The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Making Homes Out of Cities In general, this is not a happy time among the nations. There is the cold war--without any sign of armistice or truce or treaty or...
...So I jumped to the conclusion that this was simply an official body...
...The citizens are not just taxpayers and voters...
...The fifteen members, appointed by the Mayor, really represent the city, its religions, its educational institutions, its clubs, its neighborhoods...
...There is the cold war--without any sign of armistice or truce or treaty or ending of any sort...
...Our political machinery is usually thought of as a means of carrying on our essential common business and maintaining a minimum of order...
...The Board started as a volunteer organization in 1943...
...It focuses the efforts of some fifty private and official organizations upon tasks of community betterment...
...Its duties were to find out about "inter-group tensions" and suggest to the Mayor and the Council what ought to be done to "promote amicable relations" within the town and "encourage and foster the spirit of American democracy...
...I saw on the back cover the names of the Mayor and the members of the Common Council...
...The concept being developed here is that of the city as a home for all the people who live in it...
...I saw that the address of the Board was in the City Hall...
...Next to a picture of men going into a machine-shop, a paragraph goes like this: "America was built by the labor of men who wore many different kinds of clothes...
...There are," he writes, "probably 25 agencies like ours in some of our principal cities and some of our smaller towns...
...If it looks as if something is going wrong in any neighborhood, the Board may appeal to the schools, the churches, the courts, the police, the housing authorities or anyone else who can help...
...Within this rickety and menacing framework of international danger, we are busily remaking and improving one or another of our communal or regional arrangements...
...A man would look silly working on a big cement-mixer in a business suit, and a man would look equally silly in an office if he wore heavy work clothes...
...This was started under Mayor Joseph Mruk...
...If we can just stave off that hydrogen bomb for a while...
...We wear what fits our jobs...
...There is hanging perpetually over us a hydrogen bomb capable of devastating a thousand square miles at a stroke...
...In the pictures, they are just human beings...
...They are neighbors interested in making life in the neighborhood secure, happy, constructive...
...Every family needs adequate income, but this alone does not mean a good family life...
...It is going forward under Mayor Steven Pankow...
...They have no police powers, but they work in close contact with all arms of the city government...
...It is only afterward that you realize that some of these families are white and some black, that some are Catholic, some Protestant and some Jewish...
...But he warns me not to think that this is limited to one city...
...I saw young and old in their homes, going to church and school, playing games, tending to their jobs, building houses, holding meetings, discussing their affairs...
...Questions to Executive Director Hoffman soon brought information...
...This massive cooperation is symbolized each year by a Conference on Community Living...
...It is recognized as a fixed and important part of the municipal setup...
...Most people want a job that they really enjoy doing, but one of the important things about a job is the family life it makes possible...
...In pictures and text, it showed a lot of people of different sorts living peacefully together and having fun...
...The efforts of this body go 'way beyond that idea...
...I am told that similar things are bursting out in more than a score of American cities...
...My informant is an old friend, Robert A. Hoffman, who has lately been appointed Executive Director of the Board of Community Relations in Buffalo, N. Y. He has sent me letters, pictures and pamphlets to show that the citizens up there are at work making their town more humane, more decent, more friendly...
...You cannot expect people to be gay...
...My first evidence of the new life up there by Niagara Falls came in the form of a beautiful circular...
...It seems to me that this marks an advance in the idea of government...
...But the notable thing is that here in America we are not downhearted...
...In many areas of life, our people are going forward with confidence...
...This cheerful thought has come into my mind because I have been hearing about good things which are happening in various cities here and there throughout the land...
...In 1945, an ordinance was passed giving it official status and the security of a place in the city s annual budget...
...This revealing publication came to me before I knew anything about the Board of Community Relations...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 16
