95 to rid themselves of the burden of poor relief. The theory was that transportation

of the able-bodied poor, especially the young, would have a wholesome effect on the communities which thus disposed of their surplus population, prove beneficial to the persons transported, and provide New World planters with a supply of cheap labor.

The hope that the New World would solve the Old World's poverty problem was not to be realized, but for three centuries after Winthrop's time America offered the poor of Europe a new chance and the hope of independence. The long and perilous voyage, the immigrants' lack of resources, and harsh conditions of settlement guaranteed that many newcomers would face a difficult period of adjustment.

Colonial records abound in references to orphans, abandoned infants, forsaken mothers, and "problem faimilies" incapable of providing members with either physical support or moral direction.

All of the English mainland colonies followed the mother country's example in assigning responsibility for financing and dispensing poor relief to local authorities and limiting assistance, except in emergencies, to persons who by birth or a year or more of residence, had legal settlement in the township or county in which help was sought. Ordinarily the wardens or overseers imposed a "means test"—proof of need and absence of relatives who might provide support—as a condition of relief. Since local autonomy was the rule, the kind and amount of assistance provided varied from colony to colony and even between different localities within the same colony. In New England, town officers were conscientious in seeking out and re- lieving poor families who had legal settlement in the town and warning out or passing on the poor who could not claim settlement. Officials did not hesitate to take the children of poor families out of their homes and bind them to service with someone who would agree to keep them and employ them until they grew up. For example, a town meeting at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1694 ordered selectmen "to bind out Ruth Grant's two boys to apprentice upon the best terms they can, and with as little charge to the town as may be, and for Ruth to procure a good service for her if she cannot support and provide for herself."

⁸

Independence had no effect on welfare methods except, as in Virginia, where disestablishment of the church transferred responsibility for administering relief from church wardens to county wardens of the poor. As new states entered the Union they enacted poor laws based upon those in the seaboard states. The variety of methods in use within a single state 75 years after Independence is indicated by the following passage from a report on poor relief in Rhode Island in 1851:

Four different modes are pursued by the towns in maintaining their poor.

First. By venduing them [i.e. auctioning them off] to the lowest bidder.

Second. By contracting for their maintenance, with an individual, or indi- viduals, through the agency of a committee or otherwise.

Third. By placing all the poor in one Asylum, owned by the town.

Fourth. By placing all such in an Asylum as are bereft of home and friends, and administering outdoor relief to such as have.

The author of the report, Thomas R. Hazard, said of the first method, "When stripped of all disguise, selling the poor to the lowest bidder, is simply offering a reward for the most cruel and avaricious man that can be found to abuse them."

Hazard favored the fourth or mixed system of combining almshouse care for the destitute and helpless with outdoor relief for the needy who could maintain them- selves at home with some outside assistance.

⁹

Before 1820 only the larger towns and cities maintained public asylums for

paupers.

¹⁰

Most communities relied on the simpler, more informal methods of

outdoor relief, auctioning off the poor, or arranging for their care by a private

contractor. Replacement of these methods by institutional care in a publicly super-

vised poorhouse or, better, poor farm, was the goal of welfare reformers in the first

96

half of the nineteenth century. In 1824, J. V. N. Yates, secretary of state of New York, who advocated establishment of county almshouses throughout the state, summed up the advantages of institutional care as opposed to outdoor relief:

Of all the modes of providing for the poor, the most wasteful, the most injurious to their morals and destructive to their industrious habits is that of supply in their own families . . . The most economical mode is that of the Alms Houses; in which work is provided for every degree of ability in the pauper; and thus the able poor made to provide, partially at least for their own support; and also to the support, or at least the comfort of the impotent poor.

^{1 x}

Where poorhouses were already in existence efforts were made to put them on a paying basis. A New Haven industrialist, James Brewster, appalled at the deplorable conditions of the New Haven almshouse, worked for many years to apply the systematic organization he utilized in his carriage factory to the poorhouse. In 1856 he wrote an open letter entitled "Self-Supporting Pauperism" to the New York

Tribune reporting the success achieved in New Haven and recommending that New

York City adopt the New Haven plan.

New Haven's paupers must have been an exceptional lot. At least there are few other examples of self-supporting almshouses. Under the best management the inmates of poorhouses were unable because of age or physical condition to perform much productive labor. Under the worst management, which is what almshouses often received, they deteriorated into custodial institutions for the old and the young, the feebleminded, insane, epileptic, and crippled. Every now and then someone like Hazard or the novelist, Edward Eggleston, in The Hoosier School

Master (1871), exposed conditions in poorhouses, but in the face of public

indifference and taxpayers' resistance to levies for the poor, not much was done to improve them.

The principal justification for the proposed and sometimes actual abolition of outdoor relief (that is, aid to the poor in their own homes) was that private charity could and should take care of the poor who were deserving, helpable, and not fit subjects for the almshouse. But to take on a task of such magnitude private charity had to reform itself. Throughout the latter two thirds of the nineteenth century numerous attempts were made to put private charity on a rational, unsentimental, business-like basis. In order to attain this objective it was necessary to discipline the charitable impulse, discourage implusive giving, and insist on discrimination in aid.

Charity organization societies founded in the 1870s and 1880s emphasized the necessity for careful, thorough investigation of an applicant's need and, as far as possible, recommended giving service rather than money. The slogan of the societies was "Not alms but a friend." The basic assumption was that private charity, wisely administered, was better than public aid. Charity "helped," relief "pauperized."

Josephine Shaw Lowell, founder of the New York Charity Organization Society, spoke of the stigma "rightly attached" to the acceptance of public assistance.

Despite the presumed superiority of private charity to public welfare the same trends were apparent in both. Practically speaking, neither charity nor welfare recognized the right of the poor to relief. In each case responsibility for granting assistance to the poor was exercised in an arbitrary fashion. The poor could be subjected to any test which the dictates of economy or the policy of overseers of the poor or directors of a charitable society might devise. In neither case, however, was there any assurance that the responsibility would be fully discharged-that is, that adequate relief would be provided to those in need.

The positive side of the nineteenth century war on pauperism was adoption of

social and economic reforms which were advocated and defended as measures for

preventing dependency. More or less in chronological order these included laws

prohibiting or regulating the sale of alcoholic beverages, establishment of

97 reformatories for juvenile delinquents, provision of educational institutions for the blind, deaf, and mentally retarded, the winning of free, public, tax-supported education, adoption of a liberal policy regarding disposition of public lands, recognition of workingmen's right to organize and bargain collectively, establishment of housing and sanitary codes, removal of children from almshouses, and regulation of child labor. Although all of these were presented, in part at least, as preventives of pauperism, the issue of care of dependent children has particular relevance to contemporary welfare problems.

Better provision for needy children was an essential step toward breaking the cycle of dependency. Although numerous sectarian orphan homes were founded in the middle third of the nineteenth century, many unfortunate children continued to be sent to public poorhouses where they were raised with and treated as paupers.

Nearly all reformers agreed on the unsuitability of conglomerate almshouses for child-rearing and advocated removal of children from poorhouses to environments better suited to their development as responsible citizens. There was difference of opinion, however, whether the children should be sent to special institutions to be raised in the religious faith of their parents and subjected to close supervision or placed out in private homes and allowed to grow up under the care and instruction of foster parents. A third alternative was to provide a surviving parent—typically a widowed mother—with an allowance so that she could maintain her children in their own home under her care. This was the method endorsed by the first (1909) White House Conference on Children, which declared home life "the highest and finest product of civilization" and went on record as opposing the breakup of homes solely because of poverty.

The conference recommended that mothers' aid be financed by charity rather than public funds, but the mothers' pension laws adopted in 45 states in the 20 years after 1911 authorized payments from money raised by taxation. Critics saw this as a retreat toward ^outdoor relief; advocates argued that mothers were the best guardians of their children's welfare and that it was sound policy to encourage them to devote full time to care of homes and children. The laws were permissive rather than mandatory and were so administered that only mothers deemed " f i t " and

"proper" received aid. Nevertheless, by the 1920s, almost as many dependent children were being cared for in their own homes as in institutions and many more than in foster homes. This revolutionary change in methods of helping dependent children was to be continued and expanded under one of the provisions of the Social Security Act of 1935.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, American reformers and publicists shifted their attention from pauperism to poverty. Poverty, declared writers like Robert Hunter, was a bigger problem than pauperism. It included not only the dependent and destitute but also low-paid workers subject to unemployment, accidents, and other economic hazards not of their making and beyond their individual control. Even before 1929, the want and insecurity of the poor seemed attributable less to personal failings of the sufferers than to inequality in the distribution of wealth and income and the haphazard operation of the economic machine.

The experience of the great depression of the 1930s embedded these convictions in the consciousness of a large segment of the American people. The depression shattered the myth that private charity could tide deserving poor over bad times. It also required state and federal governments to become much more involved in welfare activities than ever before. Between 1930 and 1933, states joined local governments in efforts to deal with unemployment relief. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the federal government was already lending states and cities funds which provided 80 percent of all aid to the unemployed.

After 1933, federal agencies made emergency grants to states and municipalities for cash and work relief. Beginning in 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA),

98

the New Deal's major relief program, provided jobs for an average of 2,000,000 persons a month for six years.

In contrast to WPA and other emergency programs, the Social Security Act of 1935 sought to provide a long-term answer to problems of economic insecurity. As adopted, the act was modest in scope and coverage, but it has been periodically amended to increase benefits and to bring more people under its protection. The 1935 law provided for a national system of old-age insurance financed by contributions from employers and employees, state-administered unemployment insurance financed by a federal payroll tax, and grants-in-aid to states for federally approved but state-administered programs for maternal and child health, aid to the blind, aid to the aged not eligible for federal old-age insurance, and aid to dependent children. The public assistance provisions of the act were included on the theory that even in times of prosperity the handicapped, aged, and children without an adult breadwinner in the home would require public aid. The system of grants-in-aid avoided constitutional questions regarding the role of the national government in welfare; it allowed federal participation in funding and establishment of standards while permitting states to maintain autonomy in operating public assistance programs.

Numerous other New Deal reforms strengthened the position of organized workers and installed "built-in stabilizers" in the economy. War and post-war prosperity encouraged belief that expanding productivity would solve problems of poverty and dependency. In the 1950s, however, "pockets of poverty" were discovered in areas such as Appalachia, and government reports called attention to a

"low income population" seemingly immune to the benefits of economic growth.

At the end of the decade an estimated 40 million Americans, representing 22 percent of the population, lived in poverty.

President Johnson, in signing the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which launched his administration's war on poverty, announced that its purpose was "not to make the poor more secure in their poverty but to . . . help them lift themselves out of the ruts of poverty."12 The act, focusing most of its attention on disadvantaged youth, provided training to equip young people for work; it also incorporated programs to encourage involvement of the poor, organized and assisted by federally paid advocates, in efforts for community betterment.

Despite the war on poverty and the officially recorded decline in the number of persons in poverty,13 welfare rolls and expenditures increased precipitously in the 1960s. Between 1959 and 1969 the cost of such federally assisted programs as aid to the aged, the blind, and the disabled doubled and that of aid to families with dependent children (AFDC) tripled. By 1972 the nation's welfare rolls exceeded 15 million persons, almost 11 million of whom are under AFDC. In 1969 President Nixon proposed to eliminate AFDC in favor of a family assistance plan that would have assured a minimum income for all families but would also have required all recipients except persons unable to work and mothers of very young children to register for work or training. Twice passed by the House of Representatives, the measure failed to receive approval of the Senate. Administration statements extolling "workfare" and denouncing "the welfare mess," and the emphasis debates in and out of Congress placed on stringent work tests, suggested that the nation's distrust of pauperism was still stronger than its determination to combat poverty.

99 III

THE GOSPEL OF WEALTH AND THE BEGINNING OF THE GREAT FOUNDATIONS

The most famous document in the history of American philanthropy—although the word philanthropy does not appear in it—is an article entitled "Wealth,"

published in the North American Review in June 1889. The author was Andrew Carnegie. Born in a weaver's cottage in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1835, Carnegie had come to the United States in 1848. As the eldest son of a poor family, he was old if not large for his years, and at the age of 12 cheerfully and self-confidently assumed the responsibilities of breadwinner. "Anybody can get along in this country," he wrote in 1852. "If I don't it will be my own fault." Andrew Carnegie, likable, alert, shrewd, and able, got along famously. By 1889, thirty times a millionaire, he had been a rich man for more than 20 years. For him the question had long been not how to gain wealth but what to do with it. He had reached some conclusions on the problem as early as 1868, and in 1887 had told his friend William E. Gladstone that he considered it a disgrace to die rich. Now, in his famous essay, he proposed that millionaires, instead of bequeathing vast fortunes to heirs or making benevolent grants by will, should administer their wealth as a public trust during life.

Carnegie attributed his own and other millionaires' wealth not to Providence but to fitness to survive and triumph in the competitive struggle. The trusteeship Carnegie proposed thus differed from traditional doctrines of stewardship. The millionaire, a product of natural selection, was an agent of the public, of the forces of civilization, rather than a servant of God.

An English critic, astounded by the brashness of Carnegie's scheme, named it the gospel of wealth to distinguish it from the gospel of Christianity. With customary good humor Carnegie accepted the label. As a matter of fact, there were religious overtones in Carnegie's gospel. He was willing to have the scriptural passage about the difficulty of rich men entering the kingdom of Heaven interpreted strictly, and he believed that laboring for the good of one's fellows was the essence of Christ's teaching. But, as Carnegie frankly admitted, he did not believe that under modern conditions much good could be accomplished by imitating the life or methods of Christ. Let the laws of accumulation and distribution be left free; let the able and energetic dispose of their surplus as they saw fit; the millionaire class, working toward the same objectives as Christ but (as Carnegie said) "laboring in a different manner," would someday bring "Peace on earth, among men good will."

According to the gospel of wealth, philanthropy was less the handmaid of social reform than a substitute for it. Wise administration of wealth was an antidote for radical proposals for redistributing property and a method of reconciling the poor and the rich. Carnegie spoke of "the temporary unequal distribution of wealth";

like his mentor, Herbert Spencer, however, he though that it would take eons, an overturn of natural laws of economics, and an almost inconceivable revolution in human nature to erase that inequality. He believed it was a waste of time to challenge evolutionary processes, and he was firmly convinced that the only alternative to the system that rewarded millionaires with palaces and laborers with cottages was one that would condemn all to hovels. But Carnegie was no less convinced that "administrators of surplus wealth"—his term for philanthropists-had it in their power to bestow benefactions of lasting benefit on their weaker and poorer brethren.

Had Carnegie chosen to do so, he might have said simply that men possessed of

more wealth than they could possibly use would be well advised to employ it for

the public good. Possibly that was all he really meant. Although Carnegie preached

and practiced giving on an undreamed-of scale, he did not propose that

philanthropy should shoulder the whole burden of welfare. Far from it. Recognizing

the responsibility of the state to care for the destitute and helpless, he urged the