“The Struggle to Raise the Lower Classes”: Public Health Reform and the Problem of Poverty in Toronto, 1910 to 1921.

"The Struggle to Raise the Lower Classes'': Public Health Reform and the Problem ofPoverty in Toronto, 1910 to 1921. PAUL ADOLPHUS BATOR "Is Toronto a civilized city?" asked the editor of The Globe in the spring of 1912. The paper's response in the negative was based upon the reporting of the tragic deaths of four people the previous week, a statistic which showed the inadequacy of the city's relief system. A young fellow had committed suicide because of his lengthy unemployment; a man in his seventies had been found sick and starving, alone in a rented room; an elderly lady in her eighties had killed herself by gas asphyxiation; another old man had died, in jail unable to work and without a family or home. ''Can any community of four hundred thousand people possessed in the aggregate of vast wealth, call it [sic] civilized," The Globe bitterly complained, "that permits men and women to die of starvation?'' After diagnosing the state of Toronto's philanthropy, the newspaper refused to blame the widespread suffering of the city's poor on a lack of financing for charities. It placed responsibility on the fragmented system of denominational distribution where ''the professional mendicant feeds fat but the needy die like dogs in their kennels." I The Globe's editorial expressed the growing unease and confusion in the city with the prevalence of destitution. It reflected both the prevailing attitudes towards poverty and the desire for changes in the municipality's private welfare programmes during the decade after 1912.2 These years witnessed the unwilling but growing involvement of City Hall in the management of public and private almsgiving. The major catalyst in this development was the Department of Public Health. Before the First World War, the dramatic Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 14, No. I (Printemps 1979 Spring) expansion of Toronto produced a crisis in the Queen City. Fears concerning the deterioration of the social order were fuelled by an alarming rise in the cost of municipal grants to charitable institutions and the visible increase of slum conditions . In 1912 council appointed a Social Service Commission to investigate the state of charity in the community. Its reports over the next decade furnished ample evidence of a breakdown in the traditional methods for handling indoor and outdoor relief.3 In 1915, the Toronto Bureau of Municipal Research further inflamed existing reform anxieties by reporting a frightening jump of 400 per cent in welfare expenditures during the previous ten years.4 While politicians and ratepayers worried about the financial burdens of caring for the poor and the unemployed, the monthly reports of Toronto's Department of Public Health painted a grim picture of the destructive affects of destitution on the ordinary family. The aggressive campaign of health officials against preventable diseases opened the eyes of reformers to the economic realities of poverty. Public health reformers were forced to face the fact that if they hoped to save humans, especially children, from unnecessary death and suffering, they would have to deal with the problem of poverty. A major leader in the movement to reorganize Toronto's splintered system of charities was Dr. Charles Hastings, the city's Medical Officer of Health from 1910 to 1929, who was determined to solve the public health crisis. Until his administration , Toronto's working population, was regularly ravaged by preventable diseases such as typhoid fever, tuberculosis and diphtheria. Hastings virtually eliminated the health dangers from the city's milk and water supplies.s While many reformers rightly applauded the cleaning up of the milk and water supplies as a major improvement in the living conditions for ordinary citizens, Hastings remained unsatisfied and pushed for a broader social concept in preventive medicine. "Man does not live by water alone," he admonished his colleagues. "He suffers from other things beside typhoid fever, and a great many of these other things have deep roots and their solution is involved in the general question 43 of destitution and misery, and in poverty and relief. ''6 Charles Hastings' career illustrated the evolution of the public health movement's attitudes towards the problem of poverty and the poor. He typified the Canadian public health reformer. Financially...