As you look over any American community it is amazing how universally the idea prevails of organizing the social force of the people. If you go into the newest settled town of any community, you may find this same principle working itself out. Just as soon as the pioneers begin to get their breath and look around and plan out their common existence, they begin to form organizations to accomplish certain definite ends. Old World towns also have social forces fairly well organized. But this spirit is more highly developed in this country than elsewhere. The Americans are a restless and determined people, always looking on toward larger accomplishment
. In any live community there are a lot of things that people want that they have not got. It is their first instinct to get together and attempt to accomplish by united force what the individuals could not accomplish separately.
It is astonishing what a group of people can achieve when they unite for a common end. Individually they might seem commonplace or insignificant, and people would regard the expression of their opinion as unimportant, but when they associate for a common purpose, their separate individualities are fused in a powerful mass and men everywhere begin to take notice.
Organizations are the machinery through which the personality of a community accomplishes its purpose and gets things done.
The Kiwanis Club, just organized here, is worked out on a practical sort of a basis. Individuals come together once every week and touch elbows with one another. In these meetings they discuss subjects of vital interest to Lenoir. Individual views work into a kind of co-operative affair—and co-operation means community progress.
From the editorial page of The Lenoir News-Topic, April 27, 1923
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