On September 18, 1873 Jay Cooke, financial angel of the Northern Pacific Railroad, announced that his investment house was bankrupt. Cooke's failure opened the way for the outstanding business organizer, J. P. Morgan, to step in and impose a new degree of order and rationality onto the railroad industry. From railroads Morgan eventually turned his institution-building talents to the steel industry, and in 1901 organized the United States Steel Company. U. S. Steel immediately became a symbol of a shift from individual to corporate effort and to increasing organization and structure in America's business institutions. But the impulse for rationality and structure was broader than the business sector.  Cooke's failure exposed a chaos that went beyond the houses of finance. The depression which his bankruptcy triggered revealed a similar disorder and lack of dependable institutional structure to protect the welfare of the humblest laborer in American industry.

By the winter of 1877-78 an estimated twenty per cent of America's labor force was unemployed, with other laborers working only intermittently. For the victim there were no institutions that-automatically stepped in to provide a measure of economic security. A correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial offered him only the feeble advice to “make a small pack of his necessary clothes, commend his family . . . to the mercies of God and the care of the charitable, and set himself on foot if need be, into the country in quest of work." In many cases committing his family to a private charitable agency was a solution only if the unemployed man could convince the agency's officials that he was one of the “honest poor” who deserved help. New York's largest private charity, the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, declared that most idle workers belong to the “degraded class” and its help would go only to victims of “disabling sickness or other providential causes.” Charles G. Trusdall, superintendent of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society, also reflected the prevailing attitude that “a great many of the able-bodied men” could find work “if they were not too lazy to look for it.” If the manifest destiny of a man is the poor house," thought Trusdall, “we must let him go there.”1

Rather than subject himself to charity officials' judgments, the hungry man of the 1870s often turned to the soup kitchens, to the dinner tickets that the Young Men's Christian Associated sold to the wealthy to pass along to the poor, to ad hoc mutual aid societies, and to other sources of relief that were similarly haphazard. For shelter thousands slept in the police stations of large cities, even though philanthropist Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. found New York's stations “foul” and “filthy in the extreme.” Or the hungry man might receive some relief from public poor law officials, or if he were one of the few unionized workers, some trade union out-of-work benefits. But these too operated spasmodically, and were not the kind of well-rationalized institutions upon which he could depend to provide help when he needed it.2

The man suddenly unemployed was not alone in his plight. The aged, the sick, the victim of an industrial accident, and the widow or orphan who survived a breadwinner's death shared to a greater or lesser degree the same haphazard fate. In the field of social welfare American society lacked the institutional mechanisms needed to act adequately and consistently, But in the next half-dozen decades charity and social workers, economists, propagandists, medical men, labor leaders, businessmen, and others took up the implicit questions of whether the welfare sector should participate in the general institutional structuring and maturation of America's social system; and if so, what social ideas new welfare institutions should embody.

Leaders of public and private welfare agencies recognized the disorganized state of their field. Parallel to the men who "Morganized" business corporations, they worked for organization and rationality in their sector. With the formation of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities in 1863 states had begun to consolidate administration of insane asylums, penal institutions, orphanages, schools for the blind, and other instruments of welfare under new boards of charities and corrections. Early in 1873 officials of the Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois boards met to compare practices. From their informal meeting emerged what in 1879 became the National Conference of Charities and Correction. By the turn of the century the NCCC had eighteen offspring--state conferences of charities and correction.* Early NCCC discussions reflected the drive toward rationalization by attempting from time to time to build justification for a governmental role in welfare (no small problem, of course, in a day of laissez faire ideology), by a semi-scientific concern for classification, separation, and special treatment of particular types of dependents and delinquents, by debates over such questions as caring for children in orphanages versus placing them in foster homes, and by improving statistical information. Even more they were preoccupied with practical and technical matters incident to rationalized procedures, questions ranging from the mechanics of administering and supervising asylums, prisons, almshouses, etc, to proper procedures in the treatment and discipline of inmates. Improve legislation was also a “conscious aim of the conference,” dominated as it was at first by public officials who had “close and intimate relations with the governors of the states having” boards of charities. Yet one characteristic of the early NCCC severely limited its role: it confined its interests predominantly to the traditional classes of defectives, delinquents, and paupers who filled institutions of confinement. Although born in the midst at a severe industrial depression, at first it paid little attention to the kinds of welfare problems that such a depression brought to the surface.3 Before the welfare sector could mature, the discussion had to broaden to include the insecurity of persons who normally expected to be self-supporting, but who always faced the risk of falling into dependency-and occasionally fell.

The broadening occurred with the charity organization movement.  Impelled by an ideal of service to the urban poor, outraged at the welfare chaos of the 1870s, and intensely convinced of the wisdom of their solution, the charity organizers led a movement of great verbal and organizational vigor. A Reverend S. Humphrey Gurteen released their energies in 1877 when he founded the Buffalo, New York Charity Organization Society, America's first. From Buffalo the movement quickly spread to other industrial cities of the Northeast, to Cincinnati and Indianapolis, and on farther west and south. Within a decade a committee of the NCCC reported COSs in 52 U. S. cities, though Charles D. Kellogg, secretary of the New York society which was becoming the movement's leader, lamented that in some cities charity workers had done little more than adopt COS phraseology. The luxurant growth of the American movement drew from sources outside itself. It had a well-developed precedent in the English COS movement, from whence Gurteen had come, and partial precedents in the public poor relief system of Elberfeld, Germany; the New York Society for the Prevention of pauperism, founded in 1817; the New York Association of Improving the Condition of the Poor, established in 1843; and the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, imported from France in 1845.4 But it was not until the late nineteenth century, when the COS leaders codified some of their predecessors' ideas and injected them into the context of turbulent institutional change and growth, that their approach became a significant historical force in America. For the last quarter of the nineteenth century and into the first decade of the twentieth, COS ideas dominated not only the societies themselves, but they swept the NCCC and became the conventional wisdom of American attitudes toward welfare. Even persons not connected to the charity organization societies frequently were spokesmen for the COS philosophy.

The COS founders conceived of their movement as bringing rationality and order to the welfare field. “Are we, out of misdirected love to Christ, simply to multiply so-called charities . . .?" Gurteen asked rhetorically in 1882. Was there no "more rational, more philosophic, more God-like method of meeting Pauperism?” The Rev. Oscar McCulloch, founder of the Indianapolis COS, argued that charity organization was proper because it was an expression of a Christianity that had become “ ‘structural,’ that is, a part of the very structure of society.”5 But while some of the COS emphases and techniques did point toward more smoothly functioning, intelligent structure in the welfare sector, others militated against the rationalizing process.

The COS principle most obviously directed toward order and structure was that of cooperation. The ideal COS was a supra-charitable agency analogous to the trust that emerged later in business, an organization society in much greater part than a charity society. Its governing body was an executive council chosen from among all persons and agencies who were engaged in meeting or repressing the demands of the indigent for aid--persons and agencies ranging from public charity and police officials, through private relief agencies and fraternal societies, to churches. A purpose of the ideal COS, then, was to coordinate the efforts of the individuals and groups it represented and prevent duplication of effort. In the words of McCulloch, it was to “measure the work to be done and inaugurate schemes for doing it, which would be as wise and successful as the business methods and plans of its members.”6 One technique for cooperation was “registration,” the keeping of central, up-to-date files on all persons in the city who applied to charitable agencies for help, in order to prevent imposture and duplicate giving and to retain information useful for counseling. Another was systematic division of larger cities into districts, each with an office, a paid superintendent, and a local charity committee. The office kept case records on each individual or family applying for aid, and the district committee passed judgment in each case regarding the source and the type of aid most suitable. The aid might consist of material relief, medical attention, institutional confinement, help to find employment, or anything else the committee decided upon. The COS slogan of “cooperation”, meant primarily systematic compilation of information and a high degree of coordination of the process of deciding individual cases. These were the backbone of the COS drive for rational structure in the welfare sector. Charity was in great need of uniformity in definition, classification, and reporting, declared the 1887 NCCC Committee on Organization of Charity. The dangers of embarrassing our work by too rigid systemitization, of barring the entrance of new experiments, and of substitution stereotyped perfunctoriness for free impulse,” the Committee believed, were “at present remote.”7

The major purpose of the COS, toward which cooperation and all other COS techniques pointed, was a frontal attack on indiscriminate almsgiving. On the one hand, wrote Gurteen, "we find a vast band, composed of organized societies and noble-hearted individuals,” promoting their particular (often sectarian) hobbies and flooding the field of charity with a plethora of ill-conceived schemes and institutions. On the other hand was the relief that public officials dispensed under the ancient poor laws, which too often relieved “the idleness of the community at the expense of its struggling industry, fostering habits of dependence, destroying manliness and self-respect, and tending to render pauperism a permanent institution.” The hand of the public official moved “while the heart is untouched,” Gurteen charged, since the officials took "note of naught save the bare fact of destitution.”8 Intensive investigation of individual cases was the COSs’ most direct weapon against lack of discrimination. The investigators were usually well-to-do women who volunteered, without pay, to visit and become friends of the poor. These “friendly visitors” took their information to the district committee, which held conferences periodically to decide the fate of the cases, and to give the good ladies instructions. “Investigation,” "friendly visiting,” and “conference,” along with “cooperation” and “registration,” became rallying cries of the movement.

COS spokesmen considered their crusade against unwise alms to be without question an effort bringing rationality and order to the practice of charity. But inherent in their criteria were ambiguities and conflicts of assumptions and of goals. The resulting confusions limited the ability of the COS approach to impose order onto the welfare sector.

Efficiency was one criterion. Waste in charity had been  “so mischievous,” wrote Gurteen in 1882, “that no single object can well be imagined more worthy of the care of a well-organized body, than the protection of this alms-fund from waste and the alms-givers from deception.” It was the “avowed purpose” of his Buffalo COS to bring economy to the administration of both private alms and the city’s poor funds, Though his organization had other goals, “a society which did nothing more than this would add thousands of dollars annually to the disposable charity-fund--to the means of relief for the poor.'' In similar spirit McCulloch complained that confirmed paupers and frauds got half the relief that private and public charities dispensed. In fact, he believed, most charity was “doing positive harm by teaching the poor to be idle, shiftless, and improvident.”9

Such statements, expressed ad infinitum, never made clear whether the criterion for efficiency was economy to relieve the tax-paying and philanthropic classes, or some standard of the welfare of the poor. Sometimes the criterion was neither, but the general welfare of society. Josephine Shaw Lowell, prominent charity leader in New York City, argued that the aim of COS methods was the good of the entire community, not to do something for the poor. The

Rev. E. R. Donehoo of Pittsburgh did not hesitate to say that he was willing even to sacrifice the poor's welfare if need be. “Better for society that the deserving poor should be left to struggle on in their misery," he wrote, “ . . . than that the vicious methods of dealing with the poor as practised in other days should be suffered to continue with all the deplorable consequences, which are so palpable to every student of social science.” But few COS spokesmen recognized as did Donehoo that there might be conflicts among the goals that they wished to institutionalize. Most simply believed as did Mary Richmond, General Secretary of the Baltimore COS in the 1890s, that “kind and adequate treatment” and a “wise economy” went together.10 Assuming no conflict, the logicians of the COS movement never decided whether economy, the poor's welfare, or the welfare of society should be the predominant test of efficiency, or in what measures they might mix their criteria. The lack of clarity set limits on the COSs' ability to go very far toward developing a clearly functioning set of welfare institutions as a part of America's maturing social system.

In their confusion the apostles of COSs did not move much beyond the hoary categories of the “worthy” and the “unworthy” poor. Had not the ancient Roman orator Cicero declared that charity “shall be proportioned to the worthiness of the recipient; for his is the cornerstone of justice”? The “unworthy” were the able-bodied adult paupers, whom William P. Letchworth, President of the New York Board of Charities, described in 1884 as a fungus growth and “the most limpsy, hopelessly inert, and utterly good-for-nothing objects in the world;” or the vagrants whom Levi Barbour, President of the Detroit Association of Charities, described in 1881 as “poor, miserable specimens of quasi-humanity.” They did have souls, Barbour thought, “and what is more appalling, they generate souls with fearful rapidity.”11 Barbour probably meant to be sympathetic, not to imply dismay that the unworthy had souls, but the slip of his pen was telling. His kind of attitude persisted. In 1899 Charities, organ of the prestigious New York COS, published a harsh bit of doggerel, entitled “A Lesson of the Hour: By a Charity Worker at the End of a Heavy Day:"

Such moral strictures against the poor were frequent, and make understandable later denunciations by modern social workers and writers against the COS movement for being harsh and repressive. The latter-day denunciations, however, can also be too harsh. “Check benevolence?” asked Gurteen with hurt outrage, when accused of steeling men's hearts against the poor and trying to eradicate paupers by starving them. “God forbid” Few COS spokesmen were as much in tune with Social Darwinism as was Donehoo, who would not only allow the worthy to struggle if necessary for the good of society, but thought perhaps it might be appropriate that the unworthy be given “the privilege of starving.” Unlike the most radical Social Darwinism, the COS philosophy at least, allowed room for help to the worthy poor, Moreover, it recognized a wide range of environmental causes explaining why, in the words of McCu3_lc,cch in 1880, “many a hard working man and honest woman has broken under social pressure,” McCulloch saw urbanization, lack of work, overcrowding and bad sanitation, disease, and failure to provide children with playgrounds as causes of poverty, as well as personal failures such as inability to save and attraction to saloons. Even more sympathetic in its outlook was the 1885 report of the NCCC Committee on Charity Organization, which warned that scientific treatment, rather than punishment was the proper approach of  “charity organization, which is based on science.”13

Use of the categories “worthy” and “unworthy” or more typically, “honest poor” versus “pauper” coincided not only with the moral outlook of the day, but, being a form of categorization, with a quasi-scientific drive for classification. The trend toward classification of dependents and treatment of each according to his category had a long history in the building of orphanages, reformatories, insane asylums, etc. With their aspirations toward system, and rationality COS leaders worked to accelerate the trend and extend it. Gurteen, in his 1882 Handbook of Charity Organization, broke the two traditional categories of the poor down into five: the unfortunate, who were too proud to receive relief and bore their deprivations in silence; the unemployed, victims of financial and business failure; the idle and incompetent, victims of natural or acquired shiftlessness"; the vicious, dragged down by their habits of self-indulgence; and criminals. In 1886 the NCCC Committee on Charity organization suggested four categories and some rough statistics: those worthy of permanent relief (9% of all COS applicants); worthy of temporary relief because of sickness, death, accident, and such causes (25%); in need of work rather than relief (40%); and unworthy of any relief (26%).14 The NCCC scale was more functional in concept and hence breathed less of the moral judgment implied in Gurteen’s continuum, which with honest poverty at one end and criminality at the other suggested that even the victim of a financial depression had traveled one-fourth of the road to crime. But it still left wide latitude for highly subjective and arbitrary judgments.

From the perspective of efforts to rationalize welfare institutions, the greatest deficiency of the COSs’working categories was their lack of objective criteria rather than moral judgmentalism or callousness per se.                        Without objectivity they were functionally inadequate as concepts upon which to build smoothly-operating welfare machinery in which expectations and procedures were clear and treatment not left to arbitrary discretion. The first COS purpose, cooperation, seemed to make the COS movement a rationalizing force in welfare, But as the movement tried to apply its second and major purpose, an end to indiscriminate almsgiving, it could offer only a confused and highly subjective set of criteria. Consequently it very quickly reached limits of its ability to promote orderly institutional arrangements in the welfare sector.

A third COS Purpose, moreover, included strains that directly countered efforts to rationalize.

The third purpose was to uplift the individual, and help him to be self-sufficient. Often COS spokesmen enunciated this principle in ambitious terms of prevention, of aiding the person before he fell into dependency. In practice, however, the charity organization societies started with cases where need was already apparent, so that the task was restoration more than prevention. “To heal this sick one, to protect this weak one, to restore this vicious one, is the thing we have to do," declared McCulloch of the COS movement in 1885. “Thus, its broad object is restoration, --not detection of impostors, not relief.” From the very earliest days the apostles of COS saw possibilities for Prevention and restoration in environmental reforms, such as tenement laws and playgrounds, Often, of course, the friendly visitor began her uplifting operation by emphasizing the needy person's character and attempting to inculcate industriousness, providence, and sober habits. “A man with a bank account is twice the man that he is without it”15 was a common working assumption.

The emphases upon preventing and restoring, rather than allowing unfortunate persons and classes to continue indefinitely in dependency were in themselves rational enough. The COSs tried to be scientific. Demanding that the crippled and the handicapped perform such labor as they could before receiving aid was an application of the principle of division of labor, Gurteen argued; and giving an applicant just the amount of aid necessary to supplement his unfitness was a method, through corporate action, to defeat the scientific law of natural selection. The COS practitioners frequently tried to give their uplift emphases (even the character-building ones) rationality and concretions they sponsored industrial training and other vocational schools; fuel-saving, food-saving, and burial societies; penny savings schemes and provident loan agencies; medical dispensaries; tenement reforms; and wood-yards for dispensing work relief. But the efforts to be scientific and to translate ideas into institutional structures often raised questions which the COS philosophers scarcely tried to rationalize. Gurteen applied his principle of giving aid only to the degree of the recipient's unfitness even to widows with children, and The Charities Review agreed that work instead of alms was more important for women than for men, since a woman's “self-respect and independence spirit are . . . more easily broken.”16 Such expressions did not recognize that there might be dependent classes to whom the doctrine of “unfitness” or of work-not-doles did not logically apply. And when COS leaders built savings, loan, and mutual-aid institutions they ignored the question of whether it was logical to spread the financial burden of dependency primarily among the poorest classes. Even in the best COS attempts at rationalization of the welfare sector there were extended lapses.

The foremost COS technique for uplift was “friendly visiting” by volunteers, the forerunners of modern social case workers.  Friendly visitors, effused McCulloch in 1880, were persons who took "their warm hearts, cheery spirits and wise thoughts into homes where the need is.” There they established "personal relations" with the poor, in contrast to an organization that would treat them as members of a class “to be dealt with by rule."17 The COSs’ assumption that at bottom charity must be intensely personalized and individualized acted as a direct and potent counterforce to all their efforts to rationalize the welfare sector. The desires to bring order and organization on the one hand, and yet to rely completely upon personal discretion rather than established rules in the treatment of dependents on the other, was the COSs' central dilemma.

A stable equilibrium between the two countervailing forces was elusive, and by the mid 1880s the emphasis on personalized, individual case treatment began to displace COSs’ rationalizing tendencies. At the 1886 NCCC George Buzelle, General Secretary of the Brooklyn Bureau of Charities, offered friendly criticism of too much organization in charity, especially the proneness to categorize. “Once, some of us would have undertaken to arrange all the human family, according to intellect, development, merit, and demerit, in accurate divisions and subdivisions, each with a label, ready for indexing and filing away.” he told the conferees. But charity workers were learning that "the poor . . . have not in common any type of physical, intellectual, or moral development, which would warrant an attempt to group them as a class.” Few COS doctrinaires could have rejected their semi-scientific classifications so easily, but most would have agreed that “each case is a special case, demanding special diagnosis.” In 1885 McCulloch observed that “while for purposes of investigation and control of causes” the COS movement “deals with classes, yet its thought is to reach the individual man.” He noted with alarm “the tendency of all organized charity” to lose sight of the individual. “We ask the people to cease giving indiscriminately, to refuse the tramp or the street beggar” and “they do so; but ultimately” he observed, “they learn the lesson so well that they cease all personal charity.”18

The emphasis on the non-rational side of charity continued throughout the 1890s and into the new century. “Investigation to prevent overlapping and imposture” or “the development of the spirit of cooperation,” might need emphasis at some times, declared the editor of Charities in 1898. But at present “the cultivation of the spirit of service is the most crying need.” The displacement of the rationalizing trends in the COS movement reached the point where charity workers began to doubt the use of the word “organization” in the movement's name. Many felt that it implied a charity “separated from personal relations with the poor,” observed Miss Richmond in 1900. According to her the movement's central affirmation was not the need of organization but that "charity is a great spiritual force.” From her settlement house in Chicago Jane Addams also found “something distasteful in the juxtaposition of the words ‘organized’ and ‘charity’ ”--even to “those of us who feel most sorely the need of more order in altruistic effort.”19

The anti-organizational emphasis rested on the idea that charity was a question of relationships, rather than of institutional arrangements. Gurteen cast the idea in the language of alienation and breakdown of social solidarity, explaining that with the growth of population and large cities “the classes became more widely separated and the isolation of the poor, one of the greatest evils of modern society, began to creep in.” Most speakers expressed it more simply as a breakdown of mutual aid among neighbors, relatives, and friends. Factory workers might still collect a few dollars for the widow when a fellow-employee was killed, observed James Walk, General Secretary of the Philadelphia COS, in 1883. But they were too poor to give much. Charity organization, by contrast, brought the rich and poor back together. The bringing of the rich to the poor, as givers and visitors, was a central theme in the COS rationale. Both rich and poor stood to benefit, declared Mrs. Lowell in 1887. The rich could learn from the poor the “independence, the strength of character, the courage and practical ability which come from contact with real life,” while the poor could benefit from the “beauty and grace of character,” the "high moral standards,” the “trained intellect,” and the “refined tastes” of the rich. Miss Richmond made very clear the connections among use of visitors from the cultured classes, COS methods, and the relational approach to welfare. By breaking up large cities into “workable districts, small enough to be known and understood thoroughly by charitable workers selected for their devotion and intelligence,” she argued in 1904, the COS was facilitating “a return--laborious and awkward at first it may be, but still a return—to the village ideal.”20

People imbued with the relational concept of welfare were sure that any device for attacking poverty as a mass problem could not do much for persons. “Personality is to-day recognized as the fulcrum on which rests the lever which will eventually move society to a higher level,” declared Mrs. Edwin C. Bolles of New York in the 1893 Charities Review, as she discussed how to uplift paupers. No “patent mechanical device” could hoist the masses “in solid blocks . . . out of its misery and degradation.” Mrs. Lowell deplored the fact that people had come to think of organized charity as a kind of “machine” for distributing money. “They do not pause to consider how wisdom and kindness are to be developed by machine or to reflect that these attributes can only be exercised by human beings in their relations to human beings.” John M. Glenn of the Baltimore COS made it clear that he slid not consider the goal of charity organization to be smooth, reliable functioning with a minimum of human caprice. “By organization,” he declared in 1899, “I mean the union in harmonious action of various units--whether individuals, institutions, societies, or governmental bodies. I do not mean the creation of a mere machine which will run itself.”21 Such fear of mechanism hardly pointed to solutions such as social insurance.

Gurteen, father of the American COS movement, had warned charity workers not “to give out of pity, or simply because a man is poor, but because he is a man."22 Neither he nor his followers understood that institutional relationships might be just as human as personalized ones, nor did they perceive that they might do more for one's personhood and manhood by surrounding him with a set of thoroughly dependable, well-engineered, protective welfare institutions than by continuing to subject him to a type of charity which hinged on the judgments of upper-class friendly visitors and district committees. With their principle of cooperation they did develop some rationalizing and institutionalizing techniques. Their attack on indiscriminate giving appeared on the surface also to be a rationalizing influence, but the unclear and discretionary nature of their criteria blunted its effects. Finally, the kind of personalized, relational content that they built into their third principle, uplift, ran directly counter to any effect the COS movement had for fostering well rationalized structures in the welfare sector. While institutional structures were developing ever more rapidly in other sectors of the American social system, the COS movement imposed upon the evolution of welfare institutions some crippling limitations.

In short, the relational approach to welfare that was the central logic of the COS movement moved directly away from an institutional device such as social insurance. But the side currents of the period held more promise. The COSs released a burst of energetic discussion, experimentation, and study, and sometimes precipitated the kind of healthful self-criticism that prepared charity workers to move on to another stage of development with the passage of time.It gradually opened minds to an approach in welfare that stressed economics more than character, and evolved a more liberal attitude toward the giving of relief. And so while the mainstream of COS logic flowed away from social insurance, it generated eddies that flowed in the opposite direction. Observing the activities of American COSs in 1893, the London Charity Organisation Review noted especially the vigor of their experimentation. “There is at least no stagnation in their work,” the editor remarked. He need not have been surprised. Seven years, earlier Nathaniel Rosenau, Secretary of the Buffalo COS, explained why the COSs were trying everything from savings and loans institutions to temperance billiard halls. “What shall the poor man do if he may not beg and the rich may not give?” Rosenau asked rhetorically. The schemes were self-help devices to fill the void. 23

The experiments did not always succeed. Penny Provident Funds to help the poor save their surplus pennies could hardly have been expected to become a significant financial resource for welfare. The New York COS repeatedly rushed to explain that the value of its Fund lay in the teaching of thrift. Ansley Wilcox, Chairman of the Buffalo COS Executive Committee, complained that the traditional COS device of asking men to perform work to show their worthiness for relief did not work well in the 1893-1894 depression. Americans, German- Americans, and Irish-Americans refused to break stones for 10¢ per hour even when they were worthy, he said; while immigrant Poles and Italians gladly seized the opportunity for employment even when they did not need the money. Why non-working Americans were worthy when ambitious Italians were not, Wilcox did not explain. Other, more logical charity workers began to have doubts on other grounds--such as the “cruelty of sending narrow-chested tailors to the stone-pile”24

Given the prevailing folk mythology of self-help, such experiments probably had to precede any new approach in welfare. They were necessary, if only to prove their inadequacy. However inadequate some of the experiments were, they represented a spirit of search for new methods which prepared the way for better-structured welfare devices later on.

If a COS had any claim to authority over the various relief agencies it attempted to coordinate, wrote the editor of Charities in 1898, it was as “storehouse of information.” The early, inadequate attempts in the 1880s to classify the poor and the causes of their poverty were only a beginning. As the years passed, information in bulging COS files became the basis of new studies by COS staff members and university scholars. In Baltimore about 1890, the prominent reform economist Richard T. Ely sent his students to the local COS to perform practical work and collect data. In 1889 and in 1894 Stanford Professor Amos G. Warner, using COS case records, published studies of the causes of poverty that became landmarks not so much because of their content but because Warner harbingered a heightened attempt to be systematic and empirical in coming to conclusions on the question. With that attempt scholars became increasingly critical of their own assumptions and pre-set categories, and their studies grew more careful and precise. 25

Studies that the New York COS sponsored demonstrated how the new findings pointed forward logically toward insurance for unemployment, sickness, industrial accidents, dependent motherhood, etc. In cooperation with Columbia University professors and students the agency made a study of its records for the years 1890 to 1897 (a period including, of course, a sharp industrial depression) and reported that lack of employment was the most frequent cause of poverty, sickness and accident second, with intemperance third and shiftlessness a cause in only ten percent of the cases. In 1906 and 1907 Lilian Brandt, secretary of the society's Committee on Social Research, published findings that were remarkable for stating with precision who the poor were by age, marital status, family size, length of residence in the city, etc. She found that one-third of the families whom the New York COS had been assisting lacked male heads, that one-half of their members were children under fourteen, and that the over-whelming majority were not recent migrants to the city. In 1908 the Society's Publication Committee initiated one of the most systematic attempts ever made to compile comprehensive data on the social conditions of one industrial community, the famous Pittsburgh Survey. Among its significant findings were the reports of investigator Crystal Eastman on the extent of poverty due to industrial accident.26 Findings such as Miss Eastman's, Miss Brandt's and others' were by themselves almost sufficient causes for a new turn in welfare, and they eventually became the stuff of social insurance arguments.

Better information helped people in the welfare sector to think in terms of material aid. Before they could develop a rationalized set of welfare institutions, charity workers had to learn to think less in quasi-mystical terms of spiritual forces and intense personal relationships between rich and poor, and more in terms of the concrete and objective. By the end of the COS period there was emerging a new appreciation of dependent persons' material needs.

The COS’s traditional slogan was “not alms but a friend.” But, declared Brooklyn Bureau of Charities Secretary Samuel Bishop, a strong advocate of friendly visiting, in 1901, more and more charity workers were beginning to believe that there was “no absolute reason . . . why a friend may not give alms.” Charity workers were groping for a new formula. To be sure, moral judmentalism and the reflex to repress rather than assist the dependent were not dead. As late as 1905 Charities declared that most of the unemployed in America were improvident and self-indulgent types, and urged that the state do as Germany was doing, put them in labor colonies for indefinite periods until they found and kept regular employment.27 But there was a search for some new balance. “The difficulty,” wrote Edward T. Devine, General Secretary of the New York COS and editor of Charities, in 1903, “is that in every case that we encounter, in every application for relief we consider, in every poor family that we come to know, we do find some moral delinquencies, and we do find some economic shortcomings.” Devine went on to argue that “we may quite safely throw overboard once for all the idea that the dependent poor are our moral inferiors-- that there is any necessary connection between wealth and virtue, or between poverty and guilt.” Christ had enjoined men not to judge the merits and demerits of their fellows, and moreover, moral judgments were irrelevant to welfare. “I plead therefore for the consideration of the claims of the needy on an economic basis.” Devine was a remarkable bellweather of charity worker opinion, and his ideas seemed to point logically to some solution such as social. insurance. “What is the extent of the deficiency in their wage-earning capacity if there is one,” he continued, “and from what source may it be made good without injury to their economic welfare.”28

“How may relief be made to raise their standard of living rather than lower it?” Devine asked. The concept of standard of living was one of the seminal ideas making up the new emphasis on economics. Already in 1899 Annie S. Daniel of New York had done a study of the cost of living in that city, and in 1901 Homer Folks, a prestigious figure in New York charity circles, made reference to the ideas of the Englishman Sidney Webb and called for the application of the standard of living idea to private charity. In the first decade of the nascent century the notion of standard of living caught on, electrifying charity workers' discussions and appearing in a famous 1906 book by the Catholic social reformer John Ryan calling for a minimum wage.29 Proponents of the idea were naively confident that they could determine objectively what a minimum standard of living should cost. Objective criteria were elusive, and the minimum standard always remained a rather arbitrary concept. But it caused people in the welfare sector to delve into studies of budgets and costs of living and attuned their minds to thinking of welfare in economic and material terms, concrete enough to provide a basis for rational institution-building.

Charity workers reflected their new emphases on economics and standard of living by a new friendliness toward the giving of material relief. Early COS leaders had never completely opposed such aid, of course. Yet they so much feared having their visitors identified with almsgiving that they wanted no mixing of relief and COs functions. After a friendly visitor had investigated a needy case the district committee might decide that material relief was appropriate, but it should then refer the case to one of the relief-giving agencies related to the COS. One district committee which lapsed and gave $30 of its organization's money in direct relief was said to have been so remorseful that its members returned the funds from their own pockets. Yet at the height of the COS movement the NCCC Committee on organization of Charities had repeatedly to admit that in some places relief directly from COS treasuries “has been a deplored necessity.” It urged in 1887 that such material relief “must be reduced to a secondary incident of the work, or, better still, entirely abolished.” The trend however, was in the opposite direction. By 1907 even the original Buffalo COS had reversed itself and become a relief-giving agency.30

The change in attitude toward material relief was only a nuance, not a complete about face. In the early days charity workers saw relief as a necessary evil at best. It was, according to Alexander Johnson, General Secretary of the Cincinnati Associated Charities, something which hurt the recipient unless followed by some “treatment as an antidote;” or, in the contradictory metaphors of Mrs. Lowell, something to “be kept out of sight” and “looked upon as merely an unimportant matter,--while the building up of character, even in (or indeed especially in) those who come to us in the direst physical distress, must be always held to be the one vital work before us.” But about the turn of the century the charity workers began to see in relief a positive instrument for the treatment of cases. The new perspective related closely to another perceptible, shift in emphasis, that from character-saving to family-saving, “The Charity Organization Society believes in relief and is established to secure it,” wrote the editor of Charities in 1898, “It places high estimate upon the educational and social value of the family, and wherever there is any substantial basis for family life prefers to keep the family intact and to provide any amount of assistance necessary to that end.”31 Within the next half-dozen years the slogan “care of dependent families in their homes” became a dominant theme of charity conferences, and it was within that framework that speakers discussed the potentialities of material relief.32 By 1903 Lee Frankel, manager of New York's United Hebrew Charities, was prepared to argue at the NCCC that giving needy families a judicious amount of material relief would not pauperize them but would prevent “dependency from developing into pauperism, with its accompanying evils.” In fact, such aid was the prerequisite for other treatments, “Naturally other influences which might be brought to bear, education, moral or otherwise, can but help in the family's rejuvenation and development,” Frankel reasoned. “Without, however, a previous intervention of sufficient material aid, such other agencies will be futile and powerless.33

Charity workers were cautious. In 1900 Frank Tucker, General Agent of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, declared “that material relief is a thing to use wisely, and not something to be afraid of;” but at the same time he warned, “Don't use material relief when the problem can be solved in another way.” In 1907 Devine defended material aid only as a tool of self-help, arguing that under the right circumstances it could release “native latent springs of energy” in the poor man. The greatest skepticism came from those who in the next period of welfare history would emphasize the centrality of case work.  In the midst of the 1907-1908 recession Mary Richmond declared that “the real remedy for the present distress in Philadelphia is a mixture of common sense and kindness.” Three years later she expressed hope that “having survived our mistakes about the essential wickedness of material relief, we shall survive also the mistake” of overemphasizing it. Relief as such had no “moral or immoral qualities . . . . It can never occupy the front row, therefore, and can never be agitated for or against save as a part, a secondary part, of some plan of curative treatment.”34

Though the charity workers’ shift on material relief was cautious and only a nuance, it was a significant nuance. It helped to unknot a rope of ideas holding back the ability to think of welfare in concrete, material terms. The emancipation allowed a person such as Frankel to diverge away from the relational approach that Miss Richmond still represented and to think of devices that might deal with large numbers of welfare cases in a regularized, institutionalized way. As early as 1901 Frankel had shown interest in German social insurance. In 1908 he traveled to Europe to study this institutional mechanism. In 1910 he and an associate published a book on the subject.35 New emphases on a standard of living, caring for families in their homes, and material aid, like the habits of experimentation and information-gathering, were eddies in the COS stream of ideas, and flowed toward social insurance while the main current flowed away.

The injection of another issue into the stream, however, often turned the eddies into swirls. That issue was the role of public agencies in the dispensing of relief. Frankel was bold. “I even go so far as to question whether it would not be possible to devise some form of public outdoor relief,” he continued in 1903.   “The day may again come when the community, through its corporate agencies, may take over the responsibility of caring for its poor, by methods similar to those in vogue among our more advanced private relief societies.”36 Though Frankel was scarcely conscious of it, the issue he raised had two strains. One was the question of governments' taking much broader action in the welfare field, and in that his words flowed toward social insurance. If the process of building a rationalized set of welfare institutions was to go forward very far it needed freedom from the limitations of private effort. A distrust of public aid to people living normally in their own homes had to be broken down. The other strain was his suggestion that public efforts emulate those of private relief societies. Those words held far less promise for social insurance.*

*Roy Lubove of the University of Pittsburgh constructed his recent book, The Struggle for Social Security, 1900-1935 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968) around the thesis that affinity for private, voluntary action over public effort in welfare stunted the development of social insurance in America. It is my view that especially among charity and social workers much of the fear was not of government per se, but of any device that seemed to them mechanistic, and not built upon direct personal relationships. Lubove’s thesis carries a great deal of truth, however. His book and this study complement more than contradict each other.

The COS philosophy had always made room for the government to care for the kinds of dependents and defectives who required confinement in asylums, almshouses, and other bricks-and-mortar institutions. But it made scant room for the government to provide “outdoor” relief to people who did not need confinement. To the COS mind of the 1880s, it was simply the conventional wisdom, almost axiomatic, that public outdoor relief was generally evil. The attitude had a long history, so that throughout much of the nineteenth century public officials de-emphasized public relief in favor of almshouses. COS spokesmen were much impressed by the facts that in 1878, under the leadership of Mayor Seth Low, the city of Brooklyn had ceased distributing outdoor relief and recorded no increase in the almshouse population as a result; and that the following year Philadelphia took similar action with a like result. The spokesmen ignored the consideration that in 1878 and 1879 the cities were emerging from a deep industrial depression, and also Low's warning not to dogmatize from Brooklyn's results. Instead they used the Brooklyn and Philadelphia examples to abolish public outdoor relief wherever they could. Or if, as in most cases, they were not able to abolish it completely, they might at least prevent its becoming too institutionalized. At least R. D. McGonnigle, a public poor relief official of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, thought that any public relief “should be temporary, --no specific amount should be allowed any person or family.”37

While data from cities such as Brooklyn and Philadelphia were convenient, the arguments against public relief were largely a priori. It was a common assumption of the COS spokesmen that public outdoor relief not only burdened the public treasury but created a thirst for alms that added also to private charity's burden. In 1899 Frederick Almy of the Buffalo COS completed a study of public and private welfare in forty cities, and his data showed an opposite correlation: private welfare spending was high where public expenditures were low, and vice versa. So in a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose switch he concluded that public relief was evil because it acted as a check on “the more personal and uplifting private charity.” And despite the fact that the public systems were much the more generous in their per capita spending, he somehow was convinced that the private charity was hardly “less adequate or effective than the public charity.” Devine, in 1902, simply dispensed with data and stated the case against public outdoor relief. Private philanthropy, he believed, was a more generous and dependable source of money than were tax funds. The state should care only for those who required control as well as support, and stay out of the field of outdoor relief lest it discourage the flow of private gifts. Private philanthrophy was better, Devine declared with a familiar echo, because it was flexible, less mechanical, more filled with personal sympathy.  In addition to its inherent value the personal element would prevent the excess demands so often made upon public funds, since even well-meaning ministers and charity workers felt freer to recommend cases for relief when the fund was public and impersonal. Finally, there was so much room for improvement in the state's institutions of confinement that it were better to spend the public moneys on them.38

Throughout the COS period there were a few men within the NCCC dissenting from such a blanket indictment of public outdoor relief, usually representing the state boards of charities which had dominated the NCCC before the COS onslaught. In 1885 the report of the Standing Committee on State Boards of Charities told conferees that of course it was imperative to eliminate abuse in public relief. “However,” the report warned, “let it not be forgotten . . . that the business of the public almoner is to relieve, that an almoner is appointed not to withhold alms but to distribute it.” The NCCC's most constant defender of public relief was Frederick Wines of the Illinois state board, one of the organization's founders and its president in 1883. Wines could speak against indiscriminate almsgiving and “taking money from pockets of producers to lavish on consumers” as vigorously as any COS official. Yet in his presidential address to the NCCC he charged boldly that on the subject of public relief “a great deal of romantic nonsense is current on the lips of men who only partly comprehend what they are talking about.” So long as human ignorance, crime, and misery existed, there would have to be relief “sometimes even to those who do not deserve it.” Nor did considerations of common humanity necessarily mean that charity had to be private, individual. to individual. “Within certain limits, relief in some form is a right; the bestowal, of it is merely a recognition of the universal right of existence.39

Wines' friendliness toward government action was rooted in an institutional, as opposed to the COSs' relational, concept of welfare. In 1903 Wines cleverly chose the most rationalizing aspects of the charity organization philosophy and turned it against the COS opposition to public relief. “The final form of organized charity is public charity,” he reasoned.  “It is the only form which requires all to contribute according to their means and absolutely guarantees relief to all who need it.” Though he recognized the educative value of private efforts, he would not be satisfied until a given social reform took on firmer institutional form. “The highest expression of public sentiment, indeed the only authoritative expression, is in statutory enactments” he wrote in 1898. And he related public relief to the most sweeping institutional mechanism for welfare in sight. “Our public charitable system,” he declared, “may be regarded as a scheme of compulsory insurance.”40

Wine was not a typical spokesman for the COS period in American welfare, however. The more typical spokesmen began to respond to his kind of logic to some extent about the mid-1890s, and to become more receptive to public outdoor relief. Harbinger of their response was Warner’s 1894 book on American charities, which emphatically rejected public outdoor relief in the large cities of the East but concluded that it was the only effective form available among the more scattered populations in the West. Its problems, Warner reasoned, were matters more of administration than of principle.41 But for the COS spokesmen to accept what in fact existed did not necessarily mean that they would associate it with a more institutional approach to welfare and to the idea of insurance, as did Wines.

In 1900 Almy, who with his data on welfare in forty American cities had become a leading theoretician on the private versus public question, posed a searching question. Why not apply COS principles of investigation to public relief, he asked, and thereby “reform it instead of doing away with it?" Almy admitted that private charity could be “precarious” and “desultory,” and “just as vicious and pauperizing, just as wasteful, just as corrupt and profligate, as public charity.” It laid the welfare burden on the generous few and upon the impoverished treasuries of relief agencies, whereas public relief might spread it equally on all taxpayers. In the end Almy answered his own question with a “no” still clinging to the fundamentalistic argument that only private charity could provide a personal element, and that the tendency for public agencies to increase relief expenditures was ipso facto evidence of bad welfare.42 But his question would not lie down.

Writers in the charity field began increasingly to note examples in which public relief officials seemed to be applying COS principles with success, Mary Richmond's associate Francis McLean became an energetic propagandist for public welfare reform, first in his position as Director of the Field Department of Charities and the Commons, then in the same capacity after his department became the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation in 1909, and after 1911 as Director of a new National Association of Societies for Organizing Charities. In 1910 the kind of reform he had in mind began to materialize when the Kansas City, Missouri Common Council precipitated a “board of public Welfare” movement. The Kansas City board "municipalized" organized charity. With broad powers both for conducting public welfare and overseeing private, it was soon passing judgment on which charitable agencies were sound, acting as a central co-ordinator and clearing-house, and developing a staff of investigators for case work. Within the next decade the BPW movement spread to some fifty cities.43

But Boards of Public Welfare were not social insurance. They built on the precedents of the COSs, with their relational approach to welfare, not on the ideal of rationalized mechanisms that would surround the insecure with automatically-functioning, non-descretionary institutions for their protection. Willingness to use the machinery of government and law was a necessary prerequisite for the social insurance movement, toward which the growing acceptance of public forms of relief pointed. But the belief of charity workers that they had to apply COS concepts raised the possibility that their new willingness would not necessarily redound to the movement's benefit. That possibility became a central issue in social workers’ attitudes toward social insurance after 1910. Even in a renaissance of public welfare, the conflict between the relational and the institutional approaches to welfare continued.

The men of the COS movement left that conflict as their legacy, and failed to provide an adequate institutional structure for the welfare sector because they made two wrong assumptions. One error was their belief that they could formalize the directly personal, morally judgmental, discretionary principles underlying their relational approach, and make of them a well-functioning welfare system upon which the wage worker could rely if his need were genuine. Such a system could never be reliable, for it would always subject the applicant to the subjective decisions of investigators and officials, possibly even to caprice. In the other, more fundamental error, the men of the COSs assumed that only by structuring a system around direct personal relationships could they respect the humanity and worth of the men and women who would benefit. Their thinking was ironic. Americans had long believed that institutional safeguards around property were a means of protecting the owners' status and dignity as human beings. On that rationale the American social system offered to men of business a vast legal structure to protect contracts and corporation charters, which enabled them to bring organization and a degree of rationalization to their sector of American life. But the COS philosophers did not perceive that surrounding the wage worker with an analogous set of institutions designed to protect his economic status might be the best way to insure his dignity and humanity, Persons of property got their status within an institutional frame-work. The poor were to get theirs through personal relationships with their superiors.

Social insurance, being an institutional device, promised a new approach.

NOTES , Ch.1

1 Joseph Rayback, A History of American Labor (New York, 1966), 129; Herbert George Gutman, "Social and Economic Structure and Depression: American labor in 1873 and 1874" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1959), 320-23.

2 Gutman, "Social and Economic Structure and Depression," 320-23.

3 Andrew E. Elmore, "Presidents Address," Proceedings of the Ninth Annual National Conference of Charities and Corrections (hereafter cited as NCCC Proceedings,(1882), 10-13; Frank J. Bruno, Trends in Social Work as Reflected in the Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, 1874-l946 (New York, 1948),  3-6, 15, 29-30; Frederick H. Wines, "The Growth of the National Conference," Charities, 14 (July, 1 1905), 893.

4 Charles D. Kellogg, "Report of the Committee on the Organization of Charities," NCCC Proceedings (1887), 123-24; Kathleen Woodroofe, From Charity to Social Work in England and the United States (London, 1962); Arthur Miles, An Introduction to Public Welfare (Boston, 1949), 144-45; "Society of Saint Vincent de Paul,” Encyclopedia Americana (New York, Chicago, Washington, 1963), XXV, 206-07; S. Humphreys Gurteen, A Handbook of Charity Organization (Boston, 1882), 12-13.

5 Gurteen, Handbook, 20; Oscar C. McCu1loch; “Associated Charities," NCCC Proceedings (1880), 122.

6 McCulloch, "Associated Charities," 128-29.

7 Ibid., 126-27.

8 Gurteen, Handbook, 22.

9 Ibid., 64; McCulloch, "Associated Charities," 123.

10 Mrs. C. R. Lowell, "How to Adapt 'Charity Organization' Methods to Small Communities," NCCC Proceedings (1887), 135 E. R. Donehoo, "Combined Efforts in Charity Work," NCCC Proceedings (1885), 326; Mary Richmond, "Report of Baltimore's Delegate to National Conference of Charities and Corrections," Charities 3 (June 24, 1899), 2.

11 Cicero, quoted in René Sand, The Advance to Social Medicine (London, New York, 1952), 348; William P. Letchworth, "President's Address," NCCC Proceedings (1884), 17; Levi L. Barbour, “Vangrancy," NCCC Proceedings (1881), 133.

12 W.B.H. [sic], "A Lesson of the Hour:  By a Charity Worker at the End of a Heavy Day," Charities, 2 (Feb. 25, 1899), 6.

13 Gurteen, Handbook, 65; Donehoo, "Combined Efforts in Charity Work," 326; McCulloch, "Associated Charities" (cited note 5), 124-25; W. Alexander Johnson, "Report of Committee on Charity Organization," NCCC Proceedings (1885), 316.

14 Gurteen, Handbook, 21; Johnson, "Organization of Charity: Report of the Committee," NCCC Proceedings (1886), 171

15 McCulloch, "The Personal Element in Charity," NCCC Proceedings (1885), 341; Anne Townsend Scribner, "The Savings Society," NCCC Proceedings (1887), 144-45.

16 Gurteen, Handbook, 200-05, 60; Johnson, "Report of Committee on Charity Organization," 320; McCulloch, "Associated Charities" (cited note 5), 134; "Relief in Work," The Charities Review, 2 (Nov.9 1892), 37.

17 McCulloch, "Associated Charities" (cited note 5), 128.

18 George B. Buzelle, "Individuality in the Work of Charity," NCCC Proceedings (1886), 187; McCulloch, "The Personal Element in Charity,” 342.

19 “A New Name," Charities, 1 (May, 1898), 2; Richmond, “What Is Charity Organization?" The Charities Review, 9 (Jan., 1900), 492, 490; Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (New York, 1902), 25.

20 Gurteen, Handbook, 10; James W. Walk, "The Need of Charity Organization," NCCC Proceedings (1883), 141-43; Lowell, "How to Adapt 'Charity Organization' Methods”(cited note 10), 137; "Six Cities Within a City." Charities, 13 (Nov.19, 1904), 158.

21 Mrs. E. C.Bolles, "Would Direct Personal lnfluence Diminish Pauperism?" The Charities Review, 2 (July, 1893), 410 Lowell; "Charity Problems," The Charities Review, 5(Jan., 1896), 127; John M. Glenn, “The Need of Organization in Charity Work," Charities, 3 (July 15, 1899), 2.

22 Gurteen, Handbook, 59.

23 "An English View of American C.O.S. Work," The Charities Review, 2 (Mar., 1893), 282, reprinted from The Charity Organisation Review (London), Feb., 1893. Nathaniel Rosenau, "Schemes for the Self-Help of the Poor," NCCC Proceedings (1886), 176.

24 "A Year of Substantial Progress: Extracts from the Report of the Central Council of the New York Charity Organization Society for the Year Ending June 30, 1903," Charities, 12 (Jan. 2, 1904), 49; "Seventeen Years of Small Savings," Charities and the Commons 16 (May 5, 1906), 152; Ansley Wilcox., "Concerning Labor-Tests," The Charities Review, 4 (Jan., 1895), 119-24; Philip Klein, The Burden of Unemployment: A Study of Unemployment Relief Measures in Fifteen American Cities, 1921-1922 (New York, 1923) , 6

25 "What Is the C.O.S.?" Charities, 1 (Feb., 1898), 1; Robert H. Bremner., From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York, 1956 ), 56; Amos Warner, "Notes on the Statistical Determination of the Causes of Poverty" and "The Causes of Poverty Further Considered;" Quarterly Publications of the American Statistical Association., New Series I (1889), 183-201, and IV (1894), 49-68 (excerpts reprinted in Ralph and Muriel Pumphrey, eds., The Heritage of American Social Work: Readings in Its Philosophical And Institutional Development [New York, 1961], 240-251) . Warner published essestially the same materials in his American Charities: A Study in Philanthropy and Economics (New York, 1894), Ch. 2. See, for instance, A. M. Simons, “A Statistical Study in Causes of Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology, 3 (Mar., 1898), 614-21

26 Items, The Charities Review, 8 (Apr., 1898), 57-59; Lilian Brandt, "On the Verge of Dependence," Charities and the Commons, 15 (Jan. 6, 1906), 462- 68; Brandt, "On the Verge of Dependence,"Charity and the Commons, 17 (1906-1907), 395-402; see Crystal Eastman, Work Accidents and the Law (New York, 1910).

27 Samuel H. Bishop, “The Psychology of Charity Organization Work,” Charities, 7 (July 6, 1901), 21; Charities, 13 (Mar. 4, 1905), 517-18.

28 Edward T. Devine, “Economic Aspects of Material Relief,” Charities, 11 (Dec. 5, 1903), 541-42.

29 Ibid., 542; "The Cost of Living," The Charities Review, 9 (Aug., 1899), 237-39; Homer Folks, "The Care of Needy Families in Their Homes," Charities, 7 (Nov. 16, 1901), 415-18; John A. Ryan, A Living Wage, Its Ethical and Economic Aspects (New York and London, 1906).

30 Mrs. James T. Fields, "Upon the Constitution and Duties of a District Conference," NCCC Proceedings (1881), 127; Johnson, “Report of Committee on Charity Organization” (cited note 13), 317; Kellogg, "Report of the Committee on the Organization of Charities" (cited note 4), 123; "Twenty-five Years and After," Charities and the Commons, 19 (Nov. 30, 1907), 1130

31 Johnson, "Relief Work: The Dangers Attending Alsmgiving by Charity Organization Societies," NCCC Proceedings (1884), 77; Lowell, "How to Adapt 'Charity Organization' Methods" (cited note 10), 138; editorial, Charities, 2 (Dec. 3, 1898), 8.

32 See, for instance, "Organized Charity at Work," Charities, 8 (Jan. 4, 1902), 30-43; and Frank Tucker, "The Uses and Limitations of Material Relief," The Charities Review, 10 (Aug., 1900), 249-53.

33 "Opening Days of Annual Conference: Material Aid--Dr. Frankel," Charities, 10 (May 9, 1903), 481.

34 Tucker, "The Uses and Limitations of Material Relief,” 252, 250; "The Treatment of Poverty," Charities and the Commons, 18 (Sept. 7, 1907), 635-38; "Present Needs and Methods of Relief," Charities and the Commons, 19 (Feb. 29, 1908), 1638; Richmond, in "Discussion" following Frederick Almy paper, "Adequate Relief", NCCC Proceedings (1911), 293-94.

35 Lee K. Frankel, "Cooperation and Health Insurance for Consumptives," Charities, 7 (Nov, 30, 1901), 475-76; Lee K. Frankel and Miles M. Dawson, Workingmen's Insurance in Europe (New York, 1910).

36 "Opening Days of Annual Conference,'' 480.

37 Walter A. Friedlander, Introduction to Social Welfare (New York, 1955), 82-85. Two early documents state the rationale for ceasing public outdoor relief:  the text of the Quincy and Yates Reports may be found in Sophonisba P. Breckinridge, Public Welfare Administration in the United States (Chicago, 1935) 30-54. For Low's account of his action.-- see Seth Low, "Out-door Relief in the United States," NCCC Proceedings (1881), 148. R. D. McGonnigle, "The Causes and Prevention of Pauperism," NCCC Proceedings (1881), 252-55.

38 Frederic Almy, "The Relation Between Private and Public Outdoor Relief," The Charities Review, 9 (Mar. and Apr., 1899), 22-33, 65-71; Devine, “Outdoor Relief,” Charities, 8 (Apr. 26, 1902) 373-79, 386-88.

39 F. B. Sanborn, O. H. Young, and R. Brinkerhoff., "Report of the Standing Committee," NCCC Proceedings (1885), 402-06; Frederick H. Wines, "Presidential Address," NCCC Proceedings (1883), 15-18, 12-14.

40 “Summer School in Philanthropic Work: A Three Weeks’ Study of the Care and Treatment of Needy Families in Their Homes," Charities, 11 (July 11, 1903), 41; Wines, "Charity and the State," The Charities Review, 7 (Feb., 1898), 1018, 1014.

41 Warner, American Charities, 174-75.

42 Almy, "Public or Private Outdoor Relief," NCCC Proceedings (1900), 134-44.

43 Margaret E, Rich, A Belief in People: A History of Family Social Work (New York, 1956), 66-67, 70-71; Richmond, The Long View (New York, 1930), 627-30; L. A. Halbert, "Boards of Public Welfare; A System of Government Social Work," Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, (1918), 220-24; Roy Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security, 1900-1935(Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 94-96.