Changing America
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM.
By Edward A. Ross, Professor of Sociology in the University of Wisconsin. New York: The Century Company, 1912. Pp.236. Analyzing and interpreting the present is unquestionably more difficult and hazardous than moralizing about the past, but as Mr. Ross points out, it is only “living tendencies that man can work with, curb or guide.”
In the present-day tendencies in America, Mr. Ross sees the future triumph of democracy. He believes that the swarming in of low-grade immigrants and the mal-distribution of wealth are manageable things, and he sees in the spread of socialism only one more and that the latest effort on the part of the people to control government for their own benefit.
In the falling birth-rate he sees, not inevitable ruin necessarily, but our deliverance from the over-population horror, the only grave danger being that we may come to standardize the dwarf family of two or three children.
Mr. Ross points out as one of the main causes of increasing divorce, the economic and intellectual progress of women. As remedies he suggests, making it impossible to marry on too brief an acquaintance, the training of girls in domestic arts, and?as intemperance figures in nearly one fifth of the divorces? a strengthening of the temperance movement.
A plea for laws decreeing a certain standard working-day suited to the health and strength of the average young woman, comes with added force at the end of a chapter which graphically sets forth the cost to society of wearing out women in our factories and endangering the health and lives of the future generation.
His arraignment of commercialism and of “Big Business,” and the ideals of “Big Business” is thorough-going and convincing, his remedies practical and far-seeing. He shows that not the least evil connected with “Big Business” is the effect upon our newspapers. Mr. Ross voices what many citizens suspect but few have the courage to avow?that the daily newspaper fails to give the news, and that news is deliberately being suppressed or distorted. For this of course the growing commercialism of the press, its subjection to outside interests, and its increasing dependence upon its advertisers are responsible. His plea for an endowed newspaper has both point and force.
The middle west’s lead in democracy is carefully analyzed and set forth. Of the west, Mr. Ross says?”It is not to be reconciled to social stratification by any amount of ‘welfare work’ in the mills or ‘social work’ in the tenements. It knows philanthropy is good, but it thinks that the linch-pins of society ought to be rights and the spirit of square dealing rather than gifts and the spirit of kindness.”
There appears to be little doubt that the western states have gone further than the eastern on behalf of labor, but in no direction has this re-assertion cf democracy gone deeper than in their state universities, wherein is shown the people’s determination to bring about a greater equality of opportunity. The offer of a college course at a nominal fee has met with a tremendous response.
Fewer than half the students in Massachusetts colleges come from the Bay State, while a third of the Illinois youth anywhere in college and two-thirds of those of Wisconsin are enrolled in their state’s university. To those who listened to the able exponents of the Wisconsin Idea this winter in Philadelphia, it will not be a surprise to hear of the amazing extension of the university’s work to cover the entire state, and that thirty or forty of their faculty are connected with the non-political public service of Wisconsin, serving on state boards and commissions or aiding the state in other ways by their expert knowledge. To those contented, and we might add in passing, hopelessly illogical stand-patters, who in one breath condemn the Wisconsin Idea as an effort to “vulgarize knowledge,” and yet aver that Pennsylvania is really doing the same work under a different name, we recommend Mr. Ross’s statement that “Pennsylvania, though one of the oldest and richest states of the Union, as a whole has never come into a conception of education from the point of view of the whole people, and as a consequence its public school system is still in its rudimentary stage and its normal schools and many of its colleges are engaged in the work of secondary education.”
One closes Mr. Ross’s book with a feeling of having thrown wide a window, of inhaling some very invigorating air, and of looking out for a brief space on an interesting, wide, and thought-compelling view. E. R. W.
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