all the spiritual 
 and all the material values that imagination 
 demanded. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 
 
 SUBSTITUTE the word "city" for "na- 
 tion" in this extract from the historian 
 Lecky: 
 
 "All civic virtue, all the heroism and self-sacrifice 
 of patriotism spring ultimately from the habit 
 men acquire of regarding their nation [city] as a 
 great organized whole, identifying themselves with 
 its fortunes in the past as in the present, and looking 
 forward anxiously to its future destinies. When the 
 members of any nation [city] have come to regard 
 their country [city] as nothing more than the plot 
 of ground on which they reside, and their government 
 as a mere organization for providing police or con- 
 tracting treaties; when they have ceased to enter- 
 tain any warmer feelings for one another than those 
 which private interest, or personal friendship, or a 
 mere general philanthropy, may produce, the moral 
 dissolution of that nation [city] is at hand. Even 
 in the order of material interests the well-being of 
 each generation is in a great degree dependent upon 
 the forbearance, self-sacrifice and providence of those 
 
 78 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 79 
 
 who have preceded it, and civic virtues can never 
 flourish in a generation which thinks only of 
 itself." 
 
 Chambers of Commerce have become 
 Chambers of Citizenship perforce, because 
 they could be effectively commercial by 
 no other means. A chamber of commerce 
 cannot supply a city with coal mines, or 
 oil wells, or mahogany forests, or water 
 power, unless these things are at hand by 
 the bounty of Nature. But chambers can 
 and do lead men to capitalize the gifts, of 
 Providence, which is only another way of 
 saying that the organization has to deal 
 primarily with men instead of natural re- 
 sources. 
 
 It is worth while to remember, dear 
 reader, that the management of men re- 
 quires the mind of a statesman; the man- 
 agement of materials the mind of an en- 
 gineer. The managing head of a chamber 
 of commerce sometimes needs both kinds 
 of mind, but statesmanship is more of an 
 art than a science; while engineering is the 
 reverse. There is nothing academic about 
 either. The statesman and the engineer 
 
8o COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 must be men of action. So it is with the 
 chamber of commerce secretary. 
 
 Bernard Shaw's famous saying, "Those 
 who can, do; those who can't, teach," 
 might be paraphrased for the benefit of 
 organization secretaries. Those who can, 
 do; those who lack the talent for action, 
 take it out in making surveys. Not that an 
 accurate knowledge of facts is undesirable — 
 on the contrary, no one needs facts more 
 than a commercial organization secretary. 
 But all surveys are not essential facts, nor 
 even a safe foundation for the assembling of 
 facts. The field of practical sociology is 
 very new and the professional talent therein 
 is still newer. "Surveying" has become an 
 end in itself with a certain type pf genus 
 homq that will never be hanged for modesty. 
 If surveys have lost some part of public 
 confidence, it is because their makers have 
 aimed at being "calmly sociological" or 
 "coldly scientific," or what not, with the 
 result that ordinary men were not impressed. 
 The trouble with such surveys is lack of 
 steam. 
 
 The successful commercial organization 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 8i 
 
 secretary in the years to come must he a 
 ^'doer." In the long run — and it is only 
 the long run that counts with real men — 
 the man who does things enjoys the most 
 intense of all pleasures, i. e., the joy of 
 accomplishment. Every tussle with cir- 
 cumstances makes a man stronger. There 
 is a contagious effluence — a radiant energy 
 — that surrounds the man who learns the 
 habit of success. It is worth any price in 
 toil, weariness, or struggle; and it is seldom 
 bought with any other coin. 
 
 The secretary must also be the community 
 teacher. The reader will understand the 
 meaning of this declaration when he re- 
 flects that a chamber of commerce never 
 includes a majority of the voting public in its 
 membership, and must, therefore, accom- 
 plish results by persuading the public to 
 accept its leadership. A minority organi- 
 zation (as distinguished from such an or- 
 ganization as a dominant political party) 
 which is charged with the responsibility of 
 getting things done, must always be engaged 
 in propaganda of one sort or another. 
 
 In assuming the role of community 
 
82 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 teacher, the commercial secretary has to 
 instruct business men in the art of public 
 appeal. As a generality, business men are 
 woefully ignorant of it — perhaps that is why 
 they are business men. At any rate, the 
 habit of a business executive is to give or- 
 ders instead of making requests. He carries 
 this habit of mind into public places and 
 immediately finds himself in trouble. Orders 
 will go well enough among employees on 
 his own pay-roll, but the public does not 
 take orders from anybody. When business 
 men are organized for the purposes of com- 
 munity leadership, the commercial secretary 
 frequently has to induce them to unlearn 
 the executive habits of a lifetime and adopt 
 the art of leadership instead of the way of 
 the boss. Be it said that the good sense of 
 the average American business man will re- 
 spond quickly to instruction when the sec- 
 retary can prove that he is a real teacher. 
 
 The commercial organization secretary must 
 be something of a practical ■politician. He 
 must be familiar with the political ma- 
 chine in his city and must be able to make 
 a shrewd judgment of its actual strength. 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 83 
 
 Much of the prestige of a municipal political 
 machine is unalloyed bunk. There is more 
 cheap intimidation and braggadocio in po- 
 litical machines than in any other American 
 institution. When business men cease to 
 fear them, most of the machines' power evap- 
 orates. Like the evil wolf, it disappears 
 when the "Big Billy Goat Gruff" stamps 
 his foot. The secretary should begin his 
 investigation with the knowledge that there 
 is always a small minority that is willing to 
 be corrupted, and a large majority of honest 
 men oftentimes allowing themselves to be 
 misruled by their intellectual and ethical 
 inferiors. Politics, from this angle, is 
 merely a study of emotional forces that 
 move men. Murphy of Tammany Hall and 
 hundreds of lesser political lights in other 
 cities stand as the modern edition of the 
 tribal chieftain of a thousand years ago. 
 Sometimes he won his position by brute 
 strength and sometimes by actual service 
 to the tribe, but he was always aggressive, 
 always selfish to a degree and secretly 
 contemptuous of the men he ruled. It is 
 this latter trait that ultimately leads the 
 
84 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 modern political boss to overconfidence 
 and dethronement. A reasonably shrewd 
 observer can readily discern the symptoms 
 of this disease of overconfidence or over- 
 grown ego. When it appears, it is the time 
 to strike. Build up, quietly as possible, a 
 better organization than the boss has, and 
 he can be disposed of so easily that his 
 purblind admirers will regard you as a su- 
 perman. A certain political boss had con- 
 trolled every munidpal election in Dayton, 
 Ohio, for years when he assumed the role of 
 a dictator. The autocratic boss was much 
 less formidable than was the same man that, 
 in early days, was fighting for recognition in 
 his own party. 
 
 The commercial organization secretary must 
 be a student of municipal advance. What- 
 ever is to be learned about city planning, 
 Americanization, industrial welfare work, 
 new charters, taxation, social unrest, voca- 
 tional education, charities, and a host of 
 related matters, demands the secretary's 
 study.. An extensive library of such books 
 has come into existence. Some are excel- 
 lently conceived and executed, while others 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 85 
 
 are mere theories. It is occasionally worth 
 while to read the worst of them, because 
 it goads a real man into holy resentment at 
 such pretensions. The city library should 
 provide these books for its general readers 
 as well as for the use of the commercial 
 secretary. The Public Library at Newark, 
 N. J., is rendering a distinguished service 
 in that line. And such questions as city 
 planning, zoning, water supply, sewage 
 disposals, paving, fire protection, park de- 
 velopment, housing, charters and franchises 
 are sure to arise that will require the advice 
 of a specialist. The secretary should not 
 hesitate to get such help. 
 
 7*^1? commercial secretary must be a coura- 
 geous man. It would be profitless, indeed, 
 to know much but dare little. Courage 
 may be developed. No man is born with 
 a full measure of it. Little boys are 
 afraid of the dark, of the evening shad- 
 ows that dance mysteriously through the 
 woods, of strange nOises in the back yard; 
 but they learn to disregard all these things 
 because no harm comes from them. So 
 grown men can cultivate that wise courage 
 
86 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 that tells them not to fear false alarms. 
 And what is the chief professional danger to 
 the commercial secretary? Is it the loss of 
 his job ? That might seem like the extreme 
 danger, but it is, by no means, a thing to 
 fear. The less thought given to holding the 
 job the better. But the more thought 
 given to unconditional observance of the 
 finest idealism and the convincing presenta- 
 tion of it, the better. Nowhere else in 
 human affairs does the scriptural statement 
 hold more true that "he that would save 
 his life shall lose it." No secretary will ever 
 really succeed until he takes his job in his 
 hands and walks into a meeting of his board 
 of directors, some day, determined to win 
 them to a real understanding of their duties 
 and opportunities as trustees of the city's 
 citizenship or resign and walk out. And 
 there is but one way to get over the fear of 
 losing one's job, which is to make its reten- 
 tion absolutely secondary in the minds of 
 men who surround you. So long as men 
 think of the secretaryship first and the sec- 
 retary afterward, it means professional fail- 
 ure. The secretary must always be bigger 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 87 
 
 than his job. The courage that makes a 
 man bigger than his job is gotten by ac- 
 quiring famiUarity with the possibility of 
 losing it. As a matter of fact, the actual 
 danger of a secretary's losing his place is 
 much less than it appears. Remember that 
 the directors, in engaging a secretary, 
 thought they were getting a man who could 
 help them. This relationship of mutual 
 helpfulness can be preserved only through 
 mutual respect. Servility is not helpful; 
 neither is boastfulness. A decent regard 
 for one's own self-i:espect and for the other 
 fellow's is the safest policy. Even failure in 
 the first secretaryship does not necessarily 
 brand a man as a professional misfit. Stories 
 might be told of men who failed in their 
 initial engagements but later scored genu- 
 ine successes. Few men fail who refuse to 
 accept defeat. 
 
 The commercial secretary must cultivate 
 social judgment. Every passing year dem- 
 onstrates the need for maturity of mind. It 
 is not an occupation for a college boy. 
 There is so much of new decision and so 
 little of science or dictum in the profession 
 
88 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 that immaturity is the recipe for failure. 
 The materialism that has colored much of 
 the economic teachings of many American 
 colleges actually unfits a recent graduate 
 for dealing with the human constituents of 
 a chamber of commerce. College boys 
 trained in the classic school of economics 
 that regarded a day's work and a ton of 
 coal as equally definite articles are unready 
 to handle the membership of a chamber of 
 commerce. Such set notions must go into 
 the scrap pile. Men are the most elastic 
 quantities in the universe. Their limit of 
 extension has never been found. Kindness, 
 generosity, patriotism, imagination, self- 
 sacrifice, square dealing — these qualities are 
 so close under the skin of the ordinary man 
 that the least appeal to them brings a re- 
 sponse. America gave eleven times as much 
 money in 1918 to the common good as in 
 any other year of her history prior to 1914, 
 yet no one was asking for his Red Cross 
 donations to be returned! Social judgment 
 may be cultivated just as the talent for 
 mathematics is. It is doubtful if ordinary 
 colleges afford much help in this most 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 89 
 
 delicate development. The accurate study 
 of men and their reactions is, perhaps, 
 the only way, and is certainly the best 
 way. 
 
 The commercial secretary must under- 
 take to master the art of appeal. Main- 
 taining the morale and the number of mem- 
 bers in a chamber of commerce is essentially 
 the responsibility of the secretary. He 
 must "sell" the chamber to the public. 
 While a certain degree of success has at- 
 tended some crude efiForts in this direction, 
 there is no reason for a secretary's being 
 satisfied with himself. Like all art, the 
 art of appeal has principles that ought to 
 be mastered by the secretary. Oratory, 
 literature and pictures — the spoken word, 
 the written word and the pictured idea- — 
 are the three means of making an effective 
 appeal to the public. 
 
 It may seem like a large contract for a 
 public leader to undertake to acquire a 
 working knowledge of the three great arts 
 of speaking, writing and graphic presen- 
 tation, but the requirements are not so 
 formidable as one might expect. The pub- 
 
90 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 lie tastes haye changed in the last ten 
 years, and for the better. 
 
 Speaking to American business men today 
 demands radical departures from the gran- 
 diloquence of thirty years ago. There is 
 no time for turgid phrases of Fourth-of- 
 July's. The noonday luncheon that has 
 become so universally popular with cham- 
 bers* of commerce and Rotary Clubs allows 
 only thirty minutes for the speaker, and 
 whatever is to be said must be compressed 
 within the time limits. It is hard on the old- 
 fashioned "orator" who always consumed 
 twenty minutes in a wordy introduction, 
 while gathering his own thoughts together 
 for the body of the speech. But it is the 
 salvation of the commercial secretary who 
 knows exactly what message he must con- 
 vey to his audience and wastes no breath 
 in getting to it. 
 
 Noonday speaking is as well-defined a 
 branch of public addresses as after-dinner 
 speaking became with the past generation. 
 Its technique should be studied by the 
 secretary. Since a speech must be shaped to 
 fit the audience, if its appeal is expected 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 91 
 
 to produce results, the first point to con- 
 sider, in the study of noonday speaking, 
 is the unusual character of the audience. 
 Business men who meet together in the 
 middle* of the business day for brief re- 
 laxation do not divest their minds of the 
 "office habit of thought." The decisiveness, 
 the nervous tension, the intolerance of delay, 
 the self-reliance which amounts to egotism 
 in many cases — ^all these habits of the busi- 
 ness day's thinking are hovering, like dis- 
 embodied spirits, over the luncheon table, 
 and the speaker who can feel the atmosphere 
 of the place prepares to meet them. And, 
 in passing, it should be said that every 
 speaker worth his salt can "feel" the re- 
 ceptivity of his audience or its lack, and 
 literally can measure that intangible some- 
 thing in degrees. The beginner may be 
 so busy thinking what he has to say that 
 no corner of his consciousness is left to 
 receive impressions from the audience, but, 
 with practice, this last and most important 
 attainment may be acquired. 
 
 In a general treatise like this, only a few 
 of the most important elements of noon- 
 
92 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 day speaking may be mentioned. It is well 
 for the beginner to consistently recall the 
 fact that, although understanding the char- 
 acter and mental habits of his audience, he 
 is not to surrender tb his hearers. He 
 speaks to persuade, not to be intimidated 
 into abject capitulation by serried rows of 
 cold business eyes trained across the table 
 at him. Analyzing one's audience is for 
 no immediate purpose, save to find the 
 open door to il;s consciousness. What time- 
 ly thought, or what combination of telling 
 phrases, may I employ that will catch my 
 listeners when their guard is down? Just 
 where may the thin edge of my wedge be 
 inserted in their minds? Which is the line 
 of least resistance ? These questions ought 
 to be in the speaker's mind before he rises 
 to his feet. 
 
 What is argument? What is persuasion? 
 What is appeal ? What is eloquence ? What 
 is force? What is vividness, and l^ow ob- 
 tained ? A simple definition of these terms 
 should be memorized by every man who 
 aspires to speak publicly. Particularly 
 should the commercial secretary know them, 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 93 
 
 because his speaking calls for brevity, force, 
 vividness, persuasion. Seldom is he re- 
 quired to mount to genuine eloquence in 
 order to score his point, but it is well to 
 know that eloquence aims its appeal direct 
 at men's hearts, while argument directs 
 itself to their intellects. 
 
 The ideal noonday speech makes a joint 
 appeal to the feelings and the intellect. An 
 argument to the effect that four subtracted 
 from six leaves a balance of two might 
 be intellectually convincing, but it would 
 not move an audience to action. Nor would 
 the bare effort to prove that "a." minus 
 ^*b" equals "x" be any more exciting, 
 although broader in scope. But if "a" 
 can be made to stand forth as a poor widow 
 and "b" as a package of Christmas toys 
 bought with a few cents taken from her 
 slender earnings, then the subtraction of 
 "b" from "a" transcends the science of 
 mathematics and enters the realm of the 
 Art of Life. Perhaps no better recipe for 
 noonday speaking could be given to a be- 
 ginner than this: tell the truth and couple 
 it up with life. 
 
 7 
 
94 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 Said an eminent divine, "No souls are 
 saved after the first thirty minutes." He 
 established the time limit of the noonday 
 speech by this witty remark. Pay no at- 
 tention to the lugubrious individual who 
 mournfully tells you that the day of ora- 
 tory is past. Never has the spoken word 
 been more potent than now. The news- 
 paper has not supplanted public speaking 
 — on the contrary, the papers have mul- 
 tiplied the interests of the public and en- 
 larged the possible audiences. Billy Sun- 
 day finds little difficulty in getting audi- 
 ences. It is only the post-bellum Civil 
 War political spouter that can induce no 
 one to listen to him. Words in the mouth 
 of an able speaker remain the most rapid 
 agency in the world for transmuting thought 
 into action. 
 
 Of course the chamber of commerce sec- 
 retary must speak to audiences that are 
 not made up of business men, on occasion. 
 But since he cannot master all varieties 
 of public address, it is well for him to con- 
 centrate upon the sort of audience that is 
 most important to his work. Equal suffrage. 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 95 
 
 with the inevitable intermixture of women 
 in chamber of commerce audiences, is bring- 
 ing, in its train, further changes in the art 
 of noonday speaking. 
 
 A commercial secretary, like a clergy- 
 man, must speak repeatedly to the same 
 audience. Unlike the minister, however, 
 the secretary has no Bible of organization 
 work. The secretary must develop his 
 gospel — ^his good word — as he goes along. 
 
 The strain of talking to the same audi- 
 ence, over and over, will tell on the secretary 
 unless he arranges his studies to meet the 
 necessity. The average man will find it 
 highly desirable to keep a high-school or 
 college text-book on rhetoric at his right 
 hand, daily. Refer frequently to those 
 definitions of the elements of style that slip 
 from memory most easily. Pick out a few 
 of the great orations of the world and study 
 the thought and language. Commit to 
 memory some usable bit of poetry or prose 
 each day. Every secretary has heard of 
 Demosthenes' oration "On the Crown," but 
 few have thought of it as an aid to noon- 
 day speaking. Yet a study of it will more 
 
96 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 than pay for the time spent. Among the 
 less known orators, Henry Grattan has 
 given, in his speech in the Irish Parliament, 
 on the Declaration of Irish Rights, an ex- 
 ample of a rare combination of emotional 
 and intellectual appeals. Henry Grady's 
 addresses will supply more recent material 
 for study. The great metropolitan daily 
 papers contain extracts from the , public 
 utterances of important men. Clippings 
 from these sources will provide an astonish- 
 ing amount of illustrative material. But in 
 addition to all the above expedients, the 
 secretary should keep a loose-leaf note-book 
 into which he puts the best anecdotes, in- 
 spirational poetry, well-turned phrases and 
 telling quotations that come into his ken. 
 Such a note-book is a veritable life-saver 
 for a man who must speak often. He should 
 make a brief written outline of each talk 
 before its delivery and put the outline into 
 another note-book for subsequent reference. 
 This enables a speaker to recall the talk he 
 made to a certain audience months or even 
 years agone. This habit of outlining a 
 speech insures readiness when the speaker 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 97 
 
 is called to his feet, and it also preserves his 
 best thoughts as no other plan will. 
 
 There is nothing in the foregoing program 
 that is outside the ability of any commercial 
 secretary, but if the plan is really followed 
 it will develop a tongue-tied man into a 
 tolerable speaker. A secretary should visit 
 other cities and other organizations, bring 
 spokesmen from them to his aid, and add 
 to his mental equipment all that is timely 
 in his own field. 
 
 There is no specific rule as to the amount 
 of public speaking a secretary should do. 
 Good sense will have to be his guide. A 
 city soon tires of a "glory grabber," but it 
 may be trusted to concede the value of a 
 sincere public servant who can speak per- 
 suasivelyi The quantity can be overdone — 
 has been overdone in some cases — but it is 
 safe to believe that public condemnation 
 would not have been unleashed over mere 
 quantity if the quality had been right. If he 
 knows what he is talking about, the secre- 
 tary will be forgiven much. Because his 
 day's tasks range from managing a retail 
 credit bureau to addressing the Women's 
 
98 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 Club on the details of a city plan, or urging 
 the political leader of the second ward to 
 support an appropriation for playgrounds, 
 the secretary must be a constant student 
 of his job. But he must know more than 
 facts ; he must know reasons why, and how 
 to make those reasons human. Facts are 
 said to be stubborn things, and certainly 
 they are indigestible. Community indiges- 
 tion is a more common disease than is ordi- 
 narily supposed. 
 
 After speaking, the ability to write good 
 letters, fair newspaper stories, and telling 
 essays, is next in importance. There is a 
 library of texts on letter-writing, and some 
 excellent books on newspaper-writing. To 
 them the commercial secretary may go for 
 help. Just as noonday speaking is the dis- 
 tinctive branch of oratory that the chamber 
 of commerce |ias brought into being, so the 
 distinction of chamber of commerce letters 
 is the large element of persuasion they must 
 contain. There is a subtle difference be- 
 tween the best chamber of commerce letter 
 to a member, and the best sales letter from 
 a seller to a buyer. This difference arises 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 99 
 
 from the unlikeness of the subject matter. 
 The chamber of commerce offers its mem- 
 bers ideals and ideas, while the seller offers 
 merchandise to the buyer. It is only the 
 superficial thinker that cannot distinguish 
 between the two cases and frame his lan- 
 guage to express the distinction. To talk 
 about "selling the chamber to its members" 
 is a rather crude way of describing a great 
 art. "Selling" in the ordinary sense of the 
 term is not sufficient. To revamp an excel- 
 lent sales letter would not fill the chamber of 
 commerce need. Persuade, and persuade, 
 and still persuade ; this is the heart of the 
 chamber of commerce letter. Keep in mind, 
 always, the meaning of persuasion. "Coax" 
 is a lighter word than "persuade" and im- 
 plies an attempt to influence by superficial 
 means. Even "convince" is not the equal 
 of " persuade," for a man may be convinced 
 of his duty and not do it; but when per- 
 suaded he finds that his will is bent to the 
 new thing. 
 
 Such a magazine as "The Atlantic 
 Monthly," with its essays on American 
 thought and progress, is a constant stimu- 
 
loo COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 lant to clear thinking. A few late books on 
 sociology, coupled with some of the na- 
 tional weeklies, form a mixture of theory 
 and timeliness that should not be missed. 
 And once in a while a secretary should read 
 the "want ads" in the daily papers! Per- 
 haps there is no more illuminating part of 
 a daily paper than the "want ad" columns. 
 Every word is devoted to telling what people 
 want and how they want it. If secretaries 
 could but have a "want page" of their 
 entire city that would disclose the aspira- 
 tions of the populace, what would it mean ? 
 Sometimes the want ads are stupidly con- 
 ventional in phrasing and approach, and 
 then again a flash of genius illuminates the 
 page. Once an unemployed man advertised 
 for work in a Chicago paper. The familiar 
 "situation wanted" brought no results and, 
 at the end of his money, he inserted some- 
 thing new in "want ads." "In the name of 
 God, must an industrious and reliable man 
 starve in Chicago for want of work?" was 
 the perfectly human way in which he 
 couched his final advertisement. It brought 
 results. There may seem to be little of 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE loi 
 
 literary merit in the "want ads" and the 
 display advertisements in the daily press, 
 yet one will do well to remember that just 
 such literature is tested by its result in per- 
 suading men and women to a certain action. 
 Is any other form of the printed word subr 
 jected to a more severe test ? And shall we 
 not respect the printed word that accom- 
 plishes the purpose for which it is used ? 
 
 While thinking about literature in gen- 
 eral, as an adjunct to the secretarial pro- 
 fession, it is suggested that books read by 
 the secretary ought to be digested and 
 passed on to the organization when the 
 subject matter is fundamental in character. 
 A review of a new book, or an old one, for 
 that matter, so written as to lead members 
 to read and absorb the book for themselves, 
 is a valuable service to the community. 
 It is one way of directing community 
 thought. Sometimes the appearance of an 
 old book in a new edition will furnish an 
 excuse for reiterating age-old ideas. Plato 
 is literally meat and drink to this new pro- 
 fession of the commercial secretary, but 
 his idealisni is nothing unless the secretary, 
 
102 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 in the language of the day, can sell its great 
 truths to the second-hand clothing dealer 
 on the side street. Don't say "it can't be 
 done," for it is being done daily by the men 
 who are blazing the way to the chamber 
 of commerce of the future. One of the first 
 men to join the new chamber of Commerce 
 in a western city was a junk dealer; in 
 another city it was an Italian cobbler, and 
 in another it was a Chinese laundryman. 
 
 From all of his reading and writing, the 
 secretary should arrive at a clear under- 
 standing of the hopelessness of any form 
 of the philosophy of materialism. Between 
 it and idealism is a gulf as wide as the 
 universe. The two opposing doctrines crop 
 out in every sales department, every policy 
 of factory superintendence, every political 
 body, every retail store, in the marts of 
 trade, the school, the church, the govern- 
 ment. If we, as a people, could but 
 get this fundamental straightened out in 
 our minds, most of our community judg- 
 ments would be sound and progressive. 
 There is a comic element in the gropings 
 of some business men for real philosophical 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 103 
 
 truths. Nothing is funnier than a business 
 man who has attained some local promi- 
 nence and has discovered a bit of human 
 truth which Aristotle uttered much more 
 clearly two thousand years ago. Mr. B. M., 
 with rotund and cheerful complacency, 
 proceeds to electrify (?) an audience of 
 well-read men with the recitation of what 
 he supposes to be his own private preserve 
 of knowledge. 
 
 The chamber of commerce must not 
 overlook the value of pictures as tools 
 of organized thought and actions. At 
 first blush it might seem difficult to find 
 a way of using Whistler's impressionistic 
 art in the administration of a chamber 
 of commerce, but it is easy to understand 
 that a good cartoon might help. All of 
 which is to say that the American public has 
 gotten acquainted with cartoons and re- 
 sponds to them; later it will respond to the 
 more highly finished picture. Out of the 
 aftermath of the World War is sure to come 
 a picture that, like "The Spirit of '76," will 
 epitomize the finest aspect of the democracy 
 of the world. 
 
I04 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 Nor should the utility of music be for- 
 gotten in handling public gatherings. How 
 many battles have been won by the inspira- 
 tion of the band and the songs of the sol- 
 diers can only be guessed. Ask any speaker 
 whether he likes to have his audience join 
 in a song before he opens his address and he 
 will tell you that a subtle change pervades 
 the place; out of the harmony of sound 
 comes an indescribable harmony of feeling 
 that makes speaker and listeners an emo- 
 tional unit. When a "practical" man de- 
 cries music as an every-day necessity, ask 
 him to imagine a church, or a school, or an 
 army, or a political rally, or a funeral, or a 
 wedding, or a dance without it. If men 
 fight to the death better for music it is safe 
 to assume that they live better for it. 
 
 Of these great arts of appeal — oratory, 
 literature, pictures and music — the com- 
 mercial secretary can never know too much. 
 Of course there is a chance that he may 
 become pedantic or near-scholarly. He may 
 make the moth-eaten blunder of supposing 
 that the "Oration on the Crown" is still 
 timely. It isn't. No daily paper would 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 105 
 
 publish it as news, but if Athens had pos- 
 sessed a daily when the speech was made it 
 would have appeared as the story of the 
 day, and would have opened with "De- 
 mosthenes brought to trial today his six- 
 year-old dispute with ^schines over the. 
 golden crown that Ctesiphon proposed for 
 hini. The possible prosecution of Ctesiphon 
 for breach of the constitution of the State 
 will hang on the outcome." The matter 
 was timely enough to have commanded 
 front-page space — then. So the first lesson 
 to be learned from this masterly speech is 
 that it had to do with timely things. It is 
 the mastery of the rugged yet exquisite art 
 of persuasion and its application to timely 
 issues that mark the leader. 
 
 The secretary must be a student of his 
 work. He must know something about an 
 astonishing variety of things. The talent to 
 judge the possibilities of the public mind — 
 to anticipate the distance that progressive 
 community leadership may strike boldly 
 ahead without losing its following — is one 
 that may be cultivated highly. Of course 
 one must possess the germ of the instinct, 
 
io6 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 or whatever it may be called, in the unde- 
 veloped state, if it is to be brought to full 
 strength later. Few men are without it. 
 Business men seldom take time to cultivate 
 this talent. The secretary must act as 
 their teacher. 
 
 In studying his task the secretary must 
 know that every thought in the world 
 somehow has a reflex in his city. The 
 World War, for instance, brought millions 
 of young Americans into camps, the neces- 
 sities of training pointed toward curbing 
 prostitution in the camp cities, and the 
 "curbing" was done so effectually as to 
 stamp it but in scores of cities. What we 
 had been told for ages "could not be done" 
 was done in a year. Now that we have 
 learned our strength, the Public Health 
 Service has set for itself the task of stamping 
 out venereal disease. That, also, will be 
 done. The secretary must be alive to these 
 progressive movements that seem to come 
 from the "top downwards," for they im- 
 pinge upon his city at some point. 
 
 The secretary must study himself and 
 adopt specific devices for his own improve- 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 107 
 
 ment. Set for yourself the habit of doing 
 one thing each day, superlatively well. All 
 the preachments about efficiency simmer 
 down to the habit of doing work well. An 
 employer once told his stenographer to 
 answer certain letters without dictation and 
 to select one letter each day for a reply 
 par excellence. An extra carbon copy of 
 this especially good reply was made and 
 filed with the "masterpieces" of preceding 
 days. At the end of the year that stenog- 
 rapher had written three hundred letters 
 that contained the best business composi- 
 tion he could produce. Unconsciously, the 
 striving to produce one superlatively good 
 letter each day reacted on all the rest of 
 the work of the year. Every day had 
 meant growth. But it is a mistake to try 
 to make every letter every day a "best" 
 one, because the human mind cannot oper- 
 ate at top speed all the time, any more than 
 a runner can sprint all day. A promiscuous 
 application of this little plan of "doing 
 one thing superlatively well each day" 
 would wreck it. 
 
 Read something each day that will stimu- 
 
io8 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 late you to higher thinking and finer living. 
 Fifteen minutes of the right sort of reading, 
 daily, will suffice. If you live with the 
 words of a great genius for fifteen minutes 
 each day, you cannot slip back into the rut 
 of the commonplace. Don't let routine 
 tasks prevent the daily climb to the peaks 
 of greatness in reading. You will soon 
 learn to seize upon ordinary work as a 
 means of self-improvement. Perhaps a man 
 walks into your office in the most casual 
 way. You suddenly perceive the oppor- 
 tunity to rouse his interest in some com* 
 mittee work. You determine to make the 
 conversation with him a "persuasive event" 
 that will rank with the "masterpieces" of 
 the days before. You bring to bear upon 
 the caller every art of speech, smile, emo- 
 tional appeal, fact and argument that can 
 be yoked together. And when he leaves 
 the office you will endeavor to handle your- 
 self so that you may remember the occasion 
 with pride tomorrow. Under such circum- 
 stances it really does not much matter 
 whether you "sell" that individual man or 
 not. It is the educational reaction upon 
 
WHAT THE SECRETARY MUST BE 109 
 
 yourself that you seek. That is the true 
 survival value. 
 
 To sum up, a chamber of commerce sec- 
 retary must be a "doer" instead of an in- 
 terested onlooker or a "surveyor " 
 
 He must know something of practical 
 politics. 
 
 He must cultivate courage and vision. 
 
 He must learn to speak and write with 
 effect. 
 
 He must be able to persuade men. 
 
 He must be a student of his profession and 
 himself. 
 
 He must adopt some simple plan of -im- 
 proving his conversation, appearance, voice 
 and smile. 
 
 8 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 A FEW THINGS THE SECRETARY MUST KNOW 
 
 THE modern chamber of commerce sec- 
 retary inherits the practices of all 
 parliamentary bodies so far as the duties of 
 officers, the conduct of elections, the ap- 
 pointments of committees, and the neces- 
 sity for a constitution and by-laws are 
 concerned. But a voluntary association in 
 a rapidly broadening field of work, as the 
 chamber of commerce is, must develop 
 organization methods peculiar to itself. 
 
 The constitution and by-laws of a cham- 
 ber of commerce should aim at the greatest 
 possible degree of democracy within the 
 organization. Because the chamber is a 
 minority organization, it understands that 
 it must persuade and lead instead of drive 
 the public ; it must appeal to the instinct of 
 fair play and patriotic service instead of 
 no 
 
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW in 
 
 adopting the spoils system so familiar to 
 political parties; it must be willing to lose 
 a fight rather than to abandon a principle; 
 it must be willing to lose votes rather than 
 to buy voters. With all these fundamentals 
 in mind, it is clear that the "nominating 
 committee" has no place in a modern 
 chamber of commerce. The nomination of 
 directors by mail-primary and the election 
 by popular vote is the right way. The offi- 
 cers should be elected by the directors for 
 one-year terms. 
 
 No list of standing committees should be 
 put in the by-laws. No makers of by-laws 
 can foresee the committees that the con- 
 stantly expanding service of the chamber 
 will need in years to come. Standing com- 
 mittees are taboo because they "stand" 
 and seldom "move." Special committees, 
 appointed because of the specific need, and 
 made up of men having a vital interest in 
 the particular task, are much more effec- 
 tive than the imposing-looking machinery 
 of *' departments," "standing committees" 
 and "bureaus" that encumbered the old- 
 time chamber. 
 
112 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 The constitution of a modern chamber 
 need contain nothing but the name of the 
 organization and a broad statement of its 
 general aims and membership eligibiHty. 
 
 The by-laws covering the essentials 
 omitted from the constitution should set 
 forth the number, titles and terms of the 
 officers and directors, and pjrovide for their 
 election. An attempt to describe duties 
 other than "such as usually pertain to the 
 office" usually ends in verbal absurdities 
 that only a verbiage-loving attorney would 
 father. Too much law is as bad as too little. 
 The attorney can pass upon the articles of 
 incorporation to make sure that individual 
 responsibility for organization debts is elim- 
 inated and whether the declared purposes of 
 the association are as broad as statute law 
 will permit. These geneial questions of law 
 are for the attorney to decide, but there are 
 lawyers whose minds run to blind restric- 
 tions, instead of providing means of growth, 
 and such legal advisers always prepare a set 
 of by-laws that hobble and manacle the 
 officers. When legal technicalities become 
 repressive instead of promotive, it is time to 
 
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW 113 
 
 call a halt. There are two kinds of lawyers. 
 As an eastern financier remarked of Elihu 
 Root: "All the other attorneys are always 
 telling me how it can't be done, while Root 
 tells me how it can." 
 
 Amazing things happen to a good set of 
 by-laws after they pass through the hands 
 of a few negative-minded lawyers. A set of 
 model by-laws, worked out laboriously for 
 the Greater Dayton Association sonie years 
 ago, were borrowed by new associations as 
 a guide, and ambitious local attorneys added 
 legal verbiage to them. After the by-laws 
 had suffered the " improvements " of a pro- 
 cession of cities, they had grown into a 
 mountain of "saids," " thereuntos," "here- 
 inbefores" and "whereases," with an im- 
 posing-looking machinery of " departments " 
 and "standing committees" and other de- 
 lusions that practical experience had dis- 
 carded long before. 
 
 As a general rule, the shorter the by-laws 
 the better the organization. Once it was 
 the pride of a secretary that he had suc- 
 ceeded in making a highly democratic asso- 
 ciation in fact, while the by-laws remained 
 
114 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 autocratic in theory, but such experiments 
 are not for beginners. 
 
 The most important document that is 
 possessed by a chamber of commerce, how- 
 ever, is its Program of Work. If the or- 
 ganization knows where it is going, it will 
 go. The wretched failures among chambers 
 of commerce were among those that had no 
 policy but sheer opportunism. And the 
 number of good business men who are in- 
 capable of that process of thinking called 
 "generalization," but whose concept of or- 
 ganization management is to seize upon 
 the momentary public sensation and jump 
 from it to its successor is surprisingly large. 
 No constructive public endeavor can be 
 handled that way. The commercial secre- 
 tary must have a Program of Work for his 
 organization ; a poor one is better than none. 
 
 The Program of Work should represent 
 the best thought the membership is capalble 
 of taking, and it must come from the mem- 
 bers. The thinking must be done by them 
 — not by the secretary. So far as it is 
 humanly possible, see that the members 
 have an understanding of the activities 
 
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW 115 
 
 successfully undertaken by the best cham- 
 bers of commerce in the nation, while they 
 are doing their own thinking about their 
 Program of Work. But the secretary must 
 refrain from attempting to dictate the 
 members' choice. Give them the facts, as 
 a jury is given the facts, and let them 
 choose for themselves the activities their 
 chamber is to undertake. Such a Program 
 of Work will be truly the best thinking the 
 community can do at that time. Later, 
 when team-thinking and team-action have 
 opened the spiritual eyes of the city to 
 larger things, the Program can be "revised 
 upwards." 
 
 As a practical means of getting a Program 
 of Work built up, the members should be 
 called together in small groups; say from 
 five to fifteen or twenty at a time. Unless 
 there is a chairman available who knows 
 the ideals of a modern chamber, the secre- 
 tary should preside at these group meetings. 
 Put before each person two questions: 
 
 (i) What do you expect the chamber to do for 
 the promotion of your line of business or 
 activity ? 
 
ii6 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 (2) What do you, as a eitizen, think are the things 
 of first importance to be done for the com- 
 munity as a whole? 
 
 In handling such a group meeting do 
 everything possible to stimulate discussion. 
 You will be surprised at the fine spirit men 
 will show when they have a public means 
 of showing it. The corner grocer may aston- 
 ish you by getting to his feet and appealing 
 for the remaking of the educational system 
 of the city or some other thing of as far- 
 reaching importance. When the discussion 
 is over, require each persoii to write answers 
 to the two questions on prepared blanks 
 and sign them. All the replies, classified, 
 correlated and expressed in a Program of 
 Work, put in short paragraphs and written 
 like a campaign document, should be pub- 
 lished broadcast over the city at rather 
 frequent intervals during the following year, 
 in order to afford a fire-alarm reply to the 
 man who eternally asks, "What's this here 
 chamber of commerce for, anyway?" 
 
 You will be astonished at the unity of 
 thought appearing in the replies to the two 
 questions, rather than the divergence. If 
 
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW 117 
 
 you have studied the mental processes of 
 crowds you already know that a crowd 
 can think of only one thing at a time. 
 The Program of Work evolved from the 
 members of a chamber of commerce in a 
 city of a hundred thousand population sel- 
 dom contains more than fifteen planks. 
 
 The astute politician is keenly aware of 
 the limitations of popular attention. That 
 is why he is able to camouflage administra- 
 tive incompetency or crookedness with an 
 adroit play to cheap partisan prejudice. 
 There were a host of local and national 
 issues which were pushed out of the public 
 mind by the War, and, although its immen- 
 sity may seem to explain the phenomenon, 
 it is not difficult to recall sensational mur- 
 der cases that held the popular mind of New 
 York City absolutely enthralled for a week 
 or ten days. So the limits of crowd-atten- 
 tion — i. e., the limits of the crowd ability 
 to attend to any line of thinking — make 
 themselves apparent in the relatively few 
 matters in a chamber of commerce Program 
 of Work. 
 
 When the members haye been consulted 
 
ii8 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 in group meetings and the Program of Work 
 is complete, the directors of the chamber of 
 commerce will meet and determine the 
 order in which the various planks shall be 
 attacked. It may not be possible to ap- 
 point committees at once for each plank. 
 There may be more work than funds with 
 which to do it, so that an order of precedence 
 must be established. This is the responsi- 
 bility of the directors. When it is done the 
 chamber of commerce has a definite aim for 
 a considerable period. The administrative 
 machinery can be built to that end. The 
 secretary finds himself following a policy 
 instead of drifting from one expedient to 
 another. 
 
 By going back to the signed answers to 
 the two group-meeting questions, it is easy 
 to pick, for committee service, the men who 
 have expressed interest in specific matters. 
 That is a safe guide in choosing men for 
 service on committees. In the old days, 
 before the idea of a Program of Work had 
 found its way into chamber of commerce 
 management, the plan of selecting com- 
 mitteemen bordered on the ridiculous. One 
 
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW 119 
 
 or two enthusiasts were usually hooked up 
 with as many pessimists and the chairman- 
 ship given to some "leading citizen" who 
 cared not a whit for the whole matter. 
 No wonder such "teams" never got any- 
 where. E. H. Doyle, of Detroit, char- 
 acterized such committees as "things that 
 spend a month doing what one man would 
 accomplish in a forenoon." And such com- 
 mittees are sure to be made up unless the 
 group-meeting plan and the signed "an- 
 swers" are employed to disclose the indi- 
 viduals who ask specific accomplishments. 
 
 When a committee is made up of men 
 with a living interest in the task, given 
 enough money for necessary research and 
 provided with intelligent secretarial aid, it 
 has the elements of success. 
 
 There are chambers of commerce still 
 in existence that have no Program of Work, 
 but they are sorry commentaries on the 
 progress that has been made in the science 
 as well as the art of managing public or- 
 ganizations. The handhng of a chamber 
 of commerce is more of an art than a science, 
 and in common with other arts it has its 
 
I20 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 principles that may be taught, though not 
 with the exactness of a science. If, per- 
 chance, one of these chambers without a 
 Program is making a measurable success, 
 it is because some dominating personality 
 is supplying the public with camouflaged 
 autocratic direction. In such an institution 
 the permanency of its work depends upon 
 the continued dominance of one man. 
 There is no room for real organized effort by 
 the members. 
 
 The appointment of a committee is the 
 beginning of action or — procrastination. 
 The organization and management of the 
 committees of a chamber of commerce are 
 vital factors in doing work. Everything — 
 or nearly so — ^must pass through some com- 
 mittee, and if the committees are slow, in- 
 effective, or superficial their work is incon- 
 clusive and the chamber finds itself short 
 in accomplishment. There are plenty of 
 cases on record where one good committee 
 has saved the life of a chamber and the job 
 of a secretary — so vital is committee work. 
 
 Call a committee together promptly after 
 its appointment and before its members 
 
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW 121 
 
 have time to cool. At the first session 
 see that a typewritten step-by-step analy- 
 sis of the committee's task is laid before 
 each member. If it is appointed to bring 
 about the improvement of a road leading 
 from the city, its task will be laid out some- 
 what as follows: 
 
 (i) When shall we invite the County Road Com- 
 missioners to meet with us? 
 
 (2) Who is to prepare a statement of the cost of 
 
 the improvement and the parties benefited ? 
 
 (3) Who is to be ready with the law of this case? 
 
 (4) What evidence of public interest in the im- 
 
 proved road should we have to impress the 
 Commissioners? 
 
 (5) Should this evidence of public interest take 
 
 the form of a petition in writing or a " peti- 
 tion in boots"? 
 
 (6) Is there a particular individual whose "say 
 
 so " goes with the commissioners ? 
 
 (7) What is the next step ? 
 
 You will notice that the "steps" are 
 stated in the form of questions. That form 
 immediately suggests the necessity of a re- 
 ply, and a reply begets action. 
 
 The "steps" should be placed on a black- 
 board in the room where the committee 
 meets, if possible. The bane of committee 
 
122 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 meetings is desultory conversation. The 
 next thing that ruins them is a fund of 
 good stories and a confirmed story-teller. 
 Such a committee meeting may be enter- 
 taining, but the next time it is called the 
 members stay away. If the secretary allows 
 a committee session to begin without a pro- 
 gram, he is inviting failure. If the program 
 is not clearly stated in questions and lit- 
 erally forced under the eye of each member, 
 the secretary has no means of keeping the 
 attention of the committee on the work it 
 was called to do. The primary danger in 
 going into meetings without a program is 
 that the secretary himself doesn't know 
 what the committee is called to do. He 
 may think he does, — in'a cloudy sort of way 
 he knows "what it is all about," — but he 
 has not thought the matter out to the point 
 of clear statement. The secondary danger, 
 of course, is that no member will come to 
 the meeting prepared by thinking in ad- 
 vance to propose a course of action. But 
 with the program in front of each member 
 and on the blackboard, it is difficult for 
 John Smith to ramble from step number 
 
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW 123 
 
 one to step number seven and interject a 
 half-dozen good stories between. The chair- 
 man of the committee will silently bless the 
 devices that enable him to keep the mem- 
 bers to consecutive and logical considera- 
 tion of their task. 
 
 Especially valuable is the question asked 
 last, "What is the next step?" Good com- 
 mittee management demands that question 
 at the conclusion of every meeting. With- 
 out it men are apt to leave a meeting with 
 a sigh of finality and forget the sequence of 
 events planned for the immediate future. 
 When men know where they are going, they 
 go. It is only when they are not sure of 
 their path that they stand still. 
 
 In almost every case committees have to 
 report their findings to the directors before 
 the organization is committed to a course 
 of action. In so far as possible, with impor- 
 tant committees, it is desirable to have the 
 directors kept informed of the discussions 
 and investigations undertaken, so that the 
 final decisions of these committees shall 
 not fall upon a board of directors unpre- 
 pared for sympathetic consideration. 
 
124 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 A committee report should be a thor- 
 oughly human document written in an in- 
 teresting way. Just as there is the style of 
 the essayist or historian or novelist, so there 
 will be some day a style of composition 
 evolved with special regard to reports of 
 committees and public bodies. The oppor- 
 tunity awaits the man. Since the days 
 when congressional committees began mak- 
 ing dry-as-dust reports which had to be dry 
 because they must necessarily contain all 
 the testimony given the committee, the sec- 
 retaries of chambers of commerce, civic clubs, 
 historical and scientific societies and literary 
 associations have continued to grind out un- 
 numbered volumes of perfected dullness. 
 
 It must not be supposed that the last few 
 years have been entirely barren of improve- 
 ment in the style of report-writing by com- 
 mercial secretaries. Here and there appear 
 docurtients that give evidence of a new era. 
 The tone and spirit are better than before. 
 
 It is safe to say that a committee that has 
 lived its task will not make a dry report and, 
 conversely, it is possible to diagnose the 
 lack of interest when the atmosphere of the 
 
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW 125 
 
 report is depressing. Like the prophet 
 whose days were long but with no joy in 
 them, such a committee drags its weary 
 service to a stupid close and a dull report. 
 
 There are three sorts of committee re- 
 ports: 
 
 (i) Internal 
 
 (2) Informative 
 
 (3) Propagandist 
 
 This classification is based upon the pur- 
 pose of the report. Internal reports deal 
 with matters inside the organization that 
 do not concern the public except indirectly. 
 Informative reports are collections of data 
 that may be used as a guide to subsequent 
 committee or organization action. Propa- 
 gandist reports are intended to mold public 
 opinion into new forms and must always be 
 excellent campaign documents. 
 
 When you write a committee report, re- 
 member that it is a chance to tell the story 
 of patriotic service in such a way that the 
 members will carry the elation of accom- 
 plishment into the intimate circles of their 
 friends. As a general rule the shaping of an 
 
126 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 internal or informative committee report 
 should be governed by its effect on the mem- 
 bers of the committee. Having tasted pub- 
 lic success once, men grow to enjoy it. Their 
 report is their voice and it ought to be 
 worthy of them. It should not indulge in 
 effusive personal gratulations ; — that is not 
 worthy of men who delight in serving the 
 public. It cheapens the effort. On the 
 other hand, do not hesitate to tell who did 
 the work and why it is well done. A de- 
 cent regard for the truth of the case and a 
 vigorous portrayal of it is a fair recipe for 
 a committee report. There is no stereo- 
 typed methbd that can be followed blindly. 
 
 There is one class of committee reports 
 that should be written with an eye solely to 
 the effect on the public, namely, propa- 
 ganda reports. A committee set at the 
 task of campaigning for a new city charter 
 must shape its various expressions to appeal 
 to the voters. Here again the art of per- 
 suasion comes into play as in all the things 
 a chamber of commerce does. 
 
 Aristotle said the drama must have "a 
 beginning, a middle and an end." So must 
 
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW 127 
 
 a report. Forget the chronological order. 
 No one has ever written a chronology that 
 was a popular document. Do not fail to 
 make the motive underlying the committee 
 task perfectly clear. If the committee has 
 worked hard and has few tangible results to 
 show for it, say so, but inspire the reader 
 with a story of the ideals and the spirit back 
 of the effort. 
 
 The annual report of the chamber is sub- 
 ject to the same rules of composition as a 
 committee report. In fact, it is a report of 
 the committee of the whole. Usually it is 
 a deadly collection of reports by committees 
 and officers published in a forbidding vol- 
 ume that is never read through by any one 
 except the proof-reader. Within the past 
 ten years there has come into use a unique 
 form of annual report that possesses so many 
 points of excellence it is bound to be adopted 
 widely. The Program of Work is printed 
 in one column and the efforts and accom- 
 plishments printed in a parallel column, with 
 the names of the committees in a third 
 column. All that the form lacks is an initial 
 page that will keep the ideals of the organi- 
 
128 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 zation to the fore. Make the recitation of 
 facts as brief and pungent as possible— em- 
 phasize the spiritual values instead of the 
 material ones, and remember that every- 
 thing which is a part of life will affect men. 
 
 The chamber of commerce is always under 
 criticism by people who do not understand 
 it. If its committee and annual reports do 
 not meet such criticism intelligently, it is 
 not to be supposed that the critics will hunt 
 up replies to their own questions. A mere 
 statement of material results is a poor way 
 to educate a "kicker" to a realization of the 
 underlying philosophy of a great community 
 movement for better things. He has to be 
 told that his own neighbors are citizens 
 who are willing to give time, thought and 
 money to efforts for the public good because 
 men ought to be citizens in the fine sense of 
 that good old word. The story of the patri- 
 otic service of a soldier is not told by tabu- 
 lating the number of the enemy he killed 
 or the miles he marched. It is the splendid 
 spirit with which he left home and faced 
 the foe that makes men's blood leap. 
 Why attempt to tell of the service of 
 
A FEW THINGS TO KNOW 129 
 
 chamber of commerce members wholly in 
 terms of material accomplishments ? 
 
 As a part of the general policy of winning 
 public respect the chamber of commerce 
 should house itself in good quarters and 
 should equip its offices with as good fur- 
 niture as the city affords. There is the same 
 reason for doing this as for building a fine 
 city hall. Cheap furniture, dirty quarters 
 and a general air of decadence is the road 
 to organization failure. The Y. M. C. A. 
 movement would never have arrived at its 
 high place in the public mind without the 
 imposing buildings that were erected in 
 many cities. A chamber of commerce 
 should undertake to erect a community 
 building as soon as practicable, which will 
 house neighborhood associations, smaller 
 civic clubs and other organized endeavors 
 of minor groups that have the betterment 
 of the city at heart. But throughout the 
 whole project the aim is the centralization 
 of public effort instead of its diffusion ; and 
 the use of every righteous means of winning 
 public confidence. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE SECRETARY IN RELATION TO THE 
 COMMUNITY 
 
 THE commercial secretary who succeeds 
 is a personage in his city. He ought to 
 Uve up to the expectation of the public and 
 to do that will require every resource of 
 body and mind that he possesses. The 
 writer, while a chamber of commerce secre- 
 tary, has found it necessary to spend four 
 evenings each week for years speaking, 
 attending gatherings where public matters 
 were to be considered, and getting ac- 
 quainted with the men of the city. One hun- 
 dred public speeches in a year, outside of 
 office hours, is no more than other men 
 have done— the new secretary must expect 
 to equal the record qf others. Three hun- 
 dred "parish calls" by the secretary on as 
 many members of the chamber at their 
 places of business during the forenoons of 
 business days, in addition to the one hun- 
 
 130 
 
RELATION TO THE COMMUNITY 131 
 
 dred public speeches in the evenings of the 
 same year, is not impossible. But to accom- 
 plish so much work, on top of the mass of 
 office detail that arises from a proper super- 
 vision of committees and the ever-present 
 task of answering correspondence, means 
 long hours and complete concentration. 
 Sometimes a secretary finds himself in a 
 difficult situation because of the demands"^ 
 on his time ; and the temptation is strong to 
 do a larger quantity of work and poorer 
 quality. It is then that the test of judgment 
 comes, for the secretary should not hesitate 
 to go before his directors and require the 
 authorization of more help. Though his 
 directors may say they are willing for him 
 to "let down," each one of them will want 
 him to "let down" on some matter that is 
 of interest to the other fellow, but keep full 
 steam ahead on those things that interest 
 him. The secretary cannot afford to do slip- 
 shod work under any circumstances. On 
 one occasion the writer was faced with the 
 necessity of speaking eighteen times within 
 two weeks, to essentially the same audience. 
 Not even the stories or the illustrative ma- 
 
132 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 terial could be used a second time. The 
 only way to save one's self in such a predica- 
 ment is to have access to a good library and 
 time to use it. 
 
 In the midst of endless demands on his 
 time the secretary must exercise some judg- 
 ment in excluding from his day's work 
 those men and those measures that are not 
 worth while. 
 
 First: the intelligent part of the com- 
 munity, in the end, is the one that "does 
 things." The Bolshevik betrays the public 
 in America just as he did in Russia. Waste 
 no time on "revolutionaries" — ^they get no- 
 where in America, nor is revolution neces- 
 sary in a nation where men have the greatest 
 freedom to evolve. Evolution, and not revo- 
 lution, must continue to be the means of 
 larger liberties. Nor can revolutions occur 
 except when the propertied classes or the 
 political Brahmins become utterly stupid 
 and reactionary. 
 
 Second : beware of that school of charity 
 workers who think all business men are 
 cruel, dishonest and mean. Business men 
 are nothing of the sort. Business and pro- 
 
RELATION TO THE COMMUNITY 133 
 
 fessional men, as classes, are always reach- 
 ing upwards, always aspiring after the higher 
 truth. The percentage of business men who 
 are without motivating interest in the public 
 weal is as small as in any other class — 
 professional uplifters included. There are 
 fine-spirited men in the business life of every 
 city who are ready to respond to the call of 
 service regardless of cost. From the time of 
 Robert Owen to the present, the standards 
 of human values have been evolved by the 
 much-despised business man more than by 
 professional social workers. Among the 
 chambers of commerce organized by the 
 American City Bureau are thousands of 
 business men who, on the road to Damas- 
 cus, heard the call to serve. 
 
 Third : the secretary must know that the 
 chamber of commerce is the greatest eco- 
 nomic and sociological laboratory in the 
 world, where the technique of social appeal 
 may be tried daily and where, assured of 
 the innate decency of mankind, experi- 
 ments in community betterment may have 
 a fair test. 
 
 Fourth: the chamber of commerce spirit 
 
134 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 and technique are of slow growth. Little can 
 be done in one year to convince a critical 
 public of its utility. Therefore the Program 
 of Work and the funds with which to work 
 should be pledged for three years. It is the 
 growth of team-thinking that determines the 
 real value of the organization. In a little 
 Vermont town of about 3,000 people there 
 had come into being a score of cliques, each 
 separated from the others by some prejudice 
 of political, business or social origin. Finally 
 there was organized a chamber of commerce, 
 and men sought and found the greatest com- 
 mon divisor of their various interests. After 
 they had worked together for a spell, a big 
 fire started one afternoon in the plant of a 
 lumber mill and, to the astonishment of 
 one another, the whole town turned out to 
 fight the fire and sympathize with the suf- 
 ferers. Then some one remarked that such 
 good feeling would have been impossible 
 before they had learned to work and think 
 and "feel" together in their little commer- 
 cial association. 
 
 How much should a commercial secretary 
 undertake in the matter of joining fraternal 
 
RELATION TO THE COMMUNITY 135 
 
 and social clubs ? It is a question that must 
 be answered in a qualified way. So far as 
 such relationships enable him to serve the 
 community better, he should try to culti- 
 vate them. So far as he is temperamentally 
 fitted to make friends for the chamber by 
 mixing with men, he should use the divine 
 gift — but not to the neglect of his admin- 
 istrative work. Living publicly and for the 
 public is a fine art that cannot be bound to 
 minute rules. 
 
 Strive for a cordial relationship with the 
 newspapers. As a rule the papers will sup- 
 port what the chamber of commerce advo- 
 cates. The secretary, on his part, owes it to 
 the papers not to commit thiC organization 
 on a matter of controversial public policy 
 until the issue has been submitted to the 
 entire membership by mail referendum. 
 Not even the board of directors has the 
 moral right to arrogate the authority to 
 bind the chamber in favor of a street rail- 
 way franchise without a referendum. Many 
 a chamber has gone to pieces on such a rock. 
 
 In some cities the secretary will have to 
 contend with a yellow newspaper. This 
 
136 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 demands wariness and generalship because 
 such a paper does not want the truth — it 
 lives oflF the opposite. Always maintain an 
 attitude of inviting the yellow journal to co- 
 operate in movements for the public good; 
 never slam the door in its face. Its long 
 suit is playing the martyr. This policy may 
 require an almost superhuman toleration at 
 times, but it is the only strategy that can 
 win over an unprincipled adversary. 
 
 Good newspapers, on the other hand, are 
 almost priceless to the chamber. They can 
 be depended upon to study the problem of 
 publicity with the secretary and help him 
 over many a difficulty. In smaller cities the 
 secretary will find it desirable to write his 
 own news stories from day to day and give 
 them to the reporter ready for print. Of 
 course this means extra work, but the daily 
 papers in small cities have to work with 
 limited staffs and cannot provide the deft 
 treatment of particular lines of news that 
 the chamber of commerce needs. 
 
 Seek out a few men in the city for dose 
 friendships. Tie them to you with bonds 
 stronger than steel. Friendship is a mutual 
 
RELATION TO THE CXDMMUNITY 137 
 
 concern and a man gets just as much as he 
 gives. The commercial secretary can pick 
 his intimate friends from the finest and 
 strongest men in the city. No other pro- 
 fessional man has such a possibility of choice 
 of associates ; certainly the preacher and the 
 doctor do not. A half-dozen genuine friends 
 will furnish a commercial secretary with the 
 knowledge of what other men think, which 
 he must have to succeed. But the friends 
 should be of the kind that are not afraid to 
 offer constructive criticism. The flatterer 
 and the fawner are always dangerous. 
 
 It is impossible to make a word picture of 
 the potentialities of this new profession of 
 the commercial secretary. It touches every 
 element of community life. Under its direc- 
 tion housing ceases to be a subject of aca- 
 demic discussion among uplifters and be- 
 comes a living issue affecting the output of 
 factories through contented workmen; a 
 stimulant to retail trade through the culti- 
 vation of tastes for better things; a factor 
 in education and the support of the church 
 through making life worth living to more 
 people. City government becomes a human 
 
138 COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP 
 
 thing, as in Dayton where the Welfare De- 
 partment accepts for immediate applica- 
 tion social, charitable or recreational en- 
 deavors that private trial proves worthy. 
 Education claims the attention of the par- 
 ents, instead of merely frightening the 
 children. Recreation takes its place in re- 
 creating men after the toil of the day. The 
 sectarian churches gradually seek brother- 
 hood instead of antagonisms. 
 
 It is with such possibilities and such 
 forces the commercial secretary lives. The 
 World War enormously increased the re- 
 sponsibilities for right community response 
 to patriotic needs. The Red Cross, the War 
 Chests, the Liberty Loans, were all materi- 
 ally aided by local chambers of commerce 
 and in some cases saved from disaster. The 
 secretary who could see what opportunities 
 were opening before his organization imme- 
 diately found himself in a field of service 
 that had no boundaries. 
 
 World peace and the complex problems 
 of the after-war readjustment period have 
 increased the importance of the chamber of 
 commerce in its home city. Its importance 
 
RELATION TO THE COMMUNITY 139 
 
 is likely to be further increased if the 
 organization has the imagination to per- 
 ceive the new community needs that the 
 years will bring. 
 
 The future of this newest profession rests 
 with the men who are in it. The salaries will 
 be as high as men can measure up to. Cities 
 have shown a willingness to overpay rather 
 than underpay for leadership when the 
 leader could be found. But the commercial 
 secretary in 1930 must be a man of unusual 
 ability, splendid imagination, boundless en- 
 ergy, and able to grow with the expansion 
 of his work. 
 
 THE END