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INDIANA U^^TVERSITY 



double cottages. They are crowded A-^ery close together, little or 

 no space being available for j^ards. We found dark, gloomy 

 rooms in every house in certain squares. This darkness Avas 

 caused, not by a lack of windows in the houses themselves, but 

 by the fact that the houses are crowded so closely together that 

 not enough sunlight can get between them. The tables given later 

 will show that over 55 per cent of the families of this district live 

 in either double houses or apartm.ent houses. These figures alone 

 give one an idea of the cramped conditions. 



This district has, for the purpose of our investigation, been 

 selected as a territorial unit, but in no sense can it be said to be 

 a social unit. No common interest in schools or churches, busi- 

 ness or pleasure, seems to bind together the people with any kind 

 of neighborhood feeling. One cause for this lack of common in- 

 terests lies in the fact that within this small territory there 

 lives a very heterogeneous mass of people. Twenty-five per cent 

 of them are foreigners,* either Irish, German, Italian or Hunga- 

 rian. ]\Iost of these speak English to some extent, but only a few 

 of them can be said to be Americanized. Of the remainder of 

 the people of the district 14 per cent are negroes. Their homes 

 are mostly in the northeast corner of the district, near Indiana 

 Avenue. Thirty-four per cent of the total number of families 

 are classed as American born, i. e., they come from states 

 of the Union other than Indiana. Consider this mass of people 

 — foreigners of different nationalities; negroes, Americans from 

 a dozen different states, and a handful of native citizens of In- 

 dianapolis. Could they be expected to mix well in any sort of 

 social organization, or to have many common interests or aims? 



It might have been stated at the beginning of this chapter that 

 the territory which we chose to cover in this second part of our in- 

 vestigation, is set off by the City School Board as School District 

 No. 5. But we cannot infer from this that all of the children 

 within this territory go to the same school. The transfer system 

 has been so worked out that School No. 5 has become primarily 

 a foreign school. The native white children of the district and 

 the negroes are sent to other schools not far away, and children 

 living in adjacent districts, whose parents cannot speak English, 

 are in most cases transferred to this school. This division of 

 school interests breaks down one of the principal factors in the 

 development of common social feeling. 



* We have been forced to omit from this part of our study a number, not ex- 

 ceeding forty, of groups or families' of non-Englisti-speaking foreigners. 



