A Public Charity: Religion and Social Welfare in Indianapolis, 1929-2002

Introduction

INTRODUCTION In , a girl pregnant with her first child arrived at Indianapolis’s Suemma Coleman Home for unmarried mothers. When the women running the home learned that the girl was Catholic, they quickly contacted St. Elizabeth’s Home, the city’s Catholic home for unwed mothers. Although the Suemma Coleman Home was not an official Protestant institution, the city’s social workers had long accepted that the Coleman Home would serve Protestant girls, St. Elizabeth ’s the city’s Catholic girls, and the Jewish Family Service Society Indianapolis’s Jewish girls. A clear religious division of labor defined maternity home care.1 In , when Stephen Goldsmith became mayor of Indianapolis , he initiated a restructuring of city government to privatize public services and encourage ‘‘public-private partnerships.’’ He called upon city churches to address social problems. His most visible initiative, the Front Porch Alliance, encouraged clergy and their parishioners to take responsibility for the social ills plaguing neighborhoods . In justifying his outreach to religious institutions, Goldsmith claimed they had previously played an important role in the city and that it was the rise of the ‘‘big government systems such as welfare’’ that had ‘‘marginalized’’ them.2 Although Goldsmith’s assertion about the historic role of religious organizations in the city’s social welfare system was correct, his contention that the welfare state had ‘‘marginalized’’ them was erroneous. The relationship between public and private social welfare agencies has been much more complex. Certainly since the New Deal of the s, government authorities have assumed greater responsibility for social welfare. However, the expansion of public programs did not always result in the withering of private ones. Rather than compete with the private sector, public authorities in Indianapolis—who were fiscally conservative—often turned to private institutions, including religiously affiliated ones, to sup-   A Public Charity plement the services offered by public agencies and in some cases to administer publicly financed programs. Using the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and the recent turn to faith-based organizations as benchmarks, I explore the relationship between religion and social welfare in Indianapolis within a national context. I evaluate the extent to which Indianapolis participated in or resisted the trajectory of national social welfare trends, highlighting three questions. First, what role have religious organizations played within the city’s larger social welfare matrix, both its public and private sectors? Second, how have the more general relations between the public and private sectors evolved? And third, how have notions of citizenship affected the delivery of social services ? The answers to these questions reveal that in Indianapolis, religious boundaries helped define social services both when the welfare state expanded its responsibility and when it devolved authority to private citizens. In the last two decades social welfare historians have discussed in detail the emergence of the welfare state, examining how and why the state emerged as the central actor. Much of this work focuses, rightly so, on the s, when the New Deal’s Social Security Act established Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and on the s, when the Great Society introduced such initiatives as Medicare , Medicaid, and the Community Action Program. We now know a great deal about the development of policy at the national level, and we continue to learn more about the delivery of services locally .3 Studies that focus on gender and race have been especially helpful in deepening our understanding of the values and assumptions that have structured the American welfare state.4 Less well understood is what relationship public authorities had with private social welfare organizations. Because public agencies provided considerably more material assistance and grew at a much faster rate than private agencies, it might seem unnecessary to consider the relations between these two sectors. There are, however, a number of historians who argue that public programs should not be examined in isolation from the private sector because historically , the line dividing the two has been far from clear, particularly  Introduction in the late twentieth century. Michael Katz, for instance, insists that an examination of the ‘‘blurred boundaries’’ between public and private social welfare will illuminate the practical and ideological underpinnings of America’s ‘‘semiwelfare state.’’5 Such a focus clarifies how public resources have never been sufficient, and how aid continues to be cast as a charitable endeavor rather than a right of citizenship. Theda Skocpol suggests that these ‘‘blurred boundaries’’ challenge those who believe that the welfare...