Almost Worthy: The Poor, Paupers, and the Science of Charity in America, 1877-1917

6 The Potentially Normal Poor: Professional Social Work, Psychology, and the End of Scientific Charity

6 THE POTENTIALLY NORMAL POOR: PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL WORK, PSYCHOLOGY, AND THE END OF SCIENTIFIC CHARITY In the late 1890s and early 1900s, influential leaders of the scientific charity movement repudiated their initial premise that most poverty originated in character defects and shied away from the more draconian approaches suggested from that premise. Reformulating scientific charity, they adopted a more lenient and environmental view of poverty that emphasized economic and social justice for the poor and elevated societal causes of poverty to a status equal to or above personal defects. The change of direction breathed new life into an embattled movement, as demonstrated in the establishment of so many new charity organization societies, changes in nomenclature and categorization, the liberalization of relief policies, and growth of political influence. Among the rank and file of the movement, however, similar changes are more difficult to detect. In areas where the Indianapolis COS’s work was not warped by the gravitational pull of McCulloch’s personality— the system of friendly visiting and investigation, and the society members ’ work during the 1893 depression and 1907 panic—scientific charity didnotbearmuchresemblancetothescientificallyinformedandpotentially progressive project that McCulloch envisioned. While the 1890s brought some changes in nomenclature and relief decisions at the In179 180 Almost Worthy dianapolis COS, the statements made by COS members, reports of the friendly visitors, and the COS’s statistical data suggest volunteers deviated far less from the original intent of scientific charity: to control pauperism and instruct the poor. Lay members furthermore seem not to have shared the charity organization leaders’ interest in a scientific analysis of poverty, either in the form of expression it took in the 1880s, where leaders emphasized repressive treatment of the paupers, or in the early 1900s, when the same scientific values informed their more liberal critique. If the introduction of training courses designed to provide friendly visitors with a scientific perspective toward poverty had any effect on attitudes or relief decisions, there is little evidence of it in the records of the friendly visitors and investigators. The strains between national reform leaders and local volunteer friendly visitors concluded in the 1910s with the replacement of volunteer visitors who possessed uncertain levels of training in favor of professionally trained and salaried agents, the first social workers. As the movement professionalized, those leading the effort turned from sociology to psychologyandpsychiatryasthepreferredsciencesforreformingthepoor .1 Similar to what sociology had once offered scientific charity workers, psychology and psychiatry offered the first social workers new claims to expertise,greaterprofessionalrecognition,andrespectablemoderation. Psychologicalanalysisallowedthemtoreformthepoorwhileplacingresponsibility for poverty in individuals’ lack of psychological adjustment to their environment, thereby returning the onus for poverty back to the person and away from the society. The psychological turn further situated their profession in an enviable position where social workers could disavow eugenic solutions for their charges in one breath, while referring the more intractable cases to eugenics-friendly psychiatrists with the next. From Poverty to Unemployment: The Panic of 1907 While the national scientific charity movement faced its greatest challenges with the depression of the mid-1890s, in Indianapolis the defining period arrived in November 1907 when a financial panic and weakened employment market led to rapid withdrawals from banks nationwide. The Indianapolis Dime Savings and Loan reported $11,000 in withdraw- The Potentially Normal Poor 181 als in three months, while the COS registered a whopping 2,959 applications for relief from 1 December 1907 to 1 April 1908.2 Their annual report for 1908 added that they received 3,345 applicants for aid that year, when a normal year averaged only about 800. Another estimation declared, perhaps incongruously, that the COS had “received almost a thousand applications for relief each week” in February 1908. The COS described that winter’s work as “the largest and in some respects the most important done by the Society” in its history.3 Later than most of its brethren, the Indianapolis COS now declared its support for a more generouspolicyongivingrelief.ApamphletreleasedbytheCOSin1908 recognized that the economic panic marked the beginning of a new era in which it must prepare for a “much larger problem of relief” than its original mission; their work now moved away from detecting the indolent and the idle to concentrate instead on the problem of unemployment and economic issues such as family budgeting.4 Belying the bold new pronouncements, the COS’s relief projects stayed fastenedtotheunderlyingpresumptionthatreliefoughttotaketheform of temporary employment for those who would accept it, a position the COS expressed with...