^ if BULLETIN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN Serial No. 470: General Series, No. 306. EXTENSION DIVISION The University of Wisconsin General Information and Welfare THE SOCIAL CENTER A MEANS OF COMMON UNDERSTANDING All address delivered by Hon. Woodrow Wilson, Gov- ernor of New Jersey, before the First National Confer- ence on Civic and Social Center Development, at Madison,. Wis., October 25. 1911. PRICE 5 CENTS MADISON Published by the University December, 191 I tmere- common things bj' com- mon means, you simply cannot have it; we must study the means hy which these things are produced. In the first place, don't you see that you produce com- munities by creating common feeling? I know that a great emphasis is put upon the mind, in oiir day, and as a university man I should perhaps not challenge the supremacy of the intellect, but I have never been con- vinced that mind was really monarch in our daj-, or in any day that I have yet read of, or, if it is monarch, it is one of the modern monarchs that rules and reigns but does not govern. Common Feeling Essential to Free Government What really controls our action is feeling. We are governed by the passions and the most that we can man- age by all our social and i)olitical endeavors is that the handsome passions shall be in the majority' — the passion of sympathy, the passion of justice, the passion of fair dealing, the passion of unselfishness, (if it may be elevated into a passion). If you can once see that a working ma- jority is obtained for the handsome passions, for the feel- ings that draw us together, rather than for the feelings that separate us, then you have laid the foundation of a community and a free government and, therefore, if you can do^iothing else in the community center than draw men together so that they will have common feeling, you will have set forward the cause of civilization and the cause of human freedom. As a basis of the conamon feeling you must have a mu- tual comprehension. The fundamental truth in modern life, as I analj^ze it, is a profound ignorance. I am not one of those who challenge the promoters of special in- terests on the ground that they are malevolent, that thej' are bad men; I challenge their leadership on the ground [8] that they are io-norant men, that whcMi you have absorbed yourself in a particular business thi'ough half your life, you have no other point of view than the point of view of that business and that, therefore, you are dis(|ualitied by ignorance from <;iving counsel as to the common interests. A witty English writer once said: "If you chain a man's head to a ledger and knock off something from his wages every time he stops adding up, you can't expect him to have enlightened views about the antipodes." Simply, if you immerse a man in a given undertaking, no matter how big that undertaking is, and keep him immersed for half a life time, you can't exjoect him to see any horizon, you can't expect him to see human life steadily or see it whole. Means to Liberal Education I once made this statement that a university was in- tended to make young people just as unlike their fathers as possible. By which I do not mean anything disrespect- ful to their fathers, but merely this, by the time a man is old enough to have children in college, his point of view is apt to have become so specialized that they would bet- ter be taken away from him and put in a place where their views of life will be regeneralized and they will be discon- nected from the family and connected with the world. That, I understand to be the function of education, of the liberal education. Now a kind of liberal education must underlie every wholesome political and social process, the kind of liberal education Avhich connects a man's feeling and his compre- hension with the general run of mankind, which discon- nects him from the special interests and marries his thought to the common interests, of great communities and of great cities and of great states and of great nations, and, if pos- sible, with that brotherhood of man that transcends the boundaries of nations themselves. [9] Those are the horizons to my mind of this social center movement, that they are goint>- to unite the feelings and clarify the comprehension of communities, of bodies of men who draw together in conference. Conference Always Modifies and Improves Thought I would like to ask if this is not the experience of every person here wh.0 has ever acted in anj^ conference of any kind. Did you ever go out of a conference with exactly the the same views with Avhichyou went in? If you did, I am. sorry for you, you must be thought- tight. For my part I can testify that I never carried a scheme into a conference with- out having it profoundly modified by the criticism of the other men in the conference and without recognizing" when I came out that the product of the common council bestowed upon it was very much superior to any private thought that might have been used for its development, The processes of attrition, the contributions to consensus of minds, the compromises of thought create those general movements which are the streams of tendency and the streams of development. Will Make Easier Solution of Great Problems And so it seems to me that what is going to be produced by this movement, — not all at once, by slow and tedious- stages, no doubt, but nevertheless very certainly in the end, — is in the first place a release of common forces now undiscovered, now somewhere banked up, and now some- where unavailable, the removal of barriers to the common understanding, the opening of mind to mind, the clari- fication of the air and the release in that clarified air of forces that can live in it, and just so certainly as you re- lease those forces you make easier the fundamental problem of modern society, which is the problem of accommodating the various interests in modern society to one another. [10] Adjustment Necessary to Liberty I useil to teach my classes in the university that liberty was a matter of adjustment and I was accustomed to illus- trate it in tliis way; when you have perfectly assembled the parts of a j^reat steam engine, for example, then when it runs, you say that it runs free; that means that the ad- justment is so i)erfect that the friction is reduced to a minimum, doesn't it, and the minute you twist anj- part out of alignment, the minute you lose adjustment, then there is a buckling up and the whole thing is rigid and useless. Now to my mind, that is the image of human liberty; the individual is free in proportion to his perfect accommodation to the whole, or to put it the other way, in projiortion to the perfect adjustment of the whole to his life and interests. Take another illustration; you are sailing a boat, when do you say that she is running free, when you have thrown her uj) into the wind? No, not at all. Everj' stick and stitch in her shivers and you say she is in irons; nature has grasped her and says: "You cannot go that way;" but let her fall off, let the sheet fill and see her run like a bird skimming the waters. Why is she freei' Because she has adjusted herself to the great force of nature that is brewed with the breath of the wind. She is free in proportion as she is adjusted, as she is obedient, and so men arj free in society in proportion as their interests are accommodated to one another, and that is the problem of liberty. Analysis Accomplished— Now Assembled Liberty as now expressed is unsatisfactory in this country and in other countries because there has not been a satisfactory adjustment and you cannot readjust the parts until you analyze them. Very well, we have anal- yzed them. Now this movement is intended to contrib- [11] ute to an effort to assemble tliein, brinj;- them together, let them look one another in the face, let them reckon with one another and then they will cooperate and not be- fore. You cannot bring- adjustment into play until you have got the consent of the parts to act together, and then when you have got the adjustment, when you have discovered and released those forces and they have accommodated themselves to each other, you have that control which is the sovereignty of the people. There is no sovereignty of the people if the several sections of the peo])le be at loggerheads with one another; sovereignty comes with cooperation, sovereignty conies "with mutual protection, sov^ereignty comes with the quick pulses of sympathy, sovereignty comes by a common im- pulse. You say and all men say that great political changes are impending in this country. Why do you say so? Because everjnvhere you go you find men expressing the same judgment, alive to the same circumstances, deter- mined to solve the problems hj acting together no matter what older bonds they may break, no matter what former prepossessions they may throw off, determined to get together and do the thing. Enlightened Control in Place of Management And so you know that changes are impending because Avhat was a body of scattered sentiment is now becoming a concentrated force, and so with sympathy and under- standing comes control, for, in place of this control of enlightened and sovereign opinions, we have had in the field of politics as elsewhere, the reign of management, and management is compounded of these two things, secrecy plus concentration. [12] You cannot manage a nation, you cannot manage the people of a state, you cannot manage a great population, you can manage only some central force; what you do, therefore, if you want to manage in politics or anywhere else is to choose a great single force or single gi'oup of forces, and then find some man or men sagacious and secretive enough to manage the business without being discovered. And that has been done for a generation in the United States. Now, the schoolhouse among .other things is going to break that up. Is it not signilicant that this thing is be- ing erected upon the foundation originally laid in America, where we saw from tlie first that the school- house and the church were to be the pillars of the Re- public? Is it not significant that as if by instinct we return to those sources of liberty undehled which we find in the common meeting place, in the place owned by everybody, in the place where nobody can be excluded, in the place to which everybody comes as by right? And so what' we are doing is simply to open what was shut, to let the light come in upon places that were dark, to substitute for locked doors, open doors, for it does not make any difference how many or how few come in provided anj'body who chooses may come in. So as soon as you have established that principle, you have openings, and these doors are open as if they were the flood gates of life. Faith In People Justified I do not wonder that men are exhibiting an increased confidence in the judgments of the people, because where- ever you give the people a chance such as this movement has given them in the schoolhouse, they avail themselves of it. This is not a false people, this is not a people guided by blind impulses, this is a people who want to think, who want to think right, whose feelings are based [13] upon .justice, wliose instincts are for fairness and for the light. So what I see in this movement is a x'ecovery of the constructive and creative genius of tlie American people, because the American people as a people are so far differ- ent from others in being able to produce new things, to create new things out of old. This Movement Fundamentally American I have often thought that we overlook the fact that the real sources of strength in the community come from the bottom. Do you find society renewing itself from the toi^:' Don't you iind society renewing itself from the ranks of unknown men? Do you look to the leading fam- ilies to go on leading you? Do you look to the ranks of the men already established in authority to contribute sons to lead the next generation? They may, sometimes they do, but you can't count on them; and what you are constantly depending on is the rise out of the ranks of un- known men, the discovery of men whom you had passed by, the sudden disclosure of capacity ^'ou had not dreamed of, the emergence of somebody from some place of which you had thought the least, of some man unanointed from on high, to do the thing that the generation calls for. Who Avould have looked to see Lincoln save a nation? Who that knew Lincoln when he was a lad and a youth and a young man — but all the Avhile there was springing up in him as if he were connected with the very soil itself, the sap of a nation, the vision of a great people, a sympathy so ingrained and intimate Avith the common run of men that he was like the People impersonated, sublimated, touched with genius. And it is to such sources that we must alwa.vs look. No man can calculate the courses of genius, no man can foretell the leadership of nations. And so we must see to [14] it that the bottom is left open, we must see to it that the :Soil of the common feeling* of the common consciousness is always fertile and unclogyed, for there can be no fruit unless the roots touch the rich sources of life. And it seems to me that the schoolhouses dotted here, there, and everywhere, over the great expanse of this na- tion, will some day prove to be the roots of that great tree of liberty which shall spread for the sustenance and protection of all mankind. [15] 0*020 773'l28 6'