THE CHARITABLE ELEMENT IN SOCIAL WORK
The “charities directories” of New York[6] and Philadelphia[7] offer
the most inclusive available lists of the various types of social work.
For present purposes it will be sufficient to review them by groups.
Duplications, omissions, and extraneous inclusions (all legitimate for
the purposes of the directories) make the figures of agencies of each
type inaccurate but they serve to show the multiplicity as well as the
range of social work undertakings.
New Philadelphia
York
Agencies having to do with health 412 224
Child welfare agencies 233 147
Settlements, social centers and housekeeping centers 227 608
Relief societies 180 102
Societies for civic and economic betterment by means
of surveys, investigations, education of the
public, etc. 157 369
Adult homes 136 112
Agencies for obtaining or providing employment 123 46
Special educational opportunities, agricultural,
musical, etc. 118 71
Philanthropic agencies with a predominantly
religious 96 191
Agencies interested in naturalization, colonization,
and work for immigrants 91 28
Correctional and protective agencies 81 54
Societies serving special groups 81 60
Negroes 29 36
Soldiers, sailors, or their dependents 25 10
Clergymen 8
Medical men 7
Indians 5
Artists 4
Firemen 3
Recreational facilities 63 88
Banking, loan and saving societies 23 10
Of which burial societies are 10 4
Milk stations, diet kitchens and lunch rooms 20 23
Conferences and federations which include
social work agencies 12 20
Legal aid societies 11 2
Societies for the protection of animals 9 14
In cross section no obvious, no easily discernible bond appears among
these diverse agencies. An eleemosynary purpose, the first suggestion
of most laymen, is indignantly repudiated by the modern social worker
and can be, in many cases, categorically disproved. All are benevolent,
but so also are educational, religious, artistic and other undertakings
not commonly considered social work.
It is a standing rule of science that if you can see nothing crosswise
you must try squinting lengthwise. If a present form will not
answer your questions look back along its history and consider its
origin--study its evolution and genetics. Such a policy with respect to
social work brings us promptly to a strong clue.
The interests of social work have wandered far from those of
old-fashioned charity and “mere charity” has now a bad name, but we
of this generation knew social work before it came of age and when we
hear it repudiating charity we recognize the act of a thankless child
denying an unfashionable parent. The oldest of the schools was called
until 1919 the “New York School of _Philanthropy_” and the same word
appeared in the names of the Chicago school and others. The “Survey,”
the accepted general organ of the profession (if it is a profession),
was until 1905 published as “Charities” and for three years more as
“Charities and the Commons.” What is now the “National Conference
of Social Work” was organized as the “Conference of Charities and
Corrections” and kept that title right down to 1917.
We may therefore push our investigation back a step farther and for the
question “what is social work?” substitute the less difficult inquiries
“what was charity and by what modifications did social work develop
from it?” However far apart these two may at present seem it is a
patent fact that social work developed from charity and along the route
of that development there is hope of enlightenment as to the essential
nature of social work.
Charity in one sense is the name of a human quality--that which
“suffereth long and is kind.” With this sense of the word the present
inquiry is not concerned but with a more completely objective meaning.
The dictionaries give it as “benevolence, liberality in relieving
the wants of others, philanthropy,”[8] or “liberality to the poor,
to benevolent institutions or worthy causes.”[9] The wording varies
little. Philanthropy where it is described any differently from charity
is merely a broader term not confined to the succor of the especially
unfortunate, as “love of mankind especially as evinced in deeds of
practical beneficence.”[10]
If we look at this “charity” in action we find its performance to be
directed to the same ends even though we follow it back through two
millenniums of Christianity and Paganism.[11] Motive and policy vary,
but the tasks of charity are recrudescent and impose themselves on each
successive generation in terms of the contemporary conscience. We seem,
for example, to have forgotten the question which haunted sixteenth
century motivation--whether faith without works avails for salvation,
but we might still subscribe to a contemporaneous plan of action
which demanded “the suppression of vagrant beggars, the punishment of
impostors” and “a rational organization of benefits under the control
of the municipal authorities.”[12] The _task_ is still with us.
This so adaptable and so perdurable “charity,” while constantly
changing its terms remains always in essence a free will offering made
to those who are in some fashion especially in need. It may consist
of material benefits or of services. An authoritative historian of
English philanthropy says in his nearest approach to a definition
that “Philanthropy, in common with other terms in general use, is
difficult, or more probably incapable of strict definition. We may
perhaps safely say that it proceeds from the free will of the agent,
and not in response to any claim of legal right on the part of the
recipient.” “The greater part of philanthropy may be said to consist in
contributions of money, service or thought, such as the recipient has
no strict claim to demand and the donor is not compelled to render.”[13]
Does this characterization hold good in our own country and time?
First, must the gift be free? Where a service is exacted by law do we
ever consider it charity? Free education while supported by voluntary
contribution was considered a form of charity but when it came to
be supported by taxes its connection with charity lapsed and was
forgotten.[14] The upkeep of highways and bridges has been an object
of charitable bequest--a benefit which the fortunate might out of his
abundance bestow upon his neighbors.[15] The establishment of public
responsibility for the highways has lifted this sort of benevolence
from the category of charity. Prisoners whose support was not provided
for by their own means or the concern of friends were for long
dependent upon charity.[16] A nicer sense of corporate responsibility
now requiring them to be fed at the public charge we see no charity
in their support but when private interest carries into the prisons
influences presumably improving and meets friendless prisoners at the
jail gate we recognize the unforced ministrations of charity removed
to another field. We still stand near the turn of the road in the
matter of caring for workmen injured during their work. A little while
ago any provision by the employer for the injured man or his family
was regarded as an act of charity. Latterly we have come to consider
it no more than right that an industrial establishment should share
the burden, as it does the fault, of such accidents, and state after
state has enacted laws compelling “compensation.” And as relief of
the injured man and his family has thus been made compulsory on the
establishment in which he works it has ceased to be charitable. The
act remains the same but with the loss of spontaneity its charitable
quality has disappeared.[17]
It is true that we have a very considerable development of so-called
“public charities.” But are not the services they render offered
through the body politic merely to secure a certainty and inclusiveness
of relief for which we dare not rely on private benevolence? And do we
not continue to call them “charity” precisely because we still regard
them as a free gift rather than as a routine purveyance which the
state is essentially committed to provide? Some of them are plainly
in process of transition and here and there we find the almshouse
becoming the “county hospital,” or the department of public charities
the “welfare department,” the nomenclature following a change in the
conception of function.
If, furthermore, we examine the public attitude toward those
undertakings which we have cited as having graduated from charity into
public purveyance, we will recognize that these are considered public
responsibilities in a different sense from any which so far attaches
to what we still call public charities. Public education is held to
be a natural prerequisite of democracy; the making of roads a thing
contributing impartially to the universal convenience; the feeding of
prisoners the inescapable responsibility of those who have cut them off
from the means of making a livelihood.
Moreover we make certain doles which we explicitly insist are not to
be counted “charity”--pensions given after military or government
service or to widows rearing children for the commonwealth--and in
disassociating them from charity it is the custom to point out that
they are not concessions but just deserts, something that can be
claimed as a right.
Charity then is a free gift. It need not be given in love, as its
etymology would assume, indeed it may be given in a mood of revulsion,
in the hope of expiating a sin or in mere fear of the indignation of
the deprived. The recording angel probably keeps a record of the motive
and the spirit, but charity, in its simple objective meaning on men’s
lips, inheres in the act of relief.
The brief characterization of philanthropy which we are testing was
two-fold. It declared philanthropy to be a free gift and a gift to
need. Just as the one qualification of the act was that it must be in
no way exacted so the one qualification of the recipient was that his
candidacy must consist only in need. Does this also hold true in our
own country and our own time? Surely it is plain beyond any call for
proof that only that is charity which is bestowed where need appoints
the recipient. Free gifts are made to the prosperous, there is mutual
helpfulness among equals, there are services prompted by loyalty and
personal affection, but these, though unforced, are not called charity.
But it will not do to dwell too much on the negative implications
of “need,” on deprivation or suffering. We might almost avoid that
rather misleading word and say that a gift is charity only when the
outstanding circumstance is occasion for it. But it is a familiar
observation that ardors or privations which are accepted as the order
of life while we see no prospect of remedy become conscious hardships
at the mere rumor of succor and so it necessarily happens that the
very act of service or relief prompted only by its own fitness is the
creator of an ex-post-facto need even where the situation previously
scarcely merited so strong a name.
Charity is not, however, preoccupied with material need only or with
physical suffering or any other one phase of life. Moral redemption,
intellectual opportunity, artistic realization--these also have come
within its purview. It may follow mortal man into his every predicament
and minister to his hungers of whatever sort. Only if we keep this
well in mind will we be justified in associating it with so negative
a term as need. It is the unconscious champion of the perfectibility
of man. “The normal life,” “our common inheritance,” “humanity in
whatever form,” “the rights of the humblest individual”--these are
its commonplaces that have lost significance from frequent and often
perfunctory repetition. But the fact that they are the commonplaces of
the subject is in itself significant. The commonplaces of all subjects
are not of that sort.
These then are the essentials of charity “a free gift and a gift to
need.” May we go on to inquire what additions or alterations have
developed these into social work, or is social work a thing so far
transmuted from charity that it no longer shows the very elements of
its original? A reperusal of our digest of the charities directories
shows the many forms of social work all of them still to include the
qualities of charity. In the first place the services of social work
are still a gift. Sometimes they are provided by the state in close
association with the obligatory work of some routine state department,
but in such cases the tasks of social workers will be found to differ
from those of the other employees in the department in being not only
highly extensible and almost infinitely variable but in some degree
supererogatory--as in the case of the follow-up work of the workmen’s
compensation office.
In the second place the presence of a need, though less evident among
the forms of social work than in the case of primitive charity, is
always discernible. Social work often seems to aspire to knowledge
rather than accomplishment, as when making investigations or surveys or
when any form of ministration is accompanied by so much solicitation
of information as to raise the question of which is product and which
by-product. But its activities will always on inspection be found to
claim connection with the discovery and removal of some form of human
ill. Social work itself naturally points to immediate purposes, small
definitive tasks like the formulation of a standard distribution of
expenses in the budget of a family at subsistence level. To conclude
that these are its ultimate objects would be as serious a mistake as
to imagine that the medical profession would rest satisfied with a
set of dependable prognoses. And these investigations do not exploit
the fields of prosperity. They consistently maintain a preoccupation
with untoward conditions and a sense of stewardship. Before all social
work, as surely as before charity, a Samaritan purpose floats like a
will-o-the-wisp, an inconstant and shifting but ever discernible guide,
sometimes at several removes from the work in hand but always its
ultimate sanction.
Social work then, incorporates, while it modifies, charity, and we find
ourselves ready to discuss the second part of our question--what is the
nature of these modifications which have produced social work?
FOOTNOTES:
[6] New York Charities Directory, A Reference Book of Social Service,
published by the Charity Organization Society of New York, 28th
edition, 1919.
[7] Social Service Directory of Philadelphia, 1919, corrected for 1920.
Pub. by Municipal Court.
[8] New Century Dictionary.
[9] Webster’s New International.
[10] New Century Dictionary.
[11] See Lallemand, Léon Histoire de la Charité. 4 Vols. Alphonse
Picard et Fils, Paris. Vol. I, 1902; Vol. II. 1903; Vol. III, 1906;
Vol. IV, 1910, and Queen, Stuart Alfred; Social Work in the Light of
History, J. B. Lippincott & Co., Philadelphia and London.
[12] Lallemand, Vol. IV, p. 21.
[13] B. Kirkman Gray, A History of English Philanthropy. Preface, pp. 8
and 9.
[14] Ibid., p. 103 e. s., and Philanthropy and the State, p. 222.
[15] History of English Philanthropy, p. 20.
[16] Ibid., p. 70.
[17] See also Charities for Feb., 1898. Report of the Association for
Improving the Condition of the Poor, housing inspection, vacation
schools, public baths and vacant lot farming begun by the Association
and continued by the city.