OUTDOOR RECREATION LEGISLATION AND ITS EFFECTIVENESS
By Prof. Andrew G. Truxal. New York. Columbia University Press, 1929. Pp. 216.
In our industrial civilization the provision of recreational facilities has been receiving increasing attention. This movement has been characterized by a more or less blind faith that certain benefits are sure to follow the introduction of play and recreational spaces in our crowded big cities. The result has been that the state has gone ahead making provision for recreation on the basis of the police power upon the assumption that such legislation is for the general welfare of society. The fact is that very little objective evidence has been at hand to demonstrate whether such an assumption is valid or not. Prof. Truxal's book represents one of the first serious attempts at scientific study of this important matter. The first part of the study is a painstaking analysis of state and municipal recreation legislation from 1915 to 1927; the second part seeks an answer to the very important question of the justifiability of this growing mass of legislation in terms of desirable social results obtained. He arrives at an estimate of the social significance of recreation by making an analysis of the association between recreation areas and juvenile delinquency in Manhattan in 1920.
A statement of the author's analysis of legislation enacted by various municipalities, states and the federal government in behalf of public recreation will not be attempted here; suffice to say that it has distinct practical value to all public officials who are developing recreation programs to meet the existing needs of their communities.
It has been generally claimed that the provision of recreational facilities will reduce juvenile delinquency. After considering the claims of the recreation enthusiasts, Prof. Truxal comes to the conclusion that they find in the provision of recreation spaces a panacea for too many social evils. Their most glaring fallacy is "that of assigning to the presence or absence of recreation facilities the chief contributing cause to the production of delinquency. If this were not true, it would hardly seem necessary to say that human conduct is the result of many causes."
In the latter part of the work the author set himself the task of discovering, if possible, what the environmental factors are that contribute to the making or the prevention of delinquency. He developed a methodology here, which, by taking into account several variables, gives further investigators in this field a scientific basis for further experimentation. Aside from the conclusions reached by the study, an outstanding contribution of the work is the refinement of method achieved by the author in making his investigation.
On the basis of this scientific exploration, two definite conclusions are reached. "In the first place, we should look with considerable skepticism on any easy generalization which would assign to this one environmental factor, viz., recreation spaces, the predominating influence in the control of delinquency. In the second place, we should be able to say that there appears to be a moderate association between the presence of recreation areas and the absence of juvenile delinquency, provided we have taken into account a sufficient number of environmental influences."
The corrective in this second conclusion lies in the fact that this is quite a different statement from one which would assign to the presence of recreation spaces the controlling factor in the prevention of delinquency.
The Library Journal for May 1,1930, contains a statement by Gamaliel Bradford, one of the editors of the Book League of America, giving ten biographies which he considers the best that have been published in recent years. In this list is given "The Life and Writings of John Bunyan," by Professor H. E. B. Speight.
Dodd Mead & Company have announced that Professor William A. Robinson is preparing a book in their American Political Leaders series to be entitled "Thomas B. Reed: Parliamentarian." This volume will be published next fall.
An article, "Whitman and Buchanan," by Mr. Harold W. Blodgett, appeared in the May number of the American Literature, published by Duke University. This is the second article in this series, the first, "Whitman and Dowden," having'appeared in a previous issue.
Professor Louis Mathewson is the author of an article,"A Simple Proof of a Theorem of Kronecker's," which appeared in the December 29 issue of Journalf.d.Reine u.angewandteMathematik.
KENNARD AND NOYES '89 Noyes won the cup in the spring athletic meet.
