HARLEM is a new community. Its social work structure, slight as it is, is probably more effective for that reason; it has been built flexibly and not around a set of fixed ideas.
New as it is, however, Harlem inherited its physical framework. One of its best informed leaders remarks that the Negro in Harlem is like the poor relation who inherits a limousine: he can ill afford to keep it going. Harlem was built for families with incomes well above the average. The Negroes who find themselves masters of it have not, in the mass, attained to that standard. So the mere pressure to win and hold shelter imposes a tax on the wage-earner that leaves little margin for self-improvement, and less for cooperative social activity. Out of Harlem's pinched resources, again, have come surprising sums for church buying and building, as Mr. Haynes testifies. While several of these churches have distinguished themselves by providing institutional facilities and using them for needed social service, most of them have not, so that the wave of church-building has meant that the lion's share of the money Harlem has had to give away has gone into brick and stone.
Harlem's newness affects also the personal resources on which social work must draw. There is a leisure class in Harlem, but it is not a large one, and it is not yet widely diversified. Its money is new money, and much of it has been made, not in the ordinary turnover of varied trades and industries, but in the more picturesque enterprises-- cabarets, the stage, sports, sumptuary establishments. Rich as Harlem is in personal good-will and neighborly helpfulness, it is not such money as this that makes good "prospects" for social work financing.
Nor is the community as a whole, in spite of its apparent cohesiveness, knit closely together. It has been recruited too quickly from elements too diverse. It has been hammered together by segregation, to be sure, but the unity that results is different in kind from that which grows slowly among people who live together and in a particular place by their own full choice. Harlem is probably no more factional or parochial than the typical American city of 150,000 or 200,000 souls, but it is not safe to argue from the accident of color that it is less so.
The leaders in Harlem social work are sensitive to these facts. They recognize the comparative inexperience of the Negro in organized social effort, and welcome the technical aid and advice of the maturer organizations of New York. Whether those organizations have been fully aware of their responsibility to the rapidly growing Negro community is a fair question. A recent conference on delinquency, for instance, revealed an almost total lack of attention to the underprivileged Negro boy. A thorough-going social survey of Harlem--had New York any cooperative body capable of making one--would no doubt uncover so many unmet and ill-met needs that the "downtown" agencies would be spurred to more adequate and more imaginative cooperation with those groups among the Negroes which are already struggling with their own difficult problems with growing initiative and self reliance.
Granting the handicaps to community organization, it is true that Harlem has exceptional resources in the service of professional volunteers-notably such physicians as those who compose the North Harlem Medical Association. Henry Street nurses testify to the unusually cordial cooperation of local doctors with their work; the eagerness with which the services of the New York Tuberculosis Committee were received and used, and the long association of Negro physicians with the local work of the Charity Organization Society, are cases in point. Negro dentists not only give their time for clinical service but have clubbed together to buy equipment for their clinic.
WHAT agencies has Harlem for social work? The list is a long one, and to answer the question fully here is clearly impossible. Only a handful can be mentioned. The work of the churches, for example, is presented elsewhere in this issue: here it may be said in passing that they are doing yeoman service in meeting one of Harlem's most pressing needs--that for day nursery care for the children of thousands of employed women, many of whom work the long hours of the domestic servant.
Harlem is fortunate above other communities of its size in having one generalized community agency. While the New York Urban League has a specific program of its own, its significance is that it links up the social and civic work to be done with the potential workers in the community. It pioneers in its own right, and it organizes lines of communication after it has shown the way. It has had a hand in the beginning of a number of enterprises which, once begun, it has left free to develop. It has recently formed a continuing committee of one hundred women representing the whole community. Subcommittees deal with special phases of the Urban League program, but the group as whole is in readiness for any call and limits itself by no fixed objectives. The staff of the League, which of course is Negro, has called together a luncheon conference of fourteen local executives from social, health and educational agencies who meet periodically for common counsel. It serves as a clearing-house for newcomers in New York, and for specialized workers. It functions, in other words, a little like a nascent community council.
The range of its own activities may be imagined from the article on another page by Mr. Johnson of the National Urban League. Like the national body, it is controlled by a board of white and Negro directors, with the Quaker tradition strong among them; like the national body, it devotes much attention to the special problems of the Negro in industry. It studies and promotes vocational opportunities; it seeks to adjust the Negro in industry to his employer and the unions; in some fields it does individual placement work. In housing it acts as a medium between tenants and owners; in recreation it has labored with but a remote hope of success--for public outdoor playgrounds, of which there is but one, and that on the western fringe, in all Harlem. In health it is centering its efforts now on the problem of convalescense, and on the annual health week. Some indication of its standing in Harlem may be seen in the fact that its income from local membership has increased more than sixfold in five years.
It is the Urban League, too, which has provided the nucleus for a central social service building. It shares the dwelling-house which it now owns (and which is soon to be enlarged) with the Henry Street Visiting Nurse senice and with the Harlem Tuberculosis Committee of the New York Tuberculosis Association.
The Henry Street Nurses do their customary work, and place special emphasis on a prenatal clinic. The Tuberculosis Committee comes near to being a general public health agency. Its chairman, a Negro physician, is a member of the board of directors of the New York Tuberculosis Association. Its program, shaped by a group made up about equally of Negro physicians and laymen and white social workers, and in the hands of a Negro staff, is a broad and flexible interpretation of the anti-tuberculosis campaign. Beginning with health talks in the churches and schools, it has come to include school nutrition classes; summer institutes at which local physicians have an opportunity to study the best technique in the handling of tuberculosis--an opportunity which is the more valuable because even in New York the limitations on hospital experience hinder the training of Negroes in medicine; medical examinations; a health club for mothers; and a free dental clinic organized at the behest of local dentists, with a volunteer staff of thirteen. It served as the gathering point for the Harlem Health Conference and each year gives the executive service necessary for carrying on Health Week in behalf of this conference.
Other agencies too are building up their community contacts. For example, during the past year the district secretary of the Charity Organization Society has been released from casework in order to develop community-wide relationships. A special committee on Negro problems, organized some years ago on the initiative of Negroes, has by a gradual and natural process been merged with the district committee, which thus becomes interracial, and there has been growing local support for the Negro case-worker on the district staff. The A. I. C. P., and other city-wide organizations, render their usual services in Harlem under central office direction.
THE Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations, both directed and officered entirely by Negroes, both housed in handsome new buildings in central locations, provide two much-used social centers for Harlem. The Y. M. C. A. serves about a thousand members with a dormitory, games, religious, athletic and social group activities, an employment office, a swimming pool and gymnasium, and, this year for the first time, with a summer camp. Thanks to a productive plant it is very nearly self-supporting. By way of community service, it keeps a well-informed secretary on duty all night to direct and help newcomers in New York (sent often by the Negro red-caps at the stations); maintains a rooming-house directory; opens its pool one morning a week through the summer to all boys of the neighborhood; and was the first association in the city to institute "splash week," during which every boy in the local schools-- white or black--who does not know how to swim is given free instruction.
The Young Women's Christian Association, with a nominal fee, has two thousand members. For the time being it is without dormitory facilities, but it too maintains an allnight service and refers girls and w-omen to suitable rooms, not to mention more difficult social adjustments, and its cafeteria is much used by both men and women. Emphasis is placed on a wide range of trade training courses. The index of the educational department's booklet is intriguing: Bible, Bookkeeping, Business English, Charm School, Children's Sewing, Citizenship, Crochet Beading, Dennison Craft, Dressmaking and Designing, English, Eyebrow-Eyelash Culture, Facial Massage, Filing.... A valued community service is given by the association merely by opening its meeting-rooms to various outside groups--groups which have made themselves so much at home that they often schedule their meetings without consulting their host! And no one can doubt that the agreeably-furnished lobby where girls and their friends of both sexes are welcome adds greatly to the amenities of huddled Harlem.
THE branch of the New York Public Library which stands on the main cross thoroughfare of Harlem, 135th Street, seeks to be what the Carnegie Corporation would call an intelligence center. Its staff includes both white and Negro librarians. It has held exhibitions of Negro art and readings of Negro literature. On March 1 it will open a loan exhibition of the original portraits and drawings by Winold Reiss which are reproduced in this number, together with a number of others made at the same time, some of which will appear in future issues of The Survey.
The library is now beginning to build up a special students' collection of Negro literature. Although there is rich and varied material by and about Negroes, it is so widely scattered in homes, in bookshops, in great reference libraries where it is a small part of the whole, and in private collections that it is comparatively unknown to most white people and to a large proportion of Negroes themselves. The library will set apart a special floor where such a collection may be easily available, with a competent colored librarian in charge, and has already formed a permanent organization of men and women to lend it support and to preserve and stabilize its policies. Much of the material sought for this collection consists of rare, out-of-print or costly books. It is hoped that many such now lost to the public in garrets or secondhand shops will find their way to a collection so well-founded and so safeguarded for public use. Much material usually regarded as ephemeral will be considered an essential part: photographs, broadsides? prints, newspaper articles, autographed letters, and the like. Survey readers who can help in gathering such material are invited to do so and should communicate with Ernestine Rose, branch librarian, 103 West 135th Street, New York.
THE Canadian Industrial Disputes Investigation Act was on January 20 declared ultra vires, or as we should say, unconstitutional, by the Lords of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The purpose of the act was to enable the Dominion Government to appoint anywhere in Canada a board of conciliation and investigation to which the dispute between an employer and his employee might be referred. Among other things it made it unlawful for an employer to lock-out or for a workman to strike, on account of the dispute, prior to or during the reference, and imposed an obligation on employee and employers to give thirty day's notice of any intended change affecting wages and hours.
The powers of the Dominion Government, conferred upon it by the Imperial Parliament, are defined in the British North America Act. Under a section of this act, the Dominion Parliament has a general power to make laws for Canada as a whole; but these laws are not to relate to classes of subjects assigned to the provinces, unless their enactment falls under heads specifically enumerated in the act. Exceptions to this rule might arise in case of war and of emergencies affecting the entire dominion such as the outbreak and spread of epidemic disease. The Supreme Court of Ontario had upheld the Disputes Act on the ground that a strike might conceivably spread from province to province and so create a menace to the dominion as a whole. It rested its argument largely upon an earlier decision of the .Judicial Committee of the Privy Council that it was within the competence of the Dominion Parliament to establish a uniform system for prohibiting the liquor traffic throughout Canada excepting under restrictive conditions. The Judicial Committee finds that this decision is not applicable to the case of the Industrial Disputes Act, on the ground that at the period of the passing of the Canada Temperance Act an emergency affecting Canada as a whole must be assumed to have existed, whereas neither in 1907 when the Disputes Act was passed nor since that time has a strike or lockout constituted such an emergency.
The final court of appeal in the British Empire therefore finds that in passing the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act, the Dominion Parliament exceeded its powers and after eighteen years of the law's operation declares it invalid.
IN a report which celebrated its semi-centennial, the Board of Health of Michigan tells of the remote days of the seventies and eighties when people had hardly heard of germs. One visitor, gazing through a microscope, asked how long those germs were, and learned with visible relief that 20,000 of them, laid in a row, would measure approximately one inch. "Oh," she said, "I'm not afraid of them little fellers." Within the past three months, however, some of them little fellers, and the belief of the public in their unseen powers, has laid low an industry which involves millions of dollars annually. As some hundreds of cases of typhoid fever, with scores of deaths' have been numbered in New York, Chicago and other cities which draw their supplies of oysters from the Atlantic beds, such a state of public panic has been created that oystermen from the Chesapeake northward are out of work; their season is almost over and their oysters have had no sale. Though some branches of the oyster industry have persisted in an unfortunate policy of shilly-shally, pointing accusing fingers at lettuce or celery as the source of the epidemic, the bulk of the group of producers have accepted sensibly the inescapable inference that there has been some pollution of oysters somewhere. They are ready to do almost anything to restore public confidence, but what? A Vigilance Committee of the producers centering in New York pledge their word of honor that only oysters of the most impeccable quality are admitted to the New York markets; other groups are crying for government investigation and certification. The Secretary of Commerce has asked Congress to appropriate $25,000 for a survey into the oyster industry to remove conditions which might cause typhoid or other disease, to be administered in all probability by the United States Public Health Service, which conducted a series of similar studies before the war. Whether the oyster industry succeeds in cleaning its own house, or we shall be obliged to bring in the government broom, it, and any other industry which observe its pitiful and generally undeserved plight, have had an impressive lesson in the sensitiveness of the popular mind to the germ theory, in the economies of prevention over cure and in the fact that an industry, like a chain, is judged by its weakest link.
THE dismissal of the notorious suit to test the constitutionality of California's minimum wage law (see The Survey, Feb. 15, 1925) leaves the question of the constitutionality of the law, so far as the California state courts are concerned, where it was before.
In Wisconsin Federal Judge Claude Z. Luse has made permanent the preliminary injunction restraining the Industrial Commission from enforcing the provisions of the minimum wage law relative to adult women workers in the plant of the Folding Furniture Works. In his ruling Judge Luse stated that "this case involves no attack upon, that part of the minimum wage law which applies to the u-ages of minors. This court is bound to apply the principle of the Adkins case to the one at bar, and it is therefore held that the Wisconsin Act, so far as it affects the plaintiff in employing adult women is invalid."
In view of the fact that the members of the Industrial Welfare Commission of California, as defendants in the suit against the state minimum wage law, while accepting the decision of the United States Supreme Court in the Adkins case, leaned heavily upon the contention that that decision did not properly apply in the differing environment and circumstances surrounding the state's minimum u age laws, this ruling of Judge Luse in the Folding Furniture case gives occasion for serious apprehension. Doubt with respect to the future status of minimum wage legislation is increased by the similar action of the Supreme Court of Porto Rico. Because of the decision of the United States Supreme Court that the minimum wage law of the District of Columbia was not a health measure and was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court of Porto Rico has reversed its earlier favorable decision and has declared the Minimum Wage Act of 1919 unconstitutional.
WHEN the American delegation entered gallantly into the opium affray at Geneva it had three main propositions: to "pull up the poppy," that is, to limit the production of raw opium; to abolish the smoking of opium in the East through a ten years' period of progressive restriction; and to establish a Central Board of Control to list and check, the amount of opium needed in each country for manufacture for home use or export, and control shipments from one country to another. The poppy is not to be pulled up, at least for the present; the abolition of opium smoking is shoved off almost indefinitely; but the Central Board of Control has been salvaged out of the confusion of crossed interests, and apparently the United States and Germany are to be asked to appoint representatives to sit with the Council of the League in the election of its members.
The first opium conference, which was convened last November, met to consider the question of opium smoking in the East. The tangible result of that conference is the convention abolishing the "farm system," with an attached protocol. This convention removes opium from the field of private sale and profit, and makes its distribution a government monopoly--an essential stage in the process of government regulation. The protocol, embodying a British suggestion, would limit smoking opium through a period of fifteen years, to start after an impartial commission has decided that the time is ripe for it--that is, in effect, when smuggling has been stopped, when China has established internal control which will afford some check on the appalling recrudescense of opium growing in her provinces, and when the force of public opinion in the other eastern states will permit more drastic regulation than their representatives now declare possible. The policy of registering and rationing opium addicts was affirmed as a declaration of principle. In the meantime all the states are to use all possible means to check the practice. This is a disappointing application of the principle in Article 6 of the Opium Convention that "The Contracting Powers shall take measures for the gradual and effective suppression of the manufacture of, internal trade in, and use of, prepared opium."
The second conference, of powers which produce opium and other products from which narcotic drugs are manufactured, has set up the Central Board of Control practically according to the American plan. This board is to consist of eight persons, not government employee, chosen to inspire general confidence by reason of their technical competence, impartiality and disinterestedness. It will receive estimates from the various governments stating in advance their probable requirements of opium for medical and scientific uses. Every three months it will receive and publish estimates of the current imports and exports of opium. The discrepancy between the amount necessary for medicinal purposes and the amount actually imported in each instance will give a continuous indication of the quantities diverted to illegitimate uses. If an undue amount is shipped to any one point, the board can call the attention of the nations to the phenomenon, and request that shipments be suspended pending investigation. It has no administrative power except publicity. What the effect--or whether there will be an effect--of this new machinery can be determined only by actual trial of it. It certainly will show where the raw opium is going, and how much of the manufactured product is accounted for in legitimate export or home use; moreover it offers the inspiring precedent of an international body met to consider the world's supply and distribution of one raw material on the basis of national needs. Supported by vigorous public opinion that principle might go far.
A SIDE from their administrative achievements, the two conferences have accomplished a piece of public education of enormous magnitude, though many of their revelations have been negative. They have shown the tremendous complexities which beset the carrying out of any straightforward policy in the control of the world's supply of opium. Before that can be assured, China must put down her civil wars; Persia and Turkey, which produce opium for export, say that they must have loans and other help to enable them to change the custom after centuries and adapt other crops to the regions where opium now is grown; Jugo-Slavia must provide for her opium farmers; India, which alone eats opium, must discontinue the practice by domestic legislation, or yield the principle, hitherto guarded jealously, that her habits are subject to international agreement; the colonies of the western powers in the Orient must find a substitute for the opium revenue and some method other than the keeping of opium dens, to attract Chinese coolie labor; and a network of smuggling, spread over the East, the Philippines, linked even to the Occident, must be broken. Ideally the logical method to cut under all these difficulties would have been to stop excess cultivation of the poppy, and nip opium in the bud. Since the largest producer, China, has apparently no power to enforce such policy on her subjects, and the other countries have at present no intention or desire to do so (if the ability) the actual achievement of the conferences--the Central Board--must be accepted as important in its potentialities, and as a present tool for focussing and bringing into action that part of the world's public opinion which believes that opium must and shall go.
JUST a year after The Survey's Giant Power number went to press, its forecasts of the social consequences reasonably to be anticipated from the rapid extension of large scale electrical development are sustained and reenforced by the scholarly and illuminating report of Pennsylvania's Giant Power Survey Board. The authenticity of The Survey's forecasts was largely due to the generous cooperation of Morris Llewellyn Cooke, director of the work of the Board whose findings and recommendations Governor Pinchot laid before Pennsylvania's General Assembly on February 17.
On the basis of intensive research carried on under his direction during the past year by an expert corps of engineers and economists, Mr. Cooke reaffirms Gur conclusion that electrical development, and especially the art of transmitting current in large volume over great distances practically without loss, has brought us to the threshold of momentous changes in our industrial, home and farm management, and transportation technique which will vitally affect conditions of life in both urban and rural areas. These changes are already in process on a gigantic scale. It is only a matter of months before electric energy generating and distributing companies will be interconnected from Chicago to the Gulf, from the Atlantic Coast to the Great Plains, from the state of Washington to and across the Mexican border. The quantity of electric energy now used for heat, light and power is such that in view of the present trend toward tying together the generating, transmitting and distribution systems, unprecedented economies are within reach. "This," says Mr. Cooke, "makes possible not only a widespread distribution but a revolutionary increase in the use of electricity in factory and in home, on the farm and in transportation."
These social advantages will not accrue to the great masses of our people unless they bring to bear upon the electrical industry the control of an enlightened public opinion. "No one," says Governor Pinchot in his message of transmittal, "who studies the electrical developments already achieved and those planned for the immediate future can doubt that a unified electrical monopoly extending into every part of this nation is inevitable in the very near future." It is impossible, he affirms, to imagine the force and intimacy with which such a monopoly will touch and affect, for good or evil, the life of every citizen. "The time is fully in sight when every household operation from heating and cooking to sweeping and sewing will be performed by the aid of electrical power; when every article on the average man's breakfast table, every item of clothing, every piece of his furniture, every tool of his trade, will have been manufactured or transported by electric power; when the home, the farm and the factory will be electrically lighted, heated and operated; when from morning to night, from the cradle to the grave, electric service will enter at every moment and from every direction into the daily life of every man, woman and child in America." The question before us, he adds, is not whether there shall be such a monopoly, but whether we as a people shall control it or shall permit it to control us-whether we shall respect the human wastes and tragedies which were the by-products of the steam revolution, or whether by taking counsel of that experience we shall make the new giant more the servant than the master of our common life.
The report of Pennsylvania's Giant Power Survey Board is not only a great state paper but such a treasure house of information arranged and simply interpreted for the use of the laymen as has never before been available on the supremely important subject with which it deals, and which is of direct concern to men and women in every branch of social activity- industry, education, health and family casework. Readers who were interested in The Survey's Giant Power number will be glad to know that a limited number of copies are available upon application to the Giant Power Survey Board in Harrisburg.