From "Pictorial Review," Volume XX Number 6, March 1919
For a few years before 1920, a Cincinnati neighborhood served as a laboratory to reimagine democracy. By all accounts, the experiment succeeded admirably, until Cincinnati’s mayor launched a smear campaign.
The experiment grew out of concerns that America’s cities were growing so large that really important, vital needs were overlooked and often ignored. This was especially true regarding the health and safety of residents. Sanitation was barely satisfactory in any American city, infant mortality was tragically high, tuberculosis thrived in the crowded tenements of the urban core. Clean water and pure milk were almost nonexistent.
To address this plague of societal weaknesses, a Harvard-educated New Yorker named Wilbur C. Phillips conceived a plan. Phillips recognized that attacking only one symptom at a time—tainted milk, for example—disregarded the social infrastructure of poverty and ignorance that permitted such ills to flourish. Based on his experience with the New York Milk Committee and the Milwaukee Child Welfare Commission, Phillips proposed something called the “Social Unit Plan.”
By organizing as a social unit, as Phillips envisioned it, the people who lived in a community could discuss and identify their own needs. They could then address these needs using their own resources. According to Patricia Mooney-Melvin, writing in the Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin [Spring 1978]:
“This plan, completed in 1914, entailed a democratic neighborhood structure through which the local residents could participate directly in the control of community affairs and, at the same time, make use of the highest technical skills available. Phillips wanted to divide each neighborhood into block associations to promote face-to-face contact among the residents to encourage interchange.”
After an aborted effort to create a social unit in Milwaukee, Phillips and his wife, Elsie La Grange Cole Phillips, launched a national search for a city and a neighborhood in which to bring their theories into practice. Sixteen cities volunteered to host the experiment, and Cincinnati won. Next came a search for the ideal Cincinnati neighborhood.
After intense lobbying, the Mohawk-Brighton neighborhood got the nod. The test area was bounded by Emming Street in the north, Liberty Street on the south, Colerain on the west and Central Avenue on the east. The 15,000 residents were enrolled as 31 blocks of 500 residents, each assigned to a “block mother.” In very short order, the Mohawk-Brighton residents identified infant health as their top priority. According to Mooney-Melvin, the Mohawk-Brighton Social Unit Organization (MBSUO) mobilized immediately:
“After several preparatory training sessions the blockworkers located all the homes with infants in the neighborhood, persuaded the mothers to bring their babies to the MBSUO’s health center for periodic medical examinations, and disseminated information on the principles of infant care and hygiene.”
Within a year, almost every infant in the neighborhood was registered and evaluated. Within two years, the neighborhood health station offered postnatal examinations, prenatal care, general bedside nursing, medical examinations of all preschool children, and supervision of local tuberculosis cases. Left to their own devices, enlisting resources from their own neighborhood and following the wishes of the community, the people of Mohawk-Brighton independently invented the neighborhood health center.
It is amazing, looking back from a century in the future, that so much was accomplished while the social unit experiment contended with two immense obstacles. The first was the United States entry into World War I just months after Cincinnati’s social unit experiment was launched. Military mobilization pulled many men, the majority of the neighborhood breadwinners, out of the neighborhood and introduced rationing of food and medical supplies. In response, Mohawk-Brighton took over vacant lots and raised food in community gardens.
The second obstacle was the so-called Spanish Flu pandemic, which devastated the global health care system and severely restricted public gatherings. It is here that the organized response in Mohawk-Brighton truly shined. Whereas the influenza death rate throughout all of Cincinnati reached 4.10 per thousand people, in the area served by the Mohawk-Brighton Social Unit, only 2.26 people per thousand succumbed to the flu.
Courtesy of Cincinnati History Library and Archives
From his perch at City Hall, Cincinnati Mayor John Galvin observed the people of Mohawk-Brighton organizing, getting to know their neighbors, meeting to discuss common problems and locating the resources to improve their lives. The Mayor came to a rather startling conclusion: These folks are Bolsheviks, plotting a violent revolution against the United States.
Galvin was among the last of the Cincinnati mayors elected by the Boss Cox political machine. The machine had no use for neighborhood independence and self-determination. The machine paid out bribes and created no-work political featherbed jobs for faithful minions and absolutely had no need for citizens who thought for themselves. The Mayor told the Enquirer [March 11, 1919]:
“I consider the Social Unit the most insidious type of Socialism. It is a serious menace to our municipal government and but one step removed from Bolshevism.”
The next day, the Enquirer carried an even more inflammatory indictment by Mayor Galvin:
“I do not intend to sit quietly by while the unit is permitted to develop to the destruction of American institutions purchased at great cost. Undoubtedly it will lead to dissatisfaction among the people and ultimately to revolution.”
The Cincinnati Times-Star [October 25, 1919], generally a supporter of the Cox syndicate, timidly suggested that violent revolution might not actually be imminent:
“We are a little skeptical as to the charge that the Social Unit aims at Bolshevism. On the other hand it is clear that a large element among the active supporters of the Social Unit are parlor Bolshevists—poor, pathetic people who like to play, pink tea fashion, with a large elemental force which they do not understand.”
In response to these charges, the Helen S. Trounstine Foundation paid for William J. Norton, Secretary of the Detroit Patriotic Fund, to visit Cincinnati and report on any nefarious activities. Norton gave the Social Unit a clean ideological bill of health, affirming that no political agenda was at work in the Social Unit’s organization or activities.
From "Cincinnati Post," October 26, 1917
Nationally, the Mohawk-Brighton experiment garnered nothing but praise. The New York Daily Tribune [July 20, 1919] remarked that Cincinnati’s Social Unit had transformed back-fence gossip into an agent for social welfare. The nationally distributed Pictorial Review [March 1919] commended Mohawk-Brighton:
“You and I will do well to join the watchers of this courageous community which has taken upon itself the task of working out our common problems by offering itself for experimentation.”
Still, the damage had been done. In 1919, no organization tarred with accusations of Socialism, much less Bolshevism, could survive. Although the National Social Unit Organization met in Cincinnati in 1920 to commemorate the outstanding success of their experiment, the event was more a funeral than a celebration. Although the Phillipses continued to promote their ideas for decades, the Social Unit idea never again regained traction anywhere.
