* * * * *
Charles Stelzle, pioneer in church social service, who was the founder
and has for ten years been in charge of this phase of the work of the
Presbyterian Board of Home Missions, will leave that board on October
1. Mr. Stelzle plans to set up offices of his own as consulting
sociologist and efficiency engineer for national church organizations,
social service agencies and industrial enterprises.
The broader field which he proposes to cover on severing his connection
with purely denominational work Mr. Stelzle outlines as furnishing
“Expert service with reference to Sociological and Religious Surveys;
Exhibits; Social Service Campaigns and Conferences; Social and
Religious Work among Immigrant, Industrial, and Rural Populations;
Publicity, Educational, and Evangelistic Campaigns; Efficiency Methods
for Local Churches and National Organizations; General Industrial
Problems.”
[Illustration: CHARLES STELZLE]
Mr. Stelzle came to the church, when he was ordained minister about
eighteen years ago, as a worker who in his twelve years in the machine
shop had been made painfully conscious of the lack of understanding and
co-operation between the church and the workingmen. He organized the
Department of Church and Labor of the Presbyterian Church, and this
was subsequently expanded into the bureau from which he is resigning.
The Labor Temple in lower Second Avenue, New York, a religious labor
center which he organized a few years ago, has so evidently responded
to a need that the board has recently bought the property and put the
temple on a permanent basis. Labor Sunday, a nation-wide campaign for
temperance carried on through the trade unions and a press service
on social, religious and industrial topics which is used by 350 of
the principal labor papers, are other activities of the bureau. Mr.
Stelzle has served as arbitrator in many industrial disputes and has
established a permanent connection between the church and organized
labor through ministerial delegates to the trade unions.
In addition to this industrial work he was for a year executive
secretary of the Commission on Social Service of the Federal Council
of Churches, had charge of the social service features of one of the
Men and Religion Forward Movement teams and directed the surveys made
by the movement in seventy cities. He conducted the recent publicity
campaign for the Home Missions Council and the Council of Women for
Home Missions.
Mr. Stelzle’s successor in the bureau has not yet been appointed.
* * * * *
The appointment of Louis F. Post, founder and for fifteen years joint
editor with Alice Thatcher Post of _The Public_ and worker for many
public causes in Chicago, to the assistant secretaryship of the Federal
Department of Labor has been generally recognized, to use the words of
a fellow journalist, as something more than the dropping of a plum into
the gaping mouth of a hungry politician. Mr. Post is no politician and
was by no means hungry for the position, which he at first peremptorily
refused, feeling that he could not give up his work on _The Public_. He
consented only after pressure had been brought to bear upon him from
all sides and he had been brought to realize that a still larger duty
called him to the service of the nation.
The ideals which animated Mr. Post as editor and which he brings to his
work in the Department of Labor, he thus himself expresses in a recent
valedictory editorial:
“In citizenship it has been my object and that of my
editorial associates through all those years, to inculcate
a realization of the larger citizen, the civic whole, whose
voice, when conflicting selfishnesses cancel one another,
is in a very real sense ‘the voice of God.’ As single
taxers, we have worked with the purpose on the one hand of
lifting single taxers out of a cult and broadening them
with visions of the ever-pulsating world of men wherein
their cause must flourish if it is ever to fructify, and
on the other of disclosing to all readers with democratic
ideals the subtle power of this reform in democratizing
industry as well as politics. With more comprehensive
scope we have inculcated fundamental democracy as the
social principle of which every social reform is at best
but a practical application; and with scope still more
comprehensive we have identified democracy with that
element of the universal which exhibits the physical
phenomena of life as product, instead of producer, of those
faculties which some of us call ‘intellectual’ and others
‘spiritual.’”
* * * * *
James Mullenbach’s appointment as superintendent of the great
Cook County infirmary for the poor of Chicago at Oak Forest is as
creditable to President Alexander A. McCormick of the Board of County
Commissioners as it is to Mr. Mullenbach.
With his experience as settlement resident at Chicago Commons,
as superintendent of the Municipal Lodging House, as assistant
superintendent of the United Charities, as secretary of the Land,
Labor, and Immigration Officials’ Conference, and as the representative
of the social agencies reporting social legislation at the Illinois
Legislature, Mr. Mullenbach is regarded as the ideal head for the
greatest county institutions west of New York.
It is significant of the new times to find a college educated man who
rounded out his professional training on a fellowship in a German
University, being sought for and accepting a position, to which only a
political appointee has hitherto been appointed. No higher token of the
triumph of patriotism on partisanship has been registered in America
than this, and many another, achievement of Mr. McCormick in rescuing
the County of Cook from the spoils exploitation of his predecessor and
in establishing the efficient business management and the humane social
standards of his own administration.
* * * * *
The recent death of Edna P. Alter in a trolley wreck near Pasadena,
Cal., removes one of the younger workers in the field of organized
charity. Miss Alter knew every phase of work in the homes of the
poor for she entered the Hudson district of the New York Charity
Organization Society as district nurse in 1908, later rounded out her
preparation for the work of organized charity by a summer course in the
New York School of Philanthropy, and became assistant agent in that
district. In the fall of 1910 she rose to the responsible position of
secretary of the Associated Charities of Pasadena.
Leo G. MacLaughlin, president of that society, speaks of her work as
“sympathetic, kindly, warm-hearted and keenly intelligent. She was one
of the founders of the local Associated Charities and her work won
favorable attention over a wide area.”
* * * * *
A few years of school dental clinics have made “toothbrush drills” a
fairly familiar idea in many cities. It took the Toronto public nurses,
or rather their supervisor, Lina L. Rogers, to originate another drill
quite as unique and important.
Since last October the school children of Toronto, in squads of twenty
have practised daily “nose-blowing drills” and the effect on the
freshness of the atmosphere of the schoolrooms has been so noticeable
that the teachers have become assiduous in seeing to it that no child
comes to school unprovided with a pocket handkerchief. They often,
indeed, themselves order the drills without waiting for the coming of
the nurse. The effect of the drill is perceptible already on individual
children, in cases of catarrh, and the doctors predict that it will
have an appreciable effect in time in lessening adenoids and other
throat and nose affections.
It was Miss Rogers, who has recently become Mrs. W. E. Struthers, who,
when a nurse at the Henry Street Settlement in New York in 1902 was
chosen to demonstrate at the expense of the settlement in four local
schools the need of municipal school nurses. This she did with such
success that within a month the Department of Health took over the
financial responsibility and extended the work, making her supervisor.
With a subsequent seven years’ experience in this capacity she went to
Toronto in 1909, where she has done pioneer health work in the schools.
These are now fully equipped with school nurses and with dental care,
one of the four clinics now carried on in connection with the school
system having been equipped with a model outfit at the expense of the
enthusiastic nurses themselves.
[Illustration: MRS. W. E. STRUTHERS]
Besides nose-blowing drills Toronto has undertaken another departure
in school health work, in establishing a real open-air school, on the
model of the Forest School at Charlottenberg in Germany. To a private
park on the outskirts of Toronto, which has been loaned for this
purpose and equipped with shacks, fifty anaemic or delicate children
were taken for three months last winter by special trolley cars each
morning and not returned till twelve hours later, thus living and
learning in the open air. No tubercular children were taken, sanatorium
care being provided for them. Five meals are furnished, the trolley
service is given free by the street railway company, a nurse is in
attendance and three teachers, lessons are given for three and one-half
hours in the open air. There is a great deal of outdoor play, and
nose-blowing and toothbrush drills and a weekly bath form part of this
school course, as well as a two-hour nap each day. The experiment has
been so successful that the number of children will be increased next
year to one hundred and the school term lengthened to six months.
As wife of Dr. W. E. Struthers, chief medical inspector of the schools,
Mrs. Struthers will continue her interest in the physical care of
school children. She will also have the direction of the work until her
successor, not yet appointed, is broken in.
* * * * *
To make charity administration measure up to strict tests of business
efficiency--this has been the ideal that Howell Wright has put in
practice as superintendent of the Cleveland Associated Charities. He
has succeeded so well that Mayor Baker has recently appointed him
superintendent of the City Hospital, with instructions to use the same
methods there.
Mr. Wright has no medical training. He is a social worker with a
business twist. His new appointment illustrates the growing tendency
today to put at the head of great specialized institutions, men who
have a broad social outlook combined with executive power, but minus
specialized training.
[Illustration: HOWELL WRIGHT]
The City Hospital has been a bit too professional in the past. It
has looked very closely to its diagnosis and temperature charts and
instruments. But almost no thought has been given to the human and
social background of its patients, and patients “cured” of physical
ills have been turned out with all their social ills still festering,
the inevitable result being that they speedily returned to the City
Hospital to be “cured” again.
The hope is that Mr. Wright will make of the City Hospital a social
institution, looking backward and forward into causes and effects.
Since Mr. Wright received his master’s degree from Yale University
in 1907 he has served as special agent of the Massachusetts S. P. C.
C. and as general secretary of the Norwood Civic Association. During
the past year as superintendent of the Cleveland Associated Charities
his chief move has been the abandonment of the general employment
bureau for the unskilled, which had been conducted by the Associated
Charities since 1886. After a searching study of the charitable field
and a special study of such bureaus in other places it was decided
to transfer this work to the State Employment Bureau in the city and
the experiment has so far justified itself. Mr. Wright’s service has
also been notable in bringing into use simple records, centralized
purchasing and smoothly systematic office methods.
* * * * *
Sidney B. Bock, acting head resident of Pillsbury Settlement House,
Minneapolis, has been elected head resident of Neighborhood House in
Detroit, Michigan. This settlement is just completing a new building,
having been in rented quarters since its founding in 1909.
* * * * *
Berkeley G. Tobey, until recently secretary of the National Council Boy
Scouts of America, has become business manager of the Masses Publishing
Company.