LIFE IN AMERCA

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXVI, Issue 3449, 24 November 1932, Page 2

LIFE IN AMERCA

NOT SAFE TO GENERALISE. ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR SHELLEY. "Town-planning Observations in America" was the title of an address by Professor J. Shelley to the Christchurch branch of the New Zealand Town-Planning Institute—but his audience heard much more about American people and American life, manners, and culture than the title would suggest. On one point he was emphatic—it was not safe to generalise about America. "I speak as a sociologist rather than a town-planner, but I regard town-planning merely as applied sociology. However well a town may be planned materially, unless the growth of the human mind and the human spirit is taken into account it may be a very bad thing. "It's easy to say you'll sell shoes here and postage stamps there—it's easy to plan things like that, but the human being does not work like that. The human being wants things handy. "During the whole time I was in America, over eight months, I never saw a single case of misdemeanour — except, of course, the breaking of the Volstead Act. I did not see a single racketeer, a single bootlgeger, although I spent some time in Chicago, the supposed nest of these people. I was living in the centre of New York for over three months and I didjaot see a single hold-up. Most Generous People on Earth. The Americans will give you anything, provided you're not doing business with them—they are the most generous people on earth. "I saw more horses in America in eight years than I have seen in New Zealand in 12 years. We don't realise how far behind some parts of America are—how difficult it is to put into practice some of their most efficient contraptions in the small communities. "I don't regard these things like racketeering and boot-legging as serious. They're not fundamental. They're only habits of mind, and as soon as community consciousness is developed they can be changed in a very short time. "A community spirit is rather lacking in most places in America. They have community chests, and they talk a lot about community. The reason is that they haven't got it. We only start talking about a thing when we haven't got it. The

thing America has to do within the next 50 years is to develop a public spirit, a community consciousness. It is a nation of individuals. Graft and Corruption. "In the city of Cincinnati graft got beyond a joke, and they put in a city manager. And whom did they appoint—a business man? Not on your life. They wanted a man who was beyond corruption, and so they went to a .university—of course. They appointed a professor at the University of California, and within two years the graft was cleaned up. "I never saw such punctilious obedience to traffic regulations as in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles—the red and green lights are obeyed absolutely. And yet in San Francisco a man called Mooney has been kept in prison for the last seven years on a charge of which everybody knows he is innocent. He has been kept in prison because he happens to have certain political beliefs; he has been kept there through the influence of a certain group of people with a title similar to one in Christchurch—l won't say it—a body that practically controls America. " . . . . yet in Fifth Avenue, the busiest street in New York, Soviet Russia has two big shops where you can get any book, any publication, on Soviet Russia. If you call there they will arrange a tour for you anywhere in Russia. A professor at Columbia University, which has almost 35,000 students, translates the publications of Soviet Russia, yet on the other hand a man suspected of having some leanings towards Comunism has been kept in prison fox* seven years.

"On the one side the American is a hard-headed business man—on the other, he is the most romantic chap alive, full of romance akin to that of a threepenny novelette. Desire for Big Things. "The skyscrapers are the expression of man's desire for big things. Don't think they're necessai-y. They are not—l mean for commercial purposes. More than half the skyscrapers in New York are half empty. ... On the whole from a visual point of view, the skyscrapers are a disappointment; they don't look as high as they are. And they have created more problems than they have solved. "You see beautiful flood-lighted buildings, towering up into the sky, and on the pavement below there is a filthy mess made by people spitting out chewing gum. The pavements are simply pock-marked with chewing gum.

"You cannot organise or raise human culture except in terms of small groups in which a single human being' feels himself a real person. That is the mistake the great cities are making. They think they can organise culture on a mass basis, but culture can only be organised on a personal basis. I believe that is one mistake they are making in Soviet Russia —they'll be up against the factt hat culture is an individual matter. "Short-wave transmission is a more important thing and will have a more important effect on human culture than any other invention since printing. One thing it will probably result in is a universal language."