The Poorhouse: America's Forgotten Institution (review)

No American institution carries the stigma of the poorhouse. Like everyone else, most historians have shunned and tried to forget it. Now, David Wagner has redressed the neglect with the first recent book-length account of poorhouse history. Wagner makes a compelling case for the importance of poorhouse history, which, for him, is not antiquarian. Rather, it provokes instructive reflections on how America treats its poor, elderly, and homeless citizens today.

Wagner concentrates on six New England poorhouses, or poor farms as they were often called, which he situates in the broader context of poorhouse history. He focuses less on early 19th century poorhouse origins than on the decades from the 1890s through the 1940s – a largely forgotten but significant era preceding the closing of most poorhouses after mid-century. In poorhouse records unearthed in various archives, newspapers, town and city documents, and interviews, Wagner has turned up rich examples that illuminate daily life, administrative practice, staff roles, and political conflicts. With these sources he has written a clear and lively narrative full of arresting anecdotes and quotations, with comments on historiography and related matters relegated to footnotes. At 150 pages of text, the book will be accessible to a broad audience and useful for teaching. His explicit reflections on the implications of poorhouse history for interpreting the present will prove especially thought-provoking and should spark lively debate.

Wagner emphasizes two themes. One is the agency of inmates who often subverted official rules and purposes and, even, on occasion tried to orchestrate public opinion to favor their interests. The mixed purposes poorhouses served constitute the other theme. Poorhouses were at once punitive and rehabilitative, deterrent and humanitarian, short-term residences and long-term homes. And they served diverse populations. Despite important differences from one another, most of them housed men temporarily out of work; the sick, mentally ill and long term indigent; unwed mothers; and the elderly. Like David Rothman, who writes about other Progressive-era institutions in Conscience and Convenience, a book he does not cite, Wagner roots the difficulties and failures of poorhouses in the contradictions at their core. In this argument, which applies more broadly to America's welfare state, Wagner is surely correct.

Nonetheless, Wagner underemphasizes the developing differentiation among 19th century institutions. With the creation of mental hospitals, public hospitals and orphanages, poorhouses became increasingly residual, homes for the elderly and others not serviced elsewhere in burgeoning, increasingly specialized state institutional networks. Wagner cannot analyze the impact of institutional specialization on poorhouses because he makes only limited use of the sources necessary for charting their demography: poorhouse registers. He discovered registers for at least two of his six poorhouses but used them in a cursory, almost anecdotal rather than analytic manner. He did not, that is, construct an inmate database which would have showed trends over time in age, length of residence, gender and other variables – data essential to supporting his argument. Indeed, he ignored gender ratios which, tellingly, in all poorhouses I have studied tilted strongly toward men.

Wagner's rather fuzzy periodization also neglects ideological and policy shifts in relief (the 19th century term for "welfare") – for one, the gradual displacement of the harsh doctrines and practices of Scientific Charity by Progressive-era reform in the late 19th and early 20th century. Contrary to Wagner's assertion, between 1878 and the early 1890s, 10 of the nation's 40 largest cities abolished public outdoor relief and others reduced it drastically. By the early 20th century, it had started to creep back into public policy. Except for passing reference to mothers' pensions, Wagner does not explore the important implications of this ideological and policy shift for poorhouses. Nor does he adequately explore the impact of the New Deal. Indeed, he barely mentions Old Age Assistance such as Social Security, a product of the 1935 Economic Security Act, and for many years far more important to the elderly. He also omits mention of the New Deal's crucial work-relief programs, whose...