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In the three and one-half decades from the beginning of the twentieth
century to the passage of the Social Security Act, social workers as
a group were not among the opponents of social insurance, but neither
were they very firm supporters. To be sure, at the turn of the century
charity workers were fostering some discussions and trends that harbingered
a more institutional approach to welfare, and for a brief period at
the climax of American progressivism social workers included social
insurance in a grand reform platform. Yet at the same time the agents
of welfare became increasingly preoccupied with professionalism, and
built their professionalism quite largely around ideas that harked back
to the relational approach of COS days. By the 1920s the new professionalism
dominated the social work field and, moreover, coincided with new methods
of co-ordinating private efforts, methods which recalled COs organizing
techniques. The severe hard times of the early 1930s brought the trends
of the 1920s to a halt, but also brought welfare problems so enormous
that social workers scarcely found time to think through the problems
of engineering a careful, deliberate, well-rationalized set of social
insurance institutions. And so, while social workers were seldom outright
opponents of social insurance, at no stage were they effective supporters.
By the decade just prior to World War I, charity workers were rapidly
and consciously professionalizing their field and becoming “social workers.”1
The volunteer “friendly visitor” yielded to the paid case worker,
universities provided new courses, departments, and even schools of
social work, and in 1917 the National Conference of Charities and Correction
changed its hoary name to “National Conference of Social Work.” In one
way, the professionalism reflected the increased institutionalization
of American society. Yet the social workers did not often adopt the
habit of looking at welfare in terms of carefully structured, institutional
devices.
In the first years of the new century, the attitudes of charity workers
toward social insurance were ambiguous. Charity workers almost invariably
supported workmen's compensation, and listened respectfully when Henderson
and others suggested contributory systems to cover sickness, old age,
disability, and unemployment. But their response was quite cool toward
non-contributory, or gratuitous, systems, such as the old age pensions
that Boston welfare reformer Edward Everett Hale suggested in 1903,
or that England enacted in 1908. And they were unsure as to government's
proper role: a 1902-1907 NCCC committee on workingmen's insurance chaired
by Henderson (and made up of professors and businessmen as well as social
workers) recommended only that “workingmen's insurance should be fostered
by state legislation”; this, explained the committee, did not “necessarily
mean insurance at the cost of government and by means of state administration”2
By 1912, with America's progressive tide at its peak, a new NCCC committee
was ready to propose a complete set of compulsory social insurance institutions.
The proposal was merely one item in a much larger program for reforming
workers' working and living conditions.3 Social workers
had done much to prepare the public for such a program by their numerous
firsthand descriptions of poverty and its causes; quite logically, Paul
Kellogg, an editor of Charities and the Commons, and director
of the Pittsburgh Survey, was the committee's first chairman in 1909.
After the committee presented its program at the 1912 NCCC meeting,
Kellogg and New York settlement worker, Henry Moskowitz presented it
to presidential aspirant Theodore Roosevelt. At the Progressive Party
convention that followed Jane Addams of Chicago's Hull House seconded
Roosevelt's nomination, and the Bull Moose adopted the suggestions almost
bodily into his platform.4
Yet both the committee and its program were broader than the circle
of practicing social workers. At the peak of its activity the committee's
chairman was Owen R. Lovejoy, who as secretary of the National Child
Labor Committee was more a professional reformer than a professional
social worker. Membership included academicians such as Catholic seminarian
John A. Ryan and economist John R. Commons, as well as social work spokesmen
such as Kellogg and Miss Addams. In 1912 social workers, especially
as represented by the NCCC, did not yet constitute a clearly professionalized
and definable group.
Nor did the social workers offer ideas on social insurance rising uniquely
out of direct contact with the poor. The 1912 NCCC report neglected
to discuss any structural details of their proposal, and its rationale
was only the very general one that social insurance was one of a set
of “minimum standards,” one plank in “the sub-basement floor,” which
constituted “positively the lowest stratum that should be tolerated
by a community interested in self-preservation.”5
The reform would distribute wage loses justly and economically, and
would provide for the “conservation” (a term dear to progressives) of
human welfare. The WCCC's suggestions stemmed from recognition of broad
changes in American conditions and institutions, more than from direct
experience with dependency among individuals, families, and neighborhood
groups. In 1913 the NCCC committee disbanded, moreover, and the American
Association for Labor Legislation became the focal point of social insurance
discussion--especially for an energetic but ill-fated campaign throughout
the ‘teens for state systems of health insurance.
Social workers continued occasionally to discuss social insurance,
however, and in the ensuing years they sometimes offered rationales
that did stem quite directly from social work practice. They were, for
instance, quick to see in health insurance a means of breaking a circular
relationship between disease and poverty that charity workers, from
their first-hand experiences, had long emphasized.6
Edward T. Devine managed also to defend social insurance with another
long-standing, very central concern of social workers, that of preserving
the family. Devine had no “sympathy for sneers against the fullest development
of family responsibility and solidarity,” and he argued in 1915 that
social insurance was fully compatible with that development--if properly
conceived and structured. He would not build upon the principle "that
society and not the individual is responsible for all these misfortunes
and burdens." Rather, he believed "that even sickness, unemployment,
and old age are personal and family matters" so that "ordinary
mishaps and accidents under normal conditions are to be met by savings
and the helping hand of relatives, neighbors, and friends." So
he disliked gratuitous social insurance or pensions systems. Even government
subsidies to contributory insurance were “a compromise concession.”
Harking back to the kind of private insurance concepts that Willoughby
had fostered, Devine preferred contributions only by employers and employees,
and “a rational distribution of risks on a sound actuarial basis.” Any
other system rested “on dishonest and fallacious grounds.”7
Devine's suggestions, which he explicitly labeled a “conservative”
theory of social insurance, were not entirely typical of social workers’
ideas. James Jenkins of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities consciously
or unconsciously recognized in social insurance a tool for redistributing
wealth, for he suggested financing it through an inheritance tax. More
carefully considered and realistic were the suggestions of John A. Lapp,
of the National Catholic Welfare Council. Lapp clearly understood health
insurance to be a mechanism for smoothing an uneven burden by spreading
it latitudinally throughout society, and explicitly emphasized the need
to remove the burden from the individual. He also suggested removing
a substantial part of it from workers as a class, for he emphasized
that industry and the entire community should contribute.8
Welfare workers on the eve of World War I had scarcely come to any
broad consensus regarding social insurance; and certainly they had not
as a group developed any deep theoretical understanding of the reform,
or even much practical understanding based on their professional contacts
with dependency. Even Lapp's arguments were not at all unique to the
social work profession, for they were essentially those that the AALL
was using to promote its model health insurance bills. Judging from
reaction to old age and mothers’ pensions, Devine’s antipathy toward
gratuitous systems was quite widespread. But that attitude was a function
of dislike for unprofessionalized public outdoor relief more than of
clear thinking about the social insurance mechanism.9 The social workers generally supported contributory
plans, but their interest remained occasional and incidental.
For the most part, social workers were preoccupied with their new professionalism
and its values. Those values centered around developing instruments
and standards of professional training, around agency and bureau building
and administration, and around techniques for treating individual cases.
They had little to do with the really fundamental question of whether
social workers should be trying to build some automatically-functioning
welfare mechanisms into America's developing institutional structures.
As America moved into the normalcy of the 1920s, the health insurance
campaign floundered and the increasingly professionalized social workers
grew even more indifferent to social insurance. Lapp and a few other
writers occasionally recalled the reform, and as reformers outside the
social work profession gained some success with old age pensions by
the end of the decade, discussion of them began to revive. But The
Survey, successor to Charities and the Commons and edited
by Kellogg, and The Family, organ of the new American Association
for Organizing Family Social Work (later the Family Welfare Association
of America), largely ignored the question. A polarization occurred
whereby the reformist wing of the NCSW became interested primarily in
the cooperative movement, defending, with divisive arguments full of
Marxist terminology.10 But what distracted more social workers were
developments that harked back to COs days: on the one hand an effort,
reminiscent of the COSs’ emphasis on cooperation and central registrations;
to coordinate local relief, family service, and other welfare agencies;
on the other, recalling the COs techniques of investigation and friendly
visiting, a new emphasis on social case work.
The effort at coordination took the form of “Community Chest” and Council
of Social Agency” movements. Like their COs predecessor, these movements
in the final analysis aimed to streamline the financing and administration
of charity based on the old relational approach rather than viewing
welfare as a problem of non-discretionary, institutional mechanisms.
The Community Chest was to coordinate private welfare agencies’ fund-raising,
the Council of Social Agencies to allocate the funds according to rational
plan. Community chests appeared under that name at the end of World
War I, but their roots went further back: to the “endorsement committees”
that local chambers of commerce began to create about the turn of the
century to screen charitable requests; and the “financial federations”
that they later developed to raise money in single, coordinated drives;
and finally, World War I. “war chests,” which collected funds from all
elements of the community for various wartime purposes. By the mid-1920s
about 200 cities had adopted the community chest plan, and the movement
was spreading rapidly. Welfare officials meantime created the central
councils, sometimes as antidotes to the control that businessmen were
able to exert over social work through the new fundraising mechanisms.11
In general, the chests and councils were conservative forces in welfare.
They formalized a somewhat uneasy but long-standing alliance between
private agencies and their wealthiest donors. William J. Norton of Cincinnati,
whom The Survey considered in 1927 to be “the dean of community
chest executives,” argued that chests were democratic because they induced
the poor as well as the rich to give; but when challenged he admitted
in 1928 that chambers of commerce and other “plutocratic” elements exerted
strong control. His defense was that these were “benevolent, high-grade
plutocrats” the “salt of the earth.” Some other social workers were
more skeptical.12 Nevertheless, any conflict was at
bottom not democracy v. plutocracy so much as which elite group would
exert dominant control: the businessmen in the fundraising organizations
or the social work executives in the welfare councils. And the
executives were, for the most part, deeply conservative. Their main
thrust was to shore up private efforts and refurbish established practices.
Their frame of reference, for practical purposes, was still the local
community, and they showed little inclination to depart from the particularized,
relational approach to welfare. They had little interest in national,
institutional reforms such as social insurance.
Let no one deduce from the community chest movement, however, that
social workers were indifferent to social insurance in the 1920s simply
out of preference for private over public effort.
In one respect, their attitudes toward public relief, the social workers
did not return to COs premises. Charity workers had become increasingly
friendly to public welfare beginning about 1900, and in the 1920s that
friendliness grew ever warmer. Charles H. Johnson of the New York State
Board of Charities spoke the dominant note when he declared in 1924:
“There is a place for both public and private work, and the best
results can be obtained by working in harmony and not by the affection
of superiority on either side." That was the ideal. In practice,
many social workers, including Johnson, assumed that private social
work had higher professional standards and was more flexible; and that
therefore it should lead and educate so as to improve public welfare.
The empirical evidence might not have supported that assumption--at
least Frank J. Bruno, ex-Secretary of the Family Welfare Association
of Minneapolis, implied a bit nastily in 1927 that private agencies
did not actually do much experimenting, and that their much-touted standards
were possible only because they could limit and select their case loads,
and slough off the most difficult cases to public agencies.13
But whatever its merits, even the idea of superior standards in private
agencies did not imply the old COs belief that public relief was inherently
unworkable.
Public welfare merely needed improvement. “Something important” was
happening in the “weed patch of the public service,” asserted Robert
Kelso of Boston as NCSW president in 1922. “Our departments of public
welfare are destined to a future of leadership enviable in the profession
of social work.” Gradually many social workers began to see public
welfare not merely as inherently workable, but as inherently better
than private. In “the steady increase of public governmental functions
in the field of social work,” wrote Kenneth Pray, Director of the Pennsylvania
School of Social and Health Work in 1926, there was “real democratic
growth and promise.”14
For the social insurance movement, however, there was bitter irony
in the changed attitudes. The new receptiveness to public welfare (although
in part merely a sequel to progressives' general renewal of faith in
democratic government) fed on the professionalization of social work.
Earlier, charity workers had put their faith for protecting high standards
in the private agency built on COs principles. But by the 1920s the
main guardian of welfare's morals had become, not a particular type
of agency, but the attitude of professionalism. With new organizations
and schools disseminating professional standards even to the field of
public welfare, social workers could at last entrust welfare even to
public administration. But the new development had a built-in constriction:
the standards and techniques that professionalism taught were those
developed in private agencies. And private agencies, because of the
limits of the jurisdiction of any particular unit, had always been local,
particularistic, even individualistic in their outlook. Hence they fostered
the personalized, relational approach to welfare, rather than a view
emphasizing the need to build comprehensive welfare mechanisms into
the larger economic structure. Consequently, under the hypnosis of professionalism,
even the new friendliness toward public action did not bring social
workers to any great enthusiasm for social insurance.
Indeed, the professional standards that social workers were developing
in the 1920s made social insurance appear quite irrelevant. The lure
of professionalization was leading social workers chiefly into the field
of “case work.” That field, like the new coordination of private agencies
through community chests and councils, lay squarely within what had
earlier been the COs philosophy. Case work was essentially a re-mapping
of the personalized, relational approach to welfare.
In the 1920s, the words “case work” automatically evoked the name of
Mary Richmond. In two books published in 1917 and 1922,15
and in frequent articles and lectures, Miss Richmond had raised case
work from a mere instrument in the charity worker's bag to a philosophy
that dominated the social work profession. The COs philosophy had, of
course, included as one of its important dogmas the necessity of careful
case investigation. In the 1890s Miss Richmond, then General Secretary
of the Baltimore COs, began to write as if it were the central dogma.
“Investigation” she eventually re-christened “social diagnosis,” in
order, she explained, to fix the case worker's mind “on the end in view.”16
It mattered little that her contribution was more emphasis than innovation.
As social work developed in the early decades of the new century, Miss
Richmond, aided by the wealth of the Russell Sage Foundation whose staff
she joined in 1909, managed to make her emphasis a foundation stone
of the new professionalism.
Thus she connected COs technique and modern social work practice through
the transition that was professionalization. Other professions, she
pointed out, each had a body of knowledge that all members had to master.
Part of the common ground for all social case workers would be “the
elements of social diagnosis.” Miss Richmond's “primary purpose . .
. in attempting an examination of the initial process of social case
work,” she declared, was “to make some advance toward a professional
standard.”17
However much case work theory gave its adherents a sense of professional
status, it pointed away from social insurance. With Miss Richmond it
rested on a concept of democracy that failed to see the need to translate
democracy into solid institutional arrangements. To her, case work was
essential to democracy, but democracy meant a “spiritual conviction
of the infinite worth of our common humanity.” It was not “a form of
organization but a daily habit of life.” Miss Richmond gradually drew
a dichotomy between case work and the kind of social reformism that
social insurance represented, declaring that reform should be “retail,”
based on intimate knowledge of individual cases, rather than “wholesale”
and general. Although she advised case workers to cooperate with social
reformers, gradually she spoke of social reform as a separate category
of social work, distinct from case work. Miss Richmond used the work
"social" differently from the meaning implied in “social
insurance.” She wished to apply it only to cases in which there was
genuine interaction between persons--not to “more or less arbitrary
groupings of human beings,” for example “dependents and delinquents.”18
Her definition, turning as it did on the relational concept, ignored
the situation in which human beings had in common exposure to a particular
hazard imposed by their economic roles within an increasingly structured
socioeconomic system.
Caseworkism undermined the social insurance movement by de-emphasizing
the economic and other environmental dimensions of welfare, and substituting
client-centered diagnosis. With case work becoming the rule, observed
Kelso in his NCSW presidential address of 1922, “food and shelter have
given place in importance to personal service.” Economic aid to dependent
families was legitimate, but only as one of a variety of personal services.
To give material relief apart from other case work activity, wrote Pray
in 1926, was to treat recipients “not as whole, indivisible persons,
but as members of a group or class, separated and differentiated from
others by purely external, essentially impersonal conditions.”19
Scarcely any concepts could have been more foreign to social insurance
than such de-emphasis of economics and rejection of objective classification
and impersonal criteria. By 1917, in place of economics, topics such
as “The Bearing of Psychology on Social Work” began to appear at NCSW
conferences. A 1930 book, A Changing Psychology of Social Case Work,
by Virginia Robinson of the Pennsylvania School of Social irk, represented
the full tide of a tendency of case workers to borrow concepts from
psychiatry and to look for causes of dependency within the individual.
Case work, Miss Robinson argued, should be set in a psychological rather
than a sociological framework, for psychology offered a much surer body
of data “for a procedure which it is hoped to make scientific and professional."20
Once again, considerations of professionalism and case-work technique
pointed social workers away from social insurance.
Even Miss Robinson admitted that it would probably be well if,
as “a wholesome corrective for the intensive concern with the individual's
inner life,” some social workers during the 1930s would return to “advocacy
of social reform such as old age pensions and health insurance.”21
In so saying she showed herself to be typical of the predominant attitude
of social workers toward social insurance during the 1920s: not unfriendly,
but simply preoccupied with some other concept of welfare. After their
initial bout with mothers’ pensions in the 'teens, social work theoreticians
seldom opposed social insurance. But their friendliness was most passive.
Casework-oriented social workers might appreciate social insurance
as one resource for a family, but not for its essence: an institutionalized
method of welfare structured to preserve people's dignity and independence
by automatically assuring an income as a matter of legal and moral right,
determining eligibility by objective criteria rather than leaving the
recipient to the discretionary judgments of officials and case investigators.
Stockton Raymond of the Associated Charities in Columbus favored social
insurance, but he criticized workmen's compensation in 1919 for dealing
with people “in job-lots” and not adjusting benefits to the particular
family's needs. “Wherever the human element is a factor,” he dogmatized,
“case work is the best means of approach.” As the old age pensions question
came to the fore Elizabeth Dutcher of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities
did not reject them, but warned in 1926 that the aged required “a careful
and somewhat specialized type of case work.” Kellogg, as editor of The
Survey, declared in 1930 that “there is need aplenty for both funds
and case work” for the aged, and supported a New York bill for gratuitous
old age pensions. He was doubtful about a contributory scheme that Governor
Franklin Roosevelt was promoting, for he thought it posed too many unanswered
questions.22
Case workers' failure to see the merits of a-dignified, automatically
functioning mechanism for preventing dependency was most remarkable
in the case of unemployment--which of all the hazards, seemed to call
most simply for some maintenance-of-income device. Non-caseworkers within
the profession such as the reformer John A. Lapp, president of the NCSW
in 1927, or textbook author John Gillin, had little difficulty
seeing in unemployment insurance a rational mechanism for replacing
sympathetic charity with systematic justice. Even Kellogg declared in
1929 that “while it may be that the English and German systems of unemployment
insurance will not fit our national temper, the challenge of their performance”
as bulwarks of protection” for workingmen's homes was “inescapable.”23
But among the true case work spokesmen, unemployment insurance received
scarcely more than a passing nod.
In the 1921-1922 recession the editor of The Family noted that
“unemployment insurance is being discussed.” But the solution of his
journal and its sponsoring agency, The American Association for Organizing
Family Social Work, rested instead on the ideas of Mary Richmond. In
1908 Miss Richmond had likened unemployment to a crowded hall with many
exits; and had marked the exits “emigration, migration, change of occupation,
part-time work, savings, credit, help of relatives, neighbors, and friends”--an
analogy that she revived in 1921 for a White House Conference on unemployment.
Her program followed from her analogy: the family welfare agencies of
each local community should quietly form a special committee to investigate
each case to decide which exit was suitable, to coordinate relief efforts,
and to protect high professional standards in face of temptations to
create dramatic soup kitchens or to provide “the old, wooden same-thing-for-everybody.”
In 1921 the AAOFSW and The Family issued reports that used Miss
Richmond's very words and phrases. A prominent 1923 book by Philip Klein,
a colleague of Miss Richmond at the Russell Sage Foundation, took the
same tack with an added emphasis on public works. Miss Richmond's general
approach appeared again in 1930 in a Sage Foundation-sponsored conference
of family welfare society executives, and in a Foundation pamphlet.24
Miss Joanna Colcord, director of the Foundation's Charity Organization
Department, did suggest in 1930 that when a local community formed a
special committee on unemployment, the committee might wish to study
unemployment insurance. “The question of how far government should participate
in insurance plans,” she explained, “will undoubtedly be under much
discussion.” But in her Foundation pamphlet she declared that “we are
. . . leaving untouched these larger economic considerations, and confining
ourselves to suggestions involving direct action.”25
In so saying Miss Colcord unconsciously summed up the attitude of the
first generation of professionalized social workers. Professionalism
had disseminated the limited outlook of private social welfare agencies.
Case work had become the most exciting new frontier of professional
thought. And neither private agency spokesmen nor case work theorists,
oriented as they were toward the local community or even more narrowly
toward the individual and his immediate, personal relationships, thought
much in terms of systems and institutional structuring. Hence they treated
social insurance with a passivity that was hardly more helpful to the
movement than outright opposition.
“The economic depression which started with the crash of the New York
Stock Exchange in October, 1929 marked a complete change in the methods
of American social welfare, particularly in poor relief,” declares a
typical textbook statement in retrospect.26 “Complete
change” is hyperbole. As in most historical upheavals, there was both
change and continuity.
Change was phenomenal. After a year or two
of depression, local charity agencies turned wholesale to municipal
governments for emergency funds. Cities looked in turn to states, and
by the winter of 1931-1932 the major industrial states were creating
new governmental agencies for emergency relief. By the summer of 1932
even President Herbert Hoover compromised somewhat his strong preference
for localism, and put the federal government indirectly into the relief
field by signing a law providing $300,000,000 for relief loans to state
and municipal governments. In May, 1933 Congress and the new president,
Franklin D. Roosevelt, created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration,
which went on to disburse more than $3 billion in three years for national,
state, and local programs of cash relief, work relief, and rehabilitation.
By the standard textbook criterion of shift from private to public initiative
in welfare, change was indeed extensive.
By the more fundamental criterion, impetus toward rationalization of
the welfare sector, there was: also some change. Quite naturally,
the depression revived in social workers the neglected interest in the
economic and environmental dimensions of welfare. The Survey observed
that at the 1930 NCSW meetings the fact of unemployment “cleaved its
way straight through the Conference sessions” and displaced a preoccupation
with “the drama of people's insides,” with a “new equilibrium between
individual and group concerns.” In a bellwether statement a year later
Caroline Bedford of the St. Louis Provident Association warned that
“adjustment to an unsocial environment is dangerous advice;” and declared
that family case workers were “as greatly concerned with the economic
factors of family life as we are with psychological and medical factors.”27
Social workers often expressed their reorientation in the language of
“planning.” The concept of social and economic planning had suddenly
become fashionable in intellectual circles, and alert social workers
were quick to adopt the smart new style. The planning idea, of course,
implied a rationalizing approach, a concern with the structures and
institutions of economics and welfare.
Yet by neither criterion, private-public nor rationalization, was the
change a revolution. In the change from private to public the depression
merely accelerated sharply a long-term historical trend, and social
workers' attitudes did not shift completely. Grace Abbott, Chief of
the U. S. Children's Bureau and outspoken champion of public welfare,
observed that virtually all social workers in the right wing which had
previously opposed extension of public welfare moved to the center,
and admitted its necessity. But they did not join the left, which maintained
that welfare was by its nature a public function.28
As for “planning,” it remained more rhetoric than reality, more a fashion
of language than a mode of operation. The concept with its implicit
rationalization could have produced changes of far greater moment than
a mere shift from private to public administration and financing. In
fact, it produced even less of a revolution.
The rationalizing process lagged partly because social workers adhered
strongly to reliefism, the habit of giving aid on the basis of need
with little thought to objective mechanisms and criteria. In contrast
to the faddism of planning, reliefism was a well-entrenched habit of
thought. Social workers could not throw it off in one grand conversion,
nor did they try. Consciously or unconsciously following the tradition
of relief, they responded with compassionate concern for human need
more than with hard thought about the technical details of machinery
for meeting that need, the kind of thought that a rationalizing approach
would have required.
Some social workers spoke out for social insurance under the rubric
of planning. “Our national life demands intelligent ordering, conscious
planning, and social control,” declared Clarence M. Bookman, Cincinnati’s
nationally-famous community chest director in 1934; and Bookman thought
that programs of social insurance with complementary programs to prevent
the hazards were planning devices in which social workers should take
interest. Bookman applied the planning concept at the level of specific
solutions for specific problems--a concept more akin to social insurance
than the more radical idea of one grand plan for all the processes of
production and distribution. In similar vein, Edward T. Devine declared
in 1933 that “planning is necessary,” but at the same time warned against
state socialism, guildism, and brave-new-worldism. Devine wished to
balance planning with the freedom of voluntarism. He favored compulsory
social insurance, but as a corrective for an economy built on voluntary
individual and group initiative.29 To such men, with their limited concepts of planning,
social insurance was one planning device.
To conceive a proper relationship between social insurance and the
relief tradition proved more difficult. Relief, in theory, had long
since become a mere handmaiden to case work. At first social workers'
inclination was to dichotomize, putting relief plus case work on the
one hand and social insurance on the other. “Now that the deluge is
upon us,” we have no definite program other than relief and individual
case work,” moaned John Fitch of the New York: School of Social Work
in 1931, as he argued for unemployment insurance. Linton Swift, head
of the casework-oriented Family Welfare Association of America concluded
in the same year that for most persons receiving depression relief “neither
social case work nor relief is ultimately a remedy,” and advocated social
insurance. Yet few social workers repudiated the philosophy underlying
case work, and in the end the logic shifted from dichotomization to
fusion. Russell Kurtz of the Russell Sage Foundation expressed the final
shift when he declared in 1935 that while the contractual insurance
titles of the upcoming social security program would not need case work
in their administration, the public assistance programs should incorporate
sound case work techniques; and even recipients of contractual benefits
should have access to case workers as a “collateral service.”30
One obvious way by which the social workers who championed social insurance
related their reform to the relief tradition was by residualism--the
concept of relief as the solution for the residue of cases that would
not qualify for social insurance. Social insurance, employment exchanges,
vocational guidance, etc. might “make relief in large amounts less necessary,”
thought Bookman, but there would still “be some need for relief—distasteful,
inadequate, and unfortunate as it may be.” For these Bookman advocated
“an entirely different and modernized system of relief for this country.”
Most social workers took an approach much like that of a Philadelphia
Community Council committee which reported in 1933: in practice it gave
a higher priority to a high-standard, federally-financed program of
relief than to either public works or unemployment insurance, on the
assumption that under existing circumstances relief could not wait;
but in theory it wished to see relief in third place, merely as a residual
measure to meet “the primary necessities” of those excluded from other
programs.31
Some social work commentators were reluctant to mix relief features
into the actual social insurance programs. Fitch objected to government
contributions to unemployment insurance on the ground that it would
change “the character of the plan from insurance to relief,” and to
mix the two was “bad bookkeeping.” Swift was not so adamant against
government contributions, but in his discussion of social insurance
he warned against “the easy acceptance of relief from tax funds as a
panacea for all ills.” Such persons conceptualized insurance and relief
as distinctly different in character. Relief, suggested Arthur Dunham
of the Pennsylvania Public Charities Association in 1934, was “a symptom
of a disordered society;” whereas social insurance was an expression
of “collective social intelligence.”32
Yet even such persons retained a relief outlook to the extent of being
concerned primarily with giving benefits to the needy, rather than with
other goals such as preventing the hazards or stabilizing the
economy. And many social workers went much further, made little distinction
at all between relief and social insurance, and would have structured
social insurance around a relief rationale. The venerable New Yorker
Homer Folks commented in 1933 that after all contributory insurance
raised its funds through taxes just as did relief, and that even Elizabethan
poor laws had been “a rudimentary form of general social insurance.”
He supported social insurance, but thought it more important to upgrade
relief to the point that its investigations not be humiliating and its
recipients not carry a stigma. Need should be the central criterion,
thought Folks. The prestigious female triumvirate at the Chicago School
of Social Service Administration, Grace and Edith Abbott and Sophonisba
Breckinridge, agreed. Referring to health insurance, their organ, The
Social Service Review, declared in 1934; "What America wants
. . . is universal provision” for “everyone in need, and
not a system that reaches only the contributing group.” Contributory
systems commended themselves to the powerful because they put a substantial
part of the cost on the workers. As models for social insurance the
Review suggested mothers' pensions and old-age pensions-- the
most relief-like of all programs.33 Persons such as
Folks and the Chicago group clearly wished to by-pass the problem of
residualism; the effect was a strongly reliefist concept of social insurance.
Whether by fusing social insurance with the casework tradition, by
the rationale of residualism, merely by beginning at the point of wanting
to provide compensation to people in need, or by actually favoring gratuitous
systems modeled closely on relief patterns, social workers almost
universally reflected the relief tradition. When they thought about
social insurance, it was reliefism, more than any other orientation,
that dominated their thoughts.
The chief effect of the relief tradition, however, was not to shape
but to displace social insurance ideas. “Even when the great crash came,”
a Pittsburgh settlement worker later observed caustically, “social workers
generally relied upon the individualist approach of the casework method,
believing that somehow they would be true to their professional training
if they could succeed in having casework techniques embodied in programs
of public assistance.”34 Many social
workers were reformist, but their reform still consisted primarily of
trying to apply to public welfare the patterns learned in private agencies.
Their reformism culminated in calls for a permanent “Federal Welfare
Bureau” that would coordinate relief nationally by giving grants-in-aid,
setting standards, and providing other services to state and local work
or cash relief and rehabilitation programs. The welfare bureau idea
was one version of “planning” the welfare sector, of course, and it
would have been possible to combine that version with the planning represented
in social insurance.35 But the social workers did not use the idea
in that way. Once again reform and rationalization meant to them streamlined
and centralized financing and administration, not a built-in, non-discretionary
welfare sector for the economy. They were thinking in terms of one grand
COs or Council of Social Agencies; not of social insurance.
The NCSW, for example, included discussions of social insurance in
its programs, but when its Committee on Current Relief Program reported
early in 1934 the report made no mention of social insurance. Instead
it concentrated on technical improvements in the administration of federal
cash and works relief projects. The FWAA made occasional and favorable
references to social insurance in its publications, but did not sponsor
thoroughgoing studies of the reform; and even its references were virtually
always mere incidental remarks in much larger discussions of relief
policy. The American Public Welfare Association, child of the depression
shift to public welfare, published a factual review of existing old
age pensions and unemployment insurance proposals in 1933, and at its
May, 1934 meeting it endorsed insurance for the unemployed, the aged,
dependent mothers, and the sick. But two months later it released a
program of “Legislation for Social Security,” that had as its central
concepts the federal welfare bureau and the upgrading of pauper relief
to higher-standard “public assistance.” Social insurance it included
as hardly more than one form of public assistance to be subsumed under
the new welfare bureau. The major contribution of the National Federation
of Settlements to tire discussion was a 1931 book of case studies of
unemployment, a book that suggested unemployment insurance but scarcely
gave it more emphasis than it gave traditional devices such as local
chamber of commerce and municipal committees on unemployment.36
Social workers promoted their casework standards and the vision of
an integrated, federalized system of public welfare in the hope of making
relief more adequate and liberal. But once again they tried to improve
welfare without a shift in philosophy. So they entrenched ever more
deeply the particularized, discretionary relief or semi-discretionary
“public assistance” approach.
A few social workers did perceive the inherent limitations of discretionaryism,
and catch a vision of some system that would make economic security
automatic and dependable. But they were radicals who were highly impatient
of the detailed, technical, piecemeal approach of categorical social
insurance. One of their most prestigious spokesmen was Mary Van Kleeck,
ex-settlement worker, official in the International Conference of Social
Work, and the Russell Sage Foundation's long-time Director of Industrial
Studies. But most of them were relatively young, untrained newcomers
to the social work field, in contrast to the old-line agency executives
and educators who provided most of the profession's favorable comment
toward categorical social insurance. Many were participants in a so-called
“rank-and-file” movement of militant, low-echelon social workers. The
militants fought for particular causes, such as better working conditions,
more professional training, and higher standards of case work and relief.
But their hallmark was militancy, not particularism, and they also challenged
the entire welfare system, calling for new and grand, overarching solutions.
Indeed, they challenged the entire economic system. Their ultimate solution
was total economic planning. After completing a study of America's chaotic
coal industry, Miss Van Kleeck traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932
and returned sparking enthusiasm for Russia's planned coal industry.
Thereafter she denounced the New Deal's piecemeal relief as hardly more
than devices whereby social workers helped politicians ward off the
needy's challenge to the status quo. Rank-and-filers and other militants
applauded loudly.37
But total economic planning was beyond the reach of mere social workers.
Consequently, the militants more and more rallied around another solution,
still radical and overarching in its conception, but beginning with
the welfare sector rather than with the entire economy. The Workers'
Social Insurance Bill, or “Lundeen Bill” as it was dubbed after Representative
Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota sponsored it in the House of Representatives
in 1934, proposed simply to guarantee a weekly minimum of $10 plus $3
for each dependent to persons who were unemployed or unable to work
“because of sickness, old age, maternity, industrial injury, or any
other disability.” It would benefit all farmers and all workers, whether
“industrial, agricultural, domestic, office, or professional.” Workers
and farmers themselves would administer the measure, and could withhold
benefits neither because of strike activity, nor for refusal to work
at substandard wages, under unhealthful conditions, or at “an unreasonable
distance from home.” The money would come entirely from the federal
treasury, replenished with taxes on inheritances, gifts, and personal
and corporation incomes over $5000 per year.38
The Lundeen bill had one virtue that would have improved almost every
other social insurance proposal advanced in the decades before 1935:
it gave unchallenged priority to the ideal of guaranteeing economic
security to all of the potentially dependent. It also was simple and
all-embracing-but these it carried to the point of being faults rather
than virtues. It was most vague about administrative machinery, and
totally lacking in guarantees against massive fraud and malingering.
Its economic theory was the naive assumption that bleeding the rich
would eliminate dependency. Politically it was fantastic: neither Congress
nor the electorate were ready either for the radical redistribution
of wealth or for the income guarantee that the bill sought. But such
earthy and technical considerations hardly deterred the radical minority
of social workers. Indeed, sentiment for the Lundeen bill penetrated
much deeper than the mere fringe of the profession.
Social workers' receptivity to the Lundeen bill was no mystery, for
the bill was well within the relief tradition. Its supporters recognized
that it was “insurance” only in that it guaranteed benefits in certain
contingencies, not because of its internal mechanism. Actuarial mechanisms
they explicitly rejected as “illiberal,” and spoke instead of a “compensation”
approach.39 The compensation approach was in reality
the strain in the relief tradition which had long sought to make benefits
more adequate, qualifications more generous. Its preoccupation was the
specter of people in need, not careful institutional analysis of alternative
welfare mechanisms. Its adherents might espouse economic planning in
general, but on specifics they were most simplistic and vague. So despite
their concern for some system that would make welfare automatic and
dependable, their thought was more akin to the liberal wing of the relief
tradition than to the institutional approach in welfare.
The route from traditional social welfare concepts to Lundeen-bill
radicalism was so direct that it was easily possible for social workers
to travel it with scarcely a passing gesture to social insurance. The
cases of Harry Lurie and the American Association of Social Workers
illustrated how easily social workers could almost by-pass the main
line of social insurance discussion, that of categorical insurance programs.
In the first several years of the 1930s Lurie, Director of the Bureau
of Jewish Social Research in New York, had interests similar to most
other liberal social workers:adequacy of relief, the shift from private
to public auspices, and the federalization of public welfare. Yet, more
than most, he was inclined to be critical, and to ponder social work's
philosophical roots. Without repudiating caseworkism, he declared in
1931 that case work was less significant than the fact that government
was beginning to single out certain categories of dependents, for instance
mothers and the aged, to support at levels above traditional poor-law
relief. He was receptive to the use of social insurance for some categories,
but his criteria did not point toward contributory insurance mechanisms.
Declaring that America's economic system neither distributed wealth
equitably nor provided economic security without remedial measures of
taxation and regulation, he wrote that “all forms of relief or insurance
are measures to equalize income.”40 Lumping insurance
with relief, and emphasizing redistribution of wealth, pointed toward
gratuitous rather than contributory systems, perhaps even toward some
radical measure. Yet in 1931 and 1932 Lurie was not noticeably radical.
For instance, despite the severe limitations of the July, 1932 law by
which the federal government provided relief loans to states, he accepted
the law as a significant step toward federalization of relief.41
At the depth of the depression Lurie was a prominent member of two
committees of the AASW, formed respectively in January, 1931 and November,
1932. The first, although a bit interested in unemployment insurance,
was like most social workers preoccupied with problems of relief. But
in May 1933 the second issued a report that dealt not merely with relief
but ranged broadly to working conditions and wages, public works, employment
exchanges, progressive taxation, and social insurance. Almost radically
it called for a minimum standard of living for all, “a comprehensive
plan of social and economic organization,” and something more than piecemeal
change. Still, its ideas on social insurance were quite moderate: it
was unsure that the government should share in unemployment insurance
contributions; viewed social insurance more as a device for saving through
time than for redistributing wealth throughout society; favored a psychology
of “self-aid and mutual aid rather than charity”; and called for a contributory
rather than a gratuitous system for old age.42 For
that moment in 1933 Lurie and the AASW were on the main line of the
categorical social insurance movement.
But by 1934, when the Roosevelt administration began in earnest to
formulate a social security program, social workers were becoming noticeable
radicalized. Apparently a major precipitating factor was their deep
disillusionment when Roosevelt decided in January, 1934 that the Civil
Works Administration, the most liberal of his job-producing public works
programs, was too expensive to continue. An AASW conference in February
called for “a permanent, comprehensive, well coordinated and adequate
system of welfare services, so conceived as to ensure ourselves” against
“common hazards” such as “unemployment, old age, widowhood, sickness,
or other factors.” But the conferees did not specify that the system
should use the social insurance method, certainly not categorical, contributory
plans. They did endorse the moderate Wagner-Lewis bill--a congressional
proposal to stimulate state systems of unemployment insurance through
tax credits--and reject the Lundeen bill. But that action struck one
observer as inconsistent with the theoretical stance of the conference:
that the “faculty distribution of wealth” was at the root of social
problems, and that welfare programs should rest on taxation of high
incomes and excess profits.43
At the conference Lurie called on social work to become less “remedial”
and more “revolutionary,” less preoccupied with “administrative technique,”
and more with “social change.” Within the next several months rank-and-filers
began to publish their own organ, Social Work Today, and Miss
Van Kleeck delivered a blistering but much-heralded attack on social
workers' close alliance with the Roosevelt administration. During the
remainder of 1934 the AASW's organ, The Compass, conspicuously
ignored Roosevelt's much-publicized effort to construct a social security
program. Instead, as the AASW prepared for its February, 1935 conference,
The Compass promoted the Lundeen bill. At the 1935 conference
there was almost universal dissatisfaction with the seemingly timid,
piecemeal measure that the Roosevelt administration had produced--and
deep division over whether to endorse the measure as a tiny step forward
or to reject it entirely. In the end the conference endorsed neither
the administration measure nor the Lundeen bill. Lurie, however, supported
the radical measure. And in contrast to its uncertainty on social insurance,
the entire conference strongly supported ever more liberal federal programs
of work and cash relief.44
Lurie and the AASW typified social workers' ambivalence toward social
insurance. Early in the depression they were not unfriendly to the main
line categorical insurance movement, but were preoccupied with expansion
of relief. So they contributed little to the hard, technical discussion
of social insurance, as if broad principles, especially belief in the
need to redistribute wealth, were enough. By the time the federal government
was prepared to move for social insurance, they were out of touch with
political currents and preoccupied with the radical, simplistic Lundeen
bill and with ever more relief. Attuned by the relief tradition to think
only in terms of the immediate response to need, rather than of structure
of mechanisms for anticipating need and maintaining incomes, social
workers as a group in the depression were unstable in their support
for social insurance.
The attitudes of ambivalence at the least, passive approval at the
most, had been typical of social work from the turn of the century onward.
At a high moment in the progressive atmosphere before World War I social
workers offered significant support for social insurance, but little
that arose uniquely out of their own first-hand experiences with poverty.
And already they were becoming preoccupied with their own professionalization,
around values that were not conducive to social insurance because they
stemmed from experience in private agencies. During the 1920s the preoccupation
with professionalism, especially around the techniques of case work,
continued. Caseworkism, and a renewed attempt to rationalize welfare
by the old method merely of reforming local financing and administration,
helped to keep the old particularistic, relational approach to welfare
intact. In the exigency of depression in the early 1930s, the reliefist
habit of thought came to the fore, in both traditional and radical forms,
and short-circuited tough thinking about social insurance. At no time
were social workers as a group openly hostile. But neither did they
grasp the logic of the institutionalizing approach to welfare that social
insurance represented.
NOTES Ch. 3
1
See Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist (Cambridge, 1965).
2
See Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections
(hereafter cited as NCCC Proceedings), Charities,
and Charities and the Commons' passim. For Hale's proposal see
Edward Everett Hale, “Old Age Pensions,” Cosmopolitan, 35 (June,
1903), 168-72; or Edward Everett Hale, We. The People:
A Series of Papers on Topics of Today (New York, 1903), 133-37;
“Report of Special Committee [on Workingmen's Insurance],” NCCC Proceedings
(1906), 452-57.
3
Owen R. Lovejoy, “Report of the Committee,” NCCC Proceedings (1912),
376-94.
4
Allen F. Davis, “The Social Workers and the Progressive Party, 1912-1916,”
The American Historical Review, 69 (Apr., 1964), 673-75.
5
Owen R. Lovejoy, “Report of the Committee,” 389, 377-78.
6
See, for instance, articles by Winster, Meeker, and de Schweinitz in
the Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work
(hereafter cited as NCSW Proceedings)(1919).
7
Edward T. Devine, The Normal Life (New York, 1915), 212-14.
8
James Jenkins, Jr., “Illness Insurance,” NCCC Proceedings (1915),571-72;
John A. Lapp, “Health Insurance,” NCSW Proceedings 1919 , 442-47.
9
See Chapter II for reaction to mothers' pensions.
10
See Roger Baldwin, “The Challenge to Social Work of the Changing Control
in Industry,” NCSW Proceedings (1924), 373-79.
11
Some primary-source articles are: Isaac Ogden, “Federated Support
of Charities; Is it Fractical?" Charities and the Commons,
18 (May 25, 1907), 227-29; Francis McLean, “The Trend of Charity Organization
and Endorsement,” The Survey, 22 (Aug., 1909), 707-10; American
Association for Organizing Charity, Financial Federations: The
Report of a Special Committee (New York, 1917); Sherman Kingsley,
“War Chests in Peace Times: The Contribution which Financial Federations
May Make to the Future of Social Work,” The Survey, 42 (May 31,
1919), 342-46; Sherman Kingsley, “Social Work,” Cleveland Year Book,1921
(Cleveland, 1921), /204-24; W.J. Norton, “Financial Federations--I.
Fundamentals,” The Survey, 47 (Oct. 15, 1922), 89-90; C. M. Bookman,
“The Community Chest Movement--An Interpertation,” NCSW Proceedings
(1924), 19-29.
12
William J. Norton, “Social Work Grows Up,” The Survey, 59 (Nov.
1, 1927),134-37; Joseph Lee, “The Chest and Social Work,” The Survey,
59 (Mar.,15,1928), 749-50, 792-93; Norton, “The Chest and Democracy,”
The Survey, 60 (Apr. 15, 1928), 90, 135-37; Edward T. Devine,
“Welfare Federations I. How Not to Do It: Philadelphia,” The Survey,
46 (May 4, 1921), 203-05; Chicago Council of Social Agencies, The
Financing of Social Agencies: A Fact-Finding Report, with
Special Reference to Raising Annual Operating Budgets (Chicago,
1924) ; and The Survey,1920-1930, passim.
13
Charles Johnson, “The Correlation of Public and Private Social Service,”
NCSW Proceedings (1924), 30-32; Robert Kelso, “Is There a Dividing
Line Between the Cases Which the Public Agency Should Take Over, and
Those Which Should be Handled by Private Social Agencies?” NCSW Proceedings
(1921), 215-18; Raymond Clapp, “What the Federations Are Doing to
Accomplish That End,” NCSW Proceedings (1924), 525-30; M. C.
Maclean, “The Effect of the Federation movement upon the Relationship
Between Public and Private Welfare Agencies,” NCSW Proceedings (1924),
520-24; etc. Frank Bruno, “The Integration of Effort in Theory and Practice
by Private and Public Agencies for the Common Good,” NCSW Proceedings
(1927), 242.
14
Robert Kelso, “Presidential Address,” NCSW Proceedings (1922),
11-12; Kenneth Pray, “Where in Social Work Can the Concept of Democracy
be Applied?" NCSW Proceedings (1926), 629.
15
Mary Richmond, Social Diagnosis (New York, 1917); and Mary Richmond,
What is Social Case Work? An Introductory Description (New
York, 1922).
16
Mary Richmond, “Report of Baltimore's Delegate to National Conference
of Charities and Corrections,” Charities, 3 (June 24, 1899),
2-4; Richmond, Social Diagnosis, 21.
17
Richmond, Social Diagnosis, 5, 26.
18
Mary Richmond, quoted in Gertrude Vaile, “Introductory Remarks” (to
the report of the Committee on Public Charities), NCSW Proceedings
(1917), 333-34; Richmond, What is Social Case Work?, 249;
Richmond, “The Retail Method of Reform,”, in The Long View: Papers
and Addresses, selected and edited by Joanna Colcord and Ruth Mann
(New York), 1930 , 219-20; Richmond, What is Social Case Work?,
222-25; Richmond, Social Diagnosis, 26.
19
Robert Kelso, “Presidential Address,” NCSW Proceedings (1922),
9; Kenneth Pray, “Where in Social Work Can the Concept of Democracy
be Applied?,” 628.
20
William Healy, “The Bearings of Psychology on Social Case Work,” NCSW
Proceedings (1917), 104-12; and NCSW Proceedings, 1915-1930,
passim; Virginia Robinson, A Changing Psychology of Social
Case Work (Chapel Hill, 1930), 48.
21
Robinson, Changing Psychology, 185.
22
Stockton Raymond, “Case Work and Industrial Standards,” NCSW Proceedings
(1919), 394-95; Elizabeth Dutcher, “Care of the Aged From the Point
of View of the Private Society,” The Family, 7 (July, 1926),
146; “The Seventh Age,” The Survey, 63 (Mar., 1930), 691-92.
23
John Lapp, “The Status of Social Insurance,” NCSW Proceedings (1923),
111-12; John Lapp, “Justice First (Presidential Address)," NCSW
Proceedings (1927), 3 -13; John Lewis Gillin, Poverty and Dependency:
Their Relief and Prevention (New York, 1925), 453- 86; Gillin,
Poverty and Dependency, 120-25; Paul U. Kellogg, “Unemployment
and Progress,” NCSW Proceedings (1929), 100.
24
“Editorial,” The Family, 1 (May, 1921), 58-59; Mary E. Richmond,
The Long View, 510-17, 520-21, 524-25; The American Association
for Organizing Family Social Work, “Distributing the Load,” The Family,
2 (Jan., 1922), Sec.2; Philip Klein, The Burden of Unemployment (New
York, 1923); Joanna Colcord, “Facing the Coming Winter,” The Survey,
65 (Nov., 1930). 206-08; Colcord, Recommendations Growing Out of
Experience (New York, 1930).
25
Colcord, Recommendations, 48-49.
26
Walter Friedlander, Introduction to Social Welfare (New York,
1955), 135.
27
Mary Ross and Paul Kellogg, “New Beacons in Boston: The Fifty-Seventh
National Conference of Social Work,” The Survey, 64 (July, 1930),
341-47, 361, 367; Caroline Bedford, “The Effect of an Unemployment Situation
in Family Societies,” NCSW Proceedings (1931), 206-07, 210.
28
Grace Abbott, From Relief to Social Security: The Development of
the New Public Welfare Services and Their Administration (Chicago,
1941), 11-12.
29
C. M. Bookman, “The Federal Emergency Relief Administration: Its Problems
and Significance,” NCSW Proceedings (1934), 28; Edward Devine;
Progressive Social Action (New York, 1933), 77-81.
30
John Fitch, “The Responsibility of Social Work in an Economic Crisis,”
The Family, 12 (Apr., 1931), 52-54; Linton Swift, “Community
Chests and Relief,” The Survey, 64 (Sept., 1930), 502: Swift,
“Social Insurance and Relief,” The Family, 12 (May, 1931), 81-85;
Russell Kurtz, “Social Case Work in a National Program of Social Security,”
NCSW Proceedings (1935), 224-36.
31
Bookman, “The Federal Emergancy Relief Administration,” 29; Kenneth
Pray, “Philadelphians Propose a Plan for the Treatment of Unemployment,”
The Survey, 69 (Mar., 1933), 135-40.
32
John Fitch, “Who Should Pay the Cost of Unemployment Reserves?”
The American Labor Legislation Review, 22 (Mar., 1932), 39-44;
Swift, “Social Insurance and Relief,” 83-84 ;Arthur Dunham, “Public
Relief--Mastery or Drift,” The Survey, 70 (Dec., 1934), 380.
33
Homer Folks, “Public Relief as a Social Problem,” NCSW Proceedings
(1933), 43, 45-48, 51, and passim; see also Folks, “Making
Relief Respectable,” in Savel Zimand, ed., Public Health and Welfare:
The Citizen's Responsibility--Selected Papers of Homer Folks
(New York, 1958); editorial, “Social Insurance and/or Social Security,”
Social Service Review, 8 (Sept., 1934), 537-40.
34
Daisy Lee Worcester, Grim the Battles: A Semi-Autobiographical Account
of the War Against Want in the United States During the First Half of
the Twentieth Century (New York, 1954), 366.
35
American Association of Social Workers, “Tentative Program AASW Delegate
Conference,” The Compass, 16 (Jan., 1935), 3-6; undated flyer
of the American Public Welfare Association, Legislation for Social
Security (referred to in Public Welfare News of July, 1934);
Bookman, “The Federal Emergency Relief Administration,” 29.
36
Joama Colcord, “Report of the Committee on Current Relief Program,”
NCSW Proceedings (1934), 111-29; Fami1y Welfare Association
Newsletter; The Family; Unemployment Relief Methods; Rose Porter,
The Organization and Administration of Public Relief Agencies: A
Guidance Report or Handbook Prepared at the Request of the President's
Organization on Unemployment Relief by the Department of Special Studies
of the Family Welfare Association of America (New York, 1931); and
otter FWAA publications, 1930-1935; passim; Marietta Stevenson
and Lucy Williams Brown, Old Age Security and Unemployment Insurance
(Chicago: The American Public Welfare Association, 1933); “Resolutions
Adopted at the Annual Meeting of the American Public Welfare Association,
May 23, 1934,” The Social Service Review, 8 (Sept., 1934), 529;
undated flyer of American Public Welfare Association, Legislation
for Social Security (referred to in Public Welfare News of
July, 1934 Marion Elderton, Case Studies of Unemployment (Philadelphia,
1931), especially the introduction by Helen Hall.
37
Jacob Fisher, The Rank and File Movement in Social Work (New
York, 1936); Social Work Today Vol. 1-2 (Mar.-Apr., 1934 -Apr.,
1935) , passim; Mary Van Kleeck, “A Planned Economy: As a National
Objective for Social Work” The Compass, 14 (May, 1933), 23-24;
Social Work Today (July -Aug., 1934), 4.
38
H.R. 7598, 73rd Cong., 2nd Sess. (1934); H.R. 2827, 74th Cong., 1st
Sess. (1935).
39
Phyllis Lowell, “I. Social Workers Take Counsel,” Social Work
Today (Mar.-Apr., 1934), 5; Dorothy W. Douglas “What Kind of Unemployment
Insurance?” Social Work Today (May-June, 1934 , 3; see also Dorothy
Douglas, “Unemployment Insurance--For Whom?” Social Work Today (Feb.,
1935), 9-12, 34.
40
Harry Lurie, “Spreading Relief Thin,” The Social Service Review,
6 (June, 1932), 223-34; Lurie, “The Place of Federal Aid in Unemployment
Relief,” The Social Service Review, 5 (Dec., 1931), 523-38;
American Association of Social Workers, “The Responsibility and Contribution
of Social Workers in Unemployment Crises," The Compass,
12 (Dec., 1930), 2; also “The Federal Relief Question,” The Compass,
13 (Nov., 1931), 1; Lurie, “The Drift to Public Relief,” NCSW Proceedings
(1931), 211-22.
41
Harry Lurie, “The Federal Relief Law,” The Compass, 13 (July,
1932), 1.
42
Neva Deardorff “Report of the Commission on Unemployment,” The Compass,
13 (June, 1932), 13; Committee on Federal Action on Unemployment, “National
Economic Objectives For Social Work,” The Compass, 14 (May, 1933),
10-19.
43
“Recommendations of the Conference,” The Compass, 15 (Mar., 1934),
7-9; Phyllis Lowell, “I. Social Workers Take Counsel,” Social Work
Today (Mar.-Apr., 1934), 5-6.
44
Wilbur Newstetter, “Second Thoughts on the Washington Conference,” The
Compass, 15 (Apr., 1934), 8; Mary Van Kleeck, “Our Illusions
Regarding Government,” NCSW Proceedings (1934), 473-85; “The
Delegate Conference and Some National Issues,” The Compass, 16
(Nov., 1934), 1; Lea Taylor, “Preliminary Report of the Conference,”
The Compass, 16 (Mar., 1935), passim; for Lurie's support
of the Lundeen bill see Taylor, “Preliminary Report,” 24; for conference
support see Taylor, “Preliminary Report,” passim.
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