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BOOK REVIEWS gggff
"A Right to Childhood": The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-1946
by Kriste Lindenmeyer
Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Review by
Larry DeWitt
December 2003Tea & Reform-
The perhaps apocryphal story of the origins of the U.S. Children's Bureau has Lillian Wald and Florence Kelley one morning in 1903 discussing-over breakfast at the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City-the plight of children in the early years of the Progressive Era. Wald tells Kelley, "If the Government can have a department to take such an interest in what is happening to the Nation's cotton crop, why can't it have a bureau to look after the Nation's crop of children?" (1) From this chat over the morning tea, came a determined social movement-led primarily by the clubwomen and female reformers of the period-which culminated in 1912 in the creation of the federal Children's Bureau. The Children's Bureau thus took its place in the Department of Labor (initially, Commerce and Labor) alongside the other client-based federal bureaus, including-probably the most close conceptually-the Women's Bureau, which was created eight years later.
The Children's Bureau was classically in the reform tradition of the Progressive Era, with its emphasis on the scientific investigation of social problems and their amelioration by trained professionals using the tools of modern scientific information. Indeed, it was these Progressive Era earmarks which characterized the Bureau and its work. Moreover, the Children's Bureau was most especially a venue for the Progressive Era reforming efforts of female reformers, and it was preeminently the place in the federal bureaucracy where women would play their most prominent role. The first Chief of the Children's Bureau, Julia Lathrop, was in fact the first woman in the nation's history to head a major federal agency.
Throughout the Progressive Era, and even during the New Deal, the Bureau thrived. Its achievements in the areas of child and maternal health and infant mortality were nothing short of heroic. It would reach millions of homes with its popular pamphlets and other publications, instructing parents and other care-givers in the modern Progressive-Era notions of what constituted healthy families, and precisely how to mechanically bring them about. It would play a key role in the development of the 1935 Social Security Act. It would play an important role in the wartime programs of World War II. But the air would slowly be let out of the Children's Bureau, until by the end of World War II its influence had declined to a point that in 1946 its status was diminished as part of a general federal reorganization. This narrative sequence, from an idea over biscuits, to a social reform movement, to the detailed work of a federal bureaucracy, to its decline and demotion in 1946, is the story told in Professor Kriste Lindenmeyer's book on the Children's Bureau.
The story of the Children's Bureau is interesting and important, and under-researched, and Lindenmeyer's book takes a place as a central document in reconstructing this history. The biggest contribution of Lindenmeyer's work is precisely in recapturing this somewhat overlooked history and documenting it in a thorough and accessible way. Lindenmeyer has some normative theses of course, and we shall come to them in the course of this review, but it is important to first take note of the achievement of Lindenmeyer's work purely as descriptive history. Her book will stand as a foundational contribution, even if one should wish to dispute some parts of her larger historiographical analysis.
The Rise and Fall of the Children's Bureau
Implicit in Lillian Wald's insight that we needed a federal agency to look after the nation's "crop of children," was what would come to be reified as the "whole-child" concept. The idea being that there ought to be a single federal agency responsible for all aspects of the well-being of America's children. In this respect, this rationalizing idea was of a pair with the creation of the Women's Bureau, which held the same philosophy as regards the needs of America's women.
This organizing principle-that the federal bureaucracy should be structured around client groups rather than functions-had a long history, from the creation of the Department of Agriculture to serve farmers, to the Department of Labor to serve workers. The contrary organizing principle-that federal programs and agencies should be organized by function rather than client-group-also had a long tradition and was expressed in such federal agencies as the Treasury Department, the War Department, and the like. So the idea of the whole-child concept, as an example of a generic bureaucratic organizing principle, was by no means new or unique to the Children's Bureau.
In Lindenmeyer's telling of the history of the Children's Bureau the idea of the whole-child is both the rationale for the creation of Bureau, the motive power behind its expansion, and the central reason for its ultimate decline. I will discuss in some detail later whether this theme can really carry the full weight Lindenmeyer asks of it. For now, we can simply observe that there were other reasons why the Bureau suffered a loss of support in the long run and why it declined in status in the immediate post-War period. In all, Lindenmeyer lists five salient factors in the rise and fall of the Children's Bureau:
1- The whole-child concept, which, she concludes, "was never embraced by . . . policymakers in Washington;"
2- The Bureau's reliance on state-level rather than federal administration of its programs;
3- The Bureau's embrace of a traditional conception of the family and the gender roles within families;
4- Distrust of government in general and suspicion of the reforming agenda of the Bureau's leadership;
5- The Bureau's insistence on couching its work in the rhetoric of "women's issues," which, after a time, became somewhat out of fashion.
This is a well-thought out and coherent thesis, and Lindenmeyer makes a good case for most of it. Lindenmeyer organizes the material of her research in plausible and meaningful ways using this scheme, and as a description of what happened and how events unfolded, I do not think we could do any better. But Lindenmeyer does have a few (mostly soft-pedaled) normative judgments about this scheme, and I do think we might raise a few questions about these larger normative claims.
The idea that the Bureau failed in part due to a fixed attachment to traditional conceptions of the family and the role of women, strikes me as contemporary sensibilities read back into a past context in which they did not have the salience they have today. We cannot expect the women who staffed the Children's Bureau to be 1970s-era feminists, or to be somehow standing outside the general cultural context of their era. That the traditional notions of family and gender roles were constricting features of American culture is I think beyond dispute. That is why we witnessed the subsequent rise of feminism, and why it succeeded in changing many of those traditional notions. But is it not somehow too much to demand of the Bureau that it be ahead of its times in the gender revolution? It ought, in my judgment, to be enough to recognize how far ahead of its time the Bureau was when it came to the welfare of children. So while Lindenmeyer is probably right to point out that these traditional notions of family and gender roles were dead-weights slowing the development of the American welfare state, I do not think it entirely fair to level a charge against the Children's Bureau on this score.
The second problematic thesis-that the Bureau relied too much on state-level involvement in its programs-is based on a larger normative theme in much historiography of the American welfare state. It has become a virtual catechism among critics of the American welfare state (especially feminist critics) to complain that the American welfare state is a bifurcated institution in which state-based welfare programs are separated from federal-level entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare; and to complain that this separation is inherently prejudicial to women and minorities as they tend to rely most heavily on these state programs. To the extent that a program relies on state administration or state policymaking, it is thought to work to the disadvantage of minorities and women. Thus, we can describe as a failing the reliance of the Children's Bureau on state administration of its programs.
This general critique of the American species of federalism is so commonplace that we often impose it anachronistically on bygone eras. There are without question many drawbacks in the American system of federalism. I also think it patently true that in almost any respect we can name, America would have been better off to rely more on the relatively liberal social programs of the federal government than on the more conservative programs run by the various states. But alas, history did not give the leaders of the Children's Bureau this choice-anymore than it gave the designers of the Social Security Act of 1935 the option of proposing purely federal programs. What option, exactly, in this context was it that the leaders of the Children's Bureau had before them which they failed to take advantage of? A new Bureau, with a staff of 15 and a budget less than $35,000, simply had no other option than to rely on the states (and on private sector volunteers). To even implicitly suggest that the Bureau might have challenged the prevailing reliance on state administration is I think to place too much of a burden of expectation on the Bureau.
The struggle that the administrators of the Children's Bureau-like the designers of the Social Security Act-faced was to address unmet social needs, within the context and constraints of American society in the first decades of the 20th century. The prevailing doctrine of federalism was a constraining fact of life throughout this period. The leaders of the Children's Bureau had no real option of doing anything other than relying on the states to administer their programs. Just as Franklin Roosevelt designed the Social Security Act of 1935 to feature the maximum amount of state involvement because he understood that otherwise the programs in the Act could not possibly make it through Congress, so too, the administrators of the Children's Bureau had to design and carry-out their programs with this same constraint upper-most in their minds. To suggest that conforming themselves to this reality was somehow a source of error, is surely too strong a charge against the officials of the Children's Bureau.
The Work of the Bureau
What I think is central to the story Lindenmeyer tells, and central to the story of the Children's Bureau, is its record of social welfare accomplishments. This is a strong feature of Lindenmeyer's work. Additionally, Lindenmeyer's book is the first really in-depth look at the administrative history of the Children's Bureau. Much of the previous work on the Children's Bureau tends to focus on the political ideology of what is now called the "maternalist" welfare state, minimizing the emphasis on both the accomplishments of the Children's Bureau and its detailed administrative history. (2) Lindenmeyer's work is especially strong in these two areas and provides a missing balance to the body of literature on the Bureau.
The Children's Bureau, as Lindenmeyer explains in convincing detail, was a very limited member of the federal bureaucracy. It lacked the power, the money, the staff, and the legislated mission to really address problems of social welfare in fundamental ways. As a consequence, at its heart, the Bureau's mission can be summed up by Lindenmeyer as "investigation, reporting and persuasion." There are some important exceptions, the three principal ones being the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Act, the child welfare provisions of the Social Security Act of 1935, and the wartime EMIC program of health care benefits for the wives and children of servicemen. These three programs dramatically expanded the role of the Bureau and taken together were clear harbingers of the larger welfare state in which the Bureau was relegated to a relatively minor role. The significance of these three programs; how they came about; and how they fit within the overall story of the evolution of the Children's Bureau is an especially strong aspect of Lindenmeyer's book.
But we should not underestimate the value and impact of the informational work and the raising of awareness done by the Bureau, even in its earliest years. Lindenmeyer tells us that during the period of the Sheppard-Towner law, the Bureau supported about 183,000 health conferences for mothers and babies, helped fund the establishment of nearly 3,000 clinics, held nearly 20,000 classes for mothers and distributed over 21 million pieces of literature. The Bureau also pushed a movement to persuade States to implement birth registration procedures, an effort which made such procedures a commonplace feature of modern life-and a surprisingly important enabler of many social reforms. Hundreds of thousands of letters flowed in the Bureau from anxious mothers seeking help and information of the form that the Bureau was well able to provide. And many in the public were deeply appreciative of the information they received from the Bureau's many publications. Perhaps the most telling statistic cited by Lindenmeyer is the one related to what the Bureau initially decided would be its core effort: the reduction of infant and maternal mortality. The country's maternal mortality rated dropped from 60.8 deaths per 10,000 births in 1915 to only 15.7 by 1946. Infant mortality declined from 132 deaths per 1,000 births in 1912 to 33.8 by 1946. Not all of this decline in mortality rates can be attributed to the work of the Children's Bureau, but Lindenmeyer makes a convincing case that the Bureau's work has to be seen as a significant factor.
Lindenmeyer-in concert with most historians writing since the mid-1980s-is critical of the social values embodied by the Bureau and its officials. While celebrating the opportunities the Bureau provided for professional women to gain an entry into the federal bureaucracy, Lindenmeyer criticizes Bureau officials for their assumption of traditional gender roles and a traditional conception of the family as centered around a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home mother. More than many other writers, however, Lindenmeyer is very balanced in her description of both the drawbacks and achievements of the Bureau's world-view.
Lindenmeyer is generally very even-handed in all her descriptive accounts. The strong point of her book is the breadth, depth and non-polemical tone of her descriptive history. She is quite meticulous in giving the Bureau its due and in describing the considerable limitations under which the Bureau operated. But in a few instances she might be read as implying a critical normative judgment regarding the approach the Bureau took to its mission. And in some cases, she goes too far, in my view, in her criticisms of the Bureau and its approach to social welfare provision. One example is the issue of birth control.
The Bureau under both Lathrop and Abbott intentionally avoided advocating or providing assistance with birth control or condoning abortion. Lindenmeyer says of the Bureau's posture: " . . . the Children's Bureau did not consider legalizing abortion and continued to ignore the promotion of safe birth control as a way to help save mothers' lives. This was true despite the growing influence of the national birth control movement. . . Instead of advocating that women obtain the means to control their reproduction, under Grace Abbott's leadership the Children's Bureau tightened its policy of ignoring birth control as a health care option." Lindenmeyer implies that this policy position was a failure of the Bureau's obligations to maternal health, suggesting that the Bureau traded-off its concern for the welfare of children for an indifference to the health of women: "The chief believed that the Children's Bureau's role was to educate the public about how to have healthy babies, not to encourage the use of birth control. The ultimate goal of the bureau was to reduce the infant mortality rate and improve children's health. Preserving the health of American women was only important to the Children's Bureau because most women were mothers." (3)
But surely, this judgment is too harsh. As Lindenmeyer documents in compelling detail, the Bureau worked in a hostile policy environment in which concerns of federalism, fiscal conservatism, religious ideology, opposition from the medical profession, and divisions within the ranks of activist women, all combined to constrain the range of motion of the Bureau. To put it simply, the Bureau's mission-even in the very limited forms it took-was highly controversial. To suggest that the Bureau had the potential to somehow influence social attitudes and practices toward birth control and abortion is surely over-reaching. My own reading of Lindenmeyer's evidence is that if the Bureau had been reckless enough to venture into these additional troubled waters, their political support would have plummeted like a stone and even the modest mission of the Bureau would have been impaired. So when it comes to finding fault with historical actors, it seems a bit unfair to demand of them that they should have done the impossible, because if they had been able to do so, it would have made for a better world.
Probably Lindenmeyer's most ungenerous normative reading is that she gives to the Bureau's efforts in the area of child labor reform. This is, at a minimum, somewhat ironic since the area of child labor is the one in which the Bureau was most strongly blocked from undertaking a more expansive role. Recall the highlights of the story of child labor, as detailed by Lindenmeyer. In 1916-after several failed efforts-Congress enacted its first child labor law, the Keating-Owens Act. Keating-Owens had a very limited scope, only banning from interstate commerce merchandise produced using child labor-but not banning child labor itself. The Children's Bureau had only just started administering the new law when the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. In 1919 Congress tried another law, this one using the federal taxing power as its legal basis, and the Supreme Court ruled this one too unconstitutional. In desperation, supporters of child labor reform turned to a constitutional amendment, which, despite heavy opposition, passed out of Congress in 1924, only to be blocked from ratification in the States. Against this backdrop, the Children's Bureau was forced to retreat to its usual practices on the child labor issue as well, contenting itself with "investigation, reporting and persuasion."
But despite giving us a detailed account of the obstacles to child labor reform, Lindenmeyer still wants to criticize the Children's Bureau for the sins of its times: "Furthermore, the agency did not deal with the fact that children and their families lived in a rising consumer-based economy where even meager earnings gained through the street trades helped satisfied [sic] the desires of children living with parents of little means." (4) Well, precisely what form of federal legislation could the Children's Bureau have advocated to change this? Or this observation on the problem of keeping children in school rather than in employment: "Federal funding for education may have helped children like Kemplen, but the Children's Bureau offered no such plan." (5)
In summing up her chapter on the child labor issue, Lindenmeyer makes a rather breathtaking accusation of failure against the Bureau: ". . . the Children's Bureau tried to change American attitudes about the role of children in the family and society. Some children likely benefited from this effort, but even the Children's Bureau seemed to ignore the realities of its own findings. Bureau reports condemned the circumstances of children laboring . . . but the agency offered few alternatives to families who believed that putting their children to work was a legitimate means of obtaining the American dream. . . . A rejection of nineteenth-century romantic attitudes about agricultural labor, cooperative education programs, a greater emphasis on apprenticeship and vocational training, after-school care for children of working mothers, gender pay equity, scholarships for children who remained in school, federally mandated minimum wages for adults, and unemployment compensation might have served as more effective and creative alternatives for reducing child labor throughout the United States." (6) No doubt. And if Grace Abbott were a fairy godmother rather than merely the chief of a small, underfunded and relatively powerless federal agency, perhaps she could have made all this come true.
So, I think that some of Lindenmeyer's criticisms of the Bureau are somewhat misplaced. But this is not, strictly speaking, a fault of Lindenmeyer or her book. Lindenmeyer is working very much within the tradition of historical scholarship about the American welfare state as historians have come to understand it in the last 20 years or so. It is just that I find serious fault with this standard view. In my reading, we have produced an historiography which is unnecessarily critical and insufficiently willing to acknowledge the accomplishments of the welfare state. Lindenmeyer, more than most scholars of this topic, produces a more balanced account of both the welfare state's accomplishments and its failings. But I am suggesting that despite how reasonable she is, Lindenmeyer still goes too far toward an uncharitable reading of this history. So while I find this fault evident in Lindenmeyer's book, it is a fault of the American history profession today and its prevailing conceptual paradigms and not strictly of Lindenmeyer's work. And no doubt, many readers will conclude it is not a fault at all.
Empty-Glass Historiography & the American Welfare State
In my dyspeptic reading of the last two decades of scholarship on the American welfare state, I believe scholars have developed an overly-critical, unbalanced, view of the shortcomings of the welfare state. The main focus of discontent revolves around gender and race. Since the welfare state emerged from the midst of American society in the first third of the 20th century-rather than from the head of Zeus, perfect and pure-it reflected that society. Thus the racism and sexism present in American culture left its residues on the nascent welfare state. Historians have thus for the last twenty years or so focused excessively on the shortcomings of the welfare state rather than its accomplishments. In other words, we now focus our attention on the part of the glass of the welfare state which is empty, rather than the part which is full-precisely because, perversely, it is empty. A recent example involving scholarship on the Children's Bureau may illustrate my point.
In June 2003 the bi-annual conference of the Society for the History of Children and Youth was hosted by the History Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Katharine Bullard, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, presented a paper based on her dissertation work. The paper-entitled "The Rights of American Children: The Children's Bureau, Empire, and the Ambiguities of Welfare"-was a slide presentation which consisted of the covers of various Children's Bureau publications. Bullard invited the audience to observe that the babies and children depicted in the cover artwork were invariably white, "middle-class," non-ethnic. Her thesis was that this was clear evidence of a racialist, hierarchical-elitist, effort at oppressing working class mothers and ethnic and minority families as the Children's Bureau attempted to shove middle-class child-rearing practices down the throats of urban ethnic and minority families.
What was interesting about Bullard's talk is that before she began she somewhat sheepishly confessed that she felt conflicted about her own work. After all, she did admire the women leaders of the Children's Bureau, and she did think they were admirable reformers, she thought them heroic figures even. But they only put white babies on the covers of their publications. (Which we are invited to suppose is a symptom of some deep unconscious racism, with, we are too imagine, deleterious effects on the development of the welfare state.)
What is even more interesting is that Bullard-and many historians of the present paradigm-can discuss the work of the Children's Bureau and almost completely neglect to mention the unmet social needs which the Children's Bureau was created to address. It is more important somehow to observe the sinister import of the fact that the photographs of babies in the Bureau's publications invariably show only white babies. Such accounts completely miss such huge accomplishments as the fact that in the first three decades of the 20th century average life expectancy at birth in America increased more than it had in all of recorded human history prior to that time. And this dramatic improvement in the most basic aspect of human welfare was the result of a dramatic decline in infant mortality in those decades, due, in large measure, to the public health, sanitation, and health care work of Progressive Era, and the informational work of federal agencies like the Children's Bureau. Surely, this is a cup which is very nearly full. But one will search almost in vain in many contemporary writings on the welfare state for more than merely a passing acknowledgment of its accomplishments, while its shortcomings are made the center of our focus.
I raise this point about my own larger historiographical agenda first to strongly praise Lindenmeyer for her more balanced and nuanced account, then to faintly damn her. Her book is remarkably clear of the kind of polemical critiques which are found in too many other works in this area. (7) Lindenmeyer is not unaware of these critiques; indeed I think she shares most of them, although in a more sensible and moderate way. However, I think that in the context of the Children's Bureau and its history, most of these critiques are misplaced. I have already suggested a couple of examples in Lindenmeyer's treatment of the issues of birth control and child labor. I now what to suggest that I find a similar problem in one of the central defining themes of her analysis-the notion that the whole-child concept is central to understanding the rise and fall of the Children's Bureau. Before I attempt to discredit this idea, I must admit in all candor that there is a great deal to be said for it, and that it is certainly a valid central organizing idea around which to construct a narrative of the life and work of the Bureau. For the most part, I think Lindenmeyer is both right and persuasive about the centrality of the whole-child concept. However, I think there is a plausible alternative reading to one aspect of the role of the whole-child concept, which is the place it occupies in the decline of the Bureau's influence and in the 1946 reorganization. I intend to explore this rather small point at some length. In doing so, I do not wish to create the impression that I think Lindenmeyer's use of the concept is suspect in any large way. Rather, I think she may have it wrong in one small respect, and I want to explore this single issue in some depth.
The Defeat of the Whole-Child Concept?
For both Children's Bureau officials at the time, and Lindenmeyer upon reflection, the 1946 reorganization is fraught with symbolic importance. Lindenmeyer makes the Bureau's use of the whole-child concept the core idea underlying the work of the Bureau and, hence, when the Bureau suffers bureaucratic setbacks this is equivalent to a philosophical/political repudiation of the whole-child concept. Lindenmeyer's thesis is that the demotion of the Children's Bureau in the 1946 reorganization represented a kind of concrete expression of society's rejection of the whole-child concept in favor of more functional, more atomistic concepts. There is certainly substantial reasons to accept this interpretation, and Lindenmeyer makes a good case for it. However, I think she underestimates the degree to which the whole-child concept was what I would call a "cover-story" for more commonplace struggles over bureaucratic turf and political power in Washington. Bureau officials can often be seen as crying wolf using the whole-child argument as part of debates having nothing to do with the nation's philosophy of the child. One example is given by Lindenmeyer in her description of a potential conflict between the Public Health Service and the Children's Bureau. In 1919 Julia Lathrop approached the Surgeon General about forming some type of joint federal board to advocate for maternal and child health (as a run-up to the Sheppard-Towner legislation). Surgeon General Rupert Blue responded that he thought the suggestion moot since he expected there would soon be a federal agency for health, spearheaded by the PHS, and that he expected that the Children's Bureau would become a component in this new health bureaucracy. As Lindenmeyer recounted Lathrop's position: "Lathrop adamantly argued that her agency should remain in the Department of Labor because its efforts there could better be directed at the 'whole child'." (8)
But how would being part of the PHS differ from being part of the Department of Labor, as far as the philosophy of the whole child is concerned? Initially, Bureau officials were just as worried that an association with the Labor department would produce the same effect by a too-close association with the child-labor aspect of their concerns-that this mere association with Labor would produce some sort of atmospheric pollution of the purity of the "whole-child." By 1919 it is just that the threat to the Bureau's ideals was in this instance coming from the PHS. But which ideals were really under threat? By 1919 Lathrop and the Bureau had a working position in the federal bureaucracy with which they were comfortable, and like bureaucrats everywhere, she feared a change in her position might be adverse. But this entirely reasonable fear had nothing to do with a grand philosophy about the nature of the federal approach to aiding children. It was just a bureaucrat protecting her turf and using the whole-child argument as a cover story for her real concern. (I don't mean to suggest this was done cynically or self-consciously. For all I know, the Bureau officials believed their own rationalizations.) This a pattern which repeats itself throughout the Bureau's history up to and including the 1946 reorganization.
Certainly the leaders of the Bureau saw the 1946 changes as an assault on their whole-child philosophy and used this argument in a futile attempt to prevent the 1946 reorganization, and had used it (successfully) in arguing against several earlier attempts to alter the Bureau's status. But because the Bureau's officials saw the 1946 changes as a rejection of their philosophy of the child, this does not necessarily mean that a rejection of this idea was really involved.
In the first instance, it is far from clear that federal policymakers outside the Bureau ever embraced the whole-child philosophy in the first place. Looked at pragmatically, what really mattered was that there were certain pressing unmet social needs involving the welfare of children in the industrial age and that the Children's Bureau represented the first serious federal effort to do something about them. As a tactical point about getting attention to the issues, a single agency (what the whole-child really meant in practice) may well have been a good idea. But we must notice, for example, that the educational needs of children were completely left out of the Bureau's conception of the whole-child philosophy, because there was an existing agency whose power in this area the Bureau was not prepared to challenge and which, perhaps more to the point, had no intention of challenging the Bureau's power. Moreover, placing the Children's Bureau within the Department of Labor in the first place was a violation of whatever philosophy of administration was at stake here since it was the admission that it was proper for the Bureau as a whole to be a subservient part of some larger bureaucratic structure. As it happened, the Bureau found a comfortable home at Labor, and so somewhat inconsistently used the whole-child argument against it being placed somewhere else in the bureaucracy in the same fashion in which it was placed at Labor initially.
Because the events of 1946 are such a key point in Lindenmeyer's narrative, we would do well to review a few points about the Bureau's evolution.
When the Children's Bureau was founded in 1912 it was placed on the federal government's organizational charts as one of the operating components of the Department of Commerce and Labor. In terms of the hierarchies of federal position and prestige, it was in the third-tier of the federal bureaucracy. The first tier is that occupied by the various staff and agencies in what is today the Office of the President; the second-tier is that of the cabinet-level agencies; and as an organization reporting directly to a cabinet secretary, the Bureau was thus three-levels down in the hierarchy.
It is fair to observe, as Lindenmeyer points out, that in its early years the Bureau had a great deal of prestige and influence, perhaps even beyond its formal status within the bureaucracy. But some of what happened to the Bureau's status had nothing to do with the Bureau or its programs or philosophy. For example, in 1912 the staff in the White House was virtually a non-existent layer of government. Thus, being in the third-tier of the federal hierarchy was really like being in the second-tier, as there wasn't anyone home in the layer between the President and his Cabinet Secretaries. One of the major trends in the Executive Branch in the 20th century was the dramatic expansion of this second tier of staff and agencies in the immediate office of the President. For example, in the same 1939 reorganization which the Bureau managed to escape by pleading the sanctity of the whole-child, the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget) was created and this new organization within the previously largely vacant first-tier of government quickly became a major source of authority over lower-level agencies throughout the federal government. So this new organization within the first layer of bureaucratic power between the President and his cabinet agencies tended to diminish the status of the Children's Bureau, and yet clearly this change had nothing to do with the whole-child philosophy. The point being that we cannot assume that because events in the federal bureaucracy have the effect of diminishing the power and prestige of the Children's Bureau, that this is even an implicit rejection of some aspect of the Bureau's mission or philosophy.
In any case, in 1946, as part of a massive reorganization of the executive branch, the Children's Bureau was transferred from the Department of Labor to the newly formed Social Security Administration (SSA). This moved the Bureau down one further layer in the bureaucracy, as well as shifting it to a new parent-agency. But here too, matters are not so simply one-sided. One might well argue that the real policy action in social welfare by 1946 was in the Social Security Administration and not in the Department of Labor. This shift to SSA could thus be reasonably interpreted as strengthening the Bureau to the maximum extent possible in the context of the era.
As a point of reference, the Children's Bureau did not cease to exist in 1946 when it became part of SSA. Nor did it cease to exist in 1962 when it was transferred out of SSA to the newly created Welfare Administration in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Indeed, it continues to exist to the present day, as part of the Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services (a single agency focused on the needs of children and their families), although it certainly has a diminished role and importance in the current federal structure. But these kinds of shifts and moves and reorganizations are endemic to life in government, and the officials of the Children's Bureau would have been naive to imagine themselves immune from such goings on.
But it was this first reorganization which was by far the most traumatic and the most bitterly opposed by officials of the Children's Bureau. As happens with all bureaucrats whose territory is threatened, the Bureau officials were angry, frightened, and outraged. Bureaucrats thus threatened will often try anything they can think of to oppose being reorganized. They will argue that their constituents will be ill-served. They will argue that inefficiencies will be created. They will argue that their situation is somehow unique and thus deserving of special treatment. The Bureau tried all of this. In addition, they played their whole-child card repeatedly and shamelessly.
However, from what we know of President Truman's Reorganization Plan of 1946 it seems more likely that high-level decision-makers had other things on their mind. It is doubtful that President Truman ever thought about this issue in terms of an acceptance or rejection of any particular philosophy of childhood. While he reassured Bureau Chief Katherine Lenroot that he had no intention of diminishing the Bureau's role by the reorganization (as Lindenmeyer recounts), and while Lenroot undoubtedly made the whole-child argument when making her case to the President-his assurances cannot really be read as either an affirmation or a rejection of the whole-child philosophy. It seems that Truman was just reassuring an anxious bureaucrat that he meant her and her agency no harm in the coming dislocations. No doubt he had to have similar conversations with many other worried bureaucrats.
In his memoirs, Truman discusses the reorganization of the executive branch, at several places, without of course any mention of the Children's Bureau, much less its philosophy of the whole-child. Truman's agenda was, as he states it, "the reorganization of the executive branch of the government to make it more efficient. There was too much duplication of functions, too much 'passing of the buck,' and too much confusion and waste." (9) He told his Director of the Budget, in only their second meeting of Truman's presidency, that this was "a situation which I thought required urgent action." He asked his Budget Director, "whether the time had not come to establish a Welfare Department, since the Federal Security Agency had outgrown its original purpose. We needed to extend social security to the white-collar workers and farmers. Our public health services needed expansion. I thought all these functions might properly come in a new department headed by a Cabinet officer . . ." (10) (We should note that the Federal Security Agency was not actually a cabinet-level agency, it was sub-cabinet; and part of what Truman was after was the elevation of the importance of social welfare programs by creating a new cabinet-level agency in which they could all be combined.)
As it happened, the real motive power behind the shift in the positioning of the Children's Bureau came, surprisingly, from the Department of Labor itself (it is surprising because bureaucrats rarely volunteer to surrender turf). As the Department's Historian, Judson MacLaury, has described it, Truman's new Secretary of Labor, Lewis Schwellenbach, wanted to jettison the non-labor functions of the Department in order to strengthen its labor focus, which Schwellenbach believed had been diluted by wartime delegations of authority. As MacLaury summaries events:
"By 1945, the Department of Labor was in a seriously weakened state. Of the four bureaus that made it up when it was created in 1913, only the Children's Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics remained. The Bureaus of Immigration and Naturalization, the largest chunk of the Department, had been transferred to the Department of Justice in 1940. While a few new functions, such as the Wage and Hour Division enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act, had been added over the years, others, such as the National Labor Relations Board, had been created outside the Department. In addition, the Department's U.S. Employment Service, created in 1933, had been transferred to the Social Security Board in 1939, and then to the War Manpower Commission in 1942.
One of President Truman's first domestic priorities was to restore the Department as the central administrator of all national labor programs, as a matter both of government efficiency and of fairness to working people." (11)
Secretary Schwellenbach appointed a six-person internal team to develop a proposal for reorganizing the Department. It was this report which was the basis for the subsequent action moving the Children's Bureau out of Labor and over to SSA. As MacLaury summarized matters:
"In August 1945 the Department, working with the Bureau of the Budget, completed its first reorganization proposal. It was a thoughtful document that serves as a useful benchmark for the restoration. It defined a four-part Departmental mission of employment services, labor relations, information and statistics, and wartime activities. The centerpiece was to be the return of the Employment Service so that it could work more effectively with other Departmental agencies and better serve the post-war goal of full employment. It also called for the addition of the Unemployment Insurance function because of its close relation to the Employment Service's job placement programs; for abolition of the Women's Bureau, presumably on the basis of efficiency, and for removing the Children's Bureau (except for child labor functions)." (12) So here again we find that the idea of a policymakers rejecting the whole-child concept is a little overdrawn.
Once the bureaucrats at the Children's Bureau found their status under threat, the whole-child concept was not really any longer so much about the wholeness of children as it was about the wholeness of the Bureau. Indeed, as a concept, the whole-child was not abandoned by SSA when the Bureau was placed within it. In its first Annual Report after the reorganization SSA listed the Agency's ambitions-its unfinished business. Under the heading "Children's Services and Research in Child Life," SSA reported that it sought: "More adequate financial implementation of the basic act of 1912 creating the Children's Bureau, to enable the Bureau to strengthen and broaden its work . . . to undertake research and investigations that deal with the child as a whole or with specific problems that require Nation-wide study or that have Nation-wide significance to State and community health and welfare programs for children or mothers." (13)
So, what really happened in the 1946 reorganization is that the Children's Bureau merely shifted from one bureaucratic home to another. The decline in the influence and importance of the Children's Bureau did not start in 1946, it had been underway for a long time, with only the respite of the wartime emergency and the EMIC program to slow its decline. Moreover, its subsequent decline did not happen all at once, as we might get the impression from the fact that Lindenmeyer's book ends with the 1946 changes. The air was slowly let out of the Children's Bureau over many years, both before and after the events of 1946.
In support of her thesis of the centrality of the whole-child concept, Lindenmeyer also places the 1946 changes in a larger public policy context which makes it clear that the Bureau's fate was only one event in a larger social shift from the administrative ideas of the Progressive Era to those of the New Deal and beyond. This shift had to do with evolving ideas of how to professionalize reform, and it had to do with the inevitable backlash from conservative forces who as per usual were resistant to most any ideas of reform. In this respect, a stronger case is presented.
So while there is much insight in Lindenmeyer's thesis regarding the centrality of the whole-child concept, there is probably some overemphasis as well. Indeed, one could argue that the move out of Labor enhanced the potential for a more focused role for the Children's Bureau. After all, it made little sense to have the Bureau as part of the Labor Department, especially as the Department itself was sharpening its focus on labor issues. What was really happening was not a shift in topical importance of the Bureau's work, or a dilution of its philosophy of the child. What was happening was a demotion in status for the officials who ran the Children's Bureau. They were being moved down a level in the federal bureaucracy. Understandably, persons in such a position tend to see such developments as a repudiation of something other than themselves-as an attack on some more noble principle than mere self-interest. But the President's Reorganization Plan was not an effort to attack any deep principle of the Children's Bureau's work. It was little more than the simple idea that it was a more logical arrangement to have the Children's Bureau be part of the agency which managed social welfare programs than to have it in the agency which oversaw labor relations. Were it not for the fact that there was nothing like the Federal Security Agency in existence in 1912, the Children's Bureau would never in any logical way have fit in the Department of Labor in the first place. Having been perched there by absence of alternatives, the Bureau then fought tenaciously to maintain it position. Truly self-less bureaucrats would have supported FDR's attempt to place the Bureau within FSA in 1939, as providing a home for agencies like the Children's Bureau was precisely the reason that the Federal Security Agency was created. Instead, in the finest tradition of Washington power-politics, Lenroot used her personal connection with Eleanor Roosevelt to persuade Eleanor to intervene with the President to block the move. Hardly an act of disinterested service to the children of the nation. That the leaders of the Children's Bureau were not self-less bureaucrats means of course that they were only human. But we should not mistake the shortcomings of human nature for grand conflicts over social policy.
One final point, although generally one cannot really criticize an historian for the decision she makes as to the scope of her research, the decision to limit the time horizon of her book to 1946 introduces a certain unintentional bias into Lindenmeyer's account. Lindenmeyer tells the story of the Children's Bureau, from more than a decade before its founding, to a point in 1946 when a significant milestone was reached. As a pragmatic choice, this would be a logical place to end the narrative. But by ending her account in 1946, Lindenmeyer overemphasizes the trauma of the 1946 reorganization. Since her narrative terminates with the reorganization, the reader is left with the impression that the Bureau fell off some very high cliff in 1946. But in fact, the Bureau continued to exist and continued to do its work, even until the present day. The 1946 reorganization was not really the dramatic cut-off in the Bureau's life which Lindenmeyer suggests, but is more accurately depicted as merely one milestone in a long, slow decline in influence, which occurred over several decades. If we were to look at the subsequent course of the Bureau's life in the same depth that Lindenmeyer reviews the pre-1946 era, we would likely have a very different sense of the importance of the 1946 changes.
Conclusions-
Kriste Lindenmeyer's history of the U.S. Children's Bureau from 1900 to 1946 is a masterful, thorough, well-grounded narrative and a very readable history of this important and too-little studied federal agency. Lindenmeyer's contribution to this neglected area will, in the fullness of time, come to be seen as foundational. What really remains now is for someone to do an equally in-depth job of the post-1946 history of this agency.
As a specialist in women's history, Professor Lindenmeyer is refreshingly free of the ideological cant and implicit gender-bashing of too much contemporary historiography regarding the American welfare state. She manages to tell the story of the rise and fall of the Children's Bureau-calling our attention to the role of gender in the saga-but not to the degree that this becomes the sole lens through which we are required to view every issue. This type of account, which takes policy issues and ideas seriously, and which presents women as engaged in public policy debates, more than being ensnared in gender and social roles, is a more faithful re-creation of the world of early 20th century social reformers. A focus on policy and policy issues rather than race, gender and social roles, helps us avoid the temptation of reading back into historical contexts contemporary sensibilities which in reality had not yet found their place in the fabric of the American story. Lindenmeyer's work is thus a much richer and more realistic description of historical events than the accounts in which every policy issue of intellectual substance is submerged in a sea of recriminations about male gender biases and the uncritical acceptance of those biases by "maternalist" social reformers.
The flaws in this book are few. As descriptive history, the book is highly reliable and without a blemish which I can find. I therefore can recommend it without reservation as the single most important work on the Children's Bureau. It is only with a handful of the book's normative propositions that I find myself in mild dissent. However, in candor, a would-be reader should understand that what I am here describing as flaws may well be judged by many, perhaps most, contemporary historians as not flaws at all but obvious virtues. What I take to be the questionable presumptions of the received view on the American welfare state as it involves issues of race and gender, is, in all honesty, an idiosyncratic reading. I am banging a lonely drum here. So to the faults that I find, the author may well wish to reply: "our faults are not in our books, but in our reviewers."
Endnotes:
1. Kriste Lindenmeyer, "A Right to Childhood": The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-46, (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press), 10.
2. I have in mind here Molly Ladd-Taylor's, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930, (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1994).
7. I have in mind here such works as Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942, (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995).
9. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs by Harry S. Truman, Volume 1, 1945: Year of Decisions, (New York, reprinted by SMITHMARK publishers, 1995), 226-227.
11. Judson MacLaury, "Change at the Department of Labor During the Truman Administration, 1945-1950," paper presented at the Annual Meeting, Society for History in the Federal Government, Washington, D.C., April 3, 1997. Available on the Department of Labor website at: http://www.dol.gov/asp/programs/history/SHFGpr97.htm Accessed 10/15/03.
13. Annual Report of the Federal Security Agency, Section One, Social Security Administration, 1947, (U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1948) 13-14.
