Excerpt from Building a Better Home Town: A Program of Community Self-Analysis and Self-Help Like many other newspapermen, H. Clay Tate seems to have a native resistance to writing books. Presumably, book writing is too high-falutin', theoretical, or academic to appeal to an operating editor. I feel, therefore, that I did well in wearing down that resistance over a period of six years and at last extracting from him this book. As a matter of fact, the book is based on deeds, not proposals. It is essentially a newspaperman's report - and a statesman's - on a project in community stabilization and enrichment in which Mr. Tate, the Bloomington (Illinois) Daily Pantagraph, of which he is editor, Alvin Anderson of the University of Illinois, and others took the lead. Can a big-brother community - in this case Bloomington - live in constructive harmony with little-brother communities? Can it add strength and service to their existence and receive strength and support from them in turn without undermining their economy and culture and destroying their identity as small communities? The survival of these small communities alongside of the larger one is central in Mr. Tate's vision. The importance of their continuity, influence, and way of life is the gist of his message. He rejects the urban patterns of anonymous, mass culture that tend to dominate modern times. This is a radical idea in the best sense; it is deep rooted. In the outstanding success of his community cooperation project it is quietly revolutionary. What town of forty thousand or more accepts as its destiny anything other than the aggressive capture of its neighboring small communities, the absorption of their business houses, their schools, transportation agencies, their hospitals, churches, and indeed their population? Such a town is rare indeed. The larger town usually sucks dry, as if it were a great tick, the blood and life of its smaller neighbors. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.