Dwight Sanderson

Community Organization for War and for Peace

ANY period of war is necessarilv a more or ti less revolutionary era. Movements and tendencies already under way are speeded up and new ones develop to meet new conditions. There is a conflict between the status quo ante and the pressure to meet vital needs in a new way. This has been well brought out by Kenneth Roberts in his story, Oliver Wiswell, in which he holds that the American Revolution was as much a revolution of the lower and middle classes against the tories as against England. The first World War brought about a general awakening to the need for community organization. From small beginnings of using the school as a social and civic center in the first decade of this century, there had grown up a strong community center movement which held its first national conference in Chicago in 1916 under the leadership of John Collier. It formed the National Community Center Association which did much to spread its gospel through its monthly publication, The Community Center, during the next eight years of its existence, when it was absorbed into the National Education Association.1 When this country entered the war in 1917 Congress established the system of national, state and county councils of defense through which all civilian war activities cleared. Through the influence of some of the leaders in the community center movement this system was carried down to the local community, and just before the Armistice was declared a vigorous campaign was under way for organizing community councils to carry on civilian war activities.2 With peace these quickly dissolved, but the need for coordination between the efforts of various voluntary organizations had been demonstrated and the feeling of identity with a local community had been aroused as never before. Other movements for community organization also arose during the war and have had more lasting influence. Due to the many drives for funds for war activities, war chests were formed in large numbers of cities, which were later transformed into community chests, so that we now have a wellestablished system of privately supported community chests and councils for the support of private philanthropic and character-building agencies, and for the study and coordination of programs of social work. War Camp Community Service, which had provided recreation centers for the men in service during the war, became Communily Service, Inc. and for a few years made a vigorous campaign for erecting community buildings for social and recreational centers as war memorials, which did much toward fostering community identification and providing better facilities for organizations devoted to the 4eneral community welfare. Although the Smith-Lever Act for extension work in agriculture and home economics had been passed in 1914, it was the need for food production

SOROKIN, PITIRIM A., ZIMMERMAN, CARLE C., and GALPIN, CHARLES J. (Eds.). A Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology. Vol. I. Pp. xx, 645. Min neapolis : The University of Minnesota Press, 1930

progress which have been advanced through the ages, and a large number of comments upon the difficulty of comparing civilization with savagery or of making any accurate estimate of progress. The first section, which is by far the best, is curiously one-sided in emphasis; while purporting to discuss the various theories of culture, no adequate account is given of the assumption of the Boas school that the history of a trait, as found in its diffusion, is a sine qua nan to the correct interpretation of the meaning and the r6le of that trait. Instead, the author confines himself to arguing against the more specific reconstructions proposedby Wissler and Kroeber, and to a critical analysis of Sapir’s Time Praspective article. The position of the di~usionists is attacked without being stated; some of the dicta of the functional school are incorporated in the discussion, but there is no treatment of the functional school nor any adequate treatment of any of the schools which attempt to combine the study of psychology and culture. Nowhere would the student get any idea of what culture really is, although the teacher will find a mass of. neatly summarized concrete data and detailed refutation of his-

A Sociological Case Study of Farm Families

1. The Sociological Analysis of the Family Group W IT H the recent widespread interest in the problems of the family and in child development and parent education, it has become obvious that there is need for scientific research on many phases of family life. Inasmuch as the family is a social group, the academic study of the family has been chiefly by sociologists. Recently, however, the practical problems of the individual family have become the object of study of psychologists, psychiatrists, social and mental hygienists, home economists, economists, and others. What is desired today is not an academic account of the family as an institution, but a technology for family improvement. Recent scientific research contributing to such a technology of family development, has been somewhat more important in the fields of psychology and psychiatry than in sociology and inasmuch as such a technology must obviously be derived from various social and biological sciences, the question naturally arises as to just what is the distinctive field or contribution of sociology to a knowledge of the family. Such a challenge was given us something over two years ago and we undertook the preparation of a statement of what contribution sociology had made and might make to a scientific knowledge of the family. We were at once confronted by the necessity of defining the field of sociology as a science, concerning which sociologists have not, so far as we can determine, come to any very satisfactory agreement. Upon this point we have taken the position held in a previous paper that sociology is a study of the forms