The Community Course
Part 1 - The Significance of the Community
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6. The Community in America

Roots of Community
In most countries present villages are outgrowths of past communities, sometimes with a continuous existence for thousands of years. In America, except for Pueblo Indian villages, and for a few others, this is not the case. Some American villages, as in New England, and in Minnesota and other parts of the central West, were transplanted from Europe as organized communities with continuing traditions, and others, like those of the Mormons, were consciously designed as cultural unities. There are various communities built around social or religious or political ideas: Oneida, New York; Fairhope, Alabama; Gary, Indiana, a steel mill town; Amana, Iowa, a religious communistic community; and numerous others. In numerous cases groups of people went as communities from the east coast to new settlements farther west.

The exceptional cases where American communities are continuations of old democratic community tradition are interesting. Some of the most interesting com­munities in America were settled by more or less organized or integrated groups from Europe, and to a large degree they represent an unbroken tradition of democratic community life from pre-feudal times. The Mennonite communities are examples. Valdese, North Carolina, settled by the very old democratic communal religious people called Waldensians, is another case, although so many outsiders have come to this community because of its desirable qualities that the Waldensians are now a small minority. The Dunkards, the Amish, the Dukhobors, and a few other groups also are examples. New England had somewhat this characteristic of being a continuity of democratic pre-­feudal community tradition from close to the soil in Europe, and the New England town meeting is more an adaptation of ancient democracy than it is a new creation.

Democratic Methods
Democratic church organizations, such as the Baptists, the Congregationalists, the Unitarians, the Quakers, the Mennonites, and the Presbyterians, to a considerable degree carry on the old democratic pre-feudal community tradition. They have been among the most important schools for training people in democratic methods. They are not complete communities, but, especially in rural areas, have many of the characteristics of communities. For the most part these are not creations, but adaptations of ancient ways.

Building the American Village
Most American villages have grown in a heterogeneous way as aggregations of dwellings, rather than as living social organisms. Over a large part of the country settlers went as individuals. Energetic men guessed at what would be strategic points and laid out towns in advance of the peopling of the country. Others built dams and grist mills or set up stores at promising locations. For instance, Minneapolis grew up around St. Anthony Falls in the Mississippi River, which supplied considerable power for grinding wheat before the days of effective steam power. Groups of houses, occupied by people with no previous interest in each other, sprang up at such locations. In this respect most American villages have an advantage over those of Europe and Asia. For the most part they are laid out on some definite plan, with adequate streets.

The United States Government divided most of the country west of the Little Miami River into townships six miles square, and these into "sections" one mile square. In general the federal law allowed a settler to choose a tract of land half a mile square, a "quarter section" of 160 acres, for a homestead. This practice automatically put farm homes on the average half a mile apart. Thus the whole character of a rural civilization was deeply influenced by an Act of Congress. Among the Mormons of the West a different type of settlement was followed, with the village as a center, and farm lands about.

Government Development of Communities
When the state legislatures began to make provision for local political government, they generally set up counties, and within them townships, following the rectangular township lines of the Land Office Survey. These state laws also provided for election of township and county officials by uniform methods. Whereas in Europe, and in Asia, local government mostly was a matter of slow growth through centuries, with the cities and villages far older than the nations of which they were parts, in America west of the Appalachian Mountains these subdivisions were created artificially by legislation. They largely lacked at the beginning what the Source Book in Rural Sociology calls the gestalt: that is, the personality, character, and individuality which might be said to come by the process of emergent evolution.

Within these law made, artificial political subdivisions the hamlets, villages, and cities grew up. Where settlements were made by organized groups a considerable degree of integration was present from the first. Otherwise some integration took place out of the background, experience, and needs of the new settlers, and out of their innate drive to community. But the results were very different from European and Asiatic communities. In some respects the results were better; in some respects not so good. The people had fewer cultural interests in common, and therefore community life was relatively bare. On the other hand, long standing feuds and jealousies, and what is more important, the habits of feuds and jealousies, were left behind. This was a very great social gain.

American vs. European Villages
The chief ways in which the American hamlet or village differed from the European were in heterogeneous population, in absence of traditions, readiness to change, and in expectation of change as a normal course of life. It is much easier to change an American than a European village.

For a time American villages tended strongly to develop into true integrated communities--"cumulative communities," as they are called in the Source Book in Rural Sociology. With the development of technical society, these have tended to disintegrate, and to be followed by unity around special functional interests. (See Source Book, Vol. I, pp. 321-33) At present, integrated community villages scarcely exist in the United States in any considerable numbers, though vestiges of community consciousness and community habits are found in many places, and in many villages and other neighborhoods there is conscious effort to develop community consciousness.

Changes from Modern Technology
The modern American village is in effect a small city. This condition was not possible to a high degree before the development of modern technological civilization. This change has two elements: First, there is the loss of integrated purpose; what the Source Book calls the "cumulative community" has largely passed away. Second, there is gained both the advantages and the disadvantages of the city, but in less degree than in the large cities. The modern village has acquired certain freedom from restraint, and can develop somewhat as it will.

Does not this condition provide opportunity for a new synthesis? Is it not possible that the old integration can be recovered? In the original integration, habit, customs, purpose, were controlled by tradition, largely by inertia. Is it not possible that a new integration can be achieved by free inquiry, by science, education, and the process of intelligent, critical synthesis given force by the spirit of aspiration and of social purpose? If this result should be achieved it would represent a new development in the evolution of human society.

Opportunities for Progress
Heretofore to a large degree culture has been urban, with relatively little flow toward small communities. The flow of quality has been cityward, with the constant impoverishment of the country. This fact may be one of the chief causes of the failure of human society to make greater progress.

Now the opportunity comes to recover integration of small communities, so that again they shall be social unities, and at the same time to base this unity on critical inquiry, science, education, and sophistication in its best sense. Underlying all this should be a common philosophy and life purpose.

Today the dwellers on separate farms, by means of consolidated schools, automobiles, telephones, local newspapers, etc., can be as closely integrated with the local community as were village dwellers a century ago. The village now includes them -  and they can acquire any tempo or mores that the village achieves.

The Farm’s Connection
In the disintegration of real communities which has taken place in America, there has been a tendency for the farm to detour the nearby village and to make its connections with large centers. It reads the metropolitan daily paper, listens to metropolitan radio with its advertisements, does its shopping in the larger centers. In part, this change is natural and desirable. In part it has taken place because the nearby village was not a real community but only a little city, and as between cities, the metropolis is in many ways preferable. If the village and the surround­ing farm area again becomes a real community, it will reclaim such a share of rural interest as is normal and desirable.

Census Data
C. Luther Fry in American Villages (New York, Doran) states (p.21) that the 1920 census shows 12,900 incorporated places having fewer than 2500 inhabi­tants, their combined population being nearly nine millions. (In addition there is a large population living in unincorporated hamlets or villages.)

Fry states, "Little is known about villages. . . . for incorporated places having less than 2500 inhabitants, the census volumes furnish only a single figure—the total population." (p.22) He further states, “The principal sources of informa­tion about villages, aside from the census, are a small number of first-hand studies made by individual investigators."

In addition Fry states that village population is increasing more rapidly than that of the open country.

“The American village today has very little in common with a cumulative community." (Source Book, Vol. I, pp. 323-24)

The American village has the dominant characteristics, not of a community, but of a small city. It is an aggregate, not an organic community. (Source Book, Vol. I, pp. 323-24)

The American village is over-functionalized. “On the average one village has 5.6 churches, about 16 church organizations, from 6 to 8 lodges, several civic organizations, 27 social organizations, and from 8 to 10 economic associations. On the average there are 21.1 village organizations and 16.1 church organizations, or all together about 37 different organizations per village.” (Source Book, Vol. I, p. 324)

^“The differentiated groupings of the rural population are becoming similar to the differentiated organization of the city, though the urban network of dif­ferentiated groupings is even more differentiated, complex, and fanciful than that of the rural population.¹¹ (Source Book, Vol. I, p. 325)