But the Rochester civic standard has worked no better for her than in social reforms. The phases of these are far too many to be enumerated here, but one of them stands forth too sharply to be ignored. A few years ago some Rochesterian conceived the idea of making the schools work nights as well as day. He had studied the work of the settlement houses in the larger cities, and while Rochester had no such slums as called for settlement houses it did have a large population that demanded some interest and attention. For instance, within the past few years a large number of Italians have come there, and although they present no such difficult fusing problem as the Jews of New York, the Polocks of Buffalo or the Huns of Pittsburgh, it is not the Rochester way to ignore in the larger social sense any of the folk who come to her.
"We will make the school-houses into clubs, we will make them open forums where people can come evenings and get a little instruction, a little more entertainment, but best of all can speak their minds freely," said this enthusiast. "We will broaden out the idea of the ward clubs."
The ward clubs to which he referred were neat and attractive structures situated in residential parts of the town, where folk who lived in their own neat homes and who earned from three to eight thousand dollars a year gather for their dances, their bridges, their small lectures and the like. The enthusiast proposed to enlarge this idea, by the simple process of opening the school-houses evenings. His idea was immensely popular from the first. And within a very few weeks it was in process of fruition. The school-houses--they called them "Social Centers"--were opened and night after night they were filled. It looked as if Rochester had launched another pretty big idea upon the world.
That idea, however, has been radically changed, today. One of the professors of the local university threw himself into it, possibly with more enthusiasm than judgment, and was reported in the local prints as having said that the red flag might be carried in street parades along with the Stars and Stripes. That settled it. Rochester is a pretty conservative town, and its folk who live quietly in its great houses sat up and took notice of the professor's remarks. Those great houses had smiled rather complacently at the pretty experiment in the schools. Of a sudden they decided that they were being transformed into incubators for the making of socialists or of anarchists--great houses do not make very discerning discriminations.