The Altruistic Imagination

A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States

John Ehrenreich

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780801471223
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Social work and social policy in the United States have always had a complex and troubled relationship. In The Altruistic Imagination, John H. Ehrenreich offers a critical interpretation of their intertwined histories, seeking to understand the problems that face these two vital institutions in American society.Ehrenreich demonstrates that the emphasis of social work has always vacillated between individual treatment and social reform. Tracing this ever-changing focus from the Progressive Era, through the development of the welfare state, the New Deal, and the affluent 1950s and 1960s, into the administration of Ronald Reagan, he places the evolution of social work in the context of political, cultural, and ideological trends, noting the paradoxes inherent in the attempt to provide essential services and reflect at the same time the intentions of the state. He concludes by examining the turning point faced by the social work profession in the 1980s, indicated by a return to casework and a withdrawal from social policy concerns.

1

The Origins of American Social Policy

Modern American social policy and the social work profession as we know it today were born in the Progressive Era, the two decades or so immediately preceding World War I.1 To understand social policy and social work by examining them in their contemporary, “mature” form would require a difficult task of excavation. We would have to unravel their “true” natures from their self-descriptions and aspirations, to get under their surfaces to identify the functions they serve, the social forces they represent, the logic of their structure. To go back in time, however, to a period when the very idea of “social policy,” the very concept of “social work” had not yet been developed, when no names had yet been applied to link disparate ideas, occupations, and social purposes, is to simplify our task radically. For in the formative period, the fears and hopes that created social policy and engendered social work were openly stated, clearly revealed.

At a distance of almost a century, we tend to romanticize the turn-of-the-century years. They were the “gay nineties,” the years of “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do,” of Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill to the cheers of small-town America, of children shouting “Get a horse” to the first intrepid motorists. But, in fact, the decades from 1877 to World War I were a time of deep economic, social, and political crisis in American society. Social work and social policy first emerged as a more-or-less conscious effort to deal with that crisis, to stabilize American industrial society. To understand that effort, we must first examine the turn-of-the-century crisis in some detail.

The half century following the Civil War was the great period of industrialization in the United States. From a predominantly agricultural, rural land, of no great importance in the world, the United States became the world’s leading industrial power. A few statistics tell the story well enough for our purposes: the 37,000 miles of railroad track of 1865 multiplied sevenfold, to 253,000 miles, 39 percent of the entire world’s total, by 1914. Energy production—a good measure of both industrialization and urbanization—soared: coal from 15 million tons in 1860 to 514 million tons in 1914, oil from 74 million barrels over the period 1857–75 to 266 million barrels in 1914 alone. In 1859, just before the Civil War, slightly more than 1 million industrial workers produced industrial goods worth about $2 billion and more than 60 percent of the U.S. labor force was still engaged in agriculture. By 1914 seven times as many workers labored in industry, producing twelve times as many goods as half a century earlier, and the proportions of agricultural and nonagricultural workers were reversed: 69 percent of the work force had nonagricultural jobs.2

Industrial growth itself is not important, however. The importance of industrialization lies, rather, in the impact that it had on society—on social institutions, on people’s lives, on people’s consciousness. And to see this impact, it is important to reemphasize the rapidity of the changes: they took place within the life-span of a single generation. Consider a few of the most striking changes:

First, industrialization literally transformed the American landscape. A predominantly rural and small-town society at the end of the Civil War, the United States became an urban culture by the 1920s. New York City, already over a million people in 1860, grew to some 5.6 million by 1920. Chicago, a town of about 100,000 just before the Civil War, grew to almost 2 million souls by the end of World War I. The growing cities absorbed the rural populations, literally swallowing up vast areas surrounding them. By 1910, 92 percent of the population of Massachusetts and 79 percent of the population of New York lived in what the Census Bureau defined as “urban areas.” The sense of community, the face-to-face interactions between people from all walks of life that had characterized the small town were, for most Americans, a vanished dream.

The vast increases in both the population and the physical size of the cities presented Americans with an entirely new set of problems. There was the problem of transporting people and goods to and within the metropolis, a problem met in the 1890s and early years of this century with the creation and expansion of systems of trolley cars and urban railways (subways, elevated trains). There was a housing crisis: vast slum districts arose as builders threw together flimsy, unsafe housing for the millions of new immigrants to the cities. The tenth ward on New York’s Lower East Side, with a population density of more than 700 per acre, was one of the most densely populated places in the history of the earth. One block of houses contained 605 apartments, accommodating 2,871 people; only 40 apartments had hot water, and there were no baths. One out of three people slept in windowless, unventilated rooms, and indoor plumbing was a rarity.

Under such conditions, epidemics were rampant; of every 1,000 urban infants, as many as 160 died before reaching their first birthday—an infant mortality rate not found today in the most underdeveloped of underdeveloped countries. Finally, the early years of this century were not immune from environmental pollution. In New York City in 1900, horses deposited some 2.5 million pounds of excrement and 60,000 gallons of urine in the streets every day, and some 15,000 dead horses were hauled off the city’s streets each year!3

The millions of people filling the turn-of-the-century cities came from rural areas within the United States and, especially during the period 1865–1914, rural areas abroad. About 10 million people arrived in the United States in the twenty-five years immediately following the Civil War, and some 17 million more in the next twenty-five years. Especially after 1880, the immigrants came predominantly from southern and eastern Europe—Italy, Poland, Russia, Greece. The new cities and the booming heavy industries were populated with the foreign-born. By 1915, 58 percent of workers in the iron and steel industry and 69 percent of those in the clothing industry had been born abroad. When unions and other forms of labor struggle emerged, as a consequence they often involved the foreign-born; tensions between the native-born and the foreigners, as well as among various groups of foreigners, shaped the American labor movement. More generally, issues of class and ethnicity were inextricably linked in the United States from the midnineteenth century on.

The new immigrants were not only poor; they were “different.” Their language was not English. They were, typically, Catholic or Jewish, not Protestant like most native-born Americans. They were, for the most part, rural people, and their ideas about work, time, land, money, and family had been shaped by the realities and traditions of agricultural communities. The corresponding values of an urban industrial society seemed quite alien. Conversely, to native-born, small-town Americans, imbued with the Protestant work ethic and other similar values, the immigrants seemed not merely “other” but directly threatening: loud, drunken, sexually uninhibited, violent, and altogether a threat to “decent” values and the structure of the American community.

Nor did the expectations of the immigrants always correspond to the realities they faced. It has been said that the immigrants came expecting to find streets paved with gold—not only were the streets not paved with gold, they were often not paved at all. And what’s more, the immigrants were expected to pave them! Some immigrants (most notably, most of the Jews) came to the United States expecting to stay; whole families arrived together, or, husband preceding, the family was fairly quickly reunited. Others came as “birds of passage,” hoping to make enough money to bail out or repurchase the family farm or to support the family in the old country through presumably temporarily difficult times. Many of these immigrants did, in fact, return: between 1900 and 1910, 2.1 million Italian immigrants arrived in the United States, but 1.2 million left the United States and returned to Italy. But many others, of course, perhaps contrary to their own expectations, did stay, bringing families over from abroad or creating new families in the United States. In either case, for thousands of immigrants, the United States offered a long period of a predominantly male society (79 percent of Italian immigrants, 70 percent of Poles during the years 1900–10 were male) followed by the problems of reconstructing a family in an environment very different from a traditional peasant village.4

Largely absent from the mass migration of rural people to the industrial cities of the northern United States during this period were blacks from the American South. Until shortly before U.S. entry into the war, it was simply more profitable for American business as a whole, North and South, to keep blacks in the South, through laws and terror, as a cheap labor supply for southern agriculture. With the advent of World War I, however, labor shortages, the cutoff of European immigration resulting from unrestricted submarine warfare, and the mechanization of southern agriculture produced a massive wave of north-bound migration. When blacks did come north, in the twenties and thereafter, they experienced many of the same problems of earlier waves of rural migrants (including the characteristic American class/ethnicity mix-up) in addition to the problems of race itself.

The rapid industrial and urban growth of 1865–1900 was accompanied by a rapid concentration of economic and political power. Before the Civil War, not more than a dozen or so Americans could claim to be millionaires. By 1900 there were hundreds if not thousands; some twenty sat in the U.S. Senate alone. One percent of the population owned 47 percent of the assets; and Andrew Carnegie’s income was no less than $23 million a year. Especially in the 1890s and thereafter, giant monopolistic corporations came to control much of the economy. By 1906 four groups of investors controlled two-thirds of the nation’s railroads. One company (U.S. Steel) controlled 62 percent of steel production; another (Standard Oil), 90 percent of oil; and another (International Harvester), 85 percent of agricultural machinery. It was the age of monopoly.5

As the new “robber barons” increased their own wealth, there was little concern for the human consequences. “The public be damned,” replied William Vanderbilt, when advised that discontinuing a fast mail train in 1883 would adversely affect the public. His father, Commodore Vanderbilt, had put it even more bluntly, a few years earlier, when one of his plans came in conflict with the law: “Law! What do I care about the law? Hain’t I got the power?” Judges and legislatures were bought and sold. The Standard Oil Company, opined socialist H. Demarest Lloyd, did everything to the Pennsylvania state legislature except refine it.

At the other pole of society were hardship and poverty. Turn-of-the-century statisticians estimated that a family of four needed about $750–880 a year for mere subsistence. But in Baltimore 40 percent of adult male workers earned less than $300/year; in New York State, average wages for factory workers were $8/week ($416/ year, assuming no layoffs), and dock workers averaged $520–624/ year. To survive, everyone in the family had to work. Or, alternatively, marriage was delayed—a single man, living frugally in a boardinghouse, could survive and in good times might even save a little.

For those who had work, conditions were harsh. The twelve-hour day remained common; holidays were few, and vacations for blue-collar workers were almost nonexistent. American industry was among the world’s most dangerous. On-the-job accidents killed 25,000 workers each year, and 700,000 were disabled, unable to work for four or more weeks. In 1901 alone, one of every 137 engineers, conductors, brakemen, and trainmen on American railroads was killed, along with one of every 161 miners in Colorado. And for workers used to the conditions of farm or artisanal workshop, the workplace was autocratic, impersonal, pressured, and unrewarding of skill, initiative, or creativity.6

In the harsh urban industrial world of turn-of-the-century America, childhood ended early. Two million children labored in factories and mines. Said Asa Candler, one of the founders of the Coca-Cola Company: “The most beautiful sight that we see is the child at labor; as early as he may get at labor, the more beautiful, the most useful [sic] does his life get to be.”7

The efforts of working people to organize to correct these situations were met with violence, court injunctions, and contempt. “The rights and interests of the laboring men,” wrote Pennsylvania and Reading Coal Company president George Baer, “will be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of this country.”8

Much of what I have said, in outline at least, is not unfamiliar. Today we congratulate ourselves on how far removed we are from those days, how much progress we have made. But as the Baer and Candler quotes suggest, the mere existence of poverty and hardship alone was not enough to move people to a recognition of that hardship, much less to sympathy or action to correct it. All the hardships I have described existed in 1880 or 1890; yet it was not until the very last years of the nineteenth century and into this century that the so-called Progressive movement arose, seeking to deal with the chaos of the new industrial order. For change to occur, it was necessary for the middle and upper classes to recognize the crisis in the lives of the immigrants and the poor as a crisis for “society,” that is, for themselves. Only then were they goaded into action.

By 1900, to the middle class, the crisis of industrializing society was felt. To see why, we have to go back to how the urban poor, the immigrants, the industrial workers, and poor farmers responded to their changing situation. Quite simply, they resisted the oppression and exploitation they felt, in a variety of militant ways, in the face of enormous risks.9

From the 1870s on, workers engaged in extremely intense labor struggles. When a nationwide railroad strike erupted in 1877, St. Louis, Chicago, and Pittsburgh experienced massive, deadly battles between strikers and troops. In the wake of the great railroad strike, cities all over the country built armories and strengthened their police forces, and states reorganized the National Guard. In the 1880s the Knights of Labor blossomed, some 700,000 strong by 1886, promising that, in the words of its leaders, “the attitude of the Order to the existing industrial system is necessarily one of war.” In the early 1890s came a massive steel strike at Carnegie’s Homestead (Pennsylvania) plant; a general strike in New Orleans; near civil war in the eastern Tennessee mining districts; another nationwide railroad strike in support of striking Pullman-car workers; endemic civil strife in the mining districts of Colorado and Idaho. And, at a varying pace, labor unrest continued into the twentieth century: in 1913 the nation’s newspapers were filled with photographs of police beating women and children as the children were being put on a train to escape the hardship and violence of a strike of immigrant workers in the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile mills. In 1914 armed guards at Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company destroyed a tent village of striking miners, killing sixteen (including thirteen women and children).

Along with unionism came the rapid spread of radical ideas. In 1894 only parliamentary trickery prevented the American Federation of Labor convention from adopting a resolution calling for the nationalization of the means of production. In 1901 the Socialist party of the United States was formed. Its presidential candidate, former railroad unionist Eugene Victor Debs, garnered 400,000 votes in 1904 and 900,000 in 1912. By 1912 the Socialists were able to elect 56 mayors, a congressman, and scores of state legislators and city councilmen; and the party published 13 daily newspapers and 298 weeklies. In addition, in 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World, an openly revolutionary union movement, was founded. In the next fifteen years a million or so workers became members, at least for a time, and the “Wobblies,” as they were popularly known, organized railroad workers, miners, longshoremen, textile workers, and even janitorial workers and cowboys.

Unrest was not confined to industrial workers. It spread to urban communities, where demands for bilingual schools and other community facilities emerged. New York experienced massive rent strikes; and in New York, Providence, and elsewhere, riots erupted over undue profits and exorbitant prices in the food industry. Farmers, too, shared in the discontent. Squeezed between falling prices for farm products and the monopolies that controlled the prices of seed, fertilizer, and agricultural implements, as well as interest rates and shipping costs, the farmers’ alliances and later the People’s party (the Populists) arose. Sweeping through large parts of the South, Southwest, and Great Plains in the 1880s and early 1890s, their presidential candidate, James B. Weaver, garnered 10 percent of the vote in 1892, and they elected governors, state legislators, and congressmen. The Populists were decisively defeated in the years following the 1896 elections, by electoral fr...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1. The Origins of American Social Policy
• 2. Casework and the Emergence of Social Work as a Profession
• 3. The Construction of the Welfare State
• 4. The Crisis in Social Work, 1929–1945
• 5. Social Policy in the Affluent Society, 1945–1960
• 6. Kennedy, Johnson, and the Great Society
• 7. A House Divided: The Second Crisis in Social Work, 1960–1980
• 8. The Next Phase
• Notes