RECREATION

The time has passed in which the amusements of the community can be neglected or dismissed with mere condemnation. In the husbandry of the country every factor must be counted. We are dealing no longer with a fatalistic country life, but with the economy of all resources. Therefore the neglecting of the play life and ignoring the leisure occupations of a country people are inconsistent with the new economy.

Moreover the ancient method of condemning all recreations passed away with the austere economy of earlier days. The churches in the country no longer discipline their members for “going to frolics.” The country community no longer is of one mind as to the standard by which recreation shall be governed. Yet every event of this sort is closely inspected by the general attention.

The experience of the cities, in which social control has gone much farther than in the country under the deliberate harmonizing of life with economic principles, has much to contribute for the building up of rural society through various means, among which is recreation.

The need of recreative activities in the country is shown by recent surveys undertaken in Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Kentucky by the Presbyterian Department of Church and Country Life. Generally, throughout the farming population, it was discovered that no common occasions and no common experiences fell to the lot of the country community. In the course of the round year there is, in thousands of farming communities in Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois, no single meeting that brings all the people together. The small town has its fireman’s parade, to the small city comes once a year the circus and to the great city comes an anniversary or an exposition. Every year there is some common experience which welds the population, increases acquaintance and intensifies social unity. The tillage of the soil in those farming communities from which the blacksmith, the storekeeper, the peddler and the shoemaker have departed, is very lonely.

The telephone is the new system of nerves for the rural organism, but the telephone is a cold, steel wire instead of the warm and cordial personal meetings with which the countryside was once enlivened. In eighty country towns in Pennsylvania, of which fifty are purely agricultural, we found in our survey only three that had a common leadership and a common assembling. The life of the people in these communities is so solitary as to be almost repellent. Their social habits are those of aggressive loneliness. This isolation in the pioneer days made the country people cordial to the visitor: but in the coming of the new economy the farmer shrinks from strangers, because he has become accustomed to social divisions and classifications in which he feels himself inferior; so that the loneliness of country life has become not merely geographical, but sociological. The farmer is shut in not merely by distances in miles, but by distances of social aversion and suspicion. Difference has become a more hostile influence in the country than distance.

Organized industry necessitates organized recreation. The subjection of mind and body to machine labor requires a reaction in the form of play. All factory and industrial populations, without exception, provide themselves with play-grounds of some sort. In the city where no public provision is made the streets are used by the boys for their games, even at the risk of injury or death from the passing traffic. Jane Addams has shown, in a fine literary appeal in her “The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets,” the necessity of some provision for the recreations of the young and of working people in a great city.

This necessity is not primarily due to congestion of the population. Its real sources are in the system and organization by which modern work is done. This necessity is as characteristic of the rural community as it is of the city, for on the farms as well as in the factory towns labor is performed by machinery. This means that through the working hours of the day, from eight to twelve in number, the attention of the worker must be concentrated upon one task, patiently and steadfastly pursued. The machine worker exerts himself in the control of great powers, horse power or steam power, committed to his charge. He has no opportunity for languor or rest. He has no choice. His job drives him. His movements are fixed and regulated by the nature of the machine with which he is working, and of the task to be accomplished. At the end of the day he has acted involuntarily and mechanically until his own powers of will and choice are accumulated. Being repressed through long hours of prescribed labor he is ready for a rebound. His nature demands self-expression. This self-expression takes the form of play.

The recreation which results is organized. The laborer in a factory or on a railroad is conscious of organization by the very nature of his work. He labors with a machine driven by powers unseen but of whose operation he is aware, in a great plant wherein his own labor is co-ordinated with that of other workers like unto himself. The hours of self-devotion and prescribed attention leave him free for sympathy with the other workers, whose action and whose toil are organized with his own, and on whose skill and devotion his life and limb and the continuance of his job are dependent. When he turns to recreation he naturally seeks to continue the silent communion with his fellow-workers. The repressed personal energies are already prepared for team work. He comes out of the factory bubbling over with good fellowship and seeking for comradeship in the self-expression which the long hours of the day have denied him.

The result is that in every factory town the open spaces are devoted to playground uses. Vacant lots, unoccupied fields, and the open street are used by men and boys for their games.

Exactly the same experience results from school and college organization of education work. The student in the common schools does not choose his course; it is prescribed for him by his family and by society. He does not go to school because he is mentally ambitious, but because the standards of universal education require it of him. Especially in the colleges which inherit a great name and attract young men and women for social advantage, the students are characterized by an involuntary subjection to the routine of modern pedagogy. Educational discipline is imposed upon them through the long hours of lectures and laboratory and recitations. The students in high school and college are accumulating a rebound of voluntary action. This organized self-expression takes the form of school and college athletics, which has long since been adopted as a part of the educational routine. No considerable number of educators are in favor of abolishing it, and only a few venture to believe in restricting college athletics. Its moral value is everywhere tacitly recognized, and pretty generally it is consciously accepted by college and school faculties.

Play of this sort has great moral value. We are hired to work, and we do it without choice or enthusiasm, but in play the natural forces and the personal choice are at their maximum. Every action is chosen and is saturated with the pleasure of self-expression. The result is that play has high ethical value.

Especially has organized recreation great moral power, because it involves team work, and the subjection of the individual to the success of the team. Organized recreation teaches self-denial in a multitude of experiences which are all the more powerful because they are not prescribed by any teacher or preacher, but are the free natural expression of the human spirit under the government of chosen associates working out together a common purpose.

Therefore it is necessary to use play for the recreation of country life. The word is literal, not figurative. It is not a problem merely of games, nor the question of gymnasium, but a profound ethical enterprise of disciplining the whole population through the use of the play spirit. This question must be approached on the high plane of the teaching of modern theorists, and the experience of such practical organizations as the Young Men’s Christian Association.

The Christian Associations began their work in the lifetime of present generations and for accomplishing certain purposes they have used recreation. They provided a gymnasium, at first, in order to get men into the prayer-meeting. They offered social parlors in which young men could always hear the sound of sacred song. But the Young Men’s Christian Association has traveled far from its crude and early use of recreation. Some of the early Association leaders are still living and still leading. They have steadily advanced with care and wisdom in the use of recreation. Within very recent years the leaders of the Associations have countenanced the use of billiard tables. No longer is the gymnasium an annex to the prayer-meeting. It has values of its own. Without moralizing, these practical men have discovered that the social parlors were good for ends of their own and not merely as a place for hearing the distant sound of hymns. In other words, recreation is a form of ethical culture.

Rev. C. O. Gill, who was captain of the Yale football team in 1890, has had an extended experience among farmers. He says, “The reason why farmers cannot co-operate is in the fact that they did not play when they were boys. They never learned team work. They cannot yield to one another, or surrender themselves to the common purpose.” The writer, observing Mr. Gill coaching a university team, commented upon the good spirits with which a player yielded his place on the team just before the victory. Mr. Gill had removed him, as he explained to him, not because he played poorly, but because a new formation required a rearrangement of the team. In reply to comment upon the player’s self-forgetfulness, Mr. Gill said, “Football is the greatest school of morals in the country. I learned more ethics from the coaches when I was an undergraduate in Yale, than from all other sources combined.”

It is this high ethical value of recreation which causes the working man to defend his amateur baseball team, and makes it so hard to repress Sunday games. The working man admits the high value of the Sabbath, but he sets a value also upon recreation, and without analysis of the philosophy either of the Sabbath or of the play-ground, stoutly maintains the goodness of recreation and its necessity for those who have labored all the week. “I work six days in the week, and I must have some time for recreation,” is the working man’s answer to all Sunday reformers. Waiving for a moment the question of the Sabbath, the human process to which the working man testifies is exactly as he describes it. Organized labor and systematic industry will react on any population in the form of systematic recreation.

The Play-ground Movement, therefore, is extending itself throughout the country by the very influence of modern industry. Given intelligence to interpret it, and one understands at once the desire of philanthropic and public spirited men and women to provide “a playground beside every school building, open for all the people.”

Dr. Luther H. Gulick, who was born of missionary parents, was trained in religious schools, graduated as a physician, employed for years in the Young Men’s Christian Association, and then made Play-Ground Director in the New York Public Schools, has become legitimately the heir of the experiences of the modern social conscience. He has summed up the philosophy of working men, students, and of the people whose lives are systematized, in a sentence: “There is a higher morality in the reactions of play than in the experiences of labor.”

The tradition of the church has been opposed to amusement and recreation. The church of our fathers recognized the moral possibilities of play by calling all play immoral. The early Quakers filled their records in the eighteenth century with denunciations of “frollicks.” Consciously they denounced amusement, acting no doubt in a wise understanding of the rude, boisterous character of the pioneer’s social gatherings. Only unconsciously did the Quakers cultivate the spirit of recreation in their social gatherings. It was permitted to have but few and repressed opportunities. The decadence of the Quaker church is probably due, in a considerable measure, to their stubborn unwillingness to see both sides of this question. They saw that recreation was immoral. They refused to see that its possible moral value was as great as its moral danger.

Extensive correspondence with working pastors, by means of a system of questions sent out from a New York office, has brought this result. In answer to the question, “What amusements of moral value are there in the community?” the answer, “Baseball, boating, tennis, golf, bicycling, etc.” A smaller number of recreations was named in answer to the inquiry for immoral sports. The subsequent question, “What is your position before the community?” brought from the minister very often this answer: “I am known to be opposed to all sports.” Few ministers realize the inconsistency of this position. They stand before the community as the professed advocates of public and private morality, and they stand also before the community as the professed and violent opponents, often, of the public sports which are known to the young men and workingmen generally as promoters of ethical culture and moral training. Is it any wonder that the churches, in these communities, are often deserted by the common people?

In Lewistown, Pa., the old Presbyterian Church there, seeing the congested character of the town population and the need of breathing-places for the young people and working people, looked about for a recreation field. The only available ground is the old cemetery, in which the earlier members of the congregation have buried their dead. This, the only open spot in the center of the town, it has been proposed to turn into a playground, the bodies of the dead to be disinterred and laid reverently away in a quieter place, and the ground newly consecrated to the needs of the living, and of the young. The action contemplated by this fine old church is emblematic of the modern spirit. Christianity is no longer a mere reverence for death and the other world. But it is an energetic service to the young, and the working people, in this present world. It is no longer a solemn reverence for the salvation of the individual soul in a heaven unseen, but it is a social service, no less serious, unto the living and unto the young and the employed.

Certain modern sports, such as baseball, are free from the corruption which has attached itself to horse-racing and pugilism. This corruption is not in racing a horse, or punching an opponent. It is in the dishonesty of the race, for horsemen believe that “there never was an honest horse-race,” and the followers of the prize ring are constantly suspicious that the fight will be “fixed.” The first question they ask after the decision of the referee is generally, “Was it a frame-up?” The moral power of baseball, tennis, football and the other most popular sports, is in the confidence that the game is fairly played. This fairness of the game is the widest extended school of ethical culture that the American and British population know. Honorable recreation trains in courage, manliness, co-operation, obedience, self-control, presence of mind, and in every other of the general social virtues. It makes men citizens and good soldiers when need comes. This was the meaning of the remark of the Duke of Wellington, when, after the conquest of Napoleon, he returned to view the playground at Eton, and said, “Here the Battle of Waterloo was won.”

For the building up of a community, therefore, the promotion of recreation is an essential. Just as necessary as the providing of common schools for all the people, is the provision of public play-grounds for all the people. As many as are the school houses so many, generally speaking, should be the play-grounds accessible to all, under the care of trained and responsible leaders, in which, without too much government, the free movements of the young and the abounding self-expression of the great mass of the employed shall have opportunity to work out their own education through play, into public righteousness.

The training of citizens for days to come demands exactly the qualities which are imparted on the play-ground. Morality is not taught and ethical culture is not imparted by precept, though precept and exhortation have their due place in the analysis of moral and spiritual matters, for the thoughtful. But the great number of people are not ethically thoughtful, and in the acquirement of righteousness all people are unconscious. The desired action in moral growth is universally spontaneous. The most sober and intellectual of men must be caught off his guard and must be lured into voluntary actions before any moral habits can be formed in him. Mere analysis of truth or self-examination makes no man good. But men become good by doing things first, and thinking of them afterward. They can be just as good if they never think about them, though thinking about ethical matters renders a service to the community as a whole.

It should be the duty, therefore, of the churches, who are acknowledged before the whole community as repositories of the conscience of men, to promote public recreation. Where necessary the church should even provide a play-ground. In Galesburg, Ill., fifteen churches are co-operating, through their men’s societies, in a central council of forty members. This Council is made up in the form of four Committees of ten. Each Committee considers one great interest of the community. One of these interests is recreation. It is the duty of this Committee in winter to provide musical and literary entertainment and lectures. In the summer this Committee has secured the use of the Knox College recreation field, and employing a trained man, has opened it throughout the summer as a play-ground for all the children of the city.

The use of recreation for the building up of a community seems to involve expensive apparatus and sometimes does so. Mrs. Russell Sage at Sag Harbor, Long Island, has expended many thousands of dollars in the experiment. Interested in the children, of whom there are about eight hundred in the town, through the experience of giving them a Christmas tree, she determined to devote to their use a piece of land on the borders of the village, formerly used as a fair ground. This work is to have local value for the children of this community, and has been used as a demonstration center of the efficiency of recreation as a moral discipline among the young.

But most communities have not so much money to spend. The proposal of a play-ground or of a gymnasium is itself sufficient to condemn the doctrine of play. “We cannot afford it,” settles the whole question. In the country expensive apparatus is not necessary; nor do the farmer’s son and daughter require in recreation so much physical exercise. The gymnasium is an artificial and expensive machinery for inducing sweat, but the farmer needs no such artificial machine. The problem is purely one of play, not of exercise. For this purpose a careful study of the community, and of its tendencies and inclinations, is necessary. The great essential of recreation in the country is the opportunity to meet and to talk. Therefore the social life of gatherings in the church, and in the schoolhouse, no matter what their program, provided it be innocent, is valuable. Farmers will attend an auction, and go a long way to a horse-race, or gather at a fair, without any intention of buying or selling. The fundamental service rendered by the county fair and the auction is an opportunity afforded to converse. This exercise of the tongue is far more important in rural recreation than the exercise of the biceps. But country people cannot talk without an occasion which unlocks their tongues. They must not be directly solicited to converse or they are silent. If the occasion is provided and is made to be sufficiently plausible its greatest success will be in conversation.

In almost every country community, therefore, there should be revival, in various forms, of the old “Bees,” which had so much of a place in the former economy. If there is a widow who has no one to cut her wood, the men of the country church should assemble to do it. If there is a household whose bread winner and husbandman has died at the time of planting corn, let the men of the community gather at an appointed day and till the ground for the family, whose grief is greater at that moment than their need. Let the women of the community assemble at noon to provide an abundant repast. This was recently done by a countryside, at the instigation of the minister, and the effect of it was lasting in its values as well as intense in the joy of the day’s work. It seems, in view of the need of recreation, that no other quality is so important in the country community as a lively leader. Resourceful, energetic and fertile men in the rural ministry can accomplish vastly more than conventional, orderly and proper men.

The church in which I began my ministry used to have a play every Christmas. We built out the pulpit platform with boards, we hung it around with curtains, giving dressing-room space, and we placed lanterns in front for foot-lights. The first play we gave made us anxious, for the neighborhood was an old Quaker settlement; but we found that the Quakers enjoyed the play immensely and were the best actors. We made it a genuine expression of the Christmas spirit. We abolished the old “speaking pieces.” Our little stage offered the young people team work, instead of individual elocution. The rehearsals filled a whole month with happy and valuable meetings. Everybody co-operated in the labor necessary to prepare the decorations and to take them down, during Christmas week, and on the night of the play everybody was on hand, Catholic, Protestant and heathen.

The holidays of the passing year suggest the recreations of the country church. These should not necessarily be productive of sweat, but the country boy and girl do need the recreation of laughter and happy meeting and social liveliness. Farm work is lonely and monotonous. Such immorality as there is in the country has direct connection with the tedium and dullness of long hours out-doors, alone. The recreations of country life should be meetings for the celebration of great events of the year. Easter expresses ideas which are age-old among country people: it is both a pagan festival and a Christian anniversary. If Easter is developed in a celebration of song or procession, of sermon and of decoration, with full use of its symbolic value, it is sure to bring the whole countryside together, in an experience of the New Year rising from the grave of winter and of the divine Lord risen from the dead.

Most country communities have no such celebration. In very many the whole year passes without neighbors meeting for a common social experience. This is why people move to the city, because every city, great and small, has in the course of the year some events which bring all the people to the curbstone. Country life has few such times and therefore it is dull, because the richest experience of mankind is the experience of common social joy. The best recreation is acquaintance and conversation. The farmer’s son spends many hours in silence. He wants someone to help him to talk, and to talk unto some purpose.

The Fourth of July is celebrated in Rock Creek, an Illinois community, by a “wild animal show.” Instead of explosives, which are discouraged, the boys of the community bring together in small cages their animal pets. The boys are encouraged to make small carts for the transportation of their pets, and the crowning event of the day is the procession of these carts, in an open place, before the great dinner, at which the countryside sits down together.

Recreation in the country, above all, should revolve about something to eat. The farmer’s business is to feed the world, and country people love, above all things, the social joy of eating. Farmers’ wives are the best cooks and the country household perpetuates its culinary traditions. Especially does a permanent farm population enrich its household tradition with delicious recipes and beautiful customs of the table. Thanksgiving Day should be the great celebration of the round year in the country. What a comment upon the country community it is that so few communities in the country meet together, in response to the President’s proclamation of thanksgiving, to express gratitude unto the bountiful Father of all.

The country church should minister to country people in some effective gathering of all the countryside. A most fruitful method now in use is a corn judging contest for the boys.

In the Middle West the Corn Clubs for boys have had an extraordinary value, and in the South, also, the Farmer’s Co-operative Demonstration Work has made use of the boys in the country community for demonstrating progressive methods on the farm. Thanksgiving Day can be prepared for in the preceding spring, and the boys and girls who have managed a garden, or half acre, through the summer can make their showing at that time. Such a competitive showing in the country, in the production of the staple crop, is sure to bring together the whole countryside.

The local history of the country community is a fruitful source of recreation. Farmers look to the past, and even the new people in the country are keen to hear the story of the old settlers and of the early pioneers. Nothing is of greater value in developing and refreshing country life than to enrich it by celebrating its early history.

Recreation is essential to the moral life of any people. It is the constructive method of making individuals into good citizens. Especially valuable is it as a means of educating the young people and the working people of the community. The craving for this social training and ethical experience drives many out of the country community. Conversely, training in social morality is to be undertaken especially by the church, which possesses the conscience of the country community. This training is expressed in the one phrase; the promotion of recreation.