A hypothetical Bill Smith last week arrived in the hypothetical town of Zenith on a business trip. He marched through its marble-lined railroad station, climbed into a shiny taxicab, rode up Zenith's Main Street, admiring a handsome museum, four handsome churches, a dozen glittering drug stores. After he had dined on excellent roast beef in his hotel, Bill Smith lit a cigar and strolled out to a cinema, making up his mind on the way that he would tell his wife Zenith was a "great town."
In Columbia University's Teachers College in Manhattan last week a corps of researchers, up to their elbows in statistical reports, was busy proving Bill Smith wrong. Famed Psychologist Edward Lee Thorndike and his staff were weighing not Zenith's food or its storefronts but its quality as a place to live.
Having spent nearly a lifetime testing mankind to see what makes the cranial wheels go round, Psychologist Thorndike two years ago began to test U. S. cities to see which ones were fit for mankind to live in. So important did the Carnegie Corp. consider this study that it gave $100,000 to finance it. Dr. Thorndike and his collaborator, Dr. Ella Woodyard, selected 117 middle-sized cities, gathered data about them on some 120 traits. From these he picked 23 items which he thought most people would agree were attributes of a good town—a low death rate, high per capita expenditures for education, libraries, parks and recreation, rarity of extreme poverty, high proportion of home ownership, high proportion of youths over 16 in school, large per capita circulation of good magazines, widespread installation of gas and electricity, excess of doctors, nurses and teachers over male domestic servants. The resultant score he called GG—general goodness—not from the standpoint of sophistication or show, but from the standpoint of health and decency. Conceding that the good life is not the same for all men, Dr. Thorndike selected these criteria because he believed most men prefer to live in cities where babies' lives are saved, where schools are well provided for, where people live without ostentation, etc. Then he compared other characteristics of a city with its GG to determine whether they were good symptoms or bad. Last week, having confirmed his test's reliability by trying it out on 193 more cities, Professor Thorndike was able to describe the "good town" in great detail:
¶ It has many cigar stores. Dr. Thorndike's explanation is that in the good town people practice small vices instead of big ones. "When tobacco was discovered, people who had been flogging slaves and watching bear fights began to get enjoyment instead from a quiet smoke." But many drug stores are a bad sign. Dr. Thorndike thinks this is true because an inferior town buys many patent medicines and cosmetics.
¶ People in a good city read much, but much that they read is not good. While quality magazines have a large circulation in such a city, so do the confession magazines. Many radios also is a tip-top sign. "The good citizen may not be terribly moral or intellectual, but even third-rate reading and listening to the radio replaces cheap gossip, dirty stories and hanging around saloons."